Free Republic

Ukraine’s American-backed fight against Russia is being waged not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield — to win hearts and minds.A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just worked to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets, disseminated disinformation of its own, and sought to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens.Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer...

Jack Poso 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec BREAKING: Trump found in contempt of court for 9 gag order violations

Judge Juan Merchan fined former President Donald Trump $9,000 Tuesday and held him in contempt for violating his gag order, warning he may impose jail time for future violations. Merchan ordered Trump to remove the offending posts by 2:15 pm Tuesday and to pay the fine by May 3. He rejected Trump’s defense that he was simply engaging in political speech by responding to attacks by witnesses like Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, writing that the Court is “keenly aware of, and protective of, Defendant’s First Amendment rights, particularly given his candidacy for the office of President of the United...

ive West Virginia middle school students who protested a trans athlete's participation in a shot put competition have been banned from future competitions. Becky Pepper-Jackson, 13, competed in the Harris County Middle School Track and Field Championship on April 18, two days after a federal appeals court ruled West Virginia’s transgender sports ban violates the teen's right under Title IX. Five girls from Lincoln Middle School stepped up to the circle for their turn, then refused to throw the ball. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has filed a lawsuit against the Harrison County Board of Education on the student's...

Canada has fallen. It’s become the North Korea of the West, and it’s getting worse every single day. This new bill they’ve introduced is the cherry on their tyrannical sundae. It’s called the Online Harms Bill C-63, and it would make even Stalin blush. As a matter of fact, tyrannical dictator Kim Jong-Un would look at this bill and feel an instant rush of communist inadequacy. With this new bill, Justin Trudeau is fueling those online rumors that his real father is actually communist dirtbag Fidel Castro. This new bill is supposedly aimed at safeguarding the masses from online “hate...

Tennessee and Kentucky can continue to ban gender-affirming care for young transgender people while legal challenges against those state laws proceed, federal appeals judges ruled. In a 2-1 decision by a 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel late Thursday, the majority wrote that elected lawmakers made “precise cost-benefit decisions” in instituting the bans and “did not trigger any reason for judges to second-guess them.” The laws were passed by Republican majorities in both states. “Prohibiting citizens and legislatures from offering their perspectives on high-stakes medical policies, in which compassion for the child points in both directions, is not something...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday his state “will not comply” with recently unveiled changes to Title IX by the Biden administration. “Florida rejects [President Biden’s] attempt to rewrite Title IX,” DeSantis said in a video posted to the social platform X. “We will not comply, and we will fight back.” “We are not gonna let Joe Biden try to inject men into women’s activities,” DeSantis continued. “We are not gonna let Joe Biden undermine the rights of parents, and we are not gonna let Joe Biden abuse his constitutional authority to try to impose these policies on us...

Communist societies have a long history of imprisoning political dissidents in psychiatric wards. One of the more insidious features of Marxism’s manipulation of language is its stigmatization of opposing points of view as some form of mental disorder. Opposition to “gay marriage” is said to be a “sign” of homophobia. Distrusting Islamic terrorists who celebrate 9/11 and shout, “Death to America,” is a “symptom” of Islamophobia. Wanting the federal government to secure our borders and enforce existing immigration law “reveals” underlying xenophobia. Not wanting biological men to force their way into ladies’ locker-rooms and showers suggests that a person “suffers”...

The Color Revolution is restless. Beginning in the former Soviet republics in the early 2000s, it moved along the coast of North Africa with the so-called Arab Spring in the 2010s, and, into the current decade, has spread further. The ostensible purpose of Color Revolutions—named after the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, and Tulip Revolution in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively—is to replace authoritarian regimes with Western liberal democracies. American and European intelligence services are often heavily involved in these revolutions, with ambitions not only to spread modern ideologies but also to undermine geopolitical opponents. The West’s favored methods of supporting...

The following letter by Bill Donohue is in response to the Inspector General’s report on the FBI probe of Catholics: April 24, 2024 Hon. Jim Jordan Chairman House Committee on the Judiciary 2056 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-3504 Dear Chairman Jordan: After issuing a news release on April 19, the day after news stories broke on the FBI’s internal probe of Analysts involved in the investigation of Catholics, I had a chance to read Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on this issue. While he satisfied some of our concerns, serious issues remain. Horowitz begins by noting that the...

