Free Republic

It was said during our Mideast military adventures, and has been considered a truism of war, that you can’t really win a conflict without “boots on the ground.” For it’s difficult to completely subdue a people from afar. It may not be too different with battles for civilization. I stated in 2012, addressing a long-developing reality, that the culture war was over as the Left had achieved social dominance. “What is occurring now is a pacification effort,” I wrote — one designed to stamp out the “conservative” guerrilla-group diehards. Other than its intensification, the only thing that has changed about...

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Breitbart News exclusively that she is opposed to a proposal called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would allow establishment media outlets to form a cartel to pressure big tech companies for more censorship and special favors with a special media antitrust exemption. The proposal, which has been offered in both the House and Senate, is beginning to face serious and growing GOP opposition, with Blackburn joining a now growing list of conservatives to publicly oppose the bill. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and House Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)...

For the Facebook Advisory Board to continue the ban on President Donald J. Trump posting content on Facebook and Instagram, while Facebook accepts ad revenue and content from drug and human traffickers who funneled kids into the Biden administration’s unsafe and unsanitary kid cages along our border with Mexico, is the height of hypocrisy and pulls the curtain back and shows Mark Zuckerberg more interested in power and profit than protecting people from harm/ As Fox Business reported the dictatorial decision: "The Board has upheld Facebook’s decision on January 7, 2021, to restrict then-President Donald Trump’s access to posting content...

NEW: Iowa Gov’t Officials Coordinated with Big Tech to Censor Judicial Watch Election Posts Judicial Watch Sues over Abuse of Children Tied to Biden Border Crisis Facebook’s Brazen Ban of President Trump Should Concern Every American Judicial Watch Reveals CENSORED History of 2020 Election Judicial Watch Sues for Records of Biden Dogs after Biting Incidents NEW: Iowa Gov’t Officials Coordinated with Big Tech to Censor Judicial Watch Election Posts Last week we released records from the Secretary of State of California revealing how state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google (YouTube)) to censor election posts. Included were...

The Oversight Board circumvents First Amendment concerns because it is appointed by the industry, in this case Facebook, and the firm voluntarily follows its rulings. Board members should always favor free expression but, at the same time, are not bound to what have become often dogmatic formulas regarding First Amendment precedent. Thus, in the board’s first major ruling Wednesday, it chastised the firm’s process and very likely left an opening for Trump to return to the space. Now that we’ve established the board has power, it must be expanded to cover the entire social media ecosystem. As it stands, its...

Elizabeth Warren said Wednesday that Facebook's decision to uphold its ban on former President Donald Trump's account further exhibits Big Tech has too much power. 'I'm glad that Donald Trump is not going to be on Facebook,' the progressive senator from Massachusetts clarified to Yahoo Finance. 'Suits me.' 'But part two is that this is just further demonstration that these giant tech companies are way, way, way too powerful,' she asserted during an interview. 'They need to be broken up in order to keep commerce flourishing,' she said, echoing her calls during her 2020 bid to be the Democratic nominee...

The majority of Android and iOS apps created for US public and private schools send student data to assorted third parties, researchers have found, calling into question privacy commitments from Apple and Google as app store stewards. The Me2B Alliance, a non-profit technology policy group, examined a random sample of 73 mobile applications used in 38 different schools across 14 US states and found 60 per cent were transmitting student data. Analytics SDKs, which collect behavioral data about app usage, are considered high risk because of the potential for fingerprinting, data abuse, and data transit to partners. Advertising SDKs are...

Facebook’s oversight board voted to uphold a ban on former President Donald Trump’s ability to post content to his Facebook page, as well as his Instagram account. The decision was made on January 7, following the riot at the United States Capitol carried out by supporters of the president. The indeterminate ban was triggered by a video posted by Trump in which he echoed the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but told the protesters at the Capitol to “go home.” On account of violating the platform's standards, the board agreed to suspend Trump’s pages “indefinitely and for at...

Donald Trump has responded to Facebook’s decision to keep him banned from the platform, at minimum for the next six months. In his statement, Trump called the decision a "total embarrassment" and went nuclear on Big Tech for trying to silence him. Since the decision came on Wednesday several conservatives on Twitter and other websites have called for Congress to get involved.

Vaccine virtue-signaling — three words you probably did not know could exist in connection with one another until a pandemic swept the globe — is so very tiresome.In the novel “White Noise” by Don DeLillo, a scene outlines what is called “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Tourists flock to a mundane barn in a meadow, no different from any other. They stand there among the flashing of cameras, unable to even see the barn among the crowd, tucked into a social phenomenon. If we determine this to be like anything in the real world, those in attendance will soon...

