Free Republic

If you believe it is in your best interest to allow government to take power over certain things, it won't be long before government takes power over certain things that are not in your best interest The politicians are always working on tweaking freedom of speech because political correctness has turned out not to be oppressive enough. They use back doors and side entrances to attack freedom of speech, because if they came in the front door, you would know what they were up to, and you would use your freedom of speech to stop them. The political leaders tell...

Chinese authorities have tightened already rigorous Internet controls by cracking down on online pornography and what state media called “rumormongers” and “slanderous content.” […] Xinhua said the government would also increase punishments for spreading rumors online, although it didn’t specify how it would do that. Already, Chinese courts can sentence people for up to three years in prison for writing online comments deemed defamatory. As part of the new campaign, the government has shut down websites and punished nearly 40 people it called rumormongers. …

First Costco removed Dinesh D’Souza’s book “America” from all of their stores, and now Google is piling on. Liberal hacks are doing whatever they can to make sure people don’t see this movie and hear it’s message. Liberals are all about trying to squash free speech. Makes me sick. From the Hollywood Reporter: Lawyers representing Dinesh D’Souza’s newest film, America, have fired off a letter to Google demanding that the search engine correct problems that they say are hampering the ability of consumers to figure out where the movie is playing. The letter claims that Google has been confusing America...

LONDON - America owes much of its freedom to its British heritage. But today, Britain is losing its freedom. Many Americans were stunned when British authorities arrested Liberty Great Britain party leader Paul Weston in April for publicly reciting Winston Churchill's criticism of Islam. The calendar might say it's 2014, but in Britain it's starting to feel like George Orwell's "1984" because "Big Brother" has decided that certain things can no longer be said. Arrested over Churchill Weston quoted from Winston Churchill's book, The River War, in which he wrote: "How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its...

The First Amendment, I think I’ll keep it. Not so for 44 sitting U.S. Senators — all Democrats. They’re proposing Senate Joint Resolution 19, which would amend the U.S. Constitution by scratching out a sorta important part of the Bill of Rights. Senate Joint Resolution 19 would repeal the First Amendment. Well, not all of it, actually: just our right to speak out politically, to engage in political action and campaign for or against those in power. The new amendment would remove all protections against Congress regulating our speech, at least insofar as we have to spend even a plug...

Liberals are always preaching the values of diversity and inclusion. Regrettably, such platitudes are just rhetoric, because upon closer examination liberals hate diversity. As evidence, just examine some recent and disturbing activities on the campus of Rutgers University. After former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was invited to give the commencement address, liberals went crazy. In February, the faculty council passed a resolution demanding that the university withdraw their invitation to Rice. Thereafter, student protesters stormed the office of the Rutgers President to express their disapproval of the selection and condemn Rice as a war...

Amid a growing crackdown on Chinese dissidents, the US First Lady tells an audience in Beijing that the "questioning and criticism" of political leaders is crucialFreedom of information, expression and belief should be considered "universal rights", Michelle Obama, the US first lady, told students in China on Saturday. Speaking at Peking University on the second full day of a weeklong, bridge-building family tour of the country, Mrs Obama said: "It is so important for information and ideas to flow freely over the internet and through the media." "When it comes to expressing yourself freely, and worshipping as you choose, and...

First Amendment enthusiasts are thrilled that Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, won his lawsuit against administrators who denied him a promotion because of his conservative, Christian views. Adams joined the university in 1993. He was an atheist at the time. By the year 2000, he had converted to Christianity and become an outspoken political conservative. He eventually wrote columns for Townhall.com. In 2006, he was denied a promotion. Administrators were retaliating against him for his conservative views, he claimed. The jury agreed. Adams’s lawyers said the victory is an important one for free speech...

A jury in North Carolina on Thursday found that the University of North Carolina-Wilmington retaliated against criminology professor Dr. Mike Adams for his political and social views. Adams, a Townhall columnist, explained last year that despite his track record of success at the university in terms of teaching, research and service, he was denied a promotion to full professor because of the views he advanced in his opinion columns. He described the promotion process as being “replete with procedural irregularities and with direct criticism of [his] columns and [his] beliefs.” The ACLJ, who represented Adams along with Alliance Defending Freedom...

