Free Republic

...It didn’t take long for a report to emerge claiming that Russian-sponsored Twitter accounts and bots were the real driving force behind the viral call for the release of the memo. Without worrying about the veracity of this convenient claim, all the usual suspects giddily spread the story across social media — probably because they have such a deep reverence for truth in the Era of Trump. The report also prompted Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, both Democrats, to pull out every fearmongering catchphrase available to demand that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg perform...

Twitter war

Washington, D.C. — U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (FL-01) today led a group of 65 lawmakers in a letter to Chairman Devin Nunes of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence urging the immediate release of the four-page FISA Memo document to the public, as well as any relevant ancillary information. In the letter, Rep. Gaetz states, “the audience of this document should not be limited to Members of Congress — the American people deserve to know the information it contains.” Cosigners of the letter include: Congressmen Brian Babin (TX-36), Don Bacon (NE-02), Jim Banks (IN-03), Jack Bergman (MI-01), Andy Biggs...

Williams College Students Can Report Each Other for 'Making Comments on Social Media' About Religion or Politics Bias incident reporting system undermines the very point of having a university. Williams College is one of at least 100 campuses with a system in place for students to report each other for saying or doing something slightly offensive. These trivially disturbing occurrences are known as "bias incidents"—and at Williams, virtually anything could qualify. According to the Massachusetts college's website, "name-calling and stereotyping" are examples of bias. Telling a joke that draws its humor from a stereotype is also wrong. Students shouldn't use...

CHICAGO — Federal officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested 22 criminal aliens and immigration violators in Illinois’ Cook and Lake counties during a three-day enforcement action, which ended Monday. During this operation, ERO deportation officers made arrests in the following Illinois cities and towns: Chicago (9), Cicero (4), Hoffman Estates (1), Palatine (4), Park City (1), Rolling Meadows (2) and Round Lake Beach (1). All those arrested were men between the ages of 20 and 53. Aliens arrested during this operation are from the following five countries: Ecuador (1), Honduras (2), Mexico...

A great many people – especially conservatives – reverence the Constitution, consider that it has been abused and that if only the doctrines expressed within were revived and respected, all would be well with America again. This, of course, is a kind of children’s bedtime story – and approximates reality to about the same degree as the story of the Three Little Pigs. The Constitution was peddled and imposed on us by men like Alexander Hamilton, a grasper after power who very openly loathed the ideas expressed by men like Jefferson in his Declaration (and even more so in his...

An escalation in immigration enforcement over the past year has brought a new level of anxiety for the several thousand migrant farm workers living in Vermont. For the first time since 2010, arrests and detentions by the U.S. Border Patrol increased in Vermont, New Hampshire and northeastern New York last year. The workers – many of them undocumented – are critically important to the state’s farm economy. To give you a sense of how important, consider that twice a year the Mexican government comes to a Vermont farm community to help hundreds of its citizens with financial and legal advice,...

Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material. Sites that do not remove “obviously illegal” posts could face fines of up to €50 million (£44.3 million; $60 million). The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they have been told about lawbreaking material. Social networks and media sites with more than two million members will fall under the law’s provisions. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will be the law’s main focus, but it is also likely to be applied to Reddit, Tumblr and...

Since the 2016 election, the intelligence community has been under greater scrutiny—and for good reason. The leaks emanating from this cadre of professionals in D.C. was not exposing government malfeasance from the Trump administration, but classified information that was putting America’s national security interests at stake. It seemed to have been done to hamstring a new administration. As apolitical operatives, this was not their job. If you can’t handle working under a new administration, then resign. Leaking to undercut the Trump presidency because you’re sore about Hillary Clinton losing is not an act of patriotism. Former investigative journalist for CBS...

Social Justice is often driven through shame, through a certain desire to appear moral, righteous, and proper to others. If a truth is unpleasant, if it doesn’t sound good rhetorically, it must be dispensed with for sake of appearances, to avoid being publicly shamed as a bad person. This is a concept I’ve long referred to as “Weaponized Empathy,” for this is a tactic that uses empathy as a political bludgeon to shame you into compliance with someone else’s agenda. The common pop-culture argument for why women “make 77 cents on the dollar” is that women are being discriminated against....

