Free Republic

Spain will launch a tool to measure hate speech on digital ‌platforms as part of a broader strategy ‌to increase oversight of social media companies, Prime Minister Pedro ​Sanchez said on Wednesday. The country announced a wider plan last month to regulate social media, including a ban on its use for younger teenagers and ‌measures to hold ⁠platform executives accountable for illegal or hateful content hosted on their services. The new ⁠tool, called HODIO — an acronym in Spanish for Footprint of Hatred and Polarisation — will allow the ​government to ​systematically track the presence, ​amplification and impact of ‌hate...

President Donald Trump and his supporters were targeted by four consecutive FBI code-named counterintelligence investigations over the last decade that secretly subjected hundreds of innocent Americans to privacy-invading tactics and essentially treated the man twice elected president as a national security threat for most of the first nine years of his political career, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Just the News. FBI Director Kash Patel has personally led the effort to review the operations code-named Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo and Arctic Frost that stretched from summer 2016 to January 2025, uncovering evidence of a far-reaching dragnet...

The bipartisan push to remove anonymity from the internet is ushering in an era of unprecedented mass surveillance and censorship.

merica is alone among the nations in having a Second Amendment. The Founders were among the wisest men—informed by wise women—of any age. They well understood human nature, particularly its dark side, and understood that a disarmed people are not free--can never be free—but are subjects. The Second Amendment was not written to allow sport shooting, target practice, hunting, even primarily protection from criminals. It was written to ensure that should government become tyrannical, Americans could rise against it and restore liberty. Democrats scream bloody murder when anyone speaks that fundamental truth, yet it was one of history’s most famous...

It’s easy to forget that ten years ago, candidate Donald Trump was the only national politician who took China’s growing geopolitical power seriously. He talked about China so frequently and pronounced those two syllables so deliberately — Chi-na — that comedians and voters alike enjoyed doing imitations of the MAGA-man taking America’s geopolitical adversary to task. On the stump, Trump called both Republicans and Democrats “stupid” for how they had permitted the Chinese Communist Party to devour American assets. He would list beautiful American buildings and historic American real estate that the Chinese had acquired since President Bill Clinton and...

Next month the most important political book of the year, or perhaps the decade, will be published. It is called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet. To summarize: shocked by the arrival of Donald Trump in 2016, American government officials, the media, and the technology giants created a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. The media was complicit and will never fully recover. Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many...

The Boston Globe ran a poll last December which found that a full third of respondents were thinking about leaving the state because of the high cost of living.The Globe/Suffolk survey found that about one-third of Massachusetts voters have seriously considered leaving the state in the past year because of affordability pressures, even as a majority still believe the state is generally moving in the right direction. Inflation, health care costs, housing, taxes, and soaring utility bills topped the list of financial stressors.Boston.com asked their readers how they felt and and even higher percentage said they were looking to move....

New York City is expecting something like two feet of snow, and the city’s government, led by socialist/Communist Zohran Mamdani, is encouraging able-bodied New Yorkers to help shovel the city out after the storm. But only, of course, if they have proper identification: Lefty Mayor Zohran Mamdani opposes requiring ID’s to vote — but mandates no less than five forms of identification in order to shovel snow. The New York City Sanitation Department website says that in order to register as an emergency snow shoveler, an applicant must provide two small photos sized 1-1.5 square inches, two original forms of...

The online registration states that to be accepted for the position, applicants must be at least 18, eligible to work in the US, and able to perform heavy physical labor. To register for an appointment, those interested must present two small photos of themselves, two original forms of ID, and a Social Security card. The starting pay to shovel snow with the city is $19.14 per hour, increasing to $28.71 per hour after the first 40 hours worked in a week.

Marco Rubio considers it an "overused term" while Friedrich Merz thinks it "no longer exists". But while the US Secretary of State and German chancellor may not believe in the relevance of the rules-based international order, the concept — and its potential collapse — has been at the forefront of global geopolitics of late. The phrase caught the global attention in January after a rare speech, from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in which a world leader tackled the often unspoken concept head on. "We knew the story of the rules-based international order was partially false, that the strongest would...

