Free Republic

“If they are interacting with a customer and the customer says, this is my preferred name and these are my preferred pronouns, this is the way I want to be addressed, there is a legal obligation to do that. They're compelled to use those pronouns and those surnames under Colorado's law. That's compelled speech, and the real kicker is there criminal penalties for it. You can have prison time, jail time for up to 4 months if you don't abide that.” - Kristen Waggoner, President, CEO & General Counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom

Bernadette Spofforth lay in jail on a blue gym mattress in a daze, finding it difficult to move, even breathe. “I just closed down. But the other half of my brain went into Jack Reacher mode,” she said, referring to the fictional action hero. “Every single detail was in this very vivid, bright, sharp focus.” She remembers noticing that you can’t drown yourself in the toilet, because there’s no standing water in it and the flush button is too far to reach if your head were in the bowl. She’d end up being detained for 36 hours in July 2024....

Lucy Connolly has today been released from prison after being jailed for writing a 'racist' tweet during last summer's riots. The mother had spent more than nine months behind bars after admitting making the inflammatory post on X in the wake of the Southport attacks in July last year. Connolly, who is the wife of Tory councillor Ray Connolly, pleaded guilty to a charge of inciting racial hatred and was handed a 31-month sentence in October.

It’s official: Nowhere in Britain is safe from the woke speech police. First they stomped their jackboot on universities, where it’s now a risky business to express conservative opinions or even to state biological facts, including such sinful utterances as: “Men are not women.” Then they came for the workplace. Crack an off-color joke or voice a dissenting view and you might be made to take an “awareness-raising course” — or what the Soviets called re-education. Now the Woke Inquisition is feverishly eyeing yet another zone of British society for one of its joyless crackdowns, this time laying down its...

The British government has reportedly tasked a specialist police unit to surveil social media for anti-mass migration opinions as it braces for another potential summer of unrest. Rather than address the concerns of the public, such as removing the mostly young male illegal migrants from the taxpayer-funded hotel accommodations in communities across the country, the UK Home Office has formed the National Internet Intelligence Investigations to “maximise social media intelligence” about anti-mass migration sentiment on social media, according to The Telegraph. The team will work out of the Covid lockdown-enforcing National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in London. It comes amid...

Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of 'trying to police opinions' by assembling an elite team of police officers to monitor growing anti-migrant sentiment online. Detectives are set to be drawn from forces around the country as the Government scrambles to crack down on potential violence by flagging up early signs of civil unrest on social media. It comes amid fears Britain could face another summer of disorder just 12 months after a wave of riots sparked scenes of chaos following the Southport murders. Earlier this month, demonstrations first flared up outside The Bell Hotel, in Epping, Essex, after an...

Police in Germany have executed more than 170 operations targeting people they referred to as “digital arsonists”. Starting early on the morning of June 25, officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office raided the homes of people suspected of running “criminal posts” online. The police move was not the first such in Germany, where it is flagged a “day of action”, targeting alleged authors of “online hate and hate messages”. This was the 12th time that the police took such nationwide action against so-called politically motivated crime (PMK). Two-thirds of those people whom officers hit had reportedly made right-wing radical...

A Brazilian comedian said a judge took issue with his Wikipedia page when she handed down an eight-year prison sentence. Comedian Leo Lins, whose full name is Leonardo de Lima Borges Lins, was about three years removed from his comedy special when Judge Barbara de Lima Iseppi ruled the comedian made "discriminatory" remarks while on stage. The comments the judge made during her ruling have been perceived as "power-hungry" by other comedians, who expressed shock at their compatriot's conviction. Lins' 2022 special "Disturbing," or "Perturbador" in Portuguese, was ordered to be taken down from the internet by the Brazilian government...

A court has sentenced comedian Leo Lins to more than eight years in prison for inciting intolerance through a stand-up performance viewed by over three million people on YouTube. On Tuesday 3 June, Brazilian comedian Leo Lins was sentenced to over eight years in prison for making discriminatory remarks in a stand-up routine that targeted a wide range of minority groups — including black people, obese individuals, elderly people, those living with HIV, homosexuals, evangelicals, Indigenous communities, people from the impoverished northeast of Brazil, Jews, and people with disabilities. The federal court in São Paulo ruled that the right to...

Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully stopped an enforcement guidance issued under former President Joe Biden that sought to redefine the definition of “discrimination” to include self-professed “gender identity.” This unlawful rewrite of federal law would have opened private and state employers to lawsuits if they did not adopt sweeping “transgender” inclusive policies. “The Biden Administration unlawfully tried to twist federal law into a tool for advancing radical gender ideology by attempting to force employers to adopt ‘transgender’ policies or risk being sued,” said Attorney General Paxton. “The federal government has no right to force Texans to play along with...

