Free Republic

Ben Shapiro outlines how the WEF controls what we are permitted to read, hear and discuss.

The families of the victims in the Buffalo supermarket shooting from last May have sued more than half a dozen Big Tech companies alleging that they gave the shooter a platform to take in racist and violent views before committing the shooting. Diona Patterson, Barbara Mapps and Shawanda Rogers, whose loved ones were killed in the shooting, and survivor Latisha Rogers filed the lawsuit in New York Supreme Court in Erie County on Friday against social media companies like Meta, Facebook’s parent company; Snap, Inc., which runs Snapchat; Discord; Amazon, which owns Twitch; and Reddit.

This week, the arrest of British Catholic woman for “praying” outside an abortion clinic has attracted international attention. But the jailing of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, director of anti-abortion group March for Life UK, is neither surprising nor particularly rare as a denial of free speech in Great Britain. It is also a cautionary tale for those in the United States, which is facing arguably the largest anti-free speech movement in its history. Pictures from Birmingham show Vaughan-Spruce, 45, simply standing near the abortion clinic silently praying when an officer confronts her. She was not blocking access or displaying any protest signs...

The bedrock of American democracy, the First Amendment, prohibits Congress from making laws “abridging the freedom of speech.” The Supreme Court has repeatedly applied this prohibition to executive actions, as well. The Biden administration’s campaign to censor, demonetize, and suppress dissenting voices on social media is much broader than previously known, as demonstrated by an amended complaint filed last month in federal district court in the case of Missouri v. Biden. The complaint, by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general along with the New Civil Liberties Alliance on behalf of leading health-care professionals, provides strong evidence of the administration’s vigorous...

Jussie Smollett's sentencing

Incidents of academics being targeted for their views are on the rise, according to a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). FIRE notes that the number of targeting cases has sharply increased from 24 incidents in 2015 to 113 in 2020. Unfortunately, that trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down in 2021. But one professor at North Carolina State University has decided to push back. Stephen Porter is a professor in the College of Education, where he teaches graduate courses in statistics, causal inference, and workflow of data analysis. A conservative, Porter claims that university...

Does the Constitution require Americans to accept Big Tech censorship? The claim is counterintuitive but the logic is clear: If you submit a letter to this newspaper, the editors have no legal obligation to publish it, and a statute requiring them to do so would be struck down as a violation of the Journal’s First Amendment rights. Facebook and Twitter, the argument goes, have the same right not to provide a platform to views they find objectionable. Big Tech censorship has provoked interest in new civil-rights statutes—state laws that would bar the companies from viewpoint discrimination on their platforms and...

WASHINGTON—Sen. Amy Klobuchar introduced a bill Thursday that would strip online platforms such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. of liability protections if their technology spreads misinformation about coronavirus vaccines or other public-health emergencies. The bill, which Ms. Klobuchar (D., Minn.) has previously telegraphed was in the works, would create an exception to the law known as Section 230 that shields internet platforms from lawsuits for content generated by their users and other third parties. At a congressional hearing last year, Big Tech executives signaled cautious support for modifying Section 230, a provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act that...

Law professor Alan Dershowitz was dragged online after saying Wednesday that former president Donald Trump's lawsuit against Google, Facebook and Twitter is an "important First Amendment case." "This is the most important First Amendment case of the 21st Century," the lawyer declared on Fox News' "Hannity." He went on, "It's important because it pits freedom of speech on the one hand against the First Amendment on the other hand. That may sound paradoxical, but remember, it's the high-tech giants that are banning freedom of speech. They are censoring but they're claiming the right to do so under the First Amendment...

About two years ago, I spoke to a class of UNC-Chapel Hill students about free speech: what it is and why it is important. I covered some basic points such as the kinds of speech the First Amendment does and does not protect. I also talked about the importance of respecting dissenting opinions, and how shutting down ideas is not the most effective way to get people to change their minds. To my surprise, several students stated that they believed that it was their constitutional right to prevent someone else from speaking, if they disagreed with what was being said....

Over the last 30 years, federal courts have consistently ruled that restrictive speech codes and minuscule free speech zones on college campuses violate the First Amendment. So, why do college administrators continue to create and enforce such policies? The answer is that they face no penalty for doing so. A case that arose back in 2016 at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) presents the Supreme Court with the opportunity to rectify that. Two students at the college, Chike Uzuegbunam and Joseph Bradford, were fervent Christians who wanted to communicate their beliefs to others on campus. When they spoke about Christianity and...