San Francisco just dropped a $300,000 sprinkler mandate on 9,800 condo owners — and that’s just the beginning. California homeowners are now facing a stack of unfunded mandates that could cost half a million dollars per property. No vote. No public funding. No way out. In this video I expose how a failed San Francisco politician got a $300,000 per unit fire sprinkler retrofit mandate passed after it was defeated TWICE — by burying it in a routine fire code update. I reveal why the sprinkler fitters union is blocking repeal, how the national plumbers union is pushing this mandate...

Immediately ahead of tomorrow’s EU summit, French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for the introduction of Eurobonds. Collective debt financing would be the final salvo in the march of Brussels’ central planners.As the 27 EU heads of government convene today with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the stakes are high from a fiscal perspective. A decisive item on the agenda at Belgium’s Alden Biesen Castle is the so-called Draghi Plan. The question hovering above it all is as simple as it is explosive: How can the obvious productivity and growth weakness of the Eurozone economy be overcome? For...

Guess what the main topic of debate at the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week is. It is what the Euro-elites consider the most concerning issue of the moment: “State violence in Minneapolis and the rule of law in the United States.”This is a typical example of seeing the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in your own. The European Union is criticizing the rule of law in America, while there are indications that Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission has in the past two years actively tried to interfere in eight parliamentary and presidential elections on...

EU Europe is increasingly abandoning a civilized approach to dissenting opinions. The raid on the Paris offices of Elon Musk’s company X appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Today, those who resist are being attacked on multiple levels, while those who submit are largely spared. It is time to increase pressure on Brussels. Elon Musk’s communications platform X has become caught between systemic fronts. On one side stands the American understanding of free speech, which has experienced a political revival under Donald Trump’s new presidency. On the other, an increasingly repressive EU control regime is eroding the...

Let's see how things are going in the communist utopia of New York, a month after Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor. Nearly two weeks after a massive winter storm hit the Big Apple, mountains of garbage line the still snow-covered streets (but not around Gracie Mansion, of course), and at least a dozen homeless people have frozen to death after Mamdani refused to force them into warming shelters despite the bitter cold. There were also blackouts, which is great when it's freezing outside.Oh, and the number of antisemitic incidents in the city has skyrocketed, and Mamdani...

A sweeping gun control proposal that critics say represents one of the most extreme assaults on the Second Amendment in New Mexico history is now headed to the Senate floor. Senate Bill 17, which would ban the sale of a broad range of semi-automatic firearms and impose heavy new mandates on federally licensed gun dealers, advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday night on a 6–3 party-line vote. An effort to strip out the bill’s semi-automatic firearm and standard-capacity magazine bans failed on a 4–5 vote, clearing the way for the legislation to move forward in largely intact form....

The House Judiciary Committee’s recent findings present a simple but unsettling conclusion. American speech is being curtailed in the United States, not because Congress has changed the First Amendment, but because foreign governments have learned how to route around it. Europe’s Digital Services Act, presented as a domestic regulatory framework, has in practice become a lever for global speech control. Its effects now reach deep into the American public square. To see how this happens, begin with a basic fact about the modern internet. Major platforms operate with global content moderation rules. They do so not out of ideology but...

A set of internal documents published by the Republican members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee (Judiciary GOP) has sent shockwaves through Brussels. Released under the title The EU Censorship Files, Part II, the investigation presents documentary evidence of a sustained strategy by the European Commission to influence public debate on social media and digital platforms, pressuring major tech companies to censor lawful content, alter their internal rules, and restrict certain political viewpoints. https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/2018683758006665352 The revelations go far beyond an abstract debate over content moderation. According to the material made public, the Commission has directly or indirectly intervened in at...

Say "NO!" to a Global Digital ID

JUST IN: Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler appears to suggest American citizens would be justified in shooting masked ICE agents. "What is really the major problem in this country today is the fascism in our streets." "The attacks on American citizens by masked hoodlums. If you were attacked by a masked person, you might think you were being kidnapped. You'd be justified in shooting the person to protect yourself."