Free Republic

A federal appeals court has agreed with a lower court that the Biden administration likely can be proven to have pressured Big Tech to censor Americans whose views did not align with the Democrat talking points. And the result is that leftists en masse are trying to deny it, a sentiment expressed by the White House, which stated, “This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections. Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account...

Criminal sentencing conveys a society’s moral sense. The worst crimes get the death penalty or life without parole. At the other extreme, misdemeanor offenders may be met with fines, diversion programs, time served in county jail, or probation. In between are many gradations, which reflect the individual characteristics of the offender and the objective aspects of the crime itself. This week, we saw extreme sentencing for the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021. Specifically, members of the Proud Boys received draconian sentences for the archaic, rarely prosecuted crime of “seditious conspiracy.” [snip] Conservatives love to play “Hypocrisy Bingo,” pointing out...

In March of 2020 New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham locked down her state due to the coronavirus threat. New Mexico was ranked 39th out of the 50 states in coronavirus cases at that time. But after Grisham locked down the state she made a private call to her favorite jewelry store to make a purchase. Of course, she was able to do this because she is the Democrat governor. But she got caught and started changing her story. Then in 2021 the far left governor was caught using taxpayer money to pay for groceries, whiskey and tequila. ... FOX News...

A District Court judge has denied Gov. Janet Mills’ (D) request to halt the First Amendment lawsuit filed against her administration by Maine healthcare workers concerning the State’s enforcement of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. In a ruling last week, Judge Jon D. Levy of the Maine District Court denied a motion to stay filed on behalf of Mills and several other officials in her cabinet. The lawsuit in question — Alicia Lowe, et al., v. Janet Mills, et al. — alleges that the State of Maine violated healthcare workers’ First Amendment rights by refusing to allow a religious exemption to...

Annnd… Here we go. If you have not read the background {Go Deep}, you will not have the appropriate context to absorb the latest revelation about how the Dept of Defense will now conduct online monitoring operations, using enhanced AI to protect the U.S. internet from “disinformation” under the auspices of national security. Gee, who would have predicted that U.S. internet operations would suddenly have a totally new set of enhanced AI guardians at the gateways? 👀 Read Carefully – Eyes Wide Open: The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects...

Score another victory for religious freedom! A federal judge issued a ruling in favor of a farmer in East Lansing, Michigan, who was excluded from a public farmer's market because of his Christian beliefs. It turns out that at least some government officials see that the city's rotten actions are violating civil liberties in the name of diversity.The conflict started in 2017 when the city's government decided that the biggest drama in the farmer's market wasn't the price of tomatoes but the fact that Stephen Tennes, owner of Country Mill Farms, has religious beliefs that the city deemed unacceptable. The...

On July 20, our attorney John Sauer—a brilliant legal mind and a force of nature in the courtroom—testified before a Congressional hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Emma-Jo Morris, the journalist who originally broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was subsequently censored under pressure from the FBI, also testified. In a “you can’t make this stuff up moment,” one committee member began this hearing—a hearing on the topic of government censorship—by calling for a vote to censor the hearing itself, shielding it from public view and removing it from...

A North Carolina middle school student was suspended for three days over a conversation he had with classmates about Jesus Christ. The 12-year-old is a seventh grader at Envision Science Academy in Wake Forest. He is also a devout Christian. The young man’s father told me that he received a phone call from the assistant dean saying he needed to attend a meeting about his son’s “continued behavior.” Several of the boy’s classmates had started a conversation during the previous school year about Christianity and his son had explained how they needed a relationship with Jesus Christ to go to...

“This changes the rules of the game,” Dershowitz said. “This basically says RICO is not just applicable to organized crime or to organized, commercial crime with hierarchies, but it also applies to protests against election results. It’s going to deter and chill people from challenging legitimate election results.”

The police chief whose “Gestapo”-style raid on a small town newspaper has become the focus of national outrage was being investigated by its reporters over claims of alleged sexual misconduct. Gideon Cody and every officer in the Marion Police Department stormed into the Marion County Record’s offices Friday with a search warrant where they seized computers and servers. They also raided the home of the editor and publisher, Eric Meyer, and his 98-year-old mother Joan Meyer, the paper’s co-owner. She died the following day of “shock and grief,” Meyer said, stressed and unable to sleep when police seized her computer...

