Free Republic

As the Biden administration pressured Big Tech companies to censor Americans’ speech during the COVID vaccine rollout, Google’s YouTube went along with the White House’s requests before Facebook was pressured to follow suit, according to documents shared with House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and obtained by The Daily Wire. In an April 18, 2021, email, Facebook President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg expressed concern after Andy Slavitt, a senior White House advisor, told him that Facebook was “lagging behind” as YouTube “made significant advances to remove content leading to vaccine hesitancy.” “Just got off hour long call with Andy Slavitt,”...

According to the Department of Education, “misgendering” a student could violate federal civil rights law. Last month, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights announced the resolution of its investigation of California’s Taft College for creating a hostile environment under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. OCR investigated the school after a male student was “misgendered” by his professors. The student, who did not notify university administrators that he identified as female, told his professors that he was “trans-femme” and preferred to be addressed by plural pronouns. (Because I’m not employed by a university and am therefore not legally...

With government contracts and corporate backers, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool. In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use...

Man, I'm sure glad a Republican isn't leading New York, cuz the media says they'd implement an authoritarian theocracy where Big Brother spies on you for wrongthink on the internet! We're very focused on the data we're collecting from surveillance efforts - what's being said on social media platforms. And we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms. Hochul said this in the context of a wave of antisemitism in the state. New York is home to 2.2...

House Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) held a round table Monday to discuss the so-called “nationwide gun emergency.” The Nebraska Examiner reported Raskin opened the roundtable by saying, “We’re going to examine the nationwide gun emergency that’s taking place, the endless rounds of gun violence and massacres that are plaguing our society.” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D) was in attendance, and he suggested the gun industry is frightened by the evolving demographic of gun control lobby members: “The gun lobby is more afraid, now more than ever, as they see a multiracial, multigenerational army of Americans who are not...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has rolled out a new gender pronoun policy that one Heritage Foundation expert and former HHS official says violates employee rights and will result in firings for "misgendering." "HHS and the federal government is requiring its employees to speak falsehoods," Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for domestic policy and the former head of civil rights at HHS during the Trump administration, told Fox News Digital. Severino first broke the story on X, formerly Twitter, last week. He wrote that HHS "imposed a transgender pronoun mandate on its employees who will...

Donald Trump doesn't know Thomas Robertson. But the former president’s fate appears inextricably tied to that of the former Army Rangerm, who was convicted last year for his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the U.S. Capitol. That’s because the prosecutions of Trump and his supporters, including Robertson, have often depended on reimagining the law in novel ways. To advance the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia, for example, the Department of Justice seized on the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to justify probes and wiretaps of Trump allies. In the Georgia election fraud case against Trump and...

A Democrat who helped prosecute January 6 participants is running for election to Congress against an incumbent Republican in a southern California seat, on a platform promising more tech censorship. Will Rollins, former assistant U.S. attorney in California, promises that if elected, he will tackle big tech platforms and media outlets that are “profiting by spreading division based on lies” and “erode our democracy.” Rollins is running for California’s 41st congressional district, currently held by incumbent Republican Ken Calvert.

IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel faced a grilling by lawmakers on Capitol Hill this past week, where he hinted that there's a chance that the agency will—contrary to its repeated pledges—increase tax audits of Americans earning under $400,000.The question of whether the IRS will use some of the $80 billion or so funding boost to increase tax enforcement of people making less than $400,000 has been a contentious issue.IRS and Treasury Department officials have pledged not to increase audit rates for this group of Americans, while Republicans and others have argued that this pledge is either false or wishful thinking.Treasury Secretary...

Special Counsel Jack Smith has quietly withdrawn a subpoena seeking records from former President Trump’s 2020 campaign as their investigation of whether his campaign committed any crimes continues. This week, more than a year into their investigation, Smith’s office dropped the subpoena request from Trump’s campaign following the withdrawal of a similar subpoena to Save America, the PAC formed by Trump’s aides. His campaign raised nearly $250 million despite claims the election was “stolen.” More from Trending Politics: The rescinding of the subpoenas to Donald J. Trump for President Inc. and Save America indicated that Smith’s office was slowing or...

