Free Republic

On Tuesday Facebook released the results of a study on bias within and by the platform against conservative perspectives and activity on the platform. It was led by former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and his team at corporate law firm Covington & Burling LLP.The report confirmed what many had already been experiencing firsthand in the years since social media has become central to global communications, business, governance, and interactivity – that many voices on the right felt subject to arbitrary purposefully targeted restrictions on their ability to operate freely within the terms of services of the platform.Senator Kyl and...

The following is an excerpt from “Unmasked: Big Media’s War Against Trump,” out today from Humanix Books. In July 2017, the media exploded over a meeting in June 2016 at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya, the alleged “Kremlin-backed lawyer” (she wasn’t Kremlin-backed) at which Russians promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. But before we get into this coverage, let’s stop and consider: So bloody what? At one stage or another, there were probably a hundred meetings between Team Hillary and God only knows who, from the candidate on down, discussing dirt on Donald Trump. It’s what campaigns...

When the Truth becomes inappropriate, the end of civilization nears. What a tangled web we weave when first we seek to deceive. Consider the mess the World is in. How has that happened? War is the result of dishonest behavior, isn't it? The failure to honestly, openly & effectively communicate with each other results in violent confrontations. Rational objective discussion & debate must rule for there to be peace. At this point, the opposition to the Trump leadership has offered no rational argument with a complicent contolled media propping their idiotic nonsense. It is a sad moment in the history...

The fact of the matter is that the American Left is waging a full scale war against fellow Americans who have the audacity to disagree with Left Wing orthodoxy. They are not interested in debate, discussion, ideas, free speech, or a free press. They are the enforcers of their own iron-fisted, totalitarian, Mao-style cultural revolution. The targets can be Fox News or individual Fox hosts with names like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. It can be conservative speakers invited to college campuses — with the mere appearance of conservative Ben Shapiro requiring the University of California at Berkeley...

The House voted Wednesday (April 10) 232 to 190 (with one Republican voting aye) to pass the Democrat-backed Save the Internet Act (HR 1644), which would restore FCC's Title II based rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization adopted under the previous, Democratic, administration, plus reinstate a general conduct standard to get at future conduct unbecoming an open internet but not falling under those rules. But the victory looks to be short-lived. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said the bill will be DOA in the Senate (echoed Wednesday by house Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy [R-Calif.]) and the Office...

The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies — studios — made stuff — TV shows and movies — and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers. Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, recently completed its purchase of 21st Century Fox. Distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner last year, are becoming media companies, too. Meanwhile, giant tech...

Executives and creatives are losing their jobs as the entertainment industry becomes less tolerant of offensive remarks, abusive behavior. Disney has severed ties with filmmaker James Gunn, who previously directed two ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movies. Hollywood’s longstanding say-anything, do-anything culture is rapidly turning into one where the wrong words can have career-killing consequences. Top executives at Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and Netflix Inc.,as well as creative talent who worked on the “Lethal Weapon” television series and “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies have been fired in recent months after allegations of offensive remarks, verbal abuse and other inappropriate behavior that...

Washington (CNN)He campaigned and won vowing to shake up Washington. Now, President Donald Trump is again breaking with tradition on a more personal matter: keeping a pet at the White House. The illustrious tradition of keeping pets in the White House dates back to Thomas Jefferson, who kept a mockingbird and a couple of bear cubs during his presidency. Throughout the years, presidential pets became celebrities of sorts. "It softens their image, it broadens their appeal," Ed Lengel, chief historian at the White House Historical Association, told CNN. "They help create an atmosphere of the White House as a family,...

Journalists today are elitists with their own agenda, never actually practicing journalism. Only a handful can be respected, trusted, and believed. Sharyl Attkisson falls into this category. She is an author and investigative reporter who hosts the syndicated TV news series Full Measure. Attkisson is a whistleblower of sorts in educating the public about the biased media. Her latest book, The Smear, reveals the tactics used to influence opinions in order to obscure the truth. In the beginning of this book, Attkisson discusses the propaganda campaign used by the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA. They had asked the legendary...

How the Federal Government & Big Media Collude in the Deep State Since Donald Trump introduced “The Swamp,” it’ become American slang for the corrupt and secretive underbelly of the Washington, D.C. Deep State. One Swamp secret is the whole truth of Denny Hastert’ life as a pederast. And, we are unlikely to ever know it—the whole truth. John Dennis Hastert (DOB: January 2, 1942) quit his high school teaching and coaching position in Yorkville, Illinois, held from 1965-1981, to become a politician. Eventually, from 1999-2007, he was the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in American...

