Free Republic

A school board meeting in Maine’s capital city of Augusta on Wednesday night featured a contentious interaction between a parent in a “MAGA” hat and the school board president over the state’s ongoing controversy over trans athlete inclusion in girls’ sports. Augusta School Board Chair Martha Witham cut off local parent Nick Blanchard while he discussed the controversial issue and a petition he launched to have Cony Middle and High School Principal Kim Liscomb removed from her position, as seen in footage of the meeting. Liscomb is currently the president of the Maine Principals’ Association (MPA), which supports transgender athletes’...

A Canadian anti-gender ideology activist recently invited to the White House was involved in a stand-off with police during an incident in Brisbane this week. “Billboard Chris” – real name Chris Elston – has nearly 500,000 followers on X including the like of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. He was last month at the White House to witness Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order seeking to ban trans people from playing in women’s sport. On Tuesday he turned up at Brisbane’s Queen St mall wearing a sandwich board reading “Children Cannot Consent to Puberty Blockers”. On the other...

European Union regulators are preparing to hit Elon Musk's X platform with a huge fine which could surpass $1billion for breaking disinformation laws, insiders have reportedly revealed. The move would likely to ratchet up tensions between the EU and United States, with tech billionaire Musk a close adviser to President Trump. The social media platform could also face forced product changes for failing to abide by the landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation, sources told the New York Times. The penalties are expected to be announced this summer, the sources said, and will be the first to be...

Germany’s likely new coalition government, expected to be formed between the conservatives (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), is planning a law that could effectively ban politicians deemed ‘unpleasant’ or ‘populist’ from standing for election. A draft coalition paper, presented to the press last week, proposes a significant tightening of the country’s already repressive ‘incitement of the masses’ law. Under the proposal, politicians convicted more than once under the law would no longer be allowed to stand as a party candidate. Germany’s law against incitement of the masses (Section 130 of the Criminal Code) has long been a tool to...

Vance warned that shutting down speech destroys democracy. European leaders have apparently taken his statement as an instruction manual. It’s been a banner week for authoritarians in Europe, and it’s only Wednesday. On Monday, a French court banned Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally party and the frontrunner in the 2027 presidential election, from seeking public office for the next five years. The same day, The Telegraph reported that a toddler had been booted from a U.K. preschool for being insufficiently supportive of LGBT politics. Over the weekend, a British couple revealed they had been arrested...

If you think America is just an idea, then you’ll gladly sacrifice the rights of Americans for the ‘rights’ of foreigners. Lately, it’s become fashionable for Never-Trumpers like David French to denounce the president’s new policy of revoking the visas of foreign nationals who agitate for terrorist groups like Hamas. It’s un-American, we’re told, to hold guests to a certain standard or to remove hostile foreigners from our country. This past week, French posted on X that “we can absolutely and totally dispense with the idea that Trump’s Republican Party defends free speech. We’re witnessing one of the most comprehensive...

"What this is all about is an attempt to change the face of our country..." The Irish government has frozen the bank account of an Irish teacher after his continued refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns for a student at Wilson’s Hospital School. Enoch Burke, who has spent more than 500 days in jail for refusing to comply with a court order, also had his salary payments halted. Burke attempted to withdraw funds from his Bank of Ireland account last week but found that he was unable to access his money. The account reportedly holds over €40,000—his personal savings from years...

As I listen in frustration to my liberal friends complain about encroaching authoritarianism in the United States and the danger of letting people express their opinions on X, I stand amazed at their admiration for allies in Europe, such as the UK or the European Union cracking down on people who aren't in lockstep with the ruling regimes. It is a testament to the power of groupthink and the power of propaganda and gives us a window into how otherwise civilized societies descend into barbarous madness that results in crimes against humanity. The analog isn't so much the rise of...

‘They know our voice is so powerful and influential that they can’t accomplish their goals unless they shut us down. They will not succeed.’.. Americans’ constitutionally protected right to free speech “has been under worse attack in the last decade than at any other point in our nation’s history,” Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway told lawmakers during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. “The tentacles of the censorship-industrial complex are choking out freedom of expression, debate, and the right to criticize powerful institutions such as corporate media and the government,” Hemingway said. Throughout her opening statement, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief highlighted...

