Free Republic

At today's House Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) questioned D. John Sauer, Special Assistant Attorney General at the Louisiana Department of Justice, about Biden Administration attempts to curb speech on social media. WHITE HOUSE STAFFERS ARE SOME OF THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE ON THE PLANET EARTH. OFTENTIMES, THEY GET THE DISPOSITIVE OPINION ON APPOINTMENTS TO DIFFERENT POSITIONS WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. THEY INFLUENCE STATEMENTS OF ADMINISTRATIVE POLICY. THEY INITIATED REGULATORY REFORM. THEY OFTEN HAVE A SIGNIFICANT VOICE ON WHICH ASSIMILATION THAT IS CONSIDERED AN APPROVED. MR. SOUR, I WANT TO UNDERSTAND HOW MANY OF...

Twitter owner Elon Musk sent an email to staff stating that the value of the Big Tech platform was worth $20 billion, which is just around half of the amount he paid for it. But Twitter 2.0’s value as the new free speech haven also ended up plunging like a bad stock market bet. A new MRC Free Speech America study using CensorTrack.org data shows that censorship on Twitter 2.0 has surprisingly gotten worse. MRC Free Speech America staff tallied the number of logged Twitter censorship entries between Nov. 4, 2022 — around the time Musk began mass layoffs of...

Ever since Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the [health care] bill, so you can find out what’s in it,” I have been skeptical about any law our politicians pass. The fact that you had the Speaker of the House, at the time, openly admitting that she had no idea what was included in, or more importantly – what the ramifications would be for such a major law- was downright shocking, stunning and dangerous. But time and time again we see that laws that our politicians pass end up having unintended (or intended) consequences. Whether it’s the Covid Relief...

After claiming the Disinformation Governance Board would be run in line with "best practices," DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is now shielding communications that may reveal its true purpose. When the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board burst into public view, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there was nothing sinister to hide and claimed the office was rooted in "best practices." A year later, Mayorkas' department is refusing to let Americans see most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the now-disbanded board from "blowback," FOIA documents showed. More than 100 pages of internal communication between...

For years, conservatives have complained of apparent censorship of their voices on the principal social media platforms, like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Posts or tweets get taken down, or de-boosted, or de-monetized, or degraded in search results, or “shadow-banned,” or slapped with content warnings, or otherwise suppressed. But the response from Big Tech has always been, hey, we’re private companies, and we’re not subject to the First Amendment. We can do as we please. Then Elon Musk took over Twitter, and followed by giving several journalists access to Twitter’s electronic archives to investigate any untoward government manipulation. The result has...

New emails uncovered in the ongoing Missouri v. Biden litigation reportedly show that the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts extended to Facebook to censor private communications on its WhatsApp messaging service. In recent months, the Twitter Files revealed an extensive and secret effort by the FBI and other agencies to censor citizens on social media. I testified on that effort. Democratic members oppose efforts to investigate the full scope of this effort and even denounced those calling for greater transparency as “Putin lovers” and apologists for insurrectionists and racists. Yet, the evidence of an extensive censorship and blacklisting effort by the...

Newly-released communications between the Biden administration and Meta show an effort to crack down on so-called "vaccine-skeptical" content shared on the private communications platform WhatsApp. Independent journalist David Zweig reported on Friday that the White House went beyond Twitter to curb COVID-related posts. Emails obtained through discovery from the ongoing Missouri v Biden legal battle show email exchanges from the White House to the tech giant began just days after President Biden took office. Zweig stressed that unlike Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, WhatsApp is an encrypted direct messaging platform, Citing Meta, "90% of WhatsApp...

Even the bestselling novelist in the world isn’t being spared woke rewrite treatments to spare the delicate sensitivities of modern readers, with Agatha Christie’s works getting the full treatment from her publisher. Christie is famous for creating such timeless sleuths as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and the Daily Telegraph reports new editions based on both these investigators have had original passages amended or excised by publisher Harper Collins.

