Free Republic

Next week’s scheduled speech by right-wing pundit Ann Coulter at UC Berkeley is off — for now — because campus officials say they won’t be able to protect participants from rioting if it should happen. "We have been unable to find a safe and suitable venue for your planned April 27 event featuring Ann Coulter," vice chancellors Scott Biddy and Stephen Sutton emailed the student groups co-hosting the event — the Berkeley College Republicans and BridgeUSA — Tuesday evening.

The former Federal Election Commission chairwoman Ann M. Ravel says that political speech must be controlled on social media. She presented her remarks in a speech at UC Berkeley, calling for regulations against “fake news.” Speaking at an event called “Future of Democracy,” Ravel argued the proliferation of “fake news” and political advertising on platforms like Facebook influenced elections. She warned that the lack of disclosure by the creators of these campaigns was becoming a huge problem. “We know that there’s a lot of campaigning that’s moved to the internet, whether it’s through fake news or just outright advertising and...

A rogue nation targeted a multinational corporation and won.  North Korea has almost certainly ordered the massive cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, stealing and publicly dumping enough data to make a dent in the company’s stock price. North Korea cannot challenge the United States militarily, despite what movies have portrayed.  Regardless of their saber-rattling, and America’s reduced presence on the Korean peninsula, a real attack of any substance against our ally South Korea (or Japan for that matter) would bring a suicidal level of retribution on the North, and they know it.  But they’ve found a vein where they can draw...

Hey parents, look at what your annual $63,916 tuition check is paying for! An editorial from Wellesley College’s student newspaper put out a call to arms on Wednesday against anyone who engages in alleged “racist” behavior. Ironically enough, the piece starts out responding to what the author sees as unfair allegations that Wellesley students and professors foster “an environment where free speech is not allowed or is a violated right. Many outside sources have painted us as a bunch of hot house flowers who cannot exist in the real world.”

The World Wide Web needs a complete rethink to prevent spying and the spread of "nasty, mean ideas" on social media websites, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, said on Monday. Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web as a platform on top of the internet in 1989, said his intention in building it had been for the public to "do good stuff" and share ideas among each other, as was the case with websites such as Wikipedia. Instead, negative ideas were proliferating on social media sites in particular, he said, while privacy was also being compromised by online spying....

A full-page ad is appearing in today’s Daily Californian, calling on students to “COME HEAR DAVID HOROWITZ SPEAK AT BERKELEY ON APRIL 12.” Following this, the ad says, “COME HEAR HIM, THAT IS, IF YOU CAN FIND HIM!” Well actually you can’t. That’s because the UC Berkeley Administration, which is determined to keep its students “safe” from conservative speakers like me, chose to place such onerous restrictions on the event that its hosts, Berkeley College Republicans, felt they had to cancel it. University officials will tell you that the restrictions were necessary to ensure public safety, but this will just...

Whether it is female Republican students at places like St. Olaf College and Cornell University being accosted, cursed at, threatened with physical violence and, in the latter case, actually assaulted; Cal State Fullerton Trump supporting students being assaulted by an instructor; a riot at Berkeley; or College Republicans being targeted by name as “fascists” and encouragements made to make their personal information public so that decent folks can “punch fascists”—bullying, intimidation, and threats of violence against conservative students have become staples of campus life.  While this phenomenon is an outrage in itself, equally outrageous is the fact that it has...

A Texas State University student who prides himself on tolerance punched, kicked, and tore up several pro-life signs while a local activist set them up in a central campus square. Captured on video by several passersby, politics and government student Ian Ramos shouted obscenities at the unidentified pro-lifer and ran from sign to sign, knocking them over, kicking and punching them. Finally, he later told a reporter, he was calmed down by a professor and escorted to her office to avoid police. ...Ramos later defended his actions to alternative news sources such as the Daily Caller and The Tab. Asked...

Michael Savage famously said that liberalism is a mental disorder. I think it is more precise to say that liberalism is a cult. Isolation, threats and routine shaming all serve to silence cult members who cross them, exactly as happens with political correctness. The dreaded label of racist or bigot chills most opposition. Those closest to you will ostracize you for expressing an incorrect view, exactly as in a cult. Eventually, the inclination is to censor what you not only say but what you think. Most people upon being intimidated will rein in their perceptions and even their curiosity because...

Protesters at the Claremont Colleges successfully prevented conservative commentator Heather Mac Donald from speaking on their campus. Students at the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of undergraduate and graduate liberal arts colleges in Claremont, California, blocked entrances to the building that Mac Donald was scheduled to speak in. Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, was giving a speech titled “The War on Police,” a reference to her 2016 book about how political rhetoric against police makes America less safe. Mac Donald was forced to livestream her speech after protesters blocked students and professors from...

