Free Republic

“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.”...

The queries targeted people involved in Jan. 6 and George Floyd protests, and donors to a failed congressional candidate ... The FBI improperly used warrantless search powers against U.S. citizens more than 278,000 times in the year ending November 2021, according to an unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) filing. U.S. citizens covered in that improper effort included people involved in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021; George Floyd protesters during the summer of 2020; and donors to a failed congressional candidate, the filing said. ... The court filing, which spanned 127 pages, was unsealed Friday by the FISC,...

The Capitol Police couldn’t even defend their own building, nor could they defend Pelosi’s San Francisco home from an illegal alien hammer man, but somehow, they have now established national offices to monitor U.S. citizens outside their jurisdiction? Now they want more money and authority. Are you kidding me? This week, House Republicans crafted the annual appropriations bill funding the legislative branch of government, typically the smallest and least controversial of the 12 annual spending bills. However, in that bill they plan to provide $780.9 million to the U.S. Capitol police, which is $46.3 million more than enacted fiscal year...

From the conclusion: "Just two months later, it was claimed that an allegedly real zoonotic coronavirus had begun infecting people. The “new disease” had typical flu-like symptoms and very similar death rate to seasonal flu-like diseases. Coincidentally, in this period cases of flu reportedly dropped to almost zero. Tests for this “new virus” were rushed out, skipping the usual peer review process. Mass testing of asymptomatic people was used to create “covid cases”, while mass testing of those already dying in hospital was used to create “covid deaths”. As a “response” to the “pandemic”, lockdowns were introduced, crippling the economy...

Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. 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. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services...

The allegations from FBI whistleblowers is the subject of a hearing on Thursday.. The Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained the financial records of Americans from Bank of America "without any legal process" following the January 6, 2021 riot, according to an interim staff report from the House Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The report containing allegations from FBI whistleblowers is the subject of a select committee hearing on Thursday. "Just like FBI whistleblowers [Garret] O’Boyle and [Stephen] Friend, retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill provided the Committee with detailed allegations of FBI...

The FBI conducted thousands of queries on digital data collected on U.S. citizens in 2021 and 2022 despite having no warrant and no justification under the FBI’s own rules, according to an internal report released on May 10.The audit, conducted by the FBI Office of Internal Auditing (OIA), was intended to examine the agency’s compliance with rules for querying data the government routinely collects on U.S. citizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).FISA allows the government to collect electronic data, including phone calls, text messages, and emails of foreigners overseas, even if the communications...

There are new revelations coming to light about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s unprecedented raid against former President Donald Trump prior to the 2022 midterm elections. As reported by America First Legal, a judicial watchdog, “records obtained from our investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid further confirm that the FBI obtained access to these records through a ‘special access request’ from the Biden White House on behalf of the DOJ.” The details, themselves, are shocking, as AFL noted in its press release: On August 8, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago...

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...

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...

There’s a movement brewing to shut down conservative websites that offer views and information contradicting left-wing orthodoxy. Investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky did an excellent job of uncovering how activist organizations, some partnered with the State Department, work to blacklist and defund conservative media. His ongoing series at the Washington Examiner is worth reading and explains how this is part of a larger effort to effectively shut down conservative media publications. It’s predictable—yet nevertheless disturbing—stuff. “Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly ‘nonpartisan’ groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online ‘disinformation.’” Kaminsky wrote. “These same ‘disinformation’ monitors are...

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) blasted the IRS on Monday for allegedly conducting "government surveillance" on Americans following a Just the News report on the agency's invasive questioning of an election education nonprofit, as the House Oversight Committee requested to see the underlying documents.In action reminiscent of the Lois Lerner targeting scandal under the Obama administration when the IRS singled out conservative groups for audits, the Biden IRS last year subjected an election education nonprofit applying for tax-empt status to intrusive formal questioning the group believes infringed on its speech rights under the First Amendment.Just the News reported the story on...

In a little covered lawsuit by the group New Yorkers For Religious Liberty, Inc. et al -VS- The City Of New York, something very odd has surfaced.After imposing the vaccine mandate in 2021, New York City fired the unvaccinated workers then sent the FBI the names and fingerprints of the non-compliant city employees to register within the justice files of the federal government.New York City has recently abandoned the vaccine requirement {SEE HERE}, but the lawyers for the plaintiffs are continuing the lawsuit against the city because employment in the private sector is now impacted because the names of the...

The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed "disinformation" tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm. The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged "disinformation," the Washington Examiner reported . This same "disinformation" group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress. "Any...

The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on GDI's list and spoke to an ad-buying source who said Breitbart News is also. Separately, GDI has said that the 10 "riskiest" news outlets for purported disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News Network, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.

The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government convened this week and is scheduled to hold its first hearing. The FBI stands accused of a vast swath of abuses, such as labeling parents at school board meetings with terrorist threat tags, collusion with social media to monitor and censor Americans’ free speech, and identifying (with a high level of confidence) Catholics with a preference for Latin Mass as potential recruits for Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist organizations. These assaults by the nation’s top law enforcement agency on American’s civil rights are legion (pun...

Jesus in the wilderness faced three temptations from the Devil himself: material comfort, fame, and power. Needless to say, he declined every temptation and passed all three trials. So too did the couple seeking to enter the order of virtue in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” They blasted right through the tests of silence, isolation, and fear. In the opera, much celebration ensues. Fairy tales too are often framed by three chances. The Miller’s daughter is given three chances to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name, for example, and I’m sure you can think of other instances. The final movement of the 6th “Tragic”...

The FBI is retracting a leaked document that advised the Bureau to infiltrate groups of traditionalist Roman Catholics who the assessment claimed were at risk of committing acts of extremist violence, the Daily Caller has learned. The FBI tells the Caller that the document, put forward by the Richmond field office, “does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI” and that the Bureau will be conducting an internal review.

The House Judiciary Committee under chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) issued a subpoena on Friday for FBI Director Christopher Wray, requiring that the chief hand over documents and correspondence involving the bureau’s “misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources” to politically persecute conservative parents at school board meetings across the country.