Free Republic

In Sir Walter Scott’s epic, but mostly forgotten, poem, “Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field,” Scott penned his famous couplet: “Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive.” Those lines resonate today when Americans are submerged in an ideological fog of artificial truth thanks to the American media. In step with them are digital social media platforms. In addition, our universities, political class, and elites are foisting information that is laden with lies and half-truths to promote their social and political agenda -- and they are doing it with some considerable success. These outlets’...

Imagine having a simple tool for creating and updating your own private starter page (homepage) of favorite links on the web. If you're looking for something like that, I've built one you can download and use for free. Here's the idea behind it: Build and maintain the homepage using a simple text editor (such as Notepad++) that doesn't require you to learn HTML — just insert a few HTML tags. Deliver a private HTML page that launches from your laptop so you can quickly access your links without Big Tech's help. Enable quick search engine switching to and from...

Mark Zuckerberg has control and power few have ever experienced in the history of humanity, and while many have called for the breakup of his social media empire, we’ve rarely ever heard how those who actually guide Facebook’s fleet feel about it. As a new Project Veritas video shows, those that think the empire should fracture include those at the top, who most recognize just how dangerous the monster they control is.As pointed out by the new Project Veritas video, Facebook’s Global Planning Lead, Benny Thomas, doesn’t care that he’d make less money as a result, but made it clear...

Every month 30 million people use Gab’s services to get access to the free flow of information online. Gab is the home of free speech in a world where Big Tech oligarchs have censored, deplatformed, and demonized tens of millions of good, honest, and decent people with whom they disagree politically. Tonight Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a “Republican,” issued a despicable and false statement smearing Gab as an “anti-semitic platform that quote “has no place in Texas.” This is the same Gov. Abbott who just five days ago said he was “taking a stand against Big Tech censorship.” Gov. Abbott’s...

Many Americans on the Right and Left worry about the power of Silicon Valley’s tech titans. It seems these very large companies have become a power unto themselves and answer virtually to no one. They believe it is their right to censor thoughts and ideas, and restrict the flow of information according to whatever standards they desire. They also make astronomical profits, which gives them the freedom to buy almost whatever they want—be it to stomp on any upstart competitor that looks like a threat, or to curry favor with politicians, media, and thought leaders of all stripes. But this...

High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. During COVID-19, Zoom-enabled tech workers have discovered the benefits of remote work from cheaper, less congested communities elsewhere. Is this the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? Perhaps. But other challenges to Silicon Valley’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora.Understanding four trends that may shape the future of Silicon Valley is also a road map to some of the biggest technology-enabled opportunities of the next decades:Consumer internet entrepreneurs lack many of...

Twitter refused to take down widely shared pornographic images and videos of a teenage sex trafficking victim because an investigation “didn’t find a violation” of the company’s “policies,” a scathing lawsuit alleges. The federal suit, filed in January by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of California, alleges Twitter made money off the clips, which showed a 13-year-old engaged in sex acts and are a form of child sexual abuse material, or child porn, the suit states. When the plaintiff, who is a minor referred to only as John Doe, was 13 – 14 years old, he...

Parler, the Free-speech alternative to Twitter, has been denied re-entry into Apple’s App Store after a recent review. According to Bloomberg, Parler had made several internal changes before requesting review to Apple ... However, Apple denied re-entry to their App Store due to “racist content” they allegedly found on Parler’s platform ... So, according to Apple, their standard is that they won’t allow a platform where any of its users post anything “racist”? So, given the fact that Twitter, Parler’s “not racist” alternative, is currently on the App Store, I can only assume that I won’t be able to find...

gab is down again. Right before, some hacker had posted a dear andrew hate note as a post from users

FYI. I spent the morning uninstalling updates from last month to my MS Office 10 programs. Their recent 'security fix' included removing the mail-merge wizard and functions. So if you use MS Office, check the menu of your Word program to see if 'mailings' is still there. If not, and you plan to use it, you may need to uninstall the updates from Feb.

More and more, the big tech oligarchs are behaving more like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping when it comes to the media than George Washington nearly every U.S. president since before Barack Obama started spying on journalists. What began as gentle throttling of content and reach (mostly against conservatives) has since expanded into outright information suppression that simultaneously pushes disinformation as ‘fact’ while burying facts as disinformation. .. Social media giant Twitter announced this week that it will begin labeling tweets that share “misleading information” about the coronavirus vaccine and will implement a strike system for repeat offenders of the...

