Free Republic

It’s official: Nowhere in Britain is safe from the woke speech police. First they stomped their jackboot on universities, where it’s now a risky business to express conservative opinions or even to state biological facts, including such sinful utterances as: “Men are not women.” Then they came for the workplace. Crack an off-color joke or voice a dissenting view and you might be made to take an “awareness-raising course” — or what the Soviets called re-education. Now the Woke Inquisition is feverishly eyeing yet another zone of British society for one of its joyless crackdowns, this time laying down its...

The British government has reportedly tasked a specialist police unit to surveil social media for anti-mass migration opinions as it braces for another potential summer of unrest. Rather than address the concerns of the public, such as removing the mostly young male illegal migrants from the taxpayer-funded hotel accommodations in communities across the country, the UK Home Office has formed the National Internet Intelligence Investigations to “maximise social media intelligence” about anti-mass migration sentiment on social media, according to The Telegraph. The team will work out of the Covid lockdown-enforcing National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in London. It comes amid...

Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of 'trying to police opinions' by assembling an elite team of police officers to monitor growing anti-migrant sentiment online. Detectives are set to be drawn from forces around the country as the Government scrambles to crack down on potential violence by flagging up early signs of civil unrest on social media. It comes amid fears Britain could face another summer of disorder just 12 months after a wave of riots sparked scenes of chaos following the Southport murders. Earlier this month, demonstrations first flared up outside The Bell Hotel, in Epping, Essex, after an...

If you have any doubt that the European Union is devolving into a soft totalitarian state, think again. I have been sounding the alarm bells about the developments in Europe for as long as I have been writing at Hot Air, and some of you may have thought me an alarmist engaged in hyperbole. I am alarmed, of course, but by real threats to freedom. The latest assault on freedom--not just in Europe, because the EU and Great Britain are using their criminal and regulatory powers to suppress speech in the US as well as other countries--comes with the breaking...

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."The last line of the book highlights the tragic and ironic transformation that has taken place on Animal Farm. At the beginning of the story, the animals rebel against the oppressive humans, driven by a vision of equality and justice. They establish their own government, led by the pigs, who promise a better life for all. However, as the story progresses, the pigs gradually adopt the same corrupt and oppressive behaviors as...

The Connecticut Forum hosted Barack Obama a few weeks ago to discuss current events, and the former president took the opportunity to support government regulatory constraints for online speech. “We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts,” Obama opined in his nonchalant way of attacking the First Amendment while pretending to support it. “There is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard,” he continued, “versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices, or the most polarizing voices, or the most dangerous in the sense of inciting violence.” Obama has always been a...

At around 6 a.m. this morning, hundreds of people across Germany awoke to police officers at their door. Their only ‘crime’ is to have openly made critical or offensive comments on the internet, many about specific politicians. German police raiding right-wing Compact Magazine’s editor-in-chief’s home, Twitter This is not a scene from the Third Reich or the German Democratic Republic, but from the Federal Republic in the 21st Century. Officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) intend to make approximately 170 house visits today, to investigate ‘hateful’ or insulting comments made online. Suspects have had their tablets, laptops, and...

House raids over speech violations are becoming commonplace across Germany, even as violent crime explodes... On Wednesday morning at 6 a.m., a large-scale police operation was launched across Germany, targeting hundreds of individuals suspected of insulting politicians or spreading “hate and incitement” online. The massive crackdown saw police launch morning raids against 170 individuals, which saw police seize computers, cell phones, and tablets, and conduct searches in multiple locations across the country. The action, which was conducted by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), uses the new Criminal Code Paragraph 188 to target individuals accused of racism and hate speech....

Police in Germany have executed more than 170 operations targeting people they referred to as “digital arsonists”. Starting early on the morning of June 25, officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office raided the homes of people suspected of running “criminal posts” online. The police move was not the first such in Germany, where it is flagged a “day of action”, targeting alleged authors of “online hate and hate messages”. This was the 12th time that the police took such nationwide action against so-called politically motivated crime (PMK). Two-thirds of those people whom officers hit had reportedly made right-wing radical...

On Monday’s America This Week Walter Kirn read from a bizarre introduction to his 75th Anniversary edition paperback edition of 1984. Written by Harvard-educated author Dolen Perkins-Valdez, it came with a trigger warning. I had to go looking for the foreword by Perkins-Valdez, a black female writer whose Twitter page features a line from the “discussion questions” portion of her book Take My Hand: “History repeats what we don’t remember.”In Take My Hand Perkins-Valdez stressed the importance of remembering episodes like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the use of the Henrietta Lacks cell line. Her essay about 1984 argues at...