In 1984, you could be tortured in Room 101 for believing that 2 + 2 = 4. Likewise, in Colorado you can be set upon by law enforcement for calling someone by the name their parents gave them or even for referring to them with factually correct pronouns. Leftist Governor Jared Polis has signed into law House Bill 1312: The law expands the state’s antidiscrimination laws, which apply to settings like workplaces and schools, to include provisions related to using a person’s chosen name and referring to them how they wish. “Antidiscrimination” is the Liberalese euphemism for government-imposed discrimination benefiting...

The parents of a nine-year-old girl have said they were held at a police station for 11 hours because they complained about their daughter’s primary school. . . Allen, a Times Radio producer, said six police officers turned up at his home on 29 January. He told Sky News: “When you watch the doorbell footage, you think, what are these six police officers doing? What is this operation? .. Allen had reportedly communicated to the school in May 2024 regarding the recruitment of a new headteacher but his queries were rejected. The school’s governors then reportedly wrote to the parent...

A British judge has sentenced a man to 28 weeks in prison for sending “hateful” emails intended to “disparage, insult, and offend” London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, government minister Jess Phillips, and Matt Twist, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Jack Bennett, 38, was convicted of four counts of sending malicious communications and one of using a public communication network to send offensive emails. .. Bennett had been motivated to send his emails by the “perceived” incompetence of the authorities in tackling Muslim rape gangs, which preyed on primarily white, working-class girls in Britain virtually unchecked for decades.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed on Tuesday that some Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) employees who worked on "mis-, dis-, and malinformation" were put on administrative leave. In a statement to Scripps News, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote CISA needs to "refocus on its mission," starting with election security. "The agency is undertaking an evaluation of how it has executed its election security mission with a particular focus on any work related to mis-, dis-, and malinformation," according to the statement. As first reported by Fox News Digital, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified in April 2022...

..we don’t allow hate speech on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads.... We define hate speech as direct attacks against people — rather than concepts or institutions— on the basis of what we call protected characteristics (PCs): race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease. Additionally, we consider age a protected characteristic when referenced along with another protected characteristic. We also protect refugees, migrants, immigrants, and asylum seekers from the most severe attacks, though we do allow commentary on and criticism of immigration policies. Similarly, we provide some protections for non- protected characteristics, such...

The United Kingdom’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, has threatened to extradite overseas social media users who have supported or spoken out on the anti-mass migration protests and riots gripping the country. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has promised draconian action against those protesting against the deadly stabbing of multiple young girls by a migration-background teenager in Southport, England last week. (snip) X owner and tech billionaire Elon Musk has also strongly criticized Prime Minister Starmer for two-tier policing of anti-mass migration demonstrators and Muslim counter-demonstrators, branding him “#TwoTierKier.”It remains unclear whether the British government will try to extradite...

China is leading the world in adopting generative AI, a new survey shows, the latest sign the country is making strides in the technology that gained global attention after U.S.-based OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in late 2022. In a survey of 1,600 decision-makers in industries worldwide by U.S. AI and analytics software company SAS and Coleman Parkes Research, 83% of Chinese respondents said they used generative AI, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.That was higher than the 16 other countries and regions in the survey, including the United States, where 65% of respondents said they had adopted GenAI. The global average was 54%....

… Biden’s allies believe that journalists are failing to meet the moment; that they’re falling back on horse-race coverage and ignoring the knock of fascism at America’s door. Many Biden supporters and campaign staffers have fashioned this argument into a shield against any critical coverage of the president. Like a previous White House occupant raving about “fake” stories, they sometimes behave as if they are the arbiters of what’s newsworthy at all. Sounding a bit like Donald Trump isn’t the only problem with this strategy, though; it’s also highly unlikely to advance the campaign’s larger goal of actually winning the...

In the convoluted dumpster fire of contemporary politics, we find ourselves at a peculiar crossroads. Many self-proclaimed staunch conservatives are returning to vote for Trump, driven by a blend of party loyalty and apprehension about a Biden administration. Yet, some of these individuals are not content with their choice alone—they actively criticize and vilify those within their ranks who choose a different path. To understand this phenomenon, let’s draw upon the insights of Eric Hoffer and Gustave Le Bon, which offer a deeper lens into the dynamics at play.Today, like every other day over the last several weeks, I've awakened...

Trudeau Liberal justice minister Arif Virani says that putting Canadians under house arrest on suspicion that they may commit a hate crime in the future will "help to deradicalize people who are learning things online." https://twitter.com/WeAreCanProud/status/1763301866698576259