The growing willingness by U.S. Big Tech to censor political debate highlights a hypocrisy that belies any notion that expelling conservative voices is an act of principle rather than something more cynical and sinister. President Donald Trump may have been intemperate, but violence linked to his Twitter account is more debatable. Certainly, he exacerbated America’s political polarization, but no more so than former Office of Management and Budget nominee Neera Tandren and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). Political polarization is a problem and the tone of American political leaders and cable news pundits neither elucidate nor help, but censorship is not...

Life is full of defaults. Many of them are so entrenched they are hard to even recognize as optional. "Few, indeed, ever stop to ask themselves in retrospect how they came to accept the beliefs that have found lodgment in their minds," the late Mr. Herbert Armstrong observed this in his book Mystery of the Ages. This episode takes a look at some of the defaults of life, and why we are prone to leave them unquestioned.

Genealogy company MyHeritage is putting deepfake technology to a creatively unsettling use with a new feature called Deep Nostalgia. The system animates photographs of long-deceased loved ones, turning old still portraits into uncanny blinking and smiling videos. Deepfake technology has been rapidly evolving over the past few years and generally stoking conversations over how close we are to completely losing faith in the veracity of the images we encounter. So far, the technology is still in its infancy but MyHeritage is presenting a novel use of deepfakes, bringing to life still photographs of dead relatives. Called Deep Nostalgia, the technology...

...You know, there have been legendary epochs in human history before now where everything changed for the better. The Age of Pericles. The Pax Romana. The Renaissance. The Obama years. And now joining these fabled eras, is the era of No Mean Tweets. What a time to be alive! Instead of mean tweets, we live in an age when we embrace science. Okay, some science. Not the science that says life begins at conception. Not the science that says men can’t menstruate. And certainly not the science that says public school teachers should go do their damn jobs. The other...

Larry Johnson, writing at the Gateway Pundit, attacked “Absolute Proof” and former CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery. Joe Hoft, referring to Montgomery in another recent Gateway Pundit article, wrote “We don’t know who’s paying him.” Conversely, the question should be asked, who is paying Larry Johnson and The Gateway Pundit to put out disinformation about CIA whistleblower Dennis Montgomery and to bury the story about Barack Obama’s intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper who illegally commandeered THE HAMMER to spy on Donald Trump and millions of other innocent Americans. Dennis Montgomery’s one-time attorney Michael Flynn stated yesterday during an exclusive...

In another example of how Big Tech oligarchs are in the bag for the Democratic party, the California-based monopolies are working hand-in-hand with the Biden administration to impose a chilling new round of censorship. Under the pretense of fighting “COVID misinformation,” the leaders of Facebook, Google, and Twitter will be waging war on free speech on their platforms by eliminating honest questions about vaccines, one more way that Dems have weaponized an unprecedented public health crisis to crush their political opposition.

Poland is taking a stand against the Big Tech conglomerate, proposing whopping fines for platforms that censor or remove posts for ideological reasons, according to the country’s Deputy Minister of Justice Sebastian Kaleta. In a Fox News interview, Kaleta said social media companies have been targeting Christianity, conservatives and traditional values through their blacklisting and removal of posts. “We see that when Big Tech decides to remove content for political purposes, it’s mostly content which praises traditional values or praises conservatism,” Kaleta said. “It is deleted under their ‘hate speech policy’ when it has no legal right to do so.”...

One of the costs of a censorious society is clarity of writing, and consequently of thought. If one must write, evasive thinking is an easier way to dodge cancellation than purely evasive writing. “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” That’s Francis Bacon, and probably the best thing he wrote (unless it’s The Tempest after all). The act of writing is exacting, and it improves with the care and precision of the effort. But this means—as illustrated by the hubbub around the New York Times’s treatment of Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous blogger behind...

right after the 2nd acquittal of the President, my pi-hole started blocking freerepublic as well as some links on other right wing sites (such as ben shapiro's site.) I whitelisted it but just a heads up to those with pi-holes! If you want a list of my adlists, pm me.