Free Republic

Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation. Today we know epilepsy is a disease. It’s accepted that a person who causes a fatal traffic accident while in the grip of a seizure should not be charged with murder. That’s good, says Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. That’s progress. But there's still a long way to go. After more...

Former U.S. President Barack Obama called in at the British Prime Minister’s official residence on Monday, but the office is keeping tight-lipped about the purpose of the one-hour meeting. Barack Obama surprised when he turned up at Rishi Sunak’s front door on Monday, going inside the historic Downing Street residence for an hour and meeting with the Prime Minister. Former President Obama walked up to the famous black door alone but later emerged alongside the U.S. Ambassador to London Jane Hartley. Former US President Barack Obama has arrived at 10 Downing Street for a private meeting. pic.twitter.com/l9hZEHyYvp — Harry Stedman...

On January 24, Stanford University held a forum on combating anti-Semitism. The event, which featured Stanford president Richard Saller and provost Jenny Martinez, was meant to reassure Jewish students that the university had their back amid the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping college campuses.... The events that transpired that night undercut that message. By the end of the evening, protesters had physically threatened Jewish students, harassed a rabbi, and told employees of the elite university that they would "find out where you live." David Schuller, 24, a yarmulke-wearing graduate student in Stanford’s physics department, found himself surrounded by a mob of...

Jesse Jackson and students protest Western Culture program on Palm Drive, photograph, 1987 By the mid-1980s, increasing dissatisfaction with the introductory humanities program known as “Western Culture” that had begun in 1980 came to the fore. The program was criticized for its lack of diversity and its predominantly Eurocentric readings. Students advocated for a curriculum that included ethnic minority and women authors. On January 15, 1987, as many as 500 students, along with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, rallied down Palm Drive chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go." The curriculum debate drew national attention, and in...

The keynote speaker of the World Economic Forum’s 2024 annual conference in Davos was Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President. She stated the top global risk for the EU is disinformation and misinformation, declaring disinformation destroys trust and limits the ability to “tackle the big global challenges.” In plain English, trust can only be restored by censoring inconvenient facts and evidence. Below is a short clip (1:39) highlighting her disinformation sermon. The top risk in the WEF’s 2024 Global Risk Report is disinformation. If not controlled, societies will be polarized, elections will be disrupted, and there will be mistrust...

Joe Biden is actively working to suppress or eliminate Americans' First Amendment rights. Government agencies have been weaponized to assist. The cadre of agencies has become known as the Censorship Industrial Complex. Today we got another look into those who would take everything from us. The Department of Homeland Security is looking to not only pry your First Amendment rights from you, but to change the outcome of elections. Now, newly released Department of Homeland Security (DHS) emails, obtained by the House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green and Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability Chairman Dan Bishop, suggest...

Is Obama the architect of the illegal government and Big Tech censoring machine? With the release of the Twitter files by Elon Musk, we learned that the FBI was working with Twitter in censoring and managing messaging on the social media site. From information being gathered in the case between Missouri and Louisiana and the US government, where The Gateway Pundit is the lead plaintiff, we have also learned that this was taking place with other government departments and other Big Tech companies How did this ever get started? It looks like Obama had much to do with this. Jason...

Academic dishonesty and crime are alike: ... When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year,” wrote the student who sits on Harvard’s honor council.. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her ... Gay’s plagiarism, the Harvard Corp. showed that its commitment to academic integrity was as phony as its other ideals. ... serious academic-integrity offenses, are too often ignored or excused—much like petty crimes in cities with left-wing governments....

Harvard University’s Provost and Interim President Dr. Alan Garber has made millions from sitting on pharmaceutical company boards during his time with the school. Garber made more than $2.7 million from board seats with pharmaceutical firms Exelixis, Inc. and Vertex Pharmaceuticals since becoming Harvard provost in 2011, the Harvard Crimson reported in 2019, citing company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Both firms confirmed to the outlet Garber received compensation without performing any additional duties beyond his board memberships. ... He joined Exelixis’ board in 2005 and received $2.3 million from the company, $1.6 of which came after...