As reported earlier – Far left Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed another gag order on Donald Trump on Obama- appointed Judge Tanya Chutkan placed a gag order on President Donald Trump, the leading presidential candidate in the 2024 presidential election, earlier this month. This is complete lawlessness. Even the far-left ACLU later filed a brief arguing the that an overly-broad gag order imposed on Donald J. Trump in an ongoing election interference case violates the First Amendment. Chutkan’s initial gag order on Trump was worse than we thought. According to Chutkan’s gag order, Trump cannot criticize Special Counsel Jack Smith or...

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Yesterday, Freeper Yo-Yo posted an article here about Larry Vickers (Master Sergeant, US Army, retired), a Delta Force bad-ass who pleaded guilty to charges relating to his collection of fully-automatic weapons, most or all of which had at one time he had owned lawfully. Today, an editorial by the Second Amendment Foundation's Lee Williams calls it banana republic justice. ATF pursuit of decorated American soldier about headlines, not justiceby Lee Williams The ATF wants to imprison a decorated American soldier for a series of victimless crimes, even though the federal regulations he’s accused of violating may not be constitutional, and...

The American Civil Liberties Union sued former President Donald Trump or his administration more than 400 times during his tenure in the White House.But now the ACLU is siding with Trump in the criminal case that charges he conspired to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power — telling a judge that a gag order she’s imposed sweeps too broadly in restraining Trump’s speech.“[I]f we allow his free speech rights to be abridged, we know that other unpopular voices — even ones we agree with — will also be silenced,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “As much...

Far-left Judge Engoron put Trump on the witness stand after he blasted the former president and accused him of potentially violating the gag order with his remarks to the press. He also fined Trump $10,000. Radical Marxist New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking $250 million in ‘damages’ when there is no victim in this fraud case and she is also seeking to ban Trump and his sons from operating any businesses in New York. President Trump briefly spoke with the press during the mid-morning break. He criticized Michael Cohen as a “discredited witness” and called Arthur Engoron a...

The reason you have not heard of a gag order on par with the one imposed on former President Trump is that it is highly unusual. Normally, in a criminal proceeding, there are no gag orders. To the extent they exist, they typically only bind the lawyers, who are admonished to adhere to the rules of professional conduct. Rarely—as in almost never—are criminal defendants forced into a gag order on such spurious grounds as they might “vilify and implicitly encourage violence against public servants who are simply doing their jobs.”In fact, precedent almost uniformly emphasizes familiar First Amendment principles, which...

Donald Trump is seeking to have his Washington, D.C. election interference case quashed, calling it a "vindictive prosecution." e electors are a criminal conspiracy or a symbolic act of defiance that is rooted in American history. Much of his submission, filed early on Tuesday, hangs on whether alternative electors are a criminal conspiracy or a symbolic act of defiance that is rooted in American history.

A New York judge has fined former President Donald Trump $5,000 on Friday over a disparaging post about a court staffer on his campaign website. This development comes after a gag order was imposed on Trump, prohibiting him from making supposedly incendiary statements about individuals involved in the civil fraud trial. Along with the fine, Judge Arthur Engoron also threatened to hold Trump in contempt of court for future offenses, meaning the former president could face jail time.Former President Donald Trump was fined $5,000 on Friday after his disparaging social media post about a key court staffer in his New...

Below is my column in The Hill on the imposition of a gag order on former President Donald Trump by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan. Despite my long-standing criticism of Trump’s personal attacks on judges and critics, this gag order should be curtailed or struck down on appeal. While the odds tend to favor the lower court in such orders, there is ample reason to object to the scope and language of the order. The ill-defined bar on criticizing the prosecution or witnesses (including one of Trump’s opponents in this election) raises serious free speech concerns. It is also unlikely...

New York — The judge in former President Donald Trump's civil fraud trial lashed out at him this morning for failing to remove from his campaign website a derogatory post about the judge's clerk. The post, which was spotted Thursday by liberal PAC website MeidasTouch, was a duplicate of one posted to Trump's social media site on Oct. 3, and deleted soon after New York Judge Arthur Engoron issued a limited gag order, barring Trump from posting or speaking publicly about the judge's staff. The campaign replication of the deleted post has since also been removed, but Engoron appeared quite...