Free Republic

A campus Black Lives Matter protest against an American Civil Liberties Union speaker has provoked an internal debate over free speech on the Left. Students shouted down an ACLU leader visiting the College of William and Mary in Virginia last week, preventing a discussion about free speech by chanting "liberalism is white supremacy" and "ACLU, you protect Hitler too!" for a full hour. Outrage spread as video of the college Black Lives Matter chapter's disruption circulated among shocked scholars, progressive leaders, and alumni.

<p>A University of California, Riverside student stole another student’s “Make America Great Again” hat. Then, she marched to a campus office and demanded that administrators outlaw “Make America Great Again” hats because they represent “genocide.”</p> <p>At one point, the student whose hat was stolen says, “You do not get to take other people’s property that is legally theirs.”</p>

Suddenly the alt-left is very concerned about the First Amendment rights of people — some people, anyway. Specifically, George Soros et al. care about those useful idiots in shoulder pads whom they want to use in their unending attempts to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election. As for the First Amendment rights to free speech of everyone who isn’t a card-carrying fellow traveler — what rights do those deplorables have? What about the Christian bakers in Oregon who were sued out of business for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding? Or the clerk in Kentucky...

A Trump-supporting student at the University of California, Riverside had his MAGA hat stolen by a peer who demanded that administrators refuse to allow him to continue to wear it.A video of the incident obtained by Campus Reform shows an enraged female student taking the hat to the school’s Student Life Department as Matthew Vitale fruitlessly attempts to explain to the young woman that the hat is his property.“So this guy thought it would be a good idea to go into a conference wearing this f***ing hat,” the student who stole the hat states. “Look at the kind of sh*t...

It’s true: SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) is alive and well and living in Utah. They organized the protest yesterday against Ben Shapiro’s speech at the University of Utah. I’m sure you all remember SDS’s most famous acolyte: Bill Ayers, Vietnam era student activist, co-founder of the Weather Underground, bomber and Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Chicago where he continued his revolutionary activity in clear sight by helping to turn education into a propaganda factory. Oh yeah, and he’s also known as Barack Hussein Obama’s ghost writer even though he was just some guy who lived...

He’s been cheered and condemned, boosted and banned… and now he’s at ideacity to offer perspectives from the front lines of the political correctness battleground. Professor and clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson believes that no matter how controversial, we must recognize the importance of free speech – particularly on college campuses. (This is an excellent take down of the scourge of postmodernism that is responsible for the cultural rot that is destroying the western world, from multiculturalism, relativism, egalitarianism, neo-marxism, etc. He's a passionate, eloquent, courageous and intelligent speaker on a mission, and who may single handedly end up saving...

Our college-age population consists mostly of 18- to 30-year-olds, and likewise our armed forces. I wonder whether they shared common responses to the 2016 presidential election. Many college administrators provided students with therapy dogs, play dough, coloring books, bubbles, videos of frolicking kittens and puppies, and soft music. They even canceled classes and postponed exams so that their 18- to 30-year-old snowflakes could better cope with the election results. There are numerous internet photos and videos of these youngsters screaming and in outright grief and panic. Here's my question: Were our military leaders as accommodating as college administrators? Did commanding...

It's not exactly a secret that liberal college campuses are among the most illiberal places in America. Liberals talk a good game about diversity -- but it's not diversity of opinion they have in mind. Just ask any number of prominent conservative speakers who got shouted down when they tried to speak on campus. We know about the anecdotal evidence -- the conservatives whose talks were disrupted at University of California, Berkeley, at Middlebury in Vermont, and at Claremont McKenna College in California, to name just a few. But now we have an important broad-based study that documents just how...

Author’s Note: All proceeds from the following column will be spent on me.Some college students know nothing about the First Amendment. I mean that literally. For example, a student recently complained to me that the police had violated his First Amendment rights by pulling him over without a warrant. First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, whatever! As annoying as the complete constitutional illiterate can be, I am perhaps more annoyed by those who have some familiarity with the First Amendment and therefore conclude that they are constitutional scholars. These semi-literate clowns email me pretty often. Just last week, one of them wrote...