We've been trained to think that endless rule by tiny minorities of really horrible people is the natural order of things, but that turns out to be just another lie. .... Just a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security was going all-in on the fight against “MDM.” The notion that America is fatally infected with “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation” was in fact the animating idea begind the asinine plan the Biden administration announced last April to institute a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was to be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled Mary Poppins of digital rectitude... [youtube video of...

The billionaire founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism to help Democrats win elections. He is the nation’s leading financier of the “mis”- and “disinformation” industries and is now the largest private stakeholder in America’s legacy journalism schools. The most recent Twitter Files released by Matt Taibbi add a deeply disturbing new layer to the story. They show Newmark is at the very heart of an incestuous web of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and corporate media institutions operating in concert to censor political opponents on social media. Newmark is financing the...

Newsmax is returning to DirecTV, after the satellite giant dropped the conservative news and commentary channel from its lineup in January over an alleged carriage dispute. The two companies announced the new deal Wednesday morning, according to the Hollywood Reporter, saying that the channel would return to DirecTV and its streaming services again beginning Thursday. DirecTV’s CEO Bill Morrow said in a statement: This resolution with Newsmax, resolving an all-too-common carriage dispute, underscores our dedication to delivering a wide array of programming and perspectives to all our customers. Through our persistent negotiations, we reached a resolution under mutually-agreeable business terms...

A New Jersey mother who says she was treated like a terrorist for questioning offensive signs at a local school last November is now suing nine individuals who she says violated her civil rights. Attorneys with the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit, public interest law firm, are representing Angela Reading. They filed a lawsuit on March 15, in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. Reading is a third-year law student, mother of two, and respected member of her county's regional board of education.The 62-page lawsuit alleges that the police chief of North Hanover Township, acting in...

Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet and censor citizens who don’t toe the party line. ur government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced. While the “Twitter Files” offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as...

A federal judge ruled against the Biden administration’s efforts to dismiss a case involving online censorship Monday, saying that the states of Missouri and Louisiana had “plausibly alleged” First Amendment violations. United States District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana denied the Biden administration’s motion to dismiss a suit brought on May 5 by Republican Attorneys General Erik Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana. Schmitt and Landry said the Biden administration colluded with social media companies to censor debate on multiple issues, including the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Banking is an inherently risky business. It's assets are mostly long term--loans, mortgages, and bonds. It's liabilities are mostly short term--checking and savings deposits. This timing imbalance relies on the faith of its depositors that the bank is sound. This faith can be shaken by the unwise or unlucky decisions made in how the bank invests the money entrusted to it. This past week, the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) suffered a loss of faith. Instead of investing $73 million of its deposits in income earning assets, it gave this money away to Black Lives Matter-related social justice groups. It made...

Americans need to have an important discussion about free speech now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so. The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public. To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals: Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers,...

Last week, students at Stanford Law disrupted a Federalist Society event that featured U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan. Duncan was prevented from speaking by unruly protesters and berated by the school's associate dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Now, some of the protest leaders, many of whom shared the names and pictures of Federalist Society members online and in posters, are unhappy because the Washington Free Beacon published their names. "NEW: The same students who plastered the names and faces of the Stanford Federalist Society all over the school are now demanding anonymity from the Free Beacon. They say...

A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.” National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

On Thursday, I got yet another notice from the LinkedIn's "Trust & Safety Team": "Your post goes against our policy on misinformation. It has been removed and only you can access it." The post that LinkedIn found objectionable was from my website, the Geller Report, and was entitled "CORPORATE STATE: Domestic Terror Group Black Lives Matter Received Nearly $83 Billion from Corporations."My post consisted of an excerpt from a Breitbart article plus three lines of my own commentary. LinkedIn didn't dispute the accuracy of anything in my post or its source; it just doesn't want it said. This comes after...

The BBC has injected a strong anti-colonial message into its adaptation of Charles Dickens' classic novel Great Expectations, it has been revealed. Written by Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight, the beloved novel has been given a new twist, referencing the evils of Empire which were not present in the original Victorian book. In one scene, criminal Magwitch, one of the central characters, describes the British Empire as having been 'built on the lies of privileged white men', The Telegraph reports.