Toll from Tehran’s terrorism and proxy attacks are a serious factors in Trump’s decision on whether to support or even join the Israeli war effort. Three years after 19 Americans died in a bombing at a Saudi Arabian apartment complex, then-President Bill Clinton sent a cable that told Iran’s president a secret that the 42nd president wasn’t even willing to tell the American public: U.S. intelligence had ample evidence that Tehran was behind the deadly Khobar Towers terror attack. “Message to President Khatami from President Clinton: The United States Government has received credible evidence that members of the Iranian Revolutionary...

“America can’t do a damn thing against us,” Ayatollah Khomeini bragged while holding our hostages. The Carter administration had undermined the Shah’s government in favor of the Islamists who seized power and then prevented the embassy’s Marine guards from defending the facility and the people inside against the Muslim ‘student’ groups who claimed to be coming in peace.The “peaceful” student activists took over our embassy and held our people hostage.Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei taunted President Trump with the same slogan in June after being asked to give up Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “Our response to the US nonsense is clear:...

("an analyst told CNN." CNN, June 15, 2025 https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-strikes-news-06-15-25) _______ CAMERA Special Report: The National Iranian American Council; Tehran’s Best Friend in Washington. By: Sean Durns November 24, 2015. [...] Parsi’s dissertation on Israeli-Iranian relations served as the basis for his book Treacherous Alliance (2008, Yale University Press). Parsi is a resident alien, with Swedish and Iranian passports, not an American citizen, although he runs an organization that claims to represent Iranian-Americans... Upon coming to the United States in 2001, Parsi worked as a managing director for Hooshang Amirhadmadi of the American Iranian Council (AIC) while completing graduate study. Parsi...

The 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell's novel 1984, which coined the term "thoughtcrime" to describe the act of having thoughts that question the ruling party's ideology, has become an ironic lightning rod in debates over alleged trigger warnings and the role of historical context in classic literature. The introduction to the new edition, endorsed by Orwell's estate and written by the American author Dolen Perkins-Valdezm, is at the center of the storm, drawing fire from conservative commentators as well as public intellectuals, and prompting a wide spectrum of reaction from academics who study Orwell's work. Perkins-Valdez opens the introduction...

Earlier this month authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to multiple datasets obtained by 404 Media. The news shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology, made by a company called Flock and usually marketed to individual communities to stop carjackings or find missing people, and turn it into a tool for finding people who...

A court has sentenced comedian Leo Lins to more than eight years in prison for inciting intolerance through a stand-up performance viewed by over three million people on YouTube. On Tuesday 3 June, Brazilian comedian Leo Lins was sentenced to over eight years in prison for making discriminatory remarks in a stand-up routine that targeted a wide range of minority groups — including black people, obese individuals, elderly people, those living with HIV, homosexuals, evangelicals, Indigenous communities, people from the impoverished northeast of Brazil, Jews, and people with disabilities. The federal court in São Paulo ruled that the right to...

If you were unfamiliar with the American analytics company Palanatir Technologies, prepare to hear about it on every news channel in the coming months. Donald Trump secured the presidency twice because he was the anti-establishment candidate. The White House has tasked Planatir with developing an extensive centralized federal database to house the personal data of every American citizen. In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an “Information Silos” executive order focused on “removing unnecessary barriers to federal employees accessing government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency.” Planatir was a clear choice. At...

A new round of DNA testing exonerates a homeless man who has spent nearly four decades in prison for the killing of a Santa Ana nanny, according to defense attorneys who are asking Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer to declare Kenneth Clair innocent of the 1984 slaying. Clair, who spent years on death row before an appellate court overturned his death sentence and he was re-sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. ...

Groan.Via BBC: Tony Blair and George W Bush should be taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the Iraq war, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said.Writing in the UK’s Observer newspaper, he accused the former leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction.The Iraq military campaign had made the world more unstable “than any other conflict in history”, he said.Mr Blair responded by saying “this is the same argument we have had many times with nothing new to say”.Earlier this week, Archbishop Tutu, a veteran peace campaigner who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 in recognition of...

In 1984, the National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting was held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was the first Annual Meeting this correspondent attended. It was characterized by manipulation, lies, and betrayal.In 1984, this correspondent was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. A masters degree in mining engineering was nearing completion. A life membership in the National Rifle Association had been paid off in installments. When informed the annual meeting would be held in Milwaukee, this correspondent, his brother, and a mutual friend, Jim Blair, made plans to attend.Neal Knox had been booted as head of the Institute for...