Critics are accusing the DOJ of sweeping additional charges against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried under the rug, after prosecutors said he would not face a second trial for campaign finance violations following his conviction last month. In a letter filed on Friday night in federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors said the 'strong public interest' in a prompt resolution of the case outweighed the benefits of a second trial. In his letter to the court, US Attorney Damian Williams noted that prosecutors introduced evidence about all of the dropped charges during Bankman-Fried's monthlong first trial, where he was found guilty on...

Harvard's embattled president is facing yet further questions about her academic record, after a statistics expert challenged the data used in a report which helped win her tenure at Stanford. Claudine Gay, who took over as president in July, has been at the center of a firestorm since the October 7 Hamas attacks. She was seemingly slow to condemn students who justified the terrorist violence, and slow to speak out against antisemitism on campus. The harsh spotlight has spread to her academic record, with accusations of plagiarism - and on Tuesday, a data scientist challenged her analytical methods. It was...

These self-styled 'progressives' are in reality trying to reverse four centuries of progress, taking us back to a time when a small cadre of elites ruled the world and everyone else basically lived as a serf. ... However else we might define “wokeness”--using terms like “leftist,” “Marxist,” or “progressive,” all of which are accurate enough—it is without question anti-Enlightenment, an explicit repudiation of Western, Judeo-Christian values. That is unfortunate. We call it the “Enlightenment” for a reason. Humanity emerged (in Europe, at least) from 1500 years of moral, intellectual, and spiritual darkness, where the vast majority of people lived short,...

Author and journalist Michael Shellenberger has said that “U.S. and U.K. military contractors” have used “sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics… against the American people” in sworn testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH) on suppression of free speech by the government, Shellenberger presented the information he received from a whistleblower about the origins of the so-called “Censorship Industrial complex.” Shellenberger, one of the “Twitter Files” authors, coined the phrase “Censorship Industrial Complex” to describe the network of government and private entities...

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files....

New emails released by the House Judiciary Committee reveal the Biden Department of Homeland Security created a Stanford University “disinformation” group that censored Americans’ speech before, during, and after the 2020 election. The group, known as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), worked with DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to flag, suppress and remove online speech in coordination with big tech companies. The Gateway Pundit was a top target of EIP in the 2020 election. New information leaked from the investigation into EIP found that The Gateway Pundit was also a top target of EIP during the 2022 election....

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the collapsing cryptocurrency company FTX, along with two others associated with the company, director of engineering Nishad Singh and co-founder Gary Wang, are "under supervision" in the Bahamas after the trio reportedly were planning on fleeing to Dubai. According to Cointelegraph, "Right now three of them, Sam, Gary, and Nishad are under supervision in the Bahamas, which means it will be hard for them to leave."

he Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency outsourced its "censorship operation" to a nonprofit it funded following a First Amendment lawsuit by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, "implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional," according to an interim staff report by House Judiciary Committee Republicans shared with Just the News. CISA also wanted to use the Center for Internet Security, which operates the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) and Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), as its "mouthpiece" to obfuscate its own role in censorship, the report says. It cites spring 2022...

New emails show officials at the Department of Homeland Security created a Stanford University “disinformation” group that censored Americans’ speech before the 2020 election, according to a House Judiciary Committee report exclusively obtained by The Post.

After more than 40 years of studying humans and other primates, Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the division of cells or the beating of our hearts. (Of course, he had to.) Therefore, we mustn’t harshly judge such heretofore disdained folks as drunk drivers, serial criminals, Hamas terrorists, and those who bring 29 items to the “8 items or less” checkout lane. Sapolsky said: “The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish...

An instructor at Stanford University has been suspended as the school investigates allegations he targeted students based on their “identities and backgrounds” during two classes in which he gave impromptu lectures on the Israel-Hamas conflict. In one of the classes, the lecturer began by blaming the war on Zionists before asking “Jewish students to raise their hands,” Nourya Cohen, a Jewish student leader, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust,” Cohen said, adding that when someone replied six million, “he said, ‘Yes. Only six million.’” A rabbi who said he spoke to three...