Dear NFL: If a percentage of those who play for do what has been going on the last few weeks, come next Sunday I will take a hike and not even bother to turn the on/off switch. Sincerely, This Former NFL Fan

A member of the Black Student Union at the University of California-Berkeley recently penned an op-ed complaining that she felt “violated” by Ben Shapiro’s appearance on campus. “If your perceived definition of violence is limited to the confines of physical contact, that’s probably because you’ve never had to experience the psychological trauma that comes along with being a Black person in America,” declares Shelby Mayes, who serves as Membership Development Director for the BSU, in an op-ed for The Daily Californian. “I didn’t need to be physically harmed to feel violated by my school [on September 14]

I've seen so many threads in which it is incorrectly said that the players have a right of free speech that I thought someone should explain what the right of free speech actually is. (I am an attorney.) Here is the text of the First Amendment to the US Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." (Emphasis added.) As the text...

This is a livestream of Milo Yiannopolous marching in Berkeley. The streamer is switching on a regular basis to different streams at the event.

At Berkeley, there are both unequivocal voices championing the importance of free speech, no matter how inflammatory, and professors who say lines need to be drawn on campuses. These professors argue that the First Amendment needs to be reassessed for reasons that include the rise of internet trolling and cyberbullying and that some scientific research now shows that hateful speech can cause physical pain.

On September 12, 2017, I spoke to 600 middle school students at Eubanks Intermediary School of the Carroll Independent School District in honor of Constitution Day. Since Southlake, Texas is my community it was a special occasion for me. The kids had fun, and all of the teachers and administration were very excited after the speech, and grateful. Social media photos and posts abounded from the school. The morning before the speech, September 11, 600 of the same folders arrived for the students for the speech the next day. At no time did anyone, six months prior in March, four...

Fires, pepper spray, smashed windows, punches, assaults, riots, domestic terrorism — all results of recent protests across the nation in which freedom of expression has escalated to violence. In the aftermath of violent protests on college campuses from University of California-Berkeley to Middlebury, and the deadly events of Charlottesville, some think it’s possible the University of Wisconsin could also reach a tipping point. Last November, chants of “shame” and “safety” from protesters drowned out the words of controversial speaker Ben Shapiro when he visited UW’s campus. Audience members retorted by shouting back “decency” and “you’re a baby.”

On Thursday, the “free speech” social network Gab.ai filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging it had violated federal antitrust laws when it kicked the company’s app out of the Google Play Store.

What images should appear when you Google “white couple”? Probably two people of European descent. If you search those words today, though, you’ll find almost exclusively black couples. The results are similarly skewed for “white man & white woman” and “white couple with children”. Try it. Strange, a bit annoying, and vaguely political – just imagine the reaction if a query for “black couple” turned up only whites. I suspect that wouldn’t fly at Google. What results would you expect when Googling “American inventors”? Likely a mix of great innovators from our past and present, from a variety of backgrounds....

Last week, I visited the University of California, Berkeley. The preparations for the visit were patently insane. First, the school charged the sponsor group, Young America's Foundation, a $15,000 security fee. Then, the school blocked off the upper level of the auditorium, fearful that radicals from the violent far-left-leaning group Antifa would infiltrate the speech and begin hurling objects from the balcony onto the crowd below. Finally, the school ended up spending some $600,000 on additional policing, including the creation of cement barriers and hiring of hundreds of armed police officers for a prospective riot. All this so that I...

We have been fed a dangerous lie that will cut to the very heart of freedom in America (and elsewhere soon enough). When the politicians and the media talk about “hackers,” they are telling a flat out narrative that barely exists above a whisper in the real world. They have made these “hackers” into “demons working for dangerous nations” to make us fear what is an almost non-existent threat. The real reason they are spinning this tale is far more nefarious. This whole effort is to shut down conservative voices and be lauded as heroes for it. Internet controls, censorship,...