Last week, the Diocese of Brooklyn, which I lead, filed a lawsuit in federal court, asking for relief from restrictions placed on churches, even though they haven’t contributed to the recent COVID-19 spikes. In doing so, we are taking a stand for religious liberty and against irrational and arbitrary lockdown measures. Last Sunday, we had to all but shutter 28 Catholic churches throughout Brooklyn and Queens, because they’re located in Gov. Cuomo’s red and orange zones. We could only admit 10 people to red-zone churches, 25 to orange-zone churches. Words can’t express my disappointment. The restrictions defy logic. Our churches...

NEW YORK—An organization representing Orthodox Jewish groups filed a federal lawsuit Thursday challenging the constitutionality of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent order to limit the size of gatherings at houses of worship in communities seeing surges in Covid-19 cases.

An ACLU Kentucky communications associate criticized Transylvania University on Saturday for accepting Nick Sandmann, the high school student who sued major news outlets for their coverage of a controversial interaction he and several of his classmates had with a Native American activist. “Does anyone else think it’s a bit of a stain on Transylvania University for accepting Nick Sandman [sic]? I’m sure it’s a “both sides” defense, but it’s pretty counter to their mission and another instance of there not actually being equal sides to an issue,” ACLU’s Samuel Crankshaw said in a Facebook post first uncovered by Jonathan Turley....

"YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!" is a cry you hear incessantly at protests in Portland, Oregon, always shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators. You can assert that, yes, you can film; you can point out that they themselves are filming incessantly; you can push their hands away from covering your phone; you can have your phone record them stealing your phone—all of these things have happened to me—and none will have any impact on their contention that "YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM" and its occasional variation, "PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!" I cannot say who came up with...

‘The devil made me do it!” That was how funnyman Flip Wilson explained away his rogue moves in 1970s comedy bits. In 2020, it is Joe Biden’s rationalization of the Black Lives Matter revolution, with Baal taking on a decidedly orange cast. An unmistakable correlation between the radical Left’s extortionate violence and the sudden tightening of polls has stirred the Democrats’ senescent standard-bearer to bolt the basement. He’d hoped to wait another week or so before emerging to read short speeches about President Trump’s erratic handling of COVID-19 (the government’s missteps during the Obama-era swine flu pandemic having apparently slipped...

Conservative lawmakers blasted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after he sided with the court's liberal justices in a 5-4 decision Friday that rejected a Nevada church’s request to block the state government from enforcing a cap on attendance at religious services. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted early Saturday morning that Roberts had "abandoned his oath." "What happened to that judge?" tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). "Freedom of religion is our first freedom. Yet SCOTUS has ruled that casinos can host hundreds of gamblers, while churches cannot welcome their full congregations. Justice Roberts once again got it wrong, shamefully closing...

‘Are we in a pandemic or not?” a reporter from the Orthodox Jewish newspaper Hamodia asked New York Mayor Bill de Blasio Tuesday. “And do we have one set of rules for protesters and another for everyone else?” Good questions. For nearly three months, the country founded to guarantee religious freedom has seen its houses of worship shut down. Following local and state executive orders, Catholic churches held no Mass. Communion wasn't taken, confessions weren’t heard, and Catholics went to their final rest without the comfort of the sacraments. Jewish prayer services, which require a quorum, were broken up by...

On picking up What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus, one might expect a book urging those who dismiss today’s college students’ complaints about institutional racism, persistent sexism, and other societal ills to take them more seriously. To engage with their arguments and to try to empathize with them, rather than ignoring or lambasting them, even when they engage in what seems to many people like unjustified histrionics. What Snowflakes Get Right is not that book. In fact, on completing NYU comparative literature professor (and former vice provost) Ulrich Baer’s book laying out his views on...

Shawnee State University in southern Ohio (cross the bridge and you’re in Kentucky) is an open-admissions school that opened in 1986. It’s very little known, but the school’s administrators are as politically attuned to progressive sensibilities as any across the nation. A case that has arisen at Shawnee threatens to set a terrible precedent for the suppression of speech that any “woke” student claims to find harassing. Nicholas Meriwether has been on the Shawnee faculty since 1996, teaching political science. He has risen to the rank of full professor with the equivalent of tenure. In a course on political philosophy...