Free Republic

Below is my column in USA Today on the most chilling moment from the Vance-Walz debate when the Democratic nominee showed why he is part of the dream ticket for the anti-free speech movement. Here is the column: In the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pulled the fire alarm. His opponent, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, cited the massive system of censorship supported by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate. Walz proceeded to quote the line from a 1919 case in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you do not have the right to...

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary. The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to...

His book, A People’s History of the United States, has sold millions of copies but ask for it in your local bookstore and you may be lucky to find one copy. I did this little experiment here in Washington, D. C.—not an area known for its rock-ribbed conservatism—and literally had to blow the dust off of the jacket of the volume the clerk was able to unearth for me. Where I hear about Howard Zinn most frequently is in conversations with students and their parents who have encountered, usually not happily, the bard of Boston University for the first time...

The Progressive Era and the Familyby Murray N. Rothbard [Posted July 4, 2003; originally from Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe (eds.), The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).] While the "Progressive Era" used to be narrowly designated as the period 1900–1914, historians now realize that the period is really much broader, stretching from the latter decades of the nineteenth century into the early 1920s. The broader period marks an era in which the entire American polity—from economics to urban planning to medicine to social work to the licensing of professions to the ideology...