Free Republic

On Monday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters that federal agencies such as the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) restarted discussions with Big Tech platforms. According to NextGov/FCW, this coordination will focus on “removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears.” Warner claimed these talks resumed in March, around the same time oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri — which centers on the feds’ censorship efforts — were heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. When pressed on the validity of Warner’s remarks, an FBI representative confirmed to...

The Mary Poppins of misinformation has started a new band outside the Department of Homeland Security, and this department of tortured poets is testing fresh material about the bad blood stemming from her brief leadership of the slightly longer-lived Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, whose Hunter Biden laptop trutherism and chirpy songs about "information laundering" immediately made the DHS board a punch line, cofounded a nonprofit watchdog this month with former feds, D.C. think tankers and social media executives whose mission is "increasing the cost of lies that undermine our democracy." She introduced the American Sunlight Project in a statement...

A CIA Officer/former FBI official is on an undercover video boasting about using the might of the federal government to ‘jail anyone’ by ‘setting them up.’ Gavin O’Blennis, a Contracting Officer for the CIA told an undercover journalist with Sound Investigations that the FBI “can put anyone in jail…set ’em up!” “We call it a nudge,” O’Blennis said, adding the FBI can put “problematic” right-wing journalists like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones in jail. O’Blennis said of Infowars founder Alex Jones: The FBI “took his money away,” and ‘chopped his legs off.’ Gavin O’Blennis said at least 20 undercover FBI...

A government-funded database, led by the University of Maryland and ostensibly established to track “radicalization,” is targeting a major pro-life group as “terrorists.” Students for Life of America (SFLA), which has 1,400 chapters at campuses across the country, “appears under a ‘Terrorist Group’ label in the raw dataset,” according to a Monday article in The College Fix. The database, called the “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States” (PIRUS), was funded in part by grants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for the Study of Terrorism and Behavior (CSTAB). According to the project’s...

Party machinery, underway since 2021, will make it easier for the “next Trump” to emerge. But what will actually propel such a figure into the White House is the transformation of the GOP base. The increasingly reactionary views of grassroots Republicans virtually guarantee that the movement will maintain its dominant influence on the party for the foreseeable future. A yard sign I saw in rural Pennsylvania during the 2020 presidential campaign tells the story. Planted in front of a house was a homemade poster with the words “RONALD REAGAN IS A LOSER.” President Reagan’s face was crossed out with an...

the appeals panel agreed that several federal offices and agencies, including the White House .. violated the First Amendment by coercing the platforms’ content moderation decisions. ... A federal appeals court ... finding that several agencies likely violated the First Amendment. ... The original case was brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who alleged that federal officials unduly pressured social media firms to limit speech on their platforms, as they communicated concerns about posts related to the Covid pandemic or elections. ... The decision had an immediate impact. Following the district court’s order in July, the State...

The Biden Administration has asked a court, rather than Congress, to renew controversial warrantless surveillance powers used by American intelligence and due to expire within weeks. It's a move that is either business as usual or an end-run around spying reforms, depending on who in Washington you believe. Both may be true. US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) railed at the US Department of Justice's decision to seek a year-long extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to end in mid-April unless Congress reauthorizes it. "A broad bipartisan, bicameral coalition agrees that FISA Section 702...

Dominion Voting Systems is entitled to review personal communications and text messages of Newsmax Media journalists in its defamation suit against the conservative media company, a Delaware judge ruled last week.

DHS Media Literacy Has Little To Do With Media or Literacy. It is a K-12 Surveillance Program With The Goal Of Training Teachers and Students to Identify and Report On Alleged “Disinformation” and Alleged “Violent Extremism”.

Peeling back the layers of the Obama era is like opening Pandora’s box and finding out it’s deeper than we thought. Obama might have slithered out of the White House without a flashy “legacy” tag, but he sure did leave a mess. It’s as if he was the Dems and Deep State’s MVP, playing a long game we’re still trying to wrap our heads around. He wasn’t just about making policy changes; he was on a mission to infiltrate every corner of our sacred institutions and flip them inside out for his—and their—advantage. Just look what he did by weaponizing...

Recently, investigative journalist Yehuda Miller received several FOIA documents that completely reshaped what we were told to believe about the 2020 US presidential election. We will be publishing several of these explosive documents in the coming days. The election was billed by the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, the mainstream media, and former CISA Chief Chris Krebs as the most secure election in US history. But was 2020 really the most secure election in US history?

The Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency knew that mass mail-in voting during the 2020 election contained risks but continued to flag social media posts raising such concerns as disinformation, according to new documents obtained by America First Legal in its lawsuit against the agency. The CISA documents appear to show that in September 2020, officials knew that mail-in voting came with election security risks and that there was no evidence to support the claim that in-person voting would “increase the spread of COVID-19.” Officials also were reportedly aware that mass mail-in efforts presented challenges...

Senate negotiators have agreed to empower the US to significantly restrict illegal migrant crossings at the southern border, according to sources familiar with the matter, a move aimed at ending the migrant surge that has overrun federal authorities over the past several months. The Senate deal, which is expected to be unveiled as soon as next week, would also speed up the asylum process to consider cases within six months – compared with the current system, under which it could take up to 10 years for asylum seekers. The details provide a new window into high-profile negotiations that have been...

I completely missed this when it was published at the end of last month. Fortunately, Jesse Singal did a great write-up about it which I noticed today. As you may know, Bill Adair is the founder of Politifact, a site which has generate a lot of content for this blog over the years. Last month, Adair was asked to share his predictions for 2024 and he wrote a piece titled “Fact-checking needs a reboot.” Part of that reboot would be pressuring social media companies to “suppress misinformation” more often.After I founded PolitiFact in 2007, I often said that our goal...

The Department of Homeland Security partnered with Stanford University and other colleges to create a 'disinformation group' to censor speech leading up to the 2020 election, new emails reveal. The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was created in July 2020, and consisted of members from the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, according to a new report from the House Judiciary Committee and released Monday evening. '[T]he federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions,' the report said...