“A New World Order With European Values.” Emblazoned across banners and signs, those words met the participants at this week’s meeting of the World Forum in Berlin. Each year, leaders, executives, journalists and academics gather to address the greatest threats facing humanity. This year, there was little doubt about what they view as the current threat: the resurgence of populism and free speech. In fairness to the Forum, “a New World Order” likely sounds more ominous for some civil libertarians than intended. While the European Union is a transnational government stretching across 27 nations, the organizers were referring to a...

During the first two months of Trump's second term, I have noticed that the sheer volume of protests has far exceeded what took place in DC during the first months of his first term. I noticed something else, too: the crowds are far older than any time in the past. What does this tell me? Well, for one it says that young people are not the ones taking to the streets of our nation's capital anymore. Trump gained significant ground on the younger demographic in the most recent election. While MAGA was considered to be a fringe political movement populated...

A Republican lawmaker from Colorado expressed shock at being told by Democratic colleagues that he had to remove a sticker supporting the Second Amendment from his laptop while in the state's House chamber. "I had to cover up this, they couldn't stand my sticker," Colorado Republican state Rep. Ken DeGraaf said during remarks on the state's House floor, pointing to paper covering up a sticker in support of the Second Amendment on a laptop he carried with him to the chamber. "It said ‘shall not be infringed’ and signed ‘2-A’ and that was considered offensive, which I understand would be...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) released explosive new documents obtained through ongoing litigation against the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), exposing a vast, government-backed censorship operation to silence Americans under the guise of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” The documents reveal a disturbing alliance between the GEC, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, Development Office (FCDO), and media censorship organizations, all working in lock-step to manipulate public discourse, control media narratives, and suppress free speech. The GEC, which was forced to shut down in December 2024, was designed to “combat...

We want to know who feels freer to speak in this moment, who feels they're being forced into silence, and the extent to which the right to free speech, as protected by the U.S. Constitution, might be changing for different people, for better or worse. Fill out the form below and an NPR journalist may reach out for an upcoming story.

Australian politician Chris Minns inadvertently said the quiet part out loud when he admitted that the existence of true “free speech” is incompatible with a multicultural society.The Premier of New South Wales tacitly admitted that in order to uphold the myth that ‘diversity is our greatest strength’, the freedom to say it isn’t must be censored.“I recognize and I fully said from the beginning, we don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community and have people live in...

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...

Seems like a good question, since large parts of America have yet to forgive Elon Musk for saving free speech here. Whatever Musk's other peccadilloes may be, he spent $44 billion of his own money to buy Twitter outright and immediately exposed how government pressured the platform to shut down dissent and debate during the Biden years. Musk uncovered the whole corrupt Big Brother-Big Tech Censorship Industrial Complex run out of the Departments of State and Health and Human Services and the abuse of "misinformation" to mean "anything that contradicts our positions." ... Musk hasn't abandoned the cause of free...

Major AI service providers continue to deploy content moderation algorithms designed to suppress and manipulate viewpoints, actively enforcing censorship under the guise of moderation. From Foreign PsyOps to Domestic Thought Control The censorship and content manipulation we see today did not emerge organically—it was the result of government-directed psychological operations (PsyOps) repurposed for domestic control. What was once used in foreign influence campaigns to destabilize adversarial regimes or control narratives abroad was turned inward—against the American people. The Twitter Files, exposed by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, provided irrefutable evidence that U.S. government agencies used taxpayer dollars to...

MIAMI (AP) — A company owned by President Donald Trump sued Capital One on Friday, claiming the bank unjustifiably terminated over 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts without cause in 2021, shortly after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The suit was filed by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and Eric Trump in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. The Trump Organization claims the decision by Capital One to close the accounts was an attack on free speech and free enterprise. The suit also claims the decision was a response to Trump’s political views. “Capital One has not and does...

Rose Docherty was arrested over her sign, which read: "Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want." A 74-year-old Scottish woman was arrested for standing near a hospital that performs abortions with a sign that read: "Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want." The woman's protest was in violation of an "exclusion zone" law, which bans anti-abortion protests or prayer vigils within a 200-meter radius of a facility that provides abortions. "I was approaching no one on that day. I wasn't calling out. I was standing quietly by the roadside," Rose Docherty, told...