Free Republic

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who is one of President Vladimir Putin's closest confidants and is regularly mentioned as a possible successor to Putin in 2008, made some uncharacteristic political statements in a 1 March interview with "Moskovskii komsomolets." "Only democrats, with their split personalities, could believe that we might get help from abroad," Ivanov said. "Nobody will help us except ourselves. Therefore we should be powerful and capable of guaranteeing our national security in any situation."' He also criticized Russian liberals for viewing Russia only as "a money-making enterprise." Recent Russian media reports indicate that the Kremlin has ordered...

Filed at 1:35 p.m. ET MOSCOW (AP) -- A criminal complaint from a youth group that backs President Vladimir Putin has prompted an inquiry into an iconoclastic author over a novel that depicts sexual contact between Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Police opened the investigation after prosecutors found that parts of Vladimir Sorokin's 1999 book ``Goluboye Salo'' -- which can be translated as ``Blue Lard'' or ``Gay Lard'' -- are pornographic, Svetlana Petrenko, an aide to the chief Moscow prosecutor, said Thursday. The investigation alarmed advocates of freedom of expression, who have long been concerned about the possibility of a...

Charlie Kirk talks with John Solomon about the bombshell story of government-directed censorship during Election 2020 e Charlie Kirk: While I was getting ready to speak at the great Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, Producer Andrew was emailing me and texting me about the story that came out on the terrific website, justthenews.com. And I couldn’t quite process it in time. And then I had a chance to read it and the weekend happened and I saw Sean Hannity did a segment on this with John Solomon. And essentially, it turns out new documents show that there is a censorship machine...

Journalists Nick Shirley and Jon Fetherston join 'Saturday in America' to discuss Democratic efforts to criminalize investigative journalism and allegations of fraud across the country.

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...

A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions. The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a "wish" granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California. "Tedizens" include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz. Wishes granted at TED envision ways to better the world and come with a promise that...

The Trump administration announced Wednesday it’s taking U.S. taxpayer dollars away from 66 globalist organizations, nearly half of them affiliated with the United Nations and all of which are identified as “contrary to the interests of the United States.” Most notable is the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the parent treaty underpinning all major international climate agreements, AFP reports. The treaty adopted in 1992 is a global pact by nations to cooperate to drive down planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of so-called “climate change.” A despairing European Union climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said the...

Moscow, November 5, Interfax - A ban on insulting the feelings of the faithful should be enshrined in international law, Russian President Vladimir Putin said. At his meeting with representatives from religious organizations on the National Unity Day on Wednesday, one attendee, Ismail Berdiyev, head of the North Caucasus Muslims' Coordinating Center, suggested that the president present to the UN Security Council an idea that all countries introduce a law making it unacceptable to offend religious feelings. "It is a good proposal. I don't understand, who could be against a ban on insulting the feelings of the faithful in any...

CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- When the Organization of American States asked its press freedom expert, Santiago Canton, to report on the state of the independent press in Venezuela, they must have known it was a sensitive mission. President Hugo Chavez's radical populist government does not take kindly to criticism nor does it appreciate outside scrutiny of its internal affairs. It's doubtful, though, that anyone at the OAS expected Canton to fall victim himself to the kind of tactics the Venezuelan press faces every day. Just moments after beginning the final press conference of his four-day visit to ...

UK’s Labour Censorship InitiativeAs economic and cultural suicide stalk Western Europe, it has initiated efforts to hobble America's technological advantage and diminish our freedoms. The first documented attacks on our open dialogue came from the UK and began in 2018 when Morgan McGreevy, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff (then Labour Together’s managing director), began and funded an outfit called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Recognizing that the online news purveyors could best be silenced by depriving them of funds, it first targeted UK outfits, but moved on in an attempt to starve U.S. outfits like American Thinker, Breitbart, Zero Hedge,...

As colleges across the country struggle with questions related to free speech on campuses, some schools have implemented policies that appear to give administrators significant latitude to discipline students for speaking in unpopular ways. Most recently, the dean’s office of Utah Valley University, a public institution located in the north-central part of Utah, distributed a guidance letter to all faculty encouraging them to report to the school’s Behavior Assessment Team any students who use “inappropriate language,” are “argumentative,” or who speak “loudly.”

