Free Republic

George Orwell’s “1984” is perhaps one of the most-referenced books of the modern age. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is considered a masterclass in social prescience. Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson’s “Lord of the World” has been hailed as prophetic by the late Pope Benedict XVI. Even C.S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” is fast becoming a staple in the discourse of Christian conservatives. What do all these works have in common? Yes, they were all penned by British authors within the first two-thirds of the 20th century. But as far as their content, these works share three key characteristics: each centers...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted Thursday to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules. The agency voted 3-2 along partisan lines to revive rules barring broadband providers from blocking or throttling internet traffic to some websites and speeding up access to others that pay extra fees. The move brings broadband under the purview of the FCC by classifying it as telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act. “Four years ago, the pandemic changed life as we know it,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said at Thursday’s commission meeting. “We were told to stay home, hunker down and live online. So...

President Joe Biden suggested war is peace on Wednesday after he signed legislation to provide Ukraine the funds to conduct a war against Russia. “It’s a good day for world peace,” Biden claimed about the war funds in the State Dining Room of the White House, echoing George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” “It’s going to make America safer, it’s going to make the world safer, and it continues America’s leadership in the world, and everyone knows it,” Biden said of the funds. The Senate passed the foreign aid package on Wednesday. Just minutes after the vote, Biden signed the legislation...

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” So begins 1984, author George Orwell’s frightening novel about citizens under the thrall of a dictatorship. “Big Brother is watching you” is a threat and a warning to the populace that is surveilled by the all-seeing eye of the “telescreen” that tracks their every move while also pacifying them with cheap entertainment and state propaganda. “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” are watchwords of the shadowy, thuggish regime in Orwell’s cautionary tale of tyranny rampant in a future world where courage is quashed...

VIDEOKatherine Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio, revealed her inner O'Brien when discussing how there is no single objective truth. Her 1984 type blather comes directly from the Neiman Lab at Harvard whose guiding philosophy is something called "Solidarity Journalism" which has become the prevailing philosophy of liberal "journalists." Here are direct quotes about Solidarity Journalism taken directly from the Nieman Lab webisite (link at bottom):"Solidarity eclipses objectivity as journalism’s dominant ideal."“Objectivity as an aspirational ideal ends up encouraging journalists to avoid addressing what matters.”"Aiming for objectivity as a way to resolve uncertainty, though, leads journalism far astray from...

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are ‘working to prepare US voters for a possible deepfake onslaught’ Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have launched a campaign in the fight against election misinformation - in their latest move in the world of politics. The Duchess of Sussex has long faced speculation that she could be entering the political sphere, with the couple hiring Obama’s PR guru to work on their team and speaking out about the US election back in 2020. During the last cycle four years ago, feminist activist Gloria Steinem previously told Access Hollywood that Meghan had joined her...

A government-funded database, led by the University of Maryland and ostensibly established to track “radicalization,” is targeting a major pro-life group as “terrorists.” Students for Life of America (SFLA), which has 1,400 chapters at campuses across the country, “appears under a ‘Terrorist Group’ label in the raw dataset,” according to a Monday article in The College Fix. The database, called the “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States” (PIRUS), was funded in part by grants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for the Study of Terrorism and Behavior (CSTAB). According to the project’s...

On Saturday, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it would be creating a new center for the purpose of training state and local government officials on how to implement and enforce “red flag” laws that allow the government to infringe on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. According to the Daily Caller, the new center, the National Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) Resource Center, will operate under the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP). Its mission will be to educate local officials on how such laws work, and how to act upon them when they find an individual they...

So, you're interested in learning all the terms and phrases someone might use to express their gender identity. Or maybe, you're exploring your own gender, and looking for the right word or words. Either way, there are a lot of terms out there, and you might have a few questions—especially if you're realizing that you don't (always) identify with the gender assigned to you at birth...... What is gender identity? In short: “Gender identity is how you feel about yourself and the ways you express your gender,” says Jackie Golob, MS, LPCC, an AASECT-certified sex therapist in Minnesota. It’s important...

Google was the chief promulgator of the Donald Trump "bloodbath" hoax over the weekend, flooding its search results with articles that deceptively framed the former president's comment. Trump predicted that re-electing Joe Biden would stir an economic "bloodbath," while specifically referencing the automotive industry at a rally last weekend. Yet nearly every headline Google generated on the topic led users to an article skimping over the context, suggesting Trump warned of his plans to provoke a civil war. Google understands it can no longer lead users to such deceptive headlines. Most Americans know what Trump said by now. Therefore, Google...

