Free Republic

NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself as a source of expert knowledge on which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot, will be rolling out to millions of American schoolchildren due to a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Per Axios, the AFT will purchase NewsGuard licenses for all of its 1.7 million teachers, in a major deal for the news-rating project. NewsGuard has had a reputation as a project of the political establishment since its inception. NewsGuard maintains a list of news outlets it considers “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy,” data which it uses in...

For many rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, self-incriminating messages, photos and videos that they broadcast on social media before, during and after the insurrection are influencing even their criminal sentences. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson’s posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. “Overall I had fun lol,” Peterson posted on Facebook. The judge told Peterson that his posts made it “extraordinarily difficult” for her to show him leniency. “The ’lol’ particularly stuck in my craw because, as I hope you’ve...

The professional networking platform LinkedIn has deleted the personal account of Dr. Robert Malone, who helped create some of the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 vaccine, after he raised questions over the possible risks involved in administering it to individuals younger than 18. “My business pays for LinkedIn premium. I have been deleted,” Malone announced in a recent tweet. “Purchased a service from linked in to promote my company. This is very different from the YouTube or Twitter terms. The scientist added that the action taken is “arbitrary and capricious” and has “damaged our business, and we deserve to...

They're the most elite, lethally trained members of the U.S. military, widely considered the best of the best. And yet in secret Facebook groups exclusively for special operations forces that were accessed by NBC News, they share misinformation about a "stolen" 2020 election, disparaging and racist comments about America's political leadership and even QAnon conspiracy theories. Among the hundreds of Facebook posts NBC News reviewed from forums for current and former Rangers, Green Berets and other elite warriors: a member of a special forces group lamenting that several aides to former Vice President Mike Pence were part of a "Concerted...

Today, we in the U.S. and the UK, are in the midst of self-proclaimed moralists who seek to erase the memories of those with whom they disagree, and to impose their view of the past and the present. In a letter of December 21, 1817 John Keats wrote of “negative capability,” that is when a person is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In his terse remark, relevant to literature, Keats is implicitly rejecting the search for a single truth or solution. The remark is pertinent for challenging present day cancel...

A new buzzword on social media, cable news, and among leftist activists is “deprogramming.” Along with terms like “reprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” and “deplatforming,” deprogramming refers to cleansing the incorrect mentalities of former Trump Administration officials—and even those who voted for Trump. Note that deprogramming does not refer to elites who peddled the “Russian collusion” hoax for years, despite the abject absence of evidence. Not long ago, two Washington Post columnists offered some solutions to the Trumpist threat. One, Max Boot, wished to ban Fox News and other conservative stations from cable subscriptions. The other, Eugene Robinson, suggested that there was a...

Individualism is Fascism!

"Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty." —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago COVID and the resulting restrictions on our essential freedoms have been crippling — to the economy, to education, to the psychological well-being of millions of Americans. The communist tactic so clearly depicted in books like Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and Orwell's 1984 is in play: the indoctrination of the masses by fear in order to effect the wholesale subjugation of the people. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all ruled by fear. The merest expression of disagreement with those regimes would...

World-famous podcast host Joe Rogan moved his massively popular and free talk show exclusively to the Spotify platform, and some of its staff members have been triggered ever since. “In a Spotify all-hands company meeting on Wednesday, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek defended keeping transphobic content from hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan on the audio platform,” Vice Motherboard summarized September 16. "In the case of Joe Rogan, a total of 10 meetings have been held with various groups and individuals to hear their respective concerns," Ek said, according to three sources quoted by Vice Motherboard. "And some of them want Rogan...

To @realdonaldtrump Through my ongoing conversations with friends, teammates, and leaders in the black community, I realize this is not an issue about the American flag. It has never been. We can no longer use the flag to turn people away or distract them from the real issues that face our black communities. We did this back in 2017, and regretfully I brought it back with my comments this week. We must stop talking about the flag and shift our attention to the real issues of systemic racial injustice, economic oppression, police brutality, and judicial & prison reform. We are...

Are you about to post a tweet containing “harmful” language? Don’t worry — Twitter is experimenting with a feature that will warn you ahead of time, so you don’t accidentally infect any users with your wrongthink. “When things get heated, you may say things you don’t mean,” wrote Twitter’s official support account in a tweet yesterday. To let you rethink a reply, we’re running a limited experiment on iOS with a prompt that gives you the option to revise your reply before it’s published if it uses language that could be harmful.” It’s a bit like “precrime” in the 2002...

Twitter has locked the accounts of two users with more than 60,000 collective followers after The Guardian reported they could be bots designed to push misinformation about climate change. The Guardian's story, penned by Oliver Milman, centers on an unpublished draft study, which hasn't been peer-reviewed, but claims that a quarter of all tweets about climate come from bots. It then cited a tool called Botometer, to identify Twitter users @sh_irredeemable and @petefrt as likely bots.

The media and the left will literally do anything to run protection for NFL anthem kneelers. That, unfortunately, includes some sick people literally threatening people for merely choosing to mock the kneelers. According to the Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegram, a jeweler in nearby Sturbridge is receiving threats over a billboard that gently chides the kneelers with a joke ...

Liberal Democrats who consider themselves the champions of tolerance constantly show that their actions are quite different from their talking points. Take the case of Israel Broussard, an actor in Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before movie. After being “outed” for “problematic” tweets and likes -- including liking tweets from Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, President Donald Trump and Florida Senator Marco Rubio – the conservative celebrity has officially apologized for his "inappropriate and insensitive words and likes on social media." In an article written by James R. Barrett for the Daily Wire website, the actor who played...

British police forces arrested at least nine people a day for “offensive” online comments last year. Figures obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that 3,395 people across 29 forces were arrested last under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”, in 2016. The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, as thirteen police forces refused to provide the requested information and two did not provide usable data. Around half of the investigations were abandoned before being brought to prosecution, which...