Free Republic

Social media censorship can be stopped immediately by states controlled by Republicans (meaning both legislative chambers and the governor). Here’s how, from an attorney. Legislation has been introduced in the North Dakota legislature to prohibit social media companies from censoring messages and posts, as reported by Breitbart and ARS Technica. See: North Dakota Bill Would Let Censored Citizens Sue Facebook, Twitter. So you can follow developments, it is “an Act to permit civil actions against social media sites for censoring speech.” Alas, the legislation is not well-written. The penalty is too small, a slap on the wrist, to get Facebook’s...

Federal agents arrested a self-admitted anarchist and “hardcore leftist” on Friday on suspicion of plotting to violently disrupt planned election-related protests at the Florida state Capitol. Prosecutors said they “averted a crisis” at the Capitol by arresting 33-year-old Daniel Baker, taking him into custody on a charge involving making a threat to kidnap or injure, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Florida announced in a news release. “Baker issued a call to arms for like-minded individuals to violently confront protestors gathered at the Florida Capitol this Sunday,” prosecutors said. “He specifically called for others to join him...

What is this latest impeachment gambit really about? Of course, it was a Parthian shot to discredit President Trump’s supporters. Donald Trump was impeached again on Wednesday, a week before leaving office in one of the great travesties of modern politics. Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce. One, impeachment was never intended by the founders to become a serial effort to weaken a first-term president. But this latest try will mark the third failed attempt of Democrats in Congress to remove Trump before his allotted tenure. The first Democratic impeachment effort of December 2017 fizzled. The second...

Time to put away childish things and concentrate on devising strategies and mobilizing to carry them out. Does the President have a right to free speech? Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor writing on The Volokh Conspiracy, suggests he certainly does and that his speech on January 6 is a weak reed (as was Nancy Pelosi’s past impeachment folly) on which to gain a conviction in the Senate. (Remember an impeachment vote in the House is basically an indictment with no effect unless the Senate finds guilt after a trial.) Looking at the most analogous case, the impeachment of President...

Joe Biden may ask for unity, but it's not at all different from a thief asking his victims to agree to let him keep what he's already taken. I was struck by David Atwood's "The Right will Neither Forgive nor Forget." It struck close to home because I'm a boycotter. It takes a lot to get me to such a point, but if someone goes through the effort to do so, it sets in hard and deep. I've never been an NFL fan. I played baseball. But I knew I was in the minority, so I watched the Super Bowl...

A former Congressman from Tennessee set off an internet firestorm when he appeared on Fox News remotely Thursday, with a portrait of former Chairman of the People’s Republic of China and founder of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong in the background. Harold Ford Jr., a Democrat, represented Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District for a decade, from 1997 to 2007. Now, he provides commentary frequently on Fox News. Fox News viewers noticed some strange background decor during Ford’s appearance on “Special Report” with Bret Baier Thursday. “Wow, [Harold Ford Jr.] rockin’ the Warhol Mao over the fireplace. I liked the Muhammad...

With arrest after arrest of assorted leftists emerging, it looks as though impeachment-happy Nancy Pelosi, has a lot of egg on her Botoxed face. When the Capitol riots happened on Jan. 6, the blame of President Trump was all over. Supposedly, he was the instigator. Supposedly, he'd egged the rioters on. The tape of his urging his supporters to stay strong and fight was Exhibit A in the press, and with no skepticism whatsoever, House speaker Nancy Pelosi declared Trump guilty and rushed a crazily hasty second impeachment just days before Trump's exit. She declared that it was all about...

Today, we are observing turbulence on the surface of news reports. Anyone who has spent much time fishing has likely observed turbulence on the surface of the water, without necessarily understanding what was causing it. Sometimes, it is due to a school of fish attempting to escape from a predator. Today, we are observing turbulence on the surface of news reports. SNIP What is going on? For one, the intrusions and accompanying violence were not the work of rank-and-file Trump loyalists. Some of the intruders may have been what are called right-wing extremists, but clearly, at least some were leftists....

Now what, Republicans? Our worthless opinions and romanticized delusions about democracy as a Grecian pursuit of Jeffersonian erudition won't save us. It is Republicans who romanticize democracy, not Democrats. Democrats romanticize outnumbering, overwhelming, and overtaking their opposition; their modus operandi isn't very different from that of Islamic supremacists or the Chinese. To affirm just how pathetic the now extinct national GOP is, Republicans are placing their hopes and dreams with...Joe Manchin, senator from West Virginia. We debunk ourselves, oblivious to our own self-irony. The Problem Republicans have to work much more to drive voter turnout than do Democrats. This is...