After President Joe Biden's electoral romp on Super Tuesday and his subsequent State of the Union address, his campaign quickly eased into its general election posture, with the commander in chief visiting key battleground states, including Georgia and Michigan. But it was an ad entitled "For You" released earlier this month that took on one of the 81-year-old Biden's biggest challenges ahead of the election: addressing voter concerns over his age. As he spoke in front of a camera, Biden had a distinctly sunny disposition. He quickly gets to the heart of the matter.

Residents of the Evergreen State will soon be able to report their neighbors for expressing “bias.” The governor of Washington is poised to sign a bill that ends free speech in certain counties – and the rest of the state probably sometime thereafter. Recently passed by the Washington state legislature, this measure creates a “bias incident hotline” to the State Attorney General’s Office. You read that right: American citizens in the northwestern state will soon be able to turn in their friends, neighbors, family members, or even strangers for not only physical “hate crimes” but also expressions of “bias.” Substitute...

German law enforcement authorities on Thursday carried out raids across Germany against people suspected of posting misogynistic hate speech on the internet as part of of a coordinated push to shine the spotlight on online violence against women. Police raided homes and interrogated 45 suspects in 11 states early Thursday. None of the suspects were detained, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office said in a statement. Another 37 suspects were already searched and interrogated in previous weeks and months.The raids were part of a “combating misogyny on the internet” day of action, which comes one day before International’s Women’s Day. “We...

“Centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value,” Winston Smith discovers in George Orwell’s 1984. “One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Streets, inscriptions memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light on the past had been systematically altered.” In other words, “history has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” For all but the willfully blind, the parallels are apparent on every hand. For the Biden Junta, America is nothing more than a bastion of racist...

MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade argued Monday that the United States’ “deep commitment to free speech” makes Americans uniquely susceptible to disinformation campaigns. McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, went on “The Rachel Maddow Show” to promote her new book, “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.” She said her “goal” with the book was to spark a “national conversation about truth and our commitment to it.” She added, “I hope that by dissecting it, explaining it, and educating the public, we can all see disinformation for what it is so that we can begin to push back...

Everyone knows that Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States, but if Meta, the sinister and malevolent megacorporation formerly known as Facebook, gets its way, that fact will soon go down to the memory hole. The inconvenient little speed bump of 2017 to 2021, delaying our arrival at the socialist internationalist paradise our moral superiors envision for us, will be entirely forgotten as if it had never existed at all. We see this in a small but glaring fact: Meta’s AI lists Old Joe Biden as the 45th president, omitting mention of Donald Trump as president altogether....

In a move aimed at curbing the spread of what it terms “online hate,” the Liberal government of Canada has revealed its plan, including hefty fines for online speech and stringent punishment including up to life imprisonment for hate crimes. The centrepiece of this initiative is the proposed Online Harms Act, details of which were unveiled during a technical briefing released to reporters on Monday. Among the categories of harmful content identified in the act are materials that incite violent extremism or terrorism, promote violence, or foment hatred. The bill will include amendments to the Criminal Code aimed at addressing...

Proposed Florida defamation legislation would make it easier for leftwing lawyers to sue conservative media into oblivion. It could also prevent vital anonymous sources from coming forward with information. If passed, HB 757, reports the Tallahassee Democrat, will “creat[e] a presumption that anyone publishing a false statement that relied on an anonymous source, acted with ‘actual malice,’ a key legal hurdle for public figures to win defamation lawsuits.” At the time of publication, the House bill’s sponsor, Pensacola Republican Rep. Alex Andrade, had not returned The Federalist’s request for comment. Actual malice is a legal hurdle public figures must over...

Climate change alarmists are urging Big Tech to censor accounts of those who question the real danger that global warming poses to humanity. Social media companies such as X, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok “should flag accounts that spread falsehoods about climate change and collaborate on targeted educational campaigns,” states a study published last week in Scientific Reports. Without ever defining the term, the article states that climate change “denialism” persists in the United States, with estimates ranging from 12 to 26 percent of the U.S. population. The researchers separated the population into the binary categories of “believers” and “deniers,” with...

Biometrics are transforming the way we travel. The technology, which identifies travelers using unique physical traits like fingerprints and faces, is becoming more common at airports in the United States. As a result, time-consuming rituals that once required repeated ID checks — such as bag dropping, security screening and boarding — are getting easier and faster. Some experts believe that this will be the year that biometric use, primarily facial recognition, becomes standard at many airports. The technology offers several advantages: enhanced security, quicker processing of passengers and a more convenient airport experience. It also raises concerns about privacy, ethics...