Free Republic

For more than 10 years, a Colorado law has been misused to punish me for something I didn’t do. For more than 30 years, my family and I have quietly operated Masterpiece Cakeshop, baking treats and specializing in custom-designed cakes to celebrate special occasions. I welcome everyone into my shop, treat them with respect, and if they ask for a particular kind of custom cake, do my best to create something beautiful and memorable. Like most of us, I too have sincere beliefs that guide and inspire my life, so I can only create custom cakes that will express or...

Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips has scored a victory of sorts in his ongoing lawsuit for refusing to bake a gender transition cake, with the Colorado Supreme Court agreeing to hear his appeal.Baker Jack Phillips decorates a cake in his Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., on Sep. 21, 2017. (Rick Wilking/Reuters)Last week, in a win for Mr. Phillips' years-long legal fight, the Colorado Supreme Court finally agreed to hear his case after a lower court held that Colorado authorities can force the baker to put messages on cakes that violate his personal beliefs, according to a case announcements posting.Mr. Phillips,...

For over a year, I have been writing and commenting on California’s unconstitutional Covid gag law for physicians and other medical professionals. The law allowing the revocation of licenses for “false or misleading information” on Covid-19 was a frontal attack on free speech. Nevertheless, many lawyers supported the law and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it. Now Newsom has quietly signed the repeal of the law after it was headed for an almost certain rejection by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. All of the supporters of the law seem to be shrugging and moving on after...

I’ve been writing about Denver-area baker Jack Phillips for over a decade now. It’s clear to me he’s going to be badgered into the grave by authoritarians intent on punishing him for thought crimes. From the first time his name appeared in the news until this day, the media have misled the public about him, about the case, and about the law. The latest chapter in Phillips’ Kafkaesque saga involves a transgendered lawyer named Autumn Scardina, who demanded Phillips create a pink cake with blue frosting to help celebrate a “gender transition.” As expected, Phillips, who’d already spent years fighting...

In a bombshell ruling, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has shut down the “nerve center” of federal government-led speech policing, correcting a critical error in its prior jurisprudence and striking a major blow for the First Amendment and against deep-state election interference. The court’s opinion comes in the landmark free speech case in the digital era, Missouri v. Biden. Before the litigation landed in appellate court, Louisiana District Judge Terry A. Doughty declared in a fitting Independence Day ruling that federal authorities from the Biden White House to the FBI and CDC had likely engaged in “the most...

Fifty-six years after it exempted antiwar teenagers from First Amendment protections while on campus, a federal appeals court in America's heartland affirmed students' speech rights in public schools on an equally contentious subject today. The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction Monday against an Iowa school district policy that threatens suspension and expulsion for "intentional and/or persistent refusal … to respect" a peer's gender identity, finding it's likely too vague to survive legal scrutiny. "A school district cannot avoid the strictures of the First Amendment simply by defining certain speech as 'bullying' or 'harassment'"...

The police chief who oversaw a controversial raid on a small Kansas newspaper has been suspended. The raid, carried out on the Marion County Record on August 11, was personally led by Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody . Another raid was enacted on the home of the newspaper's publisher' 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, who subsequently died. The police chief who led a highly criticized raid of a small Kansas newspaper, that saw its 98-year-old owner die the following day, has been suspended. ... The August 11 raids of the Marion County Record office and the homes of its publisher and...

Stung by court decisions limiting its ability to pressure and coerce social media companies to remove purported misinformation and facing an uncertain response at the Supreme Court, the Biden administration is finding workarounds. The State Department and National Science Foundation together awarded more than a dozen grants for misinformation-related programs with start dates this month or next, totaling about $4.4 million. The Department of Defense awarded a no-bid $2.5 million contract last week to an artificial intelligence company that scours social media, the "dark web" and audio transmissions, whose software will be used by a DOD component that neighbors the...

First Amendment experts, radical feminists and doctors are pushing back against a court ruling that held two educators responsible for their own firing because their opposition to a proposed gender identity policy sparked student protests and community complaints to Oregon's Grants Pass School District. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke botched Supreme Court precedents on the speech rights of public employees and qualified immunity from personal liability, upheld restrictions that disproportionately target women and adopted pseudoscientific language, according to ideologically diverse friend-of-the-court briefs filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Clarke's dismissal of the educators' lawsuit "effectively endorses a...

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion on Friday that, if granted, would effectively bar President Donald Trump from criticizing him, President Joe Biden, and other deep state bureaucrats for their hyperpartisan prosecution of his First Amendment right to claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “Through his statements, the defendant threatens to undermine the integrity of these proceedings and prejudice the jury pool, in contravention of the ‘undeviating rule’ that in our justice system a jury’s verdict is to ‘be induced only by evidence and argument in open court, and not by any outside influence,’” Smith wrote in...

In an assault on the First Amendment and the free press, a Washington DC jury has convicted journalist Stephen Horn of four misdemeanor charges stemming from his reporting of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill protest-turned-riot. According to journalist Steve Baker, the jury deliberated for about an hour on Monday before finding Horn guilty of entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly and disruptive conduct, violent entry, and parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol. As Headline USA has reported, Horn, by all accounts, was engaging in purely journalistic activities on Jan. 6. The FBI received a tip from...

That poses a problem for Biden, who shed the faux centrist label that he used for the campaign once he took office, but there is a larger issue at play. Biden is losing ground among black and Hispanic working-class voters because those voters are not the priority of the Democratic Party anymore. The Democratic Party is run by elitists, for elitists, and that means leaving behind blue-collar workers of all races.

The O’Keefe Media Group filed a lawsuit this week against Hawaii’s Democrat Governor Josh Green and the County of Maui after being told he could not take photographs or video on public land during a trip to investigate the aftermath of the devastating fires that burned the area to the ground.In hidden camera footage taken during the investigation, law enforcement officers in the devastated area told OMG journalists that due to the governor’s emergency order in response to the fires, they were prohibited from taking pictures or video on public land and even threatened founder James O’Keefe with arrest if...

HUGE DEVELOPMENT in the Missouri and Louisiana (and Gateway Pundit) v. Biden First Amendment lawsuit challenging the government’s collusion with Big Tech to suppress the speech of millions of Americans. LOOKS LIKE GATEWAY PUNDIT IS GOING TO THE SUPREME COURT!!! Sources sent Gateway Pundit a copy of an unfiled legal document the Department of Justice’ (DOJ) appears to have leaked to the friendly press. The document is a draft Motion to Stay, to be filed at the U.S. Supreme Court. The draft motion asks the Supreme Court to stay (halt) last week’s ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals....

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...