Free Republic

The State Department laid to rest the alleged "censorship nerve center" of the federal government last week after Congress refused to reauthorize the interagency Global Engagement Center, known for teaching youth to distrust populism and allegedly squelching American small businesses online. While it may have a peaceful afterlife – State plans to "realign" GEC staff with other entities that handle purported "foreign information manipulation and interference activities" – GEC also faces an unquenchable fire and undying worm on multiple fronts. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Monday against State, with nine exhibits, because it...

Disinformation. BLM. Masks. Count three moral panics that never made any sense, that destroyed people’s lives, yet questioning them had severe consequences. And certainly the one place that they could never be questioned was in the media. Yet, when the time came, the media simply shrugged, brushed them aside and acted like they had been no big deal in the first place. Disinformation was originally a Russiagate component that was used to conduct mass censorship of political dissent and a top-down regulation of speech on the theory that there was a dangerous kind of speech ‘disinformation’ that made democracy unworkable...

Effective December 26, Elon Musk changed the Twitter algorithm to diminish those voices who would openly confront his network of supporters within Silicon Valley and beyond. If large follower Twitter accounts, like those of Musk himself, David Sacks, Vivek Ramaswamy and Musks’ promoted network of influencers begin blocking accounts on the platform, then the voices of those accounts get purposefully diminished by the algorithm.Much like having a VIP section that can remove people from the audience, Musk is pushing opposing viewpoints into the background of the public square.[SOURCE]The timing of this is not accidental. The allies of Musk have been...

Below is my column in The Hill on the recent Wall Street Journal report on the Biden Administration’s resistance to experts who voiced support for the lab theory on the origins of COVID-19. As with many academics in higher education, government experts were warned not to question the natural or zoonotic theory. In the meantime, figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci said little to support other experts who were being censored and targeted for opposing views. Call it the Silence of the Labs. The effort to marginalize such figures continues this week as pandemic hawks circle Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in anticipation...

Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes Bankrupt COMMENTARY By Gabe KaminskyDecember 30, 2024 Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes BankruptAP The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States. Here’s how. Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years,...

For those who opposed the censorship and cancel campaigns during the pandemic, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya became an iconic figure of resistance. Unfortunately, the same can be said of the anti-free speech movement and pandemic hawks. Bhattacharya, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration and was a vocal critic of COVID-19 policies, has been nominated as the next head of the National Institutes of Health. As I wrote this weekend in my column, the nomination was heralded by many as a turning point for the NIH. It is also a rallying cry for those who supported the earlier measures, as shown by...

Weldon Kees write in his poem “June 1940″ : ” ……. the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform./An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.” Bob Dylan's Idiot Wind is a masterpeice or a messterpeice of fractured emotions and traces of deep love (“Sweet lady ……. a lone soldier on the cross (who) won the wars after losin’ every battle ……. Down the road to ecstasy/I followed you beneath the stars/Hounded by your memory/And all your ragin’ glory ……. } What I hear Dylan sing in the Chris is “Yediot Wind” What is that? A condemnation of...

WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Police are searching for the suspects who allegedly yelled a homophobic slur at a UCLA student near campus and threw wads of paper at the victim. According to the UCLA Police Department, the incident happened on Christmas Eve around 6 p.m. The video featured in the media player above is the ABC7 Los Angeles 24/7 streaming channel The student was walking westbound on the north sidewalk of Weyburn Avenue when a black Mercedes-Benz convertible with four occupants drove up next to the victim, police said. That's when police said one of the occupants yelled a...

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...

It’s been a bad few months for democracy. Election results offensive to the European Union were annulled in Romania; an attempted coup occurred in Georgia over elections that didn’t go the way the west wanted; the French government, widely hated, teetered over the abyss as president Emmanual Macron tried to ignore the last election; on December 16, Washington’s pet German government fell; lots of funny-business happened in the Moldovan referendum and election, amid widespread disenfranchisement of Moldovan voters living in Russia; elections were long ago cancelled in dictatorial Ukraine; and South Korea hosted an attempted coup. In short, western democracies’...

