Free Republic

SAN JOSE DE GUANIPA, Venezuela (Reuters) - Francisco Belisario, a Venezuelan mayor, retired general and member of the ruling Socialist party, had enough. His loudest local critic had accused him of bungling the response to the coronavirus outbreak and other big problems. In August, he wrote a state prosecutor and requested an “exhaustive investigation” of his nemesis, Giovanni Urbaneja, a former lawmaker who had become a gadfly to the mayor and other Socialist officeholders. Urbaneja, Belisario wrote in a letter reviewed by Reuters, was conducting a “ferocious smear campaign” on Facebook and elsewhere. Urbaneja not only defamed him and President...

Richard Stengel, new ‘team lead‘ for Joe Biden’s agency for global media, wrote an op-ed last year arguing for free speech restrictions. Stengel, a former MSNBC political analyst until he was named to Biden’s transition team, argued that the First Amendment needed redefining and that “hate speech” should be a crime. “All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails,” he wrote. “I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate.” ‘Speech that incites hate’ was defined in Stengel’s op-ed by two examples – Burning the Quran,...