Free Republic

So Gawker and its owner Nick Denton filed Chapter 11 today to avoid paying Hulk Hogan the $140 million they owe him after losing an invasion of privacy trial. The suit was funded by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, which, according to many liberals, makes this the most vital First Amendment case of our lifetime. In a spasm of hypocrisy, many of the same people who don’t believe corporations deserve constitutional rights; who think allowing the state to ban political movies and books is a fine idea; who are constantly telling us how important the courts are in realizing a just...

Trump is destroying the leprosy of Political Correctness, created to shut the mouths of the silent majority and to intimidate Republicans. It has reigned far too long. I say, call out the fake Indians and Mexican judges! It's time Donald Trump is in the soup again. Mr. Trump has liberal race hustlers sputtering a rain of spittle, and has the GOP Establishment jelly legged, knees knocking and lower lips quivering. With two recent comments Mr. Trump has Republicans running for the tall grass, and even Newt Gingrich - a tepid but agreeable supporter - has demanded Trump apologize. What did...

North Carolina State University infringed on the free speech rights of a student-led Christian group, a federal judge has ruled. Chief U.S. District Judge James C. Dever III, calling his action “in the public interest,” issued a preliminary injunction Saturday against NC State’s speech permit policy, saying it violates the students’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech. “The judge pretty much granted the entire request that we asked for,” a lawyer for the students, Tyson Langhofer, told The Daily Signal. “Essentially, everything in the final order that we requested was granted.”

<p>It is striking to compare the words of a leader of America’s foreign policy establishment with those of a Muslim Brotherhood member-turned apostate—who today lives with a fatwa on her head for her heresies—when it comes to free speech versus Islamic supremacism.</p>

Logan Autry, a nine-year-old from Fresno, California, is a big Donald Trump fan. However, his school is now blocking his right to wear a Trump hat. Autry was told by school officials his hat “brings negative emotions to the other children who don’t like him.” Autry’s hat is actually signed by the Republican candidate himself, so the hat is something cherished by Autry which he loves to wear a lot. He wore it to school three days in a row. On Friday before the weekend began, Autry was asked to leave school early because of the amount of “disturbances” being...

Facebook censorship of individual member pages is not just limited to the United States. On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the personal account/page of Ingrid Carlqvist, the Gatestone Institute's Swedish expert. Her offense was posting a video news report she created for Gatestone that discussed an almost 1,500% increase in rapes in Sweden. Ms. Carlqvist suggests the increase of rapes may be attributable to the mass influx of immigrants coming mainly from Muslim countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Gatestone Institute is a non-partisan; not-for-profit international policy think tank run by former UN Ambassador John Bolton. Carlqvist's video (embedded below) is...

Free speech? What free speech. “You were asking for it.” It’s the ultimate ‘blame the victim’ line, and it’s been used in an attempt to excuse everything from theft, to Rape, to Murder. If you didn’t leave it out, it wouldn’t have been taken. If you didn’t insult that guy, he wouldn’t have punched you. If you didn’t dress ‘all pretty’ the rapist wouldn’t have pounced. Now, Sam Liccardo - the Hillary-supporting mayor of ‘sanctuary city’ San Jose - is employing that argument in an effort to absolve violent rioters of wrongdoing.

Interview starts at ~4:24.

Excerpted from The Daily Caller: Controversy has followed commentator Milo Yiannopoulos on his “Most Dangerous Faggot” tour, and his Thursday appearance at the University of California, Irvine is proving to be no exception. UC-Irvine College Republicans are planning to distribute 100 infant pacifiers at a school-sanctioned “safe zone training” event taking place just hours before the Yiannopoulos event, UC-Irvine College Republicans said in a press release. The Gerber Baby pacifiers will include an attached label with the caption, “I survived! Milo tour 2016.” UC-Irvine Republican Club president, Ariana Rowlands told the Orange County Register she fears for her fellow students...

Apparently this never got posted here because of the limitations of probation, so here you go: So...here we are...18 years. Mostly good. Clintons a Liar, Dr Raouls costumes, AppyPappy's daughter singing the National Anthem, Kristinns wonderful reporting. The repugnant lies of Classy Green Eyed Blonde and DeepInTheHurtgenForest. The surreal cryptic posts of quidam. The lib trolls like Eschoir. The March for Justice? Heady times. They really were. Fighting against a President who had the gall to look us in the eye and lie to us. But the last 9 months? Absolutely unrecognizable. A lot of great FReepers run off. And...