Today, as most of you sit in your offices pretending to work while reading my column (thanks, by the way) I'll be taking the stand in federal court in a First Amendment lawsuit against my employer, UNC-Wilmington. The trial will be over in three days, thus ending a seven-year legal battle with important implications for academic freedom. Some have asked how the outcome of the trial will affect my work in the campus free speech movement. I'm writing this column in response to those inquiries. There are three possible outcomes to the trial this week in Greenville, NC. We could...

After much criticism from conservative quarters, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided, at least for now, to withdraw plans for its proposed study of how media organizations gather and report news. The expressed goal of the survey was to determine if the "critical information needs" of the public are being met. In making the announcement on Friday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler indicated the survey would be "revised" and that the government agency had "no intention" of regulating political speech of journalists or other broadcasters. You couldn't prove that from reading the initial study. The obvious question is: Who gets...

Any freedom-loving person would be outraged at the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to inject itself into monitoring the practices of print and broadcast media organizations, but the outrage came almost exclusively from conservatives, which is highly instructive. But liberals and conservatives are on such different planets that they don't even agree that this development -- that only conservatives objected -- is instructive, which is also instructive. The Washington Post was hoist with its own petard in reacting with a subtly pointed headline, "Proposed FCC study of news organizations sparks conservative outcry," and exposing its own biases rather than...

Republican legislators, stop this Fed takeover of the newsrooms in it's tracks! They already control around 95% of Big Media. We are hedging toward 100% Pravda reporting! STOP BEING WIMPS!!

The FCC is launching a new study, taking upon itself the task of deciding what news the public “needs” to hear, versus the news the public wants to hear. The agency will conduct a “General Population Survey” that will “measure community members’ actual and perceived critical information needs.” Got that? What you think (perceive) you need to know is different from what the government says you need to know. Next, the FCC will send monitors to newsrooms across the country who will ask questions regarding the “philosophy” of the newsroom, inquire about possible conflicts between reporters and their bosses, and...

Last week, a little noticed clash took place on Capitol Hill involving the fundamental values underlying the First Amendment. The issue was the lawfulness of publishing the secrets that were given to reporters by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. The disputants were Cong. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and FBI Director James Comey. Rogers is the chief congressional apologist for the massive NSA spying apparatus. He is the current chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and in that capacity, he is one of the dozen members of Congress from both houses who were privy to much...

Dinesh D'Souza is accused of giving too much money to a candidate who sought to replace former New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. Producer Gerald Molen tells The Hollywood Reporter the charges are politically motivated. Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, whose documentary 2016: Obama's America took a critical look at President Barack Obama and was a surprise hit in 2012, will be arrested in New York on Friday for allegedly violating campaign-finance laws, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Federal authorities accuse D'Souza of donating more than is legal to the campaign of Wendy Long, who ran in 2012 for the U.S. Senate...

So holds today’s Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox (9th Cir. Jan. 17, 2014) (in which I represented the defendant). To be precise, the Ninth Circuit concludes that all who speak to the public, whether or not they are members of the institutional press, are equally protected by the First Amendment. To quote the court, The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others’ writings, or tried to get both sides of a story. As the Supreme Court...

At the heart of the Duck Dynasty controversy is a modern paradox: those who most loudly celebrate the gay lifestyle seem to go into a Victorian swoon whenever anyone even obliquely mentions actual gay sex practices such as anal sex. As we watch the corporate clusterduck swirl around the alleged wrongs of reality TV star Phil Robertson concerning homosexuality, it may be instructive to take a step back. Image control has been crucial to gay activists. In 1980 Hollywood produced, Cruising, a big budget film that showed the seamier side of gay life. It got pretty good reviews because it...

It's not lost on me that I find myself just a stone's throw from Boston Harbor where the greatest of wars -- the fight for freedom and individual rights -- broke out here in 1774. Nowhere, at no time, has there been a more righteous of cause in the history of humankind. Then, as today, an out-of-control government took outrageous and egregious actions against our most basic individual rights -- and in this case, the most precious of all freedoms, the freedom of speech. Today Robert Spencer and I went to court in Boston. David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise represented...

Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Breitbart columnist, Ken Klukowski. “The power to tax involves the power to destroy,” the Supreme Court wrote in 1819, shortly after America began. Now in 2013, President Barack Obama is launching a frightening attack on free speech, using one of the most feared agencies in all the federal government: the Internal Revenue Service. One of the most roundly-condemned aspects of Richard Nixon’s malfeasance in office was his use of the IRS to target his political enemies with audits. If people shudder at Nixon’s abuses with the IRS, what Obama is doing should drive...