Free Republic

The White House on Monday pushed back on hardline Republican demands to deport foreigners who joined pro-Palestinian protests, warning the proposals would not pass First Amendment protections on free speech. Republican 2024 hopefuls are competing to see who can be toughest on demonstrators backing the Palestinian cause after Hamas terrorists killed 1400 people on October 7. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, said pro-Hamas demonstrators should have their visas canceled. John Kirby, White House national security spokesman, was asked about sending home people who support the Palestinian cause. 'I would just tell you, you don't have to agree with every...

The war between Israel and Hamas continues to spark debate in the United States and other countries as people express their opinions on the conflict. In New Jersey, a billboard denouncing Hamas was taken down.The sign, which was put up by a Jewish organization named JewBelong, was removed after law enforcement received over 100 complaints. Situated on Route 80 in Bergen County, the billboard's message did not mince words: “Oh, don’t be naïve. Hamas would chop your head off too.”This anti-Hamas billboard on Route 80 in Bogota Borough resulted in more than 100 calls to police before it was taken...

A panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 18 struck down lawsuits challenging a Nasdaq stock market rule requiring companies listed on the exchange to have "diverse" directors on their boards or explain why they don't. In a lengthy opinion, the appeals court rejected lawsuits seeking to block the rule by the National Center for Public Policy Research and the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment, a group formed by conservative legal activist Edward Blum. The rule at the center of the lawsuit was approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in August 2021.

This week, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan overseeing United States v. Donald Trump issued a gag order prohibiting a leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump, from engaging in speech aimed at “government staff,” among others, during his trial. Listen, I understand the disdain some conservatives feel for the former president. I share the sentiment. But if you’re cheering on a judge who’s inhibiting political speech on rickety grounds, you’re no friend of the “democracy” or the Constitution. “Mr. Trump may still vigorously seek public support as a presidential candidate, debate policies and people related to that candidacy, criticize the current...

A federal judge on Monday issued a gag order on Former President Donald Trump to limit what he can talk about regarding special counsel Jack Smith's probe of his alleged efforts to alter the 2020 election results. D.C.-based Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee, said in court, "This is not about whether I like the language Mr. Trump uses. This is about language that presents a danger to the administration of justice," CNN reported. "His presidential candidacy does not give him carte blanche to vilify public servants who are simply doing their jobs," she also said, as Trump runs for...

CNN — A federal judge on Monday issued a gag order on former President Donald Trump, limiting what he can say about special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution into his alleged attempt to subvert in the 2020 presidential election.The order restricts Trump’s ability to publicly target court personnel, potential witnesses, or the special counsel and his staff. The order did not impose restrictions on disparaging comments about Washington, DC, – where the jury will take place – or certain comments about the Justice Department at large, both of which the government requested.

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....