Despite being slapped down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for ordering a Jan. 6 probationer’s computer use be monitored for so-called “disinformation,” a senior federal judge in Washington D.C. appears ready to reimpose the restriction on Daniel Goodwyn of Corinth, Texas. Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ordered Mr. Goodwyn to “show cause” for why the computer monitoring provision should not be reimposed. Judge Walton set a June 4 hearing date on the issue in Washington.

NEW: Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger says that Wikipedia has been ideologically corrupted, raises the possibility that Katherine Maher collaborated with U.S. intelligence, and says that, if NPR were committed to truth, it would fire her "right away."https://city-journal.org/article/wikipedia-co-founder-shocked-by-npr-chief-katherine-maherApr 18, 2024 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ransomnote: Christopher Rufo's related posts about Katherine Maher:@realchrisrufo | Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" 4/18/2024, 6:34:17 PM · by ransomnote · 38 repliesX ^ | 4/18/2024 | Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo, Katherine MaherNPR's Katherine Maher: "the number one challenge" in...

ransomnote: I confess I kept the unattractive image of her below even though I could have retaken the screenshot to get a 'fair and balanced' image of her, but she's against all that because it supports the 'White Male' canon...so her pic is below as is. Video is less than 2 minutes in length.https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780929268949614848Apr 18, 2024 TRANSCRIPT BEGINS~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Katherine Maher: I started by talking about the idea of free and open information as some of our founding principles 'Free and open source' coming from the idea of the open source community .Well, I have come to the opinion and the...

Our mainstream press has abandoned its sentinel post, leaving America vulnerable as we move toward the most important election in generations. No one was particularly surprised when Vladmir Putin recently won reelection by a landslide. The near universal reaction could be characterized by a roll of the eyes and a sighed “what do you expect, it’s Russia.” We’ve seen this before, after all -- it is his fifth term -- but there is something new in its significance for us. What’s changed is the newly fragile condition of our own democracy, making the Moscow “election” emphatically relevant to America. Many...

"Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.” This was part of an email sent to UnHerd at the start of January from an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index. It was their justification, handed down after a series of requests, for placing UnHerd on a so-called “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers. They provided examples of the offending content: Kathleen...

On XApr 17, 2024 TRANSCRIPT:Katherine Maher: The number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States... is a fairly robust protection of rights, and that is a protection of rights, both for platforms, which I actually think is very important. The platforms have those rights to regulate what kind of content they want on their sites, but it also means it is a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of 'where does bad information come from?' and some of the influence peddlers who have made a real...

On the Ascendant Class RebellionI keep encountering this misconception from people who don't follow Canadian politics...That somehow the Trucker convoy was defeated.The Freedom Convoy was the most wildly immediately successful protest in Canadian history, maybe WORLD history.People remember Trudeau's crackdown, old ladies having their skulls cracked with batons, Disabled indigenous grandmothers trampled by police horses, Bank accounts frozen and public employees investigated for mere donations... And there's a big reason people remember this... It was dramatic, and the media and the regime certainly wanted you to think resistance was futile...What people don't remember is what happened in the immediate aftermath:...

Scotland’s new “hate crime” law already is demonstrating how it will be used to squash dissent and free speech. The so-called Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which went into force in Scotland on April Fools’ Day, adds age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity to a list of protected classes. The law provides for various potential punishments, including jail time. The new law has been fiercely criticized by author J.K. Rowling, creator of the “Harry Potter” series, and many others who rightly see it as an attack on the freedom of speech. Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf said...

In 2020, Dr. Scott Atlas was an advisor to the president and a member of the White House COVID-19 Task Force. He was shocked to see how powerful figures in Washington, including Dr. Fauci, were incentivized to politicize and monetize the response to the pandemic. In this candid conversation with PragerU CEO Marissa Streit, Dr. Atlas reveals that many Americans may have died because of censorship, dishonesty, and the demonization of medical dissent. Will Americans allow this to happen again?

It is important to understand that censorship does not occur in a vacuum. It is a symptom of a worsening disease. It is an early indicator of the political repression to come. Like a canary in a coal mine, the criminalization of speech forewarns that State-sponsored terror and murder are not far away. First, certain words and thoughts are banned. Next, certain people are rounded up and imprisoned. Finally, certain “enemies of the State” are executed quite publicly. The imposition of fear supersedes the rule of law. Terrorism undergirds social order. Oppression replaces popular support. What is happening in the...