May 4 marks "May the Fourth be with you," the official "holiday" dedicated to George Lucas' galaxy far, far away. The pun was first used back in 1979, with Britain's Conservative Party congratulating Margaret Thatcher in print for taking the prime minister post that day. According to Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, the first organized "Star Wars" event on May 4 took place in 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema. ABC News' parent company, The Walt Disney Company, purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 and has officially observed the holiday since 2013, with events at Disney parks and other celebrations. To commemorate...

Barack Obama brought America to the brink of socialism, tyranny and even despotism--Americans are done with politicians, government cronies, insiders, academics who hate Capitalism and free markets By vilifying Conservatives as sexists, racists, and imbeciles, political, academic, media, and cultural elites—the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable public debate—opened the door to a Trump presidency. And they are in a state of shock. Political Correctness is used by the left as a weapon to destroy the fabric of American society. However, the leftist attack on speech in America may have ground to a halt with the election of Donald J. Trump as...

TV was busy last Monday (night before the election) so I had to listen on radio (Westwood One) to the Seahawks-Buffalo MNF game. During the halftime, they aired a few minutes of a "mini-interview" with each Presidential candidate, and Trump's answers were interesting. Keeping with the "sports theme", he was asked why he always seems to "go on offense". His response was that he learned that growing up in New York, when he encountered opposition first as a kid in school then as a young businessman, to never to give in or submit, and "always attack back twice as hard...

Sing the song, blow out the candles, eat the cake and unwrap the gifts. According to a court filing on Monday, music publisher Warner/Chappell will pay $14 million to end a lawsuit challenging its hold on the English language's most popular song, "Happy Birthday to You." Additionally, the settlement stipulates a proposed final judgment and order that would declare the song to be in the public domain. A memorandum in support of the settlement sings the praises of the deal as "truly, an historic result." U.S. District Judge George H. King will have to sign off on it. The revelation...

For the past two years, the music industry has been watching a series of lawsuits centered on an obscure aspect of copyright law: whether the performers on older recordings should get royalties when their songs are played on digital radio services. One of those lawsuits was settled Friday when SiriusXM, the satellite radio provider, announced it would pay $210 million to the major record companies over its broadcasting of songs made before 1972. ...two years ago members of the 1960s band the Turtles, whose hits included “Happy Together” sued Sirius in three federal courts, saying their songs before 1972 were...

As we learned from Mad Men, the advertising industry is ever intent on harnessing trends that are bubbling up organically. Countercultural ideals (say, hippie-era peace and love) are wedded to a mainstream product (say, Coke) and blasted to the mainstream before anyone knows what’s hit them. Which is why hip-hop and advertising go together so well. Firmly rooted in youth culture, hip-hop is edgy but accessible, a combination that companies adore. It can be exciting to see your favorite rapper validated in big-name plugs, whether it’s Jay Z for Hewlett Packard or Eminem for Chrysler. But for every carefully considered,...

...This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see. As a part of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, Prince displayed giant screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos without warning or permission. The collection, “New Portraits,” is primarily made up of pictures of women, many in sexually charged poses. They are not paintings, but screenshots that have been enlarged to 6-foot-tall inkjet prints. According to Vulture, nearly every piece sold for $90,000 each. How is...

Bad news today for HBO, which is attempting to marry the recent debut of their HBO Now streaming service with season 5 of Game of Thrones. As of last night, the first four episodes of the new season, nearly half of the ten total episodes, have been leaked online to various torrent sites. After appearing online yesterday afternoon, the episodes have already been downloaded almost 800,000 times, and that figure will likely blow past a million downloalds by the season 5 premier tonight.

Making Big Media the issue could, in fact, be precisely the means to truly energize conservative and by making Democrats the obvious toadies of Big Media, to deflate the left in 2016. The enemy of conservatism in America is the leftist establishment, the leftist-controlled institutions of news, education and entertainment. Take away these big, fat incestuously connected institutions and the left in America is a circus sideshow and nothing else. Democrat “leaders” like Obama, Hillary, Pelosi and Reid are slow witted, mean-spirited, and narrow-minded sock puppets filled by the chubby hands of the leftist establishment. Indeed, the leftist establishment prefers...

Fox is suing a San Francisco digital music distribution company because of its name. According to TMZ, Twentieth Century Fox Television filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against EMPIRE Distribution over the name it shares with Fox's popular television series "Empire." Founded in 2010, EMPIRE Distribution releases digital music from urban artists including leading hip-hop stars Snoop Dogg, T.I. and Kendrick Lamar. Fox's fictional Empire Records releases urban music including hip-hop and R&B, but in a real life twist, songs from the series are actually available for sale. Columbia Records released songs from each episode for the duration of the...