Free Republic

My hope is that this case results in a solid legal repudiation of the tyrannical, extra-legal policy of Gov. Walz, and sets a precedent against future abuses of this kind," Stewart said. ... Russell Stewart, a former professor at Lake Superior College, has filed a federal lawsuit against Gov. Tim Walz and several college administrators, alleging wrongful termination over his refusal to comply with the state’s COVID-19 vaccination or testing mandate. ... Fired after 30 years of teaching.. Stewart, who taught ethics and philosophy at the Duluth-based institution for three decades, was fired in March 2022 after declining to follow...

Let’s revisit the tumultuous second half of 2021. Dementia-addled President Joe Biden executed a disastrous retreat from Afghanistan in August that resulted in the killing of thirteen servicemembers. Having spectacularly failed America’s warfighters, he transitioned quickly to the ongoing “fight against COVID.” No cost was too great or burden too onerous in the federal government’s war against microscopic organisms. Billions were funneled to pharmaceutical companies (aka Democrat Party donors) to pay for witch doctors’ experimental elixirs. Billions more were funneled to “news” platforms and “non-governmental” organizations (all on the USAID dole) to push the White House’s preferred COVID narratives and...

She's b-a-a-a-ck! Remember Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? She's the tenured Marxist activist who from circa October 2001 until August, with the media's consent, manipulated coverage of last fall's anthrax attacks, in which five people were murdered and over a dozen sickened by anthrax-contaminated letters. She also engineered the smear campaign that sought to railroad scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks. On September 22, 2002, Rosenberg published a long op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times, in which she sought to resurrect her discredited theory, according to which the anthrax killer was an insider from the American biodefense...

As an old congressional investigator, some things really bother me. Dishonesty at the Justice Department is one. Attorney General Merrick Garland is a disgrace – and danger. He opposes textual interpretations of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. He resents individual rights, and how they limit government power to suppress rights – which is why they were framed. Now, he disavows another core principle, called “separation of powers.” To be clear, separating powers among those who make our laws, administer them, and interpret them is ancient. It is not a MAGA idea. It goes back to the French...

Our Constitution is not dangerous. But the people who are threatened by it—all of them: politicians, academics, journalists, activists—are. Ah, the left. Ever ready to burn the foundations of America to the ground in pursuit of … progress. The latest example is a New York Times article by Jennifer Szalai titled, “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” You can guess what her conclusion will be, but the subhead nevertheless provides an additional clue: “One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.” Unsurprisingly, Szalai starts out by casting everything in terms of current...

The Biden campaign didn't like a headline written by the staff at USA Today, so USA Today was happy to oblige and change it. John Iadarola and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.

We Failed the Freedom TestThe remedy is worse than the disease.-Francis BaconThe government never cedes power willingly.Neither should we.If the Covid-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.Four years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding...

The former civil liberties group continues morphing into a progressive organization.Among the unfortunate changes of recent years has been the transformation of the American Civil Liberties Union from an advocate for free speech and other individual rights into just another progressive political organization. Historically, despite much pushback, the group defended the right of people from across the political spectrum to advocate and protest. But the organization has become unreliable on the issue; most recently in the very 21st century debate over gender identity, which sees the ACLU of Missouri targeting a whistleblower who is critical of medical transitions for minors....

U.S. spies and cops are vacuuming up huge amounts of data about Americans from data brokers — a trend that puts us on a dangerous path already trodden out by authoritarian regimes such as China. In America, we curtail government powers and guarantee civil liberties by limiting the amount of information citizens provide to the state. Police need a warrant to strap a GPS device on your car or listen to your telephone calls. Intelligence agencies and military units are banned from targeting Americans for surveillance and are supposed to focus their attention overseas.

Late last year, Congress extended Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and, in doing so, secured “the nation’s warrantless surveillance powers” until April 2024. With that month fast approaching, House Republicans have unveiled a new package to reauthorize those same powers, within limits. As the Hill reports, the new package “focus[es] on more reforms at the FBI to address misuse of the powerful spy tool,” but the deal does not include requirements for a warrant, which is “deemed a red line for the intelligence community but nonetheless a top priority for privacy advocates in Congress.” The new...

