Free Republic

A video obtained by Photography is Not a Crime shows a court security guard approach PINAC correspondent Mike Skidmore and try to snatch his camera before Skidmore punches him repeatedly in the face, prompting the guard to pull out his gun and open fire.

“Let’s make the Confederate flag a hate crime: It is the American swastika and we should recoil from it in horror.”So opines Nick Bromell, a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In the wake of a purge that has seen the Confederate battle flag vanish from stores and disappear from the grounds of South Carolina’s capitol building, Bromell says in Salon that America should be going much, much further.“Americans who refuse to acknowledge the connection between the Confederate flag and the horrors of slavery and white supremacy are still in the grip of a ‘malignant spirit’...

Flush with victory following the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Left is doing what it does best – bringing down the hammer on dissent. In Oregon, a young couple faces a gag order and ruinous fines merely for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding. Calls to eliminate tax deductions for orthodox religious organizations are increasing, and key Senate Democrats are either waffling on protecting religious schools or expressing outright hostility to their most basic liberties. Even before Obergefell, Christian schools faced threats to their accreditation, and Christian groups endured systematic and comprehensive efforts...

The first Republican to fly to Oregon and hold a press conference with Melissa and Aaron Klein will get my vote. To undo the eight years of the Obama era will take more than right thinking. It will take some in-your-face moral bravado. And a good place for a candidate to show it will be on a scaffold in the public square of Portland, Oregon. As the reader may know, the Kleins operated a storefront bakeshop, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, in that very nearly godless environment. In February 2013, these Christian parents of five refused to bake a wedding cake...

The old bromide “There are none so blind as those who will not see” is actually a misstating of the Scripture verse Jeremiah 5:21: “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding, who have eyes, and see not, who have ears, and hear not.” I make this point because there are those who a) confuse the idea that Jesus is love with condoning perversion and debauchery; and b) foolishly believe that accepting pernicious evil will appease it. Anyone one who believes homosexuals do not have an end game that has yet to be accomplished “have eyes and see not,”...

Editor's note: This piece was co-authored by Tim Graham.To look at virtually anything produced by Hollywood is to register confirmation that the libertine left cherishes clogging our popular culture with vulgarities. The messaging in movies, television and particularly music is punctuated deliberately and unnecessarily with all manner of language designed to offend. But when it comes to perfectly decent speech -- spoken innocently with no bad intention -- those same liberals need smelling salts. Welcome to the wacky world of "micro-aggressions," where conversation becomes a minefield of political correctness. It's all the rage on campuses. Both the University of California...

While President Obama described the embassy as “not merely symbolic” and a move representing the liberation of the American people from “the past” in a speech this morning, the Cuban government issued a statement refusing to reestablish full diplomatic relations with the United States until America gifted the territory of Guantánamo Bay to Cuba and ceased broadcasting radio and television news reports into the island, which constitute the only way many Cubans have of receiving trustworthy international news.

Welcome to the state of political correctness run amuck! In training initiated by UC president Janet Napolitano, provides new guidelines for the 200,000-student University of California system faculty. Inspirational phrases such as “America is the land of opportunity,” “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” “America is a melting pot,” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are now being labeled “microaggressions” – any “brief, subtle verbal or non-verbal exchanges that send denigrating messages to the recipient because of his or her group membership (such as race, gender, age or socio-economic status).”...

Dear Student Body: I am writing today for the specific purpose of recruiting a student plaintiff to sue our university over its policy of forcing students to sign a “Respect Compact,” which is used by the administration to punish speech that is clearly protected by the First Amendment. The lawsuit is also necessary because the so-called respect compact is actually breeding intolerance and disrespect among students for the constitutionally protected opinions of others. For those who are not aware, signing the Respect Compact was initially done on a voluntary basis. Of course, when government-run institutions start making “suggestions” or “recommendations,”...

Since ancient Athens free speech has been at the heart of political freedom. “Free men have free tongues,” as Sophocles said, for freedom depended on citizens empowered to speak freely in the public deliberations about policy and the laws through which they governed. That’s why the Founders wrote the First Amendment, to prevent force from trumping law by silencing dissent. That’s also why the enemies of political freedom always try to destroy free speech.Violence or force has been the usual instrument for controlling speech, whether by murder, torture, incarceration, burning books, or shutting down presses and Internet sites. Today a...