The weaponization of the IRS to suppress the organization of conservative nonprofits when the tea party movement was in full bloom, remains an open sore on our democratic political system. The weight of the most feared agency of the federal government was used to suppress a political movement. Despite the payment of millions of taxpayer dollars to groups that were prevented from getting their status approved because their politics were disagreeable to the incumbent president and his supporters in the federal bureaucracy, the damage cannot be undone, and the perpetrators have suffered no judicial consequences. Los Lerner, the point woman...

It’s not often that a court captures a debate perfectly in a sentence or two. After all, most debates are complex things that require layers of discussion. However, the Delaware State Supreme Court just lowered the boom on restrictions that kept lawfully owned and carried firearms out of state parks. In the process, they summed up what we’ve been saying for years regarding firearms and gun control laws. The Superior Court earlier upheld the ban based on the “important governmental objective of keeping the public safe from the potential harm of firearms in state parks and forests,” The Court did...

Rupert Darwall is a strategy consultant and policy analyst. He read economics and history at Cambridge University and subsequently worked in finance as an investment analyst and in corporate finance before becoming a special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has written extensively for publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator and is the author of the widely praised "The Age of Global Warming: A History" (2013). Climate change was political long before Al Gore first started talking about it. In Green Tyranny, Rupert Darwall...

The Philadelphia City Council voted 14-3 on Thursday to pass a bill allowing the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections to ban shop owners from protecting themselves and their employees with bulletproof plexiglass. Philadelphia 8th District Councilwoman Cindy Bass, who sponsored the bill, said previously that having to see plexiglass represents an "indignity" to her constituents.

On Wednesday, the Republican controlled house voted to further federalize gun laws in this country. While Ryan McMaken has noted the danger in further centralizing gun legislation, there is another deeply troubling aspect to this bill: it expands the ability of the Federal government to restrict Americans’ right to bear arms. During the legislative process, the NRA supported merging the bill aimed at nationalizing concealed carry permits with another piece of legislation aimed at “fixing” the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS.) Obviously this legislation was inspired by the failure of the US Air Force to report the criminal...

the Left engaged in gross abuses of criminal law to intimidate, harass and silence conservatives in the state. The specifics were chilling -- from pre-dawn raids on political activists' homes, to stifling gag orders preventing them from saying a peep about what was happening to them, all in pursuit of criminalizing and punishing the Badger State conservative movement. Eventually, one target violated his gag order and blew the whistle on the whole operation, eventually leading to investigations of the investigations, and multiple courts shutting down the witch hunts with extreme prejudice. ... ruthless the Left had become in its efforts...

Austria's top court has ruled that same-sex couples can get married from the start of 2019, declaring a previous law discriminatory. The Constitutional Court overturned a law that restricted same-sex unions to civil partnerships, according to court documents seen by CNN. The decision brings Austria into line with many other European nations including Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and the UK.

‘We have an obligation to redistribute’ The holiday season is upon us, and leave it to an Ivy Leaguer to play the role of the proverbial stick in the mud. Writing in the Yale Daily News, guest columnist Xuan (who uses the pronouns “they” and “them”) invokes the United States’ “legacy of colonialism, exploitation, slavery and genocide” to argue that Americans’ personal charity isn’t “quite enough” nor “all of morality.” They offer examples of a shady used car salesman and a sketchy entrepreneur who, after screwing over people in the past attempt to make good later in life through charitable...

Popular tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others—have strongly protected free speech online, a policy widely associated with the legal norms of the United States. American tech companies, however, operate globally, and their platforms are subject to regulation by the European Union, whose member states offer less protection to expression than does the United States. European regulators are pressuring tech companies to control and suppress extreme speech. The regulators’ clear warning is that, if the companies do not comply “voluntarily,” they will face harsher laws and potential liability. This regulatory effort runs the risk of censorship creep, whereby a wide array...

Seattle’s City Council made national headlines earlier this year when it enacted a city income tax aimed at “high earners.” Immediately, politicians crowed that they had planted a flag of “resistance” to the forces of “Trumpism.” In a court hearing last week, the city defended its war on wealth against several legal and constitutional challenges. The briefing from both sides exposes an inconvenient reality for the levy’s defenders: its real, ultimate victims aren’t necessarily the plutocrats they claim to be targeting. In fact, just the opposite. Some background: there are few precedents from other parts of the country for a...