Free Republic

Sometimes people can take the entire idea of complying with ridiculous government mandates several bridges too far. That appears to have been the case during a recent sporting event held in New Hampshire. A girls' soccer game was scheduled between Plymouth Regional High School and their rival Bow High School. Bow High School was fielding a boy who "identifies" as a girl to compete, but when the Plymouth Regional parents heard about this, they asked the Bow High athletic director to withdraw the boy from the roster. He refused, saying that "his hands were tied" by a federal ruling allowing...

The Irish government has abandoned plans to implement controversial new hate speech laws following widespread backlash from free speech advocates. Justice Minister Helen McEntee confirmed on Saturday that Dublin will drop new hate speech provisions in the proposed Criminal Justice Bill, admitting that the “incitement to hatred” section of the legislation did “not have a consensus,” the Irish Times reports. Critics of the speech restrictions have noted that the government failed to actually define what constitutes “hate” and therefore the law would have given broad powers to the state to crush dissent. The scope of the draconian powers would have...

Collusion between Big Tech and Western governments is a growing threat. It’s the First Amendment for a reason: free speech is a fundamental prerequisite for liberal democracy. But The Guardian, with logic that Stalin would have appreciated, insists the concern over free speech has been “concocted” by the Right. This is one example of many that shows the assault on free speech today primarily comes from the very people—the legacy media, academia, and progressives—who once championed unencumbered dialogue. Given the increasing likelihood of a Kamala Harris presidency, the outlook for free speech could turn even more dismal. As California’s attorney...

NewsGuard, a service that rates adherence to basic principles of good journalism, gives this website its highest possible score. Yet the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization that aims to steer advertisers away from disreputable websites, claims Reason is one of the 10 "riskiest" online news sources in the United States. The stark contrast between those two assessments illustrates the challenge of defining "disinformation," an increasingly nebulous concept that invites subjective judgments driven by political allegiances and policy preferences. That problem is especially acute when the government demands that websites take steps to curtail "disinformation," portraying it as a...

California Governor Gavin Newsom threatened legal action against Elon Musk for sharing a funny meme on X. Newsom this week signed into law a bill that makes it illegal to ‘knowingly distribute an ad or other election communications that contain materially deceptive content, including deepfakes.’ Who determines what is ‘materially deceptive?” Gavin Newsom? Of course, this law will only be used to criminally charge Trump supporters for exercising their First Amendment rights. -- snip -- Elon Musk trolled Gavin Newsom and encouraged X users to share a Kamala Harris parody campaign ad. -- snip -- “The governor of California just...

Elon Musk is encouraging a hilarious parody ad mocking Kamala Harris to go viral on X after California governor Gavin Newson signed a law to eliminate deepfake and other AI generated content in the lead up to the election. The law was sparked by a series of parody videos created by AI and using deepfakes to mock Kamala Harris on social media.

Hillary Clinton has long been one of the most anti-free speech figures in American politics, including calling upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). She is now suggesting the arrest of Americans who spread what she considers disinformation. It is a crushingly ironic moment since it was her campaign that funded the infamous Steele dossier and spread false stories of Russian collusion during her presidential campaign. Presumably, that disinformation would not be treated as criminal viewpoints. Speaking on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show this week, Clinton was asked about...

Elon Musk revels in the role of “free speech absolutist.” Last week, for instance, he jumped to the defense of Pavel Durov, the head of the messaging and social media app Telegram, after he was arrested by the French police. But while Musk claims he is a defender of free speech, he frequently kowtows to the Chinese Communist Party, for whom the concept is alien. Musk is now the CCP’s favorite western capitalist. So although he is eager to tell his 196 million Twitter followers that “Britain is turning into the Soviet Union,” he has avoided antagonizing China. He has...