Press Release: WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released its final 17,000-page staff report detailing the Select Subcommittee's findings about the Biden-Harris Administration's weaponized federal government. Final Report on the Weaponization of the Federal Government by the Biden-Harris Administration

The reelection of President Donald Trump could serve as a historic turning point for free speech in America. President Trump has said he will investigate censorship practices by the federal government, end the rampant disrespect for First Amendment rights on our college campuses, and take on Big Tech’s Orwellian policing of speech on the Internet. If successful, these efforts would make the First Amendment stronger than ever before. Yet President Trump’s opponents will not simply stand by and watch as he dismantles their carefully crafted censorship machine. Controlling who gets to speak and what can be said is essential to...

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean claimed Thursday on MSNBC’s “All In” that once in office, President Donald Trump will attack free speech, causing the country to be “done for as we know it.” Host Ari Melber said, “I am curious what you see here in the political side of this. These are political efforts to change how people act or change coverage or have some impact. ABC, going to make its own decisions but it was widely covered that the case was not an obvious loss by any means and their statement, I am referring to what ABC...

Democratic strategist James Carville criticized his party on Thursday for suppressing dissent on issues like sex changes and border policy. Carville’s remarks follow Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts calling out his party on Nov. 10 for attempting to “cancel people rather than having debates about issues that Americans care about” following backlash to his comments regarding transgender athletes competing in female sports. Carville, on “Politics War Room,” accused Democrats of enforcing a tyrannical adherence to their “philosophy” that undermines the party’s electability. “Anybody that questions the absolute, unquestionable benefits of transition surgery is going to be called this equivalent...

The 1,547 page funding bill includes an extension for the Global Engagement Center—a massive contributor within the Censorship Industrial Complex, who pressured social media companies to censor Americans. This bill would extend their existence for another NINE YEARS! ... This is why the bill is 1500 pages long... to ensure it never gets read. ... We need to go back to single issue bills ... The Global Engagement Center should not be included in a funding bill!

A State Department agency – which has been chided by conservatives for its alleged blacklisting of Americans and news outlets – is set to be refunded in the continuing resolution (CR) bill currently being hammered out among lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The Global Engagement Center has been included in page 139 of the CR. Although it doesn’t specify its budget allocation, a previous Inspector General report shows the agency’s FY 2020 budget totaled $74.26 million, of which $60 million was appropriated by Congress. The provision in the CR can be found under "Foreign Affairs Section 301. Global Engagement Center Extension,"...

@naval Elon’s purchase of Twitter was the single most consequential act of the last decade. It restored free speech, broke the Overton window, and enabled the second American revolution. @elonmusk May or may not be most consequential – history will be the judge – but probably within the top 5. Buying Twitter caused me mega pain, but it had to be done to ensure humanity took the good fork in the road.

The enormity of the forces brought against free speech cannot be understood simply by looking at any individual organization, like Facebook, because it’s a web of deceit incorporated by tax dollars to inhibit free speech on a global scale, but primarily against the Western nations who largely have free speech, rather than against truly authoritarian societies that don’t need it, they do that as a matter of practice. I recently watched this Joe Rogan interview of Mike Benz largely to delve into the encyclopedic knowledge of Benz, who has an understanding of the interlocking efforts of the CIA and numerous...

SNIP It also amends the Criminal Code to create a new standalone hate crime offence that would allow penalties up to life imprisonment to deter hateful conduct, as well as raise the maximum punishments for hate propaganda offences from five years to life imprisonment for advocating genocide.SNIPHarmful content is defined in the legislation as content that incites violence, that foments hatred, that incites violent extremism or terrorism, is used to bully a child, that sexually victimizes a child, that induces a child to harm themselves, or intimate content communicated without consent.The bill also creates a new Digital Safety Commission, which...

It looks like the Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr won’t be the only agency looking to tear down the government-backed dystopian activities of website traffic cop NewsGuard. Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson issued a statement Dec. 2 joining his colleague Commissioner Melissa Holyoak in urging the agency “to investigate online platforms for unfair acts or practices relating to their opaque, unpredictable processes for banning users and censoring content.” Ferguson stipulated that “we must vigorously enforce the antitrust laws against any platforms found to be unlawfully limiting Americans’ ability to exchange ideas freely and openly.” Part of Ferguson’s antitrust push...