Free Republic

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the Global Engagement Center as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the “censorship-industrial complex.”“Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, titled, “Rubio: To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.”Rubio wrote that, in 2016, the Obama administration changed the GEC’s focus on combatting international terrorism cover...

Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI) claimed on Friday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” that the Trump administration was attacking the freedoms of speech, religion and the press. Co-host Pamala Brown said, “You talk about due process, that brings me to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen was able to finally get a face to face meeting with him. The administration admitted that he was wrongly deported to El Salvador. Where do you think this goes from here?” Dingell said, “You know, I don’t know where it goes. I’m glad that the senator was able to see...

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson England is done for. A man was confronted by police for saying “speak English” to someone who mumbled. They’re labeled it as hate crime. Total insanity. From End Wokeness 11:25 PM · Apr 16, 2025

A marathon deportation case against two Palestinian immigrants, pursued by the administrations of four U.S. Presidents over 20 years, has been dismissed. The ruling closes a Byzantine legal saga that wound its way through federal appellate courts, the U.S. Supreme Court and federal immigration boards, breaking new legal ground along the way. It ended at the Department of Homeland Security, where the dismissal order was entered Tuesday. One of the defendants, Khader Musa Hamide, said in an interview that he will never get over the experience of being under suspicion for 20 years but now "I can breathe better." A...

Joe Biden’s final act of shamelessness was pardoning his entire crime family in the final hours of his presidency. There’s a mountain of corruption that’s yet to be fully revealed. On the weaponization of government front, you’d think the sustained lawfare launched against President Donald Trump from the Department of Justice was evidence enough. Pro-life activists and the January 6 defendants also being ensnared by the Biden DOJ’s extralegal crusade on political dissidents. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. The Media Research Center found not one, not ten, but 57 anti-free speech and censorship initiatives aimed at chipping away...

New German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said after his unofficial victory Sunday that a top priority is to make his country and the rest of Europe stronger so that they can become independent from the U.S. with President Donald Trump in office. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Merz said, according to the news outlet Politico . He also said Trump's recent comments show "Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”...

Irvine - Closing arguments will resume today in the trial of 11 students accused of disrupting a speech at UC Irvine by the Israeli ambassador to the United States. The students who interrupted the speech last year "meticulously" planned the disruption and one of the activists afterward boasted, "We pretty much shut them down," a prosecutor said Monday in arguing they should be found guilty of violating laws governing conduct at public meetings. But defense attorneys countered in their closing arguments that just because the students planned to protest the meeting doesn't mean they are guilty of the misdemeanor charges...

Orange County prosecutors next week are scheduled to argue against a defense motion to keep them from speaking in public about their criminal case against 11 student activists accused of disrupting an Israeli ambassador's speech at UC Irvine last year. The motion, filed in Orange County Superior Court's Central Justice Center in Santa Ana on Tuesday, accuses Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Wagner, police and representatives from the district attorney's office of tainting the jury pool with public statements against the 11 defendants. Defense attorneys are seeking a court order that would keep prosecutors from talking publicly to the media or...

An Orange County jury has reached a verdict in the Irvine 11 case of Muslim students accused of conspiring and disrupting a February 2010 speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States. The case garnered national attention over free-speech rights and centered on conflicting views of who was being censored. Prosecutors argued that Ambassador Michael Oren was "shut down" when his speech was interrupted by students who took turns shouting preplanned phrases in a crowded UC Irvine ballroom.

May 20, 2020, 7:21 p.m. EST: BREAKING: The Minnesota Catholic Conference and The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in Minnesota sent Governor Tim Walz separate letters today announcing that they will resume worship services on May 26 despite Governor Walz’s current COVID-19 executive order which allows retailers to operate at 50 percent capacity but caps church worship services at ten people. Governor Walz’s latest re-opening order allows the Mall of America to open its doors to those seeking retail therapy but disallows churches from providing spiritual healing to their congregations. At the same time, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty sent Governor...

Markus Roscher, a German lawyer, was fined €3,000 under a controversial speech law for criticizing government officials on X, highlighting growing concerns over free expression and political dissent in Germany.. The debate over free speech in Germany has taken a new turn following the case of Markus Roscher, a 61-year-old lawyer from Braunschweig, who was fined €3,000 for criticizing the government’s heating law. Roscher described Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock as “malicious failures” in a post on X back in 2021. He was subsequently issued a penalty notice under the controversial Paragraph 188...