So we are to imagine that those who objected to Biden's having stolen the election are responsible for the violence at the Capitol? And that, going forward, any public official who questions Biden's win should be removed from office, and that any corporate leader who objects should be fired? All this when the truth is that Trump in all likelihood won the election. It is the perfect example of Orwellian speech. In his classic essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell spoke of the condition where "words and meaning have almost parted company." If that "almost" is a measure of...

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be...

On the heels of the breach of the U.S. Capitol, Big Tech companies have swiftly censored the President, the emerging social media platform Parler was effectively shut down, and there are growing calls for no-fly lists. Does the assault on the Capitol warrant such a response? “We’re living in a gigantic lie that is reminiscent of the Reichstag fire,” argues talk show host Dennis Prager, founder of Prager University. This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Imagine the uproar had the Republicans given a platform to a violence-inciting, terror-endorsing, right-wing bigot at their 2020 convention. Joe Biden never stops casting President Trump and his supporters as Nazi sympathizers. After years of falsely accusing Trump of praising Nazis who showed up in Charlottesville, he re-emphasized the point by running a campaign ad featuring Nazi imagery. Now he's at it again, falsely blaming Trump for inciting extremist violence, and accusing Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley of behaving like Nazis. Biden condemned the Capitol invaders as “a bunch of thugs, insurrectionists, antisemites” (plenty of evidence supports this claim),...

When O'Brien, the interrogator from the Thought Police in Orwell's 1984, holds up four fingers and asks Winston Smith, an imprisoned member of the underground opposition, how many he sees, poor Winston persists in saying he sees four. But that is not what O'Brien wants to hear. "No, Winston, you are insane. There are five fingers." The interrogations continue until Winston, wracked with pain and exhaustion and persuaded of his insanity, agrees finally through his tears that he was lying to himself, that he had always been lying to himself, and admitted that he saw five fingers. He understood that...

It’s interesting to watch the Democrats constantly making historical analogies to Naziism because, at every attempt, they display their astounding ignorance of history. At his press conference on July 8, Joe Biden offered a rather bizarre interpretation of history, in which he likened Ted Cruz and his challenge to some electoral votes to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the “Big Lie.” Biden illustrated his point by referring to the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 in which, he said, “250 or 2,500 people” were killed. And yet Joseph Goebbels inflated the number to 25,000, even 250,000, thus perpetrating...

BEIJING - President Xi Jinping is asking former CEO Howard Schultz of Starbucks to help repair U.S.-Chinese relations that have plunged to their lowest level in decades amid a tariff war and tension over technology and security. A letter from Xi to Schultz reported Friday by the official Xinhua News Agency was a rare direct communication from China’s paramount leader to a foreign business figure. Schultz opened Starbucks’ first China outlet in 1999 and is a frequent visitor. Xinhua gave no indication whether the letter reflected an initiative to ask American corporate leaders to help change policy after President-elect Joe...

WARSAW, Poland, January 14, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The prime minister of Poland has delivered a blistering denunciation of Big Tech censorship, following the recent ban of President Donald Trump and others by virtually all social media giants. On Tuesday afternoon, Mateusz Morawiecki, 52, published a post defending internet freedom in both Polish and English on Facebook. He said that Poles are “so attached to freedom because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it.” “For close to 50 years we lived in a country in which censorship was practiced, in which Big Brother told us how...

Leftists love to throw around the word “fascist,” although half the time they don’t appear to even know what it means. Usually, it’s just a way of insulting someone unenlightened enough to disagree with them. At best, they’re calling the person a big meanie, an authoritarian. But that’s not exactly (or at least not entirely) what a “fascist” is. Perhaps, for our leftist friends, a brief primer is in order. Fascism is a political and economic system that arose in Europe following World War I. It has three primary characteristics: extreme nationalism, authoritarianism, and a state-run economy. Indeed, in terms...

We are frighteningly headed to playing out a real life scenario of the classic Star Trek episode when Kirk and company fall into the middle of a war between the Yangs and the Coms. It is uncanny how today's events are mirroring the takeover of the United States by communist infiltration. We conservatives who actually study history know full well what the communist and Nazi regimes did to acquire power. It all starts with the media and control over the information medium. I will never forget the only thing I remember from my "Introduction to Mass Media" class in college....

A former Trump worker allegedly lost his job simply because a pro sports league refused to work with a company that would employ Trump workers. Dawson Buchanan, a young Trump supporter, left a very disturbing thread on Twitter. He asserts that he was all set to begin working for a company called Private Jet Services. However, shortly before he was to begin, PJS fired him. He finally learned from the owner that PJS had a contract with the National Hockey League. When the NHL learned that PJS had hired someone who had worked for the Trump company, the NHL said...