Free Republic

1.TWITTER FILES #19 The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories”

“ If totalitarianism did not exploit [archetypes], which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.” ― Milan Kundera, The...

Love him or hate him, Tucker Carlson has become the most important political analyst of our era. The release to him of suppressed J6 Capitol footage that contradicted the Democrat/media narrative dominated political news until Carlson's questionnaire on Ukraine policy to the potential GOP presidential field knocked it out of the headlines. Not since Woodward and Bernstein dominated the news with Watergate has a media source produced results that focused the national spotlight so completely as Mr. Tucker Carlson. Unsurprisingly, many are the progressives who want to see him knocked off the air. Last night, he began his top-rated hour-long...

Below is my column in the New York Post on the suggested censorship of bank critics by Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.). It was only the latest example of how censorship has become a reflexive response of many Democrats to opposing views. It is now increasingly common for certain views to be declared as simply too dangerous to be tolerated or allowed on social media, including (it seems) questioning the solvency of banks. Here is the column: Concerned about your money after recent bank failures? You might want to keep those thoughts to yourself. While some rushed to get their...

Tucker had one good show on J6 disinformation and showtrials and then he went silent even though he had hinted that there would be many shows on the J6 videos released to him by Kevin McCarthy. The Schumer pressure seems to be working and possibly financial coercion from what I see as a sudden surge of advertisements by Blackrock which is run by leftist/communist/globalist Larry Fink. Am I just imagining this?

During a conference call about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout yesterday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) asked representatives from the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) if they had a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks, according to Republican members of the House of Representatives who were on the call. The members said there were roughly 200 people on the Zoom call, including Senators, House members, and staff members from both parties. “On our conference call, led by [Senate President Chuck] Schumer, with Fed, FDIC, and Treasury,...

In the bowels of the disinformation industrial complex, which is all about rating conservative media outlets as 'disinformation' in order to persuade advertisers to defund them, NewsGuard has always stood a little apart. It says it's transparent. It says it's private. It says it's apolitical, and politics never occurs to them as they issue their utterly objective ratings. It's not like those creepy "Lives of Others" censors at the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index who took $330 million in U.S. State Department cash to carry out their censor-the-conservatives blacklist, marketing it as objective truth-telling. Noo, siree. GDI was so naked in...

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., asked during a meeting about the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank whether social media could be censored to prevent misinformation going out that could lead to a bank run, according to reports. Michael Shellenberger, an independent journalist who reports on the Twitter files and has contributed to Fox News reported that Kelly asked the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit and Insurance Corp (FDIC) about censorship measures during the meeting on Sunday. Republican House members on the call confirmed with Shellenberger’s publication, Public on Substack, that a Democratic senator asked about censoring social media companies,...

Skip Science should not be trusted in general, but we need to be especially diligent in acknowledging science as suspect when the science of the matter concerns the possibility that scientists, health science funders, and managers overseeing science in labs in Wuhan, played a role in killing 18 million people. Such an investigation is ripe with conflicts of interest and reputational risks, as prior to a science-caused accident there will be many coteries of scientists who played some role in encouraging, conducting, funding, and/or overseeing the research that caused harm. Yet, despite the massive body of evidence making a spillover-scientist...

Civil liberties have officially gone out of style, a phenomenon on full display at the Weaponization of Government Hearing at which I just testified. The circus-like scene featured a ranking member calling two journalists a “direct threat,” a Stanford-educated former prosecutor who confused accusation with proof, and a Texas congressman, Colin Allred, who proudly held up the results of an adjudicated criminal case to argue against due process in another arena. When I asked Allred’s permission to point out that he’d just demonstrated that a proper forum for dealing with campaign abuses already existed in the court system, he basically...

“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex. Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing...

Video creators that have been uploading to YouTube are very familiar with the over-the-top censorship at that site that has been going on for years. However, it is interesting to get the perspective of someone who has discovered this YouTube censorship perhaps for the first time. Even more interesting is that Helen Lewis of the Atlantic magazine can hardly be considered a conservative with a political axe to grind. So let us now go on a voyage of censorship discovery with Lewis in her Friday piece, "What You Can’t Say on YouTube."

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was on a Zoom meeting this afternoon with members of Congress, the Fed, the Treasury, and FDIC. The call was organized after Silicon Valley Bank crashed and was taken over by the State of California on Friday. Silicon Valley Bank was the largest US bank to crash since the 2008 banking crisis. During the call on Sunday afternoon Massie reported that one Democrat Senator asked if there was a program in place to censor free speech at this time on social media. The first thought of the Democrat Party is to strip Americans of their right...

President Donald Trump has been targeted by social media censorship in its most corrupt form, since the beginning of 2021. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made it clear they are willing to cherry-pick violations of their policies and ultimately ban conservatives.However, just over one year after his ban on the Big Tech platforms, the 45th president began working on the development of a new platform that would allow free speech. President Trump handpicked former Congressman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to be CEO of the new free speech platform Truth Social. In the days leading up to the launch of...

Government must not be given the power to criminalize speech it deems distasteful or annoying' . . ... The Supreme Court refused to hear arguments in the case Barton and Sanders v. Texas, meaning that it gave a pass to Texas' plans to "criminalize protected speech." . . ... The state's new law, Penal Code section 42.07(a)(7), provides that "a person is guilty of a criminal offense simply for sending multiple electronic communications with an intent and in a manner likely to 'harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass, or offend another.'"

MSNBC host Katie Phang made the obligatory disclaimer that "we all respect the First Amendment."But in the same breath in her interview of Dem Rep. Eric Swalwell aired on her Saturday show, Phang suggested to Swalwell that there should be "congressional oversight, regulations, some type of gatekeeping" of Fox News.And just like Phang with her phony expression of devotion to the First Amendment, Swalwell piously professed, "I don't want to get into the business of telling troops what they can and cannot watch." But he proceeded to suggest just that: I don't want to get into the business of telling...

Testifying with Michael Shellenberger before a House Subcommittee was one of the more surreal experiences of my life. I expected serious attacks and spent a nervous night before preparing for them. Then the hearing began, and an episode of Black Adder: Congress broke out. The attacks happened, but it was more farcical horror and a parade of self-owns that made me more sad than upset. The Democrats made it clear they were not interested in talking about free speech except as it pertains to Chrissy Teigen, seemed to suggest a journalist should not make a living, and finally made the...

Democrats revealed their clear disregard for free speech in the second hearing of the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Thursday that featured prominent journalists who published the “Twitter Files.” Substack reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified in the nearly three-hour hearing and explained how the federal government uses major social media platforms as conduits to regulate speech through censorship. Both voted for President Joe Biden and possess decades of experience covering American politics with liberal backgrounds far from anything that could be considered “ultra MAGA.” “American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of...

There’s a price to be paid when you go against the left-wing narrative. Many of you faced the ire of friends, family members, and the medical community when you voiced skepticism about the origins of the Covid-19 virus, the lockdowns, the jabs, and the anti-science masking rules. You’ve been called conspiracy theorists and told you were (literally!) killing people when you did your own research and decided what was best for you and your family. Some of you lost your jobs because you refused to take the unproven vaccine. You’ve been censored on social media or banned from platforms outright....

There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere. It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways. But that erasure of personal and public history would be...