Free Republic

The team of opposition researchers behind the infamous anti-Trump dossier embraced by the FBI were paid big bucks to continue trying to dig up dirt on Russian meddling in American politics – even after the 2016 presidential election. That revelation, buried inside a 243-page report released by House Intelligence Committee Republicans last week, has sparked new speculation about the identities of the secretive donors who were funding the post-election project. According to the House Intelligence Committee report, Daniel J. Jones – the president of the Penn Quarter Group and a former staffer for Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein – “secured the...

Internet billionaire Marc Benioff is urging the GOP Congress and President Donald Trump to fast-track 400,000 foreign visa-workers — plus 400,000 family members — to green cards, the U.S. job market, and the ballot box. “This is good for our economy,” Benioff said in a Tuesday tweet that was applauded by Silicon Valley lobbyists. “We need to grow our workers to grow our economy.” Benioff’s comment is a tautology: Expanding the population by importing more than 800,000 people would obviously grow the nation’s economy, retail sales, government taxes, company profits, and Wall Street stock options. But Benioff’s cheap-labor importation plan...

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Peter Thiel is an optimist. Standing before a room full of nearly 100 right-of-center student journalists on Friday night, he told the crowd “we are not on the losing side of history.” But a “reformation” needs to happen first, the billionaire tech mogul and libertarian philanthropist said. “Universities today are as corrupt as the Catholic Church of 500 years ago,” Thiel said. During his speech, he spoke of an academia that has shut down debate, excommunicated conservative scholars, and insisted a college degree is the only way to “salvation,” that being a good job and solid future....

A young Manhattan man allegedly stole $1million from a Silicon Valley executive by hacking into his phone and stealing his cryptocurrency. Nicholas Truglia, 27, faces 21 felony counts after he allegedly went on a hacking spree that targeted six victims. Authorities said Truglia successfully hacked into six victims' phones, but was only able to steal money from Robert Ross.

From an office suite on the 26th floor of the iconic Frost Bank Tower in Austin, Texas, a little-known recruiting firm called Crossover is searching the globe for software engineers. Crossover is looking for anyone who can commit to a 40- or 50-hour workweek, but it has no interest in full-time employees. It wants contract workers who are willing to toil from their homes or even in local cafes. “The best people in the world aren’t in your Zip code,” says Andy Tryba, chief executive of Crossover, in a promotional YouTube video. Which, Tryba emphasizes, also means you don’t have...

...Google’s leaders conspicuously put their tails between their legs in response to employee protests... that executives were allowed to leave with nest eggs intact after being accused of inappropriate sexual conduct... A more telling loss of control was Google’s surrender to mau-mauing employees when it walked away from a Pentagon deal to develop algorithms to speed the extraction of meaningful information from... drone footage, as well as ...participate in a 10-year project to build out the military’s cloud infrastructure... The Google protests have been led by a group calling itself the Tech Workers Coalition, whose avowed purposes are ideological rather...

It certainly looks like the prejudice against Republicans, conservatives, and especially Trump supporters, is so virulent that Facebook was willing to pay a hundred mill to rid itself od one. The company denies this is the case, but the Wall Street Journal is not convinced. Facebook Inc. executive and virtual-reality wunderkind Palmer Luckey was a rising star of Silicon Valley when, at the height of the 2016 presidential contest, he donated $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton group. His donation sparked a backlash from his colleagues. Six months later, he was out. Neither Facebook nor Mr. Luckey has ever said why...

The Bay Area's "cruel and inhuman" conditions for homeless residents violate a number of human rights, according to a reportwritten by United Nations Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha. Farha revealed her findings before the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, after previously reporting that homeless residents in San Francisco and Oakland had been denied "access to water, sanitation and health services, and other basic necessities." In January, she went on a fact-finding mission to assess the state of the Bay Area's homeless encampments, which are teeming with trash, feces, and discarded needles. In Oakland, Farha witnessed rats digging through the mud and families camped outside...

Thirteen months into the international derby that is the Amazon HQ2 selection process, it seems the end of the sweepstakes is near. What's happened? What have we learned? What's next? It's been a dizzying year-plus for the giant online retailer. Amazon received 238 proposals last November from cities across North America, each wanting a crack at attracting upwards of 50,000 high-paying tech jobs that could send a local economy on an entirely different trajectory. Twenty finalists were announced last January, and Amazon began its due diligence in earnest. With limited information reaching the general public, speculation on the selected metro...