The world’s preeminent social media site, Facebook, has made its decision on whether to allow Donald Trump back on its platform. The answer came on Wednesday when the site’s Oversight Board ruled that Trump will stay banned from the platform. “The Board has upheld Facebook’s decision on January 7 to suspend then-President Trump from Facebook and Instagram. Trump’s posts during the Capitol riot severely violated Facebook’s rules and encouraged and legitimized violence,” the board said in announcing its decision. “The Board also found Facebook violated its own rules by imposing a suspension that was ‘indefinite.’ This penalty is not described...

American leftists use the same tactics as their Soviet and Chinese comrades — and now they're ascendant. American leftists use the same tactics as their Soviet and Chinese comrades. The law has the same outward form as in civilized countries, but it is subverted to political ends. Common criminals, according to Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, were considered social allies of the regime. In the prison system, they were treated much better than political prisoners. In the U.S. in leftist areas, criminals are treated gently. An active criminal element aids the leftist state by making the citizens beholden to the...

The Biden administration is reportedly considering contracting outside firms to track ​”extremist” chatter online in order to circumvent legal restrictions on the surveillance power of federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. While the move would expand the government’s intelligence gathering capability, it would also add fuel to the widespread criticism of the government’s vast surveillance power and spawn possible legal action over the monitoring of Americans, CNN reported, citing sources. The DHS is limited in its ability to surveil Americans on social media sites without strong justification and is prohibited from using false identities to get access to...

A bill recently passed by the Florida legislature would assess fines as high as $250,000 against social media companies that ban political candidates from their platforms. The bill — widely seen as a rebuke to tech companies that blacklisted then-President Donald Trump from their servers in the waning days of his administration this year — was passed earlier this week by the Florida House and Senate. It is expected to be signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The legislation directs that social media platforms "may not willfully deplatform a candidate for office who is known by the social media platform...

California Officials Pressured Big Tech to Censor Social Media Election Posts Judicial Watch in Court to Stop a Maryland County from Giving Cash to Illegal Aliens Judicial Watch Fights Hard Left ‘Critical Race Theory’ California Officials Pressured Big Tech to Censor Social Media Election Posts We now have chilling details of California state officials and Big Tech executives conspiring to uproot the First Amendment and influence the 2020 election. And, key targets were Judicial Watch and me. The proof is in 540 pages and a supplemental four pages of documents we received from the office of the Secretary of...

One of the unfortunate vestiges of liberalism's lingering influence upon American conservatism, and by extension the Republican Party that is conservatism's default political vehicle, is the pervasive knee-jerk tendency to view government action as per se bad and private-sector action as per se good. This ideology, which might be called "market fundamentalism" or "private-sector fundamentalism," takes on differing forms: in its more benign variation, a principled commitment to unwavering laissez faire, but in its more malignant variation, a less principled commitment to corporate boosterism and outright cronyism. The realignment now unfolding before our eyes in American politics could finally retire...

What actions should an individual conservative take to push back against today’s onslaught of cancel culture, loss of freedom, and the Left’s destruction of America? What if you work full-time, protests aren’t your cup of tea, you don’t plan to run for political office, and you don’t have plans to become a conservative journalist anytime soon?Action and defiance and has a storied history in America: Patrick Henry, Frederick Douglas, Susan B Anthony, Rosa Parks, and MLK. But what if you are not destined for the pages of the history books? You can still make your voice heard and your actions...

While lawmakers in the United States are engaged in a public relations battle of who can crack down harder on big tech, the European Commission is poised to pass the Digital Marketing Act that would fundamentally alter how American big tech operates on the continent.Advocates of the Digital Markets Act contend the bill will provide businesses "who depend on gatekeepers to offer their services…a fairer business environment" and prevent large tech companies from using "unfair practices" to "gain an undue advantage." Unfortunately, the Digital Markets Act is not written to advance competition, but instead it targets U.S. tech companies and...

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today that it received 540 pages and a supplemental four pages of documents from the office of the Secretary of State of California revealing how state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google (YouTube)) to censor posts about the 2020 election. Included in these documents were “misinformation briefings” emails that were compiled by communications firm SKDK, that lists Biden for President as their top client of 2020. The documents show how the state agency successfully pressured YouTube to censor a Judicial Watch video concerning the vote by mail and a Judicial Watch lawsuit settlement...

Judicial Watch has done an excellent job discovering direct evidence of collusion between government officials, the Biden campaign and social media companies Facebook, Twitter, Google (YouTube) to censor speech and remove content. California officials were using a list generated by a firm called SKDK (working for Biden campaign) to inform the social media companies of content for removal. […] The Office of Election Cybersecurity in the California Secretary of State’s office monitored and tracked social media posts, decided if they were misinformation, stored the posts in an internal database coded by threat level, and on 31 different occasions requested posts...