State Rep. Anthony Kern said he handed out materials as part of a church group on the Glendale Community College campus for several years without any trouble. But one year, “all of a sudden they came up with this free speech zone which was way away from the people,” the Republican told the Arizona Capitol Times. That inspired Kern to introduce House Bill 2615, which broadens campus “free speech zones” to the entire public college campus as opposed to designated areas. It provides students the right to exercise their First Amendment rights without concerns about the time, place and manner...

Colleges are supposed to be laboratories for ideas where debates are encouraged and a diverse set of viewpoints are welcome. Today, only liberalism is allowed and our students are not being educated, but indoctrinated It happened again this week at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Another conservative speaker was harassed by liberal activists. In this case, Breitbart contributor Milo Yiannopoulos was not allowed to finish his presentation to a group of students. He was bullied and threatened and his speech was literally shut down by a group of Black Lives Matter activists. In fact, one of the free speech haters...

The explicit aim of the Istanbul Process -- currently backed by the Obama administration -- is to make it an international crime to criticize Islam. A Muslim fundamentalist group is organizing a conference focused on turning Austria and other European countries into Islamic states. The "Caliphate Conference 2012" will be held on March 10 in the Austrian town of Vösendorf, situated just south of Vienna. The main theme of the event will be "The Caliphate: The State Model of the Future." The conference is being organized by Hizb ut-Tahrir [Party of Liberation], a pan-Islamic extremist group that seeks to establish...

Well, it happened again. Except this time, it was even worse. Last night our old friend Milo Yiannopoulos had his speech at DePaul University disrupted by a couple delicate flowers. I myself spoke at DePaul back around 2007, and even then there was a threat of protest, after a leftist professor (who had zero publications of significance, you’ll be astonished to learn) wrote a column in the student newspaper accusing me of being a “white supremacist” — which in non-hysterical language simply meant I was to the right of Bob Dole. I was ready for them, believe me, but none...

It’s a classic example of hell-bound good intentions. I’m not going to go as far as George Carlin butt I will say that this whole mess started when progressives started to idolize children. First we had childproof caps, child restraints, child car seats and helmets for everything. It grew into grief counselors at school – initially on an ad hoc basis to deal with the unexpected death of a schoolmate because their kids parents couldn’t be expected to handle that, due to their own grief. Butt once the school budgets expanded to include full time on-staff counselors it became de rigueur...

My former attorneys at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) recently filed a lawsuit they never should have had to file. In the suit, they are representing a Christian student group at North Carolina State University (NCSU). At issue is an NCSU policy requiring a permit for any kind of student speech or communication anywhere on campus. This policy is a direct affront to the First Amendment, which is the only permit needed to speak on a public university campus. The policy itself is outrageous. To make matters worse, NCSU only selectively enforces the policy as they did against the plaintiffs,...

The Arizona law increases penalties against protesters who block access to a political rally. Is blocking access to a political event a political statement in itself? In a Phoenix suburb in March, protesters parked about two-dozen cars in the middle of the highway to stop drivers on their way to an outdoor rally for Donald Trump and Joe Arpaio, the controversial Arizona sheriff. With posters that read "Dump Trump" and "Must Stop Trump," the protesters, in one sense, acted on their right to demonstrate against the Republican frontrunner and the sheriff who was sanctioned for refusing a judge's order to...

The University of Oregon is sorely in need of an enema. It has become filled with the worst kind of social excrement a university can accumulate. It has descended into a state of perpetual readiness to root out and destroy any vestige of speech and thought that might even slightly deviate from liberal orthodoxy. When any member of the school’s cozy little community alleges that she/he has been offended, the speech warriors of the U of O’s Bias Response Team (BRT) spring into action. No complaint is too petty for these civil servants that have invented their own lifetime jobs....

A Scottish man who filmed his girlfriend’s dog performing a Nazi salute has been arrested by the police and could face hate crime charges. Markus Meechan, 28, from North Lanarkshire, was remanded in custody on suspicion of publishing offensive material online. Meechan uploaded a video to Youtube which allegedly shows a pug making the Nazi salute and watching videos of Hitler. He has since apologized for causing offense and claims the video was a prank to annoy his girlfriend.

It’s not often that a U.S. government agency gets caught red-handed abiding by its charter and performing its publicly-avowed and legislatively-approved duties. But last week the AP "broke" a long and breathless story from Havana that nailed the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) for just that. In their own words, "a secret plan aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government," was courageously exposed by the AP’s intrepid Havana bureau. Such is the magnitude of the scandal that a red-faced and snarling Senator Patrick Leahy is now chairing hearings on Capitol Hill where he grills USAID director Rajiv Shah on...