“LIKE Florence in the Renaissance.” That is a common description of what it is like to live in Silicon Valley. America’s technology capital has an outsize influence on the world’s economy, stockmarkets and culture. This small portion of land running from San Jose to San Francisco is home to three of the world’s five most valuable companies. Giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Netflix all claim Silicon Valley as their birthplace and home, as do trailblazers such as Airbnb, Tesla and Uber. The Bay Area has the 19th-largest economy in the world, ranking above Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. The...

Theranos Inc., the blood-testing company accused of perpetrating Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud, will soon cease to exist. In the wake of a high-profile scandal, the company will formally dissolve, according to a shareholder email. Theranos will seek to pay unsecured creditors its remaining cash in coming months, the letter said. The move comes after federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the blood-testing company’s former No. 2 executive, alleging that they defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and defrauded doctors and patients.

[Facebook Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg speaks to the audience during the Facebook F8 2018 developer community event in San Jose, California, US on Tuesday, May 1, 2018.] A group of about 100 conservative Facebook employees have formed an internal organization whose aim is to combat a liberal company culture considered by many to be intolerant of different views. The group was started by a post on the social network company's internal message board last week, as reported by The New York Times on Tuesday. "We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views," posted Brian Amerige,...

Where do we go after Trump? This question becomes more pertinent as the soap opera administration seeks its own dramatic demise. Yet before they can seize power from the president and his now subservient party, the Democrats need to agree on what will replace Trumpism. Conventional wisdom implies an endless battle between pragmatic, corporate Clintonites on one side, and Democratic socialists of the Bernie brand. Yet this conflict could resolve itself in a new, innovative approach that could be best described as oligarchal socialism. Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands...

The Economist has a fine cover story on the decline of the Silicon Valley, warning that its famed garage start-ups are fleeing to places such as Fort Lauderdale and Pittsburgh. Here's its title leader:  Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley, which sums the problem up as this: Its combination of engineering expertise, thriving business networks, deep pools of capital, strong universities and a risk-taking culture have made the Valley impossible to clone, despite many attempts to do so. There is no credible rival for its position as the world’s pre-eminent innovation hub. But there are signs that the Valley’s...

The recent wave of censorship of conservative voices on the internet by tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Apple mirrors a plan concocted by a coalition of George Soros-funded, progressive groups to take back power in Washington from President Trump’s administration. A confidential, 49-page memo for defeating Trump by working with the major social-media platforms to eliminate “right wing propaganda and fake news” was presented in January 2017 by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors, the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time. On Monday, the Gateway Pundit blog noted the memo’s...

China has charged its former top Internet regulator Lu Wei with corruption. Charges against Lu and two other former officials Mo Jiancheng and Zhang Jiehui were made by the Supreme People’s Procurate and announced on Monday through state-owned media. Cases against the three were filed in Ningbo, Beijing and Taiyuan. Trial dates were not announced. State media said that Lu had taken advantage of his positions and used other officials to seek profits for others. It said he had accepted “huge amount of money and property.” The allegations related to Lu’s activities while at state news agency Xinhua, the Beijing...

Easily the dumbest article I’ve read this year was one by a posh liberal columnist in a high end political journal explaining why freedom of speech wasn’t under threat in the West. Anyone who argued otherwise, he claimed, was a “grade A chocolate-coated plonker.” It was, of course, the kind of glib nonsense you could only spout if you were on the squishy left/bien-pensant/progressive side of the political argument. Everyone on the right knows better because they have all experienced at first hand what it’s like to live in a culture where you cannot speak your mind without being punished...

No fewer than 60 organizations branded "hate groups" or otherwise attacked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are considering legal action against the left-wing smear factory, a Christian legal nonprofit leader confirmed to PJ Media on Tuesday. He suggested that the $3 million settlement and apology the SPLC gave to Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam Foundation on Monday would encourage further legal action. "We haven't filed anything against the SPLC, but I think a number of organizations have been considering filing lawsuits against the SPLC, because they have been doing to a lot of organizations exactly what they did...

Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Tuesday that “something like 54 private jets” had arrived at an elite meeting of tech CEOs, GOP party insiders and big donors set on stopping Donald Trump before he wins the Republican nomination. Grim broke the story (link: ): Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering. The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned against the unchecked power of big tech during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Sunday, recommending that America “looks at all the tools we have to protect free speech and prevent[s] the Internet from becoming a vehicle for censorship.” “The nexus of power in media has moved from New York City to Silicon Valley,” Cruz told host Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House. “At this point, a handful of companies enjoy power that famed publisher William Randolph Hearst, at the height of yellow journalism, could never have imagined.” “We’ve heard reports from whistleblowers of...