Free Republic

Half a century ago, George Orwell, writing on literary censorship, wrote that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” That dynamic now broadly extends to an opaque network of government agencies and self-proclaimed anti-misinformation groups that have repressed online speech. There’s no official ban on discussing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines or criticizing American involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war, but editors and journalists have realized that writing on such topics can come at a cost. News publishers have been demonetized and shadow-banned for reporting dissenting views and the bureaucratic means...

VIDEOSelf-proclaimed "propagandist" and founder of the State Department's Global Engagement Center as well as one of the founders of Hamilton 68, Richard Stengel reveals himself as Mr. Disinformation. He doesn't even try to hide that he thinks the First Amendment has a design flaw and that a workaround has to be attained by the government pressuring private social media to suppress information (aka CENSORSHIP) and to push the official narrative. You can also see him justify the "fortification" of the 2020 election. Eventually, House hearings on the weaponization of the federal government will need to hear from "propagandist" Richard Stengel.

Richard Stengel, new ‘team lead‘ for Joe Biden’s agency for global media, wrote an op-ed last year arguing for free speech restrictions. Stengel, a former MSNBC political analyst until he was named to Biden’s transition team, argued that the First Amendment needed redefining and that “hate speech” should be a crime. “All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails,” he wrote. “I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate.” ‘Speech that incites hate’ was defined in Stengel’s op-ed by two examples – Burning the Quran,...

Democrat and George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley is warning that the Biden transition team has taken an "ominous turn" after former Vice President Joe Biden hired a number of anti-free speech zealots. "For those of us who have been critical of the growing anti-free speech movement in the Democratic Party, the Biden transition team just took an ominous turn. The New York Post reports that Biden tapped Richard Stengel to take the “team lead” position on the US Agency for Global Media, including Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty," Turley writes...

When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to...

Let's face the ugly truth: there is a movement in this country to diminish the weight of the United States Constitution, the very basis of our liberties and the most successful framework of governance int he history of mankind. It stands in the way of the dreams of statists, and for that reason, is under attack.The latest journalistic assault on the Constitution came from Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time Magazine, in a cover story (!) last week, that was nothing less than disgraceful and laughable. Mark J, Fitzgibbons wrote a quick blog for AT debunking the story, but now...

To quote a certain president, “let me be perfectly clear”: Liberals hate the Constitution because it obstructs their ability to control and manipulate the populace. They only care about the Constitution when a liberal activist judge concocts completely new meanings out of it, such as “the separation of church and state” the “right to privacy (i.e., abortion) or the right for foreign illegal enemy combatants to get civil protections, habeas corpus rights, etc. Probably the only document liberals hate more than the Constitution is the Bible, but that’s another topic for another blog post.The latest embarrassment comes from the editor...

What a hit piece on the Founding Fathers. I could barely get through three of five pages of Richard Stengel’s article in Time magazine online today. He twists the US Constitution like every good liberal always does. This is nothing new. Democrat and liberal politicians have done this for years. Time to call out the BS again… The framers were not gods and were not infallible. Yes, they gave us, and the world, a blueprint for the protection of democratic freedoms — freedom of speech, assembly, religion — but they also gave us the idea that a black person was...

by John Armor (BB 664, Even, 25July, 676 words) How many of you remember Casey Stengel? If you do, raise your hand. For those who don’t know the name, Stengel was the legendary manager of the legendary Yankees for many seasons. When they cut him loose, he became the legendary manager of the Mets, who were legendary for losing, not winning, games. But Casey’s immortal contribution to American civilization was scrambling the English language beyond both comprehension and belief, while at the core having an excellent base of knowledge and statistics. His mantra was, “And you could look it up,”...

It’s almost like yelling, “There’s not a fire” in a crowded theater. It’s enough to get the audience’s attention by startling them, even though the alarm isn’t supported by reality. Such is the case with the cover of the new issue of Time magazine, which features a photograph of a Depression-era soup line and a headline, “The New Hard Times.” However at the bottom of the cover in much smaller print – “No, this isn’t Depression 2.0.” And the article itself suggests a preventative measure to ward off a Depression – government intervention. ...more (w/video)...