Had the American people not rallied around President Trump as odious phony prosecutions engulfed him during his presidential campaign, he may not have been re-elected president and instead endured a terrible fate. In South America this week, we are seeing how bad it could have been. Late yesterday, Brazil's manic, freakish, version of Judge James Boasberg, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, ordered Brazil's equivalent of President Trump, former President Jair Bolsonaro arrested for questioning the 2022 Brazilian presidential electoral result, that, as with President Trump, he was mysteriously defeated in by a narrow margin after showing significant strength on the campaign...

Britain's largest misinformation monitor and "fact-checker" went into bankruptcy, according to a report in the Times of London last week. In the U.S., left-wing groups like NewsGuard and GDI have come under fierce criticism as de facto tools for censorship. Logically, founded in 2016 by Cambridge engineering graduate Lyric Jain, aimed to combat "harmful and manipulative content" following high-profile events like the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election. A pivotal misstep was its decision to work with India's Karnataka state government's fact-checking unit, a move criticized by the Editors Guild of India and others for potentially enabling state censorship...

MUNICH, Germany – Vice President J.D. Vance took a lecturing tone against a room full of European “elites” at the Munich Security Forum this afternoon, slamming leaders who fail to abide by the wishes of their electorates and condemning the censorship and persecution of conservatives, Christians, and others.Speaking at the Bayerischer Hof hotel, Vance boldly declared, “A new sheriff is in town,” referring to his boss, President Donald J. Trump, and a new American approach to the nation’s partners and allies.“We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security, and normally we mean threats to our external security,” Vance...

Just a hair over a week ago (ten days to be exact), an official arm of the German government declared the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party - now polling as Germany's most popular party in the country - a 'right-wing extremist' group. Yeah, right - so big deal, no? I mean, they've been calling them that forever. Actually, it was a big deal. It made the epithet an official label, opening the party and every last one of its members to constant, sanctioned (instead of surreptitious) government surveillance. It was also the first necessary step in the process of...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health Secretary pick, just launched a bombshell move to ban Big Pharma ads on TV, and it’s a direct strike at the heart of networks like CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC—leaving Trump supporters cheering and the left in panic. In a video, Patrick Bet-David exposes the dirty truth: “Big Pharma is keeping Cable TV in business. 75% of ad revenue on cable television comes from the Pharmaceutical Industry.” That’s $4.5 billion in 2022 alone, per MediaRadar, propping up these networks while they push drugs like Ozempic.

Vice President JD Vance has slammed CBS News' Margaret Brennan for what he called a 'crazy exchange' she had with Secretary of State Marco Rubio Sunday morning. Brennan was questioning Rubio about the vice president's remarks at the Munich Security Conference, in which he argued that free speech and democratic institutions were being eroded, when she erroneously linked the Holocaust to free speech. 'He was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups,' the news...

Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes Bankrupt COMMENTARY By Gabe KaminskyDecember 30, 2024 Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes BankruptAP The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States. Here’s how. Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years,...

SNIP It also amends the Criminal Code to create a new standalone hate crime offence that would allow penalties up to life imprisonment to deter hateful conduct, as well as raise the maximum punishments for hate propaganda offences from five years to life imprisonment for advocating genocide.SNIPHarmful content is defined in the legislation as content that incites violence, that foments hatred, that incites violent extremism or terrorism, is used to bully a child, that sexually victimizes a child, that induces a child to harm themselves, or intimate content communicated without consent.The bill also creates a new Digital Safety Commission, which...

Elon Musk has been branded “deeply irresponsible” for stoking tensions in the UK on his social media site X/ Twitter. The multi–billionaire, who bought the tech firm in 2022, clashed with Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a war of words over riots across our country. Mr Musk published a stream of posts on the crisis, sharing videos from right-wing influencers and memes about the UK to his 193 million followers. He branded the PM “two-tier Keir” in reference to accusations of “two-tier policing” in Britain, which the PM has rejected. Last night MPs said Mr Musk could be summoned to...