Free Republic

When Joe Biden made his power grab in 2020, he didn’t waste time pretending to be a unifier. As a matter of fact, one of the very first things his weaponized DOJ did, just two days after Inauguration Day, was launch a political hit job on Douglass Mackey, a young conservative mover and shaker who dared to mock Hillary Clinton with a satirical meme back in 2016.. Many believe that move was a test run, a little judicial experiment to see if the regime could jail someone for speech. Could they twist a funny meme into a federal crime? Could...

~An official message from the French government via its mission to the United Nations:That's a definition of free speech we can all get behind! You have the right to say whatever you want as long as the government has graciously agreed to permit it.What's somewhat dispiriting about the brazen authoritarianism of the above is that, after my hard-fought battle in Canada, I am well aware that, wherever you live, half your neighbours will accept that this definition sounds eminently reasonable. What does that boil down to in practice? Well, in order to prevent you noticing that a significant proportion of...

Can someone please tell New York things have changed? New Yorkers are stuck in the Biden era or earlier. Some are still pushing BLM-catch-and-release policing; some are still hoping that defunding the cops might somehow be a way to make the streets safer. Meanwhile, they just nominated Zohran Mamdani, a wacky radical socialist, as their Democratic candidate for city mayor, a guy who makes AOC look like she could be an editor for The American Conservative. But the biggest policy throwback of recent memory is a new law to force social media censorship on a state-wide level to cut off...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was ripped on social media after she called President Trump “a rapist” online — with many suggesting a tweet from the Congresswoman was grounds for a defamation lawsuit from the commander in chief. Ocasio-Cortez sparked outrage when she tweeted Friday about Trump and the release of files related to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X, apparently referring to Trump and the 2023 civil trial where he was found liable of sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll....

(LifeSiteNews) — A leading and highly influential Catholic site, Messa in Latino, was deleted by Google on Friday for alleged and unspecified violations of its “hate speech” policy. In a brief email sent from blogger.com, run by Google, the editors of Messa in Latino (MIL) were informed that the site had been taken offline with immediate effect. The email stated that “your blog titled ‘MiL – Messainlatino.it’ was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our guidelines and have made the URL https://blog.messainlatino.it unavailable to blog readers.” The reason given for the sudden removal was due...

Pismo Beach residents came face-to-face with a group "stress-testing" their First Amendment rights.Police in the California coastal community of Pismo Beach received an influx of calls earlier this week about people filming citizens at the local post office. It turns out they were First Amendment auditors. These people consider themselves to be citizen journalists and exercising their First Amendment rights by filming others in public areas. They often do this at government buildings to hold public servants accountable. Angel Ramirez was one of the individuals at the post office on Monday and said the auditors were clearly making people feel...

NEW YORK, July 9 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday overturned the conviction of a social media influencer who used Twitter posts that resembled Hillary Clinton ads to spread false information about the 2016 presidential election and help Donald Trump win. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said no rational jury could have found that Douglass Mackey knowingly agreed to join a conspiracy to deprive people of their constitutional right to vote. It overturned Mackey's March 2023 conviction in Brooklyn and seven-month prison sentence, opens new tab, and ordered an acquittal. A spokesman for U.S....

Britain's largest misinformation monitor and "fact-checker" went into bankruptcy, according to a report in the Times of London last week. In the U.S., left-wing groups like NewsGuard and GDI have come under fierce criticism as de facto tools for censorship. Logically, founded in 2016 by Cambridge engineering graduate Lyric Jain, aimed to combat "harmful and manipulative content" following high-profile events like the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election. A pivotal misstep was its decision to work with India's Karnataka state government's fact-checking unit, a move criticized by the Editors Guild of India and others for potentially enabling state censorship...

The Washington State Office of the Attorney General has launched a taxpayer-funded hotline in three counties that would allow residents, including foreign nationals and illegal immigrants, to report U.S. citizens for engaging in legally protected speech and activity, in addition to hate crimes. The launch of the hate crimes and bias incidents hotline in King, Clark and Spokane counties occurred almost exactly a year after The Center Square reported that Oregon’s hate crime and bias incident hotline mostly tracks legal activities. Referring to both legal crimes and protected speech, the hotline’s website says “these incidents have a devastating and long-lasting...

Bob Vylan have had their US visas revoked over their "hateful tirade at Glastonbury", a Trump official has said. It comes after the band were dropped by their talent agency following their anti-IDF chant at the music festival. The BBC has said it regrets not pulling the live stream of the "unacceptable" Glastonbury set, with Ofcom saying the broadcaster had "questions to answer". The corporation has faced mounting criticism over airing the performance on Glastonbury's West Holts Stage, during which the rap-punk duo's frontman Bobby Vylan led chants of, "free, free Palestine", and "death, death to the IDF [Israel Defence...