The co-owner of local newspaper the Marion County Record has died after being 'traumatized' by a police home raid that was green-lighted to seize information on a story that hadn't even been published. Joan Meyer, 98, collapsed and died following the intense stress and grief she felt when her home was raided by the entirety of the Marion Police Department in Kansas.

Wow, talk about an overreach.

Former President Donald Trump's attorneys opposed special counsel Jack Smith's proposal for a protective order in the case related to the 2020 election, according to a court document filed Monday. Trump's attorneys argued Smith's protective order, which prosecutors typically use to dictate how discovery is handled in a case, was "overbroad" and accused the Department of Justice of seeking to "restrict First Amendment rights" with it. Protecting certain discovery "does not require a blanket gag order over all documents produced by the government," Trump's defense team wrote. His lawyers added, "Rather, the Court can, and should, limit its protective order...

Public college administrators 2,700 miles apart are trying to escape legal responsibility for what some courts are calling potential viewpoint discrimination against campus chapters of the same nationwide conservative group. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made that harder for California's Clovis Community College Thursday by refusing to moot the First Amendment lawsuit against several officials by former students in its Young Americans for Freedom chapter. The question of mootness was brushed aside by the court, because even though the college being sued rescinded their "Flyer Policy" at issue, the matter was capable of repetition yet avoiding judicial review....

The latest indictment of former President Trump threatens to destroy the First Amendment and give the federal government the unprecedented power to criminalize political lies, constitutional law professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley warned Saturday. Trump was indicted this week on four charges related to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into 2020 election interference and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges in a Washington, D.C., courtroom Thursday. In an op-ed for The Hill, Turley wrote that Smith’s indictment essentially charges Trump for spreading "lies that there...

Pennsylvania state judge ruled that President Donald Trump is protected by presidential immunity for the statements he made creating doubt about the 2020 election results while in office. Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas Judge Michael Erdos ruled Monday that 2020 election worker James Savage is unable to sue Trump over the claims, according to The Hill. Trump's immunity includes a tweet and other comments he made from the White House while a Pennsylvania state Senate committee met in November 2022, the judge also said. "Other legal proceedings may examine the propriety of his statements and actions while he was...

A Washington, D.C.-based sports radio host was fired on Saturday following comments he made about a female TV reporter who was covering the Washington Commanders. Don Geronimo, whose real name is Michael Sorce, made the comments toward WUSA9 reporter Sharla McBride. The remarks led to the Commanders barring iHeartMedia – the parent company of WBIG Radio – from the team’s training camp facilities in Ashburn, Virginia, on Friday. "Hey look, Barbie's here. Hi, Barbie girl," Geronimo shouted toward McBride while on air on Thursday. "I'm guessing she's a cheerleader." Geronimo was with co-host Crash Young when the remarks were made....

A liberal college town in Idaho is paying $300,000 to three Christian churchgoers who sued the city after being arrested for not wearing masks at an outside service during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The city of Moscow announced this week that it would settle with Gabriel Rench, as well as Sean and Rachel Bohnet, who brought a case against city leaders in March 2021 that alleged their rights under the First and Fourth Amendments were violated when they were arrested at an outdoor "psalm sing" conducted by leaders from their church. Moscow, home to the University of Idaho,...

Biden punishing a censor-gone-rogue like Twitter removes all remaining doubt that the First Amendment is under attack by the government.President Joe Biden’s administration repeatedly insists it is not violating the First Amendment in its attempts to control Americans’ speech using Big Tech. The regime’s recent targeting of Elon Musk and Twitter via weaponization of the Federal Trade Commission, however, suggests otherwise. Why else would it punish the social media company as soon as its incoming CEO pledged to roll back censorship on his app?In light of a federal judge’s recent ruling that barred the Biden administration from colluding with Big...

On Monday, President Joe Biden played his cards. He’s all bluff, no aces. Biden is the defendant in a lawsuit that accuses him and his team of, in federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s words, “the most massive attack against free speech in the United States.” Yet the appeal Biden filed Monday is devoid of even one convincing argument in his own defense. Count on the appeal to go nowhere. Biden’s been caught red-handed violating the Constitution. On July 4, Doughty announced that the evidence produced so far indicates the president is operating a vast, illegal censorship scheme to muzzle...