Two years ago, I wrote a column denouncing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of a counter-terrorism law to shut down the Freedom Convoy trucker protests as an authoritarian attack on free speech. Now, a Canadian court has agreed and ruled that the use of the Emergencies Act was unlawful and “unreasonable.” Despite Trudeau’s attacks on civil liberties, he remains a favorite of the media as an iconic figure on the left. Various civil liberties groups have opposed the iron-handed measures of Trudeau, including The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation. The characterization of political critics as...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, in a continuation of his efforts to protect Americans’ civil liberties and push for reform to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) forced a Senate vote to remove reauthorization of FISA from the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). A bipartisan group of 34 senators joined Dr. Paul in voting to remove the reauthorization of FISA from the annual NDAA. The final vote tally was 35-65, six votes short of ending domestic spying authority. Below are excerpts from Dr. Paul’s prepared remarks he delivered ahead of the vote:...

In a surprising development, the Biden administration has appointed James Clapper, John Brennan, and Paul Kolbe, all former intelligence officials, to a DHS “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group” responsible for addressing critical national security matters. This decision has raised eyebrows and concerns due to the history of these individuals. It’s worth noting that Clapper, Brennan, and Kolbe were signatories of the controversial October 2020 letter that made deceptive claims about Hunter Biden’s laptop, suggesting it might be Russian disinformation. This false assertion had significant ramifications, particularly in the tightly contested 2020 election, where the outcomes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin were...

March 25, 2021, Rutgers University became the first university in the nation to announce it would require students to take COVID vaccines for fall 2021 enrollment, retracting its January 8, 2021 announcement that “…with our stance of human liberties and our history of protecting that, the vaccine is not mandatory.” What happened within a few short months that made Rutgers ultimately decide to hell with student civil liberties? Rutgers claimed and still does to this day that it has a “commitment to health and safety for all members of its community” even though on July 30, 2021, Rochelle Walensky issued...

Washington, DC – The New Civil Liberties Alliance is challenging the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) in federal court for coordinating with Google to automatically install spyware on the smartphones of more than one million Commonwealth residents, without their knowledge or consent, in a misguided effort to combat Covid-19. A newly-released video details how DPH’s actions have violated fundamental constitutional rights. ... Thousands of people do not know DPH’s Covid-19 tracking app is on their phone, as it does not appear on their home screens like other apps. NCLA client Robert Wright, who commutes to Massachusetts for work, was...

A recently-declassified report alleges that multiple U.S. intelligence agencies have been actively “flouting the law” by gathering massive collections of “sensitive and intimate” data on American citizens. According to the New York Post, the claims were made in a report to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, which was only recently declassified and is now being amplified by watchdog groups and privacy advocates. The report details a loophole that has allowed intelligence agencies, including the FBI, DHS, and NSA, to simply buy large troves of cell phone data for tracking purposes without needing a warrant. If the information was...

High-level officials from the CIA, FBI, and NSA are testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, asking Congress to continue allowing the agency to spy on the communications of US citizens. They are urging Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—one of the nation’s most hotly contested government surveillance programs. Intelligence agencies have long cited the powerful 2008 FISA provision as an invaluable tool to effectively combat global terrorism, but critics, including an increasing number of lawmakers from both parties, say those same agencies have morphed the provision into an unchecked, warrantless domestic spying tool....

Section 702 has easily become the security apparatus’ favorite excuse to conduct backdoor, warrantless surveillance on American citizens. Intelligence agencies, with the help of the current regime, market Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to Congress as a means to keep Americans safe from foreign threats. Instead, as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee demonstrated on Tuesday, it’s become a proven loophole that lets verifiably corrupt bureaucrats spy on Americans. Nearly two decades after its inception, Section 702 has easily become the security apparatus’ favorite excuse to conduct backdoor, warrantless surveillance on American citizens. The FBI’s infamous and...

“Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”—Justice Neil Gorsuch We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency. Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security. COVID-19, for example, served as the driving force behind what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” In a statement...

Justice Neil Gorsuch called government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic the “greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country” on Thursday... “Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale,” he said. “Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.” ... Gorsuch slammed deference to “experts” for decision-making during the pandemic and warned that doing so could lead to losing “many cherished civil liberties.”...