Frustrated with its inability to control the narrative in our current age of abundant social media, the Merkel Regime has decided to fine media firms that allow false news on their platforms. The penalty can range as high as $50 million for an offense the government determines is "dangerously out-of-step with accepted views." German Justice Minister Heiko Maas lamented that "unconstrained free speech has unleashed an avalanche of uniformed and anti-social messages being posted on FaceBook and Twitter. The proof of the danger is the fact that an unhinged Donald Trump was able to exploit Twitter to foment disrespect for...

Google is to start displaying fact-checking labels in its search results to highlight news and information that has been vetted and show whether it is considered to be true or false, as part of its efforts to help combat the spread of misinformation and fake news. The fact-checking feature, which was first introduced to Google News in the UK and US in October, will now be displayed as an information box in general search results as well as news search results globally. The small snippets display information about the claim made by a particular page or site and who made...

The wagon-circling campaign to protect Obama administration and intelligence community officials who surveilled Donald Trump and his transition team during his presidential campaign and post-victory transition is moving into hyperdrive. On Monday, CNN's Don Lemon proclaimed that "there is no evidence whatsoever" supporting Donald Trump's claim about having been "spied on illegally" (note the inclusion of the word "illegally," which is crucial), and declared that he would not "aid and abet the people who are trying to misinform you." Lemon's stridency as he delivered his rant on CNN Tonight appeared to betray "he protests too much" behavior, while subsequent events...

In Florida, a student—Marshall Polston—was suspended for challenging his Muslim professor Areej Zufari's assertion that the claim Jesus was crucified is a hoax. Rollins College officials maintained that "the suspension was necessary because the student disobeyed the instructor's order to stay out of the classroom. We strive to ensure an orderly transmission of knowledge from the professor to the students. Those students who disrupt this process by needlessly disagreeing with the teacher must be removed for the process to work as designed." However, when evidence, including surveillance camera footage, contradicted Zufari's contention that Polston had been disruptive the suspension was...

CNN's Brian Stelter angrily contends that the rape of a 14 year-old girl at Rockville High School in Montgomery County, Maryland on March 16 at the hands of two late-teen illegal immigrant freshman classmates should never have been a national story — and the fact that it is to an extent, despite obvious attempts to blackball it by the Big Three broadcast networks, is all Fox News's fault. The real question, which the public education establishment and their accomplices in the press don't want anyone to ask, is this: What has happened in the nation's schools during the past 35 years as...

Yep. Evidence, screenshots and analytics included. Youtube doesn't give a rat's ass about "hate speech". A silly parody of "The Young Turks" is hate speech? Nope, they only care about silencing dissent. This is why we had to create LouderWithCrowder.com/MugClub in partnership with CRTV. It's the only way to survive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kAYODuIPro

The Islamophobic industry deals in a dictatorship of thought, and here is the blunt, inescapable fact: Shariah by any other name is censorship. Intellectual terrorism precedes and follows jihad in London, Brussels, Fort Hood and Orlando “If I send you a machinegun and tell you it is a baby carriage, and I send it to you wheel by wheel and nut by nut and you do not know until you have assembled the thing that it is a machinegun and not a baby carriage,” that is exactly what has happened to this country. We are being sold machineguns without knowing...

In a previous installment I mentioned France's recent war on blogs and the internet. France along with Germany are demanding that American based ISP and Blog services censor content that might be deemed offensive to Muslims. They threatened crackdowns if it was not complied. Since last summer we have received record viewership from France.  We did not know whether to attribute it to French Catholic viewership for our posts of videos and articles by Michael Voris Of Church Militant TV and other Catholic channels or if it was warning of an impending attack by the French Government and or perhaps...

Ed Dowd (@DowdEdward), former manager of BlackRock's $15 billion Capital Appreciation Fund has a relatively small but influential Twitter following, ranging from Financial industry all-stars to prominent media personalities. Since leaving BlackRock, Dowd has shifted gears - moving to Hawaii to launch his own equity fund from the luxury of his volcano-adjacent compound, while helping his wife develop a rapidly growing business of her own. He's also quite the subversive Twitter user - known for spotlighting MSM hypocrisy, roasting progressive politicians, and doling out sharp-witted rebukes of Ivory Tower overlords. In early February, Dowd began noticing some odd behavior occurring...

College Aid: Next time you hear about students attacking a conservative speaker, check the school's tuition costs. Odds are you'll find that they are attending an elite college that caters to the rich. Money can't buy love, but it can, apparently, teach intolerance. In early March, distinguished author and social scientist Charles Murray was scheduled to talk at Middlebury College, a Vermont school that charges $64,000 a year in tuition. Several students erupted in noisy demonstrations that ended up with the 74-year-old Murray being shoved and Middlebury political science professor Allison Singer in a neck brace. The attack was so...