I have paid a modicum of attention to British and European media regulation ever since I was removed from UK broadcasting, now and forever. Probably would have been wiser to pay attention before my removal, but, be that as it may, Ofcom decided that my conversation with Naomi Wolf about the Covid vaccines risked causing "harm" to people. And we wouldn't want that, would we? So I was interested to learn from the weekend's Glastonbury Festival just who you can target for "harm". Back in my youth, Glasto was a big peace'n'lovefest with a somewhat tedious hippie aesthetic. But now...

Dr. Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya appeared this week at Aspen Ideas: Health, addressing his previously controversial stance on COVID-19, as well as his plans as the new National Institutes of Health director. Bhattacharya was sworn in as the 18th director of the NIH on April 1. President Trump nominated him for the position in late November, and the U.S. Senate confirmed his position on March 25. The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with Bhattacharya referring to it as “the crown jewel of American biomedical sciences.” In his conversation Tuesday evening with Stefanie Ilgenfritz, coverage chief for...

House raids over speech violations are becoming commonplace across Germany, even as violent crime explodes... On Wednesday morning at 6 a.m., a large-scale police operation was launched across Germany, targeting hundreds of individuals suspected of insulting politicians or spreading “hate and incitement” online. The massive crackdown saw police launch morning raids against 170 individuals, which saw police seize computers, cell phones, and tablets, and conduct searches in multiple locations across the country. The action, which was conducted by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), uses the new Criminal Code Paragraph 188 to target individuals accused of racism and hate speech....

At around 6 a.m. this morning, hundreds of people across Germany awoke to police officers at their door. Their only ‘crime’ is to have openly made critical or offensive comments on the internet, many about specific politicians. German police raiding right-wing Compact Magazine’s editor-in-chief’s home, Twitter This is not a scene from the Third Reich or the German Democratic Republic, but from the Federal Republic in the 21st Century. Officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) intend to make approximately 170 house visits today, to investigate ‘hateful’ or insulting comments made online. Suspects have had their tablets, laptops, and...

Police in Germany have executed more than 170 operations targeting people they referred to as “digital arsonists”. Starting early on the morning of June 25, officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office raided the homes of people suspected of running “criminal posts” online. The police move was not the first such in Germany, where it is flagged a “day of action”, targeting alleged authors of “online hate and hate messages”. This was the 12th time that the police took such nationwide action against so-called politically motivated crime (PMK). Two-thirds of those people whom officers hit had reportedly made right-wing radical...

Kaitlin was banned from ANOTHER farmers market in Winter Garden for her free speech!

Obama’s embrace of censorship speaks to the desperation of a party that can’t survive without uniform control of the information space.. The modern Democrat Party is many things. But an ardent defender of Americans’ First Amendment right to free speech is not one of them. This theme was front and center during a sit-down interview former President Barack Obama participated in at The Connecticut Forum earlier this week. At one point in his conversation with historian and author Heather Cox Richardson, America’s 44th commander-in-chief broached the subject of “propaganda” and how “[t]hose in power, those with money, exploit [the information]...

Vice President JD Vance was suspended from the left-leaning social media platform Bluesky on Wednesday, just minutes after joining and sharing his first post. “Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,” Vance wrote in his first post on the X competitor. “So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.” The vice president went on to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on transgender medical treatments for minors. “To that end, I found Justice [Clarence] Thomas’s concurrence on medical...

Afederal judge ordered the University of Oregon to pay $191,000 to Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley to cover his legal fees in a successful First Amendment challenge to its censorship of Gilley's comment "all men are created equal" in his retweet from UO's diversity, equity and inclusion office Twitter page, according to Gilley's lawyers. Gilley secured a preliminary injunction last summer that stops UO Equity's account on X, formerly Twitter, from blocking his interactions or "hiding, muting, or deleting" several kinds of his posts to its account. They settled in full this spring after nearly three years in court,...

Even as other banks are backing down, the bank that debanked us doubles down. Last spring, 15 state attorney generals wrote to Bank of America warning that its politically motivated debanking targeting conservatives and religious people was under the looking glass. After taking office, President Trump directly challenged Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to stop discriminating against conservatives. “I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives, because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank. What you’re doing is wrong.” But instead of ending its political discrimination, BOA launched a...