In this day and age of communication we have lost free speech and are losing our airwaves to the big corporate and government interests. http://radionewyorkinternational.com/archives/pirates-cove/2003-1107%20pirates%20cove%20rni%2087%20and%20caroline%2088.mp3 http://putlocker.is/watch-pirate-radio-online-free-putlocker.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5PQnngPX00

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that an Arizona town violated a local church's free speech rights by preventing it from posting signs notifying the public of its worship services. The court decided 9-0 in favor of Good News Community Church.... ....."Speech discrimination is wrong regardless of whether the government intended to violate the First Amendment or not, and it doesn't matter if the government thinks its discrimination was well-intended," said attorney David Cortman of the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the church.

In my last column, I made the case for establishing First Amendment Centers on public university campuses. I argued that such centers should focus on eight goals, four of which would be corrective measures, and four of which would be proactive measures designed to enhance respect for divergent opinions. In the last column, I elaborated on the corrective measures. This column will focus on the proactive measures: 1. First Amendment Sensitivity Training for Students. When students make politically incorrect comments they often face punishment in the campus judiciary. This sometimes involves putting them through re-education programs, which are often referred...

The media silence was deafening on Friday as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched “Net Neutrality” regulations–possibly the most far-reaching and intrusive regulatory action of the 21st century. When Breitbart News published “Everybody Equal, But Google Much More Equal” in February, revealing how the FCC’s Democratic majority gave Google the “heads up” on the secret regulations and allowed executives to tweak the deal, there was a huge uproar. But now that the Internet is under the FCC’s “Ministry of Innovation,” the media seem to have moved on. As Seton Motley noted at RedState, there was no mention in the tech...

Blogger and free-speech activist* Pamela Geller, the initial target of the jihadi beheading plot that later became a plan to murder police officers in Boston, said that she refuses to go into hiding after an ISIS sympathizer disclosed her home address on Twitter. “I’m a free person and I’m fighting for freedom,” she declared in an interview with CBS News affiliate 1010 WINS in New York, where she lives. “The last thing I’m going to do is go into hiding.” Geller was targeted on Twitter by a British-born ISIS recruit called Abu Hussain al-Britani, right down to her apartment number,...

Eleven years ago, I gave a speech at Yale Law School. It was called “The Constitutional Crisis in Higher Education.” I’ve have given variations of that speech on more than 80 college campuses since then. In that time period, the crisis has become substantially more serious. Now, it is time for defenders of free speech to take more aggressive measures to curb censorship on our nation’s campuses. We cannot simply keep talking about the crisis. We need to tackle it aggressively. One essential measure needed to tackle the crisis involves the creation of First Amendment centers at public universities all...

Tossing free speech on the ash heap of history The progressive storm troopers at the University of California are ramping up their PC agenda. A faculty seminar discussing “diversity in the classroom” held at nine of the 10 UC campuses during the 2014-2015 school year came with a worksheet entitled “Tool: Recognizing Microagressions and the Messages They Send.” “Microaggressions are the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership,” states the opening sentence. The ultimate cure for such...

Universities need to stop giving students caps and gowns when they graduate. Instead, I recommend they give them helmets and wrap them in bubble wrap. The reason is that in college they become so weak and bruise so easily that there is little chance they can function in a free society without hurting themselves. In fact, many college students are too emotionally immature to encounter classic literature without becoming emotionally unraveled. Take Rutgers student Philip Wythe. Last year, he suggested that The Great Gatsby was so potentially traumatizing it should be accompanied by the following warning: “Suicide, Domestic Abuse, and...

The blogosphere is sounding off about a pending new Obama policy that would impact not only the 2nd Amendment, but the 1st Amendment as well. As incredible as it seems, individuals would be in violation by “merely posting information on the Internet about common firearms” which “could be interpreted as illegally sharing sensitive information with foreign nationals” Applying issues related to “exporting” and “foreign nations” under an international treaty to individual on-line speech (under the guise of improperly sharing technical data about firearms) may seem like a stretch, but it is apparently what is happening, unless public opposition is voiced...

History is not static and it does not progress linearly. There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5th-century Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now. Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a...