Clinton might want to think twice before proposing prosecutions for spreading Russian propaganda. No one has done that more than she has.Hillary Clinton went on MSNBC this week and told Rachel Maddow that she thinks Americans who spread “misinformation” and Russia propaganda should be prosecuted.In a conversation about the recent Justice Department indictment of several alleged Kremlin-run websites and Russian state media employees, Clinton said it’s important to indict Russians who interfere in our elections but there are also Americans “engaged in this kind of propaganda” and that if they were civilly or criminally charged it would be “a better...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills Tuesday to crack down on the use of artificial intelligence to create false images or videos in political ads ahead of the 2024 election. A new law, set to take effect immediately, makes it illegal to create and publish deepfakes related to elections 120 days before Election Day and 60 days thereafter. It also allows courts to stop distribution of the materials and impose civil penalties. “Safeguarding the integrity of elections is essential to democracy, and it’s critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is being investigated for his now-deleted post questioning the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump. Musk’s post caught the attention of the Secret Service after he questioned the lack of attempts on the lives of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote on X. The X owner then followed up with a reply to his own post, writing: “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all...

A radical censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is doubling down on efforts to interfere in the 2024 election by turning the screws on Big Tech to censor speech and by manipulating journalists.

Twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Monday evening joined MSNBC’s chief conspiracy theorist and Russian propaganda host Rachel Maddow to discuss the 2024 election. Hillary Clinton immediately launched an attack on President Trump and said he is a danger our country and world just one day after a second assassination attempt against him. “The press needs to create a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is,” Hillary Clinton said. “He is a danger to our country and world,” Clinton said. WATCH: Hillary Clinton tonight on MSNBC: "The press needs to create a consistent narrative about how dangerous he is" "He...

Now they brand anyone who questions election results an 'election denier' and for some, it gets worse. Democrats were once the party of free speech. The ACLU and “truth to power” were part of the Democrat party truth brigade. Yet now Democrats and the left are stifling free speech so fast it would make George Orwell’s head spin. If Orwell was alive today, his sequel to 1984 would be 2024, replacing Winston Smith with Elon Musk or Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. Censorship, once popular in communist China, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China, is the new Converse sneakers, mom jeans, and...

"There needs to be deterrence"

Alleged FBI agents get humiliated and sent fleeing by a man after showing up to threaten him over a social media post (Credit: Jeremy Kauffman X) There has never been a more critical time in America for citizens to understand and exercise their Constitutional rights. One man in New Hampshire proved this knowledge is invaluable after the Biden-Harris regime apparently attempted to turn him into a criminal. Jeremy Kauffman, an entrepreneur and Libertarian political activist, was visited at his home Monday by two men claiming to be FBI agents regarding an unspecified X post he made. When he asks them...

In recent weeks, there have been a series of stories about the government cracking down on foreign agents allegedly working to influence the 2024 election.First, the intelligence community linked the Iranian government to a hacking of Trump campaign documents. Then the federal government seized several websites it claims were linked to a Russian campaign to circulate disinformation—meaning deliberately spread false information.The biggest story came last week when two employees of the Russian media organization RT—formerly Russia Today—were indicted for allegedly sending nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based online media company.US officials claim the scheme aimed to inject Russian government messaging...

Largely shedding Joe Biden’s canard that Trump must be defeated to save democracy, Kamala Harris’ conceit is that she prosecutes criminals and Donald Trump is one. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” she sneers. As San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, Harris supported jailing parents of truants, suppressed evidence, keeping an innocent man on death row, repeatedly covered up misconduct, leading to the dismissal of more than 600 cases, incarcerated prisoners beyond their sentences, violated Federal laws that protect donor privacy, and failed to disclose conflicts of interest arising from her personal relationships. Her record of abusing prosecutorial...

As Israel-Hamas demonstrations continue in the new school year, the misunderstanding of free speech is fueling disruption and hypocrisy on campuses.With the start of the academic year, campuses across the nation are preparing for more protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict. As students return to campus, the underlying issues that ignited these demonstrations—misunderstandings and misapplications of free speech—remain unaddressed. These protests have revealed a pressing challenge for universities: upholding the principles of free speech amid modern political activism. While many protests last semester were peaceful, others have disrupted campus operations, led to altercations and vandalism, and made some students feel unsafe...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Merrick Garland will denounce “conspiracy theories” and “dangerous falsehoods" targeting the Justice Department during a speech Thursday to employees as he forcefully pushes back against Republican claims of politicization.Garland will use a speech to U.S. attorneys gathered in Washington and other Justice Department members to vigorously defend the department's integrity and impartiality and to condemn what he describes as “outrageous” attacks that put law enforcement in harm's way. “These attacks have come in the form of conspiracy theories, dangerous falsehoods, efforts to bully and intimidate career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out,...