My name is Daniel Alman, I was born in 1971, and I’ve lived in Squirrel Hill for my entire life so far. I’m the only person in the world who matches all of those things, so there’s no doubt as to who I am.At 8:58 in this video from “60 Minutes,” Josephine Ballon happily says, “Half of the internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion.”Josephine Ballon is an evil, authoritarian scumbag.I dare her to have me arrested.Thank goodness that I washttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc

The fight for freedom rarely begins before freedom is nearly snuffed out. The plan was simple. If Western governments controlled the “narrative” and censored dissent, those with power would retain power forever. If they spied on citizens and threatened uncooperative parties with imprisonment, nobody would dare resist. If they fashioned their labyrinthine bureaucracies into regulatory weapons targeting ideological enemies, opposition leaders with the most to lose would be the first to cower in silence. Own the message. Monopolize the means of messaging. Neutralize competing messengers. This is how totalitarianism rises and freedom dies. However, as nineteenth-century Prussian military commander Helmuth...

Lisa J. Stevenson, Acting General Counsel Federal Election Commission 1050 First Street, N.E. Washington, D.C. 20463 Ms. Stevenson, As Members of Congress, we are committed to the safety and integrity of our election and democracy. We are writing to offer our support for Public Citizen's Petition for Rulemaking to Clarify the Law Against Fraudulent Misrepresentation Public Citizen is petitioning the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to clarify that 52 U.S.C. § 30124 includes deep fakes of an election candidate as a fraudulent misrepresentation. As you know, 52 U.S.C. §30124 prohibits a candidate for federal office or an employee or agent campaign...

US Vice-President JD Vance is in Paris for the AI Summit, and he has made it clear not to be joking around. He was reported to have walked out of a dinner with heads of state on Monday night, the 10th, during the Chinese vice-premier speech. The Chinese official reportedly ‘started singing the praises of trade and the UN.’ This was a hit against President Trump and his administration. The Telegraph reported: “Dominique Seux, the only French journalist present at the dinner at Paris’s Elysée palace on Monday night, said the US vice-president, clearly saw the speech – delivered by...

One day after Vice President JD Vance delivered a scathing speech to European leaders in Munich, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took the same stage to offer an apparent rebuke to Vance’s remarks, defending Germany’s democracy and its regulations on hate speech. Scholz spoke at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, slamming “outsiders intervening in our democracy, in our elections, in the democratic formation of opinion in favour of this party,” especially from “friends and allies.” Scholz said Germany’s “commitment to ‘never again’”—a promise to not return to fascism and the Holocaust—“cannot be reconciled with support” for Alternative for Germany (AfD),...

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration. And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security...

The pro-life activists who suffered partisan prosecution over the last four years by President Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice could have a chance at clemency if incoming President Donald Trump honors their request for “full and unconditional pardons.” The Thomas More Society, which has represented several of the peaceful protestors targeted by the Biden administration for their opposition to baby-killing, submitted nearly two dozen petitions asking Trump to give those who were “unjustly imprisoned” and “unjustly convicted” for advocating to protect life in the womb presidential reprieve. “These individuals participated in mere peaceable civil disobedience, in the heralded tradition...

Journalist Matt Taibbi spoke to Brian Kilmeade about Mark Zuckerberg coming out against government censorship of social media and revealing the pressure he faced from the Biden administration to censor content on Facebook and Instagram. "On the whole, it is a net positive," Taibbi said. "Zuckerberg coming out and saying all this confirms a lot of what I reported and a lot of the information that came out from Jim Jordan's committee investigation into the Facebook Files. Even if it is not 100% sincere, it confirms some things and suggests that maybe these tech companies are afraid to continue doing...

LONDON — Elon Musk “may have saved humanity” by purchasing X, a senior Conservative spokesperson declared — as the U.K.’s main opposition party continued to try and catch the tech billionaire’s eye. “The Elon Musk purchase of X may have saved humanity,” Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith posted on the platform Musk owns Tuesday evening. “With X becoming a true freedom of speech platform, the common ground of public opinion is no longer determined by a left-leaning elite,” he went on. “Recent political earthquakes in the U.S., the U.K. and now Canada are a release of pent up democratic will...