Free Republic

If Vicki Momberg had only unleashed a high-volume tirade at the South African police officers, video of it would have been of mere passing interest. But her repeated use of a racial slur — unfamiliar to most Americans, but explosive in South Africa — made her notorious, and led to demands to make her an example. On Wednesday, Ms. Momberg, a white woman, became the first person in South Africa to be sent to prison for using racist language against someone, according to prosecutors and legal experts. Specifically, she hurled the term “kaffir,” considered the most offensive racial slur in...

In an interview with Wired magazine, Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s political agenda — he wants to curb free speech and free expression on the platform in exchange for “safety.” From the Wired interview: I think at the heart of a lot of these issues we face are tradeoffs between real values that people care about. You know, when you think about issues like fake news or hate speech, right, it’s a tradeoff between free speech and free expression and safety and having an informed community. These are all the challenging situations that I think we are working to try to...

For the first time, a Belgian criminal court has convicted a man of “sexism in the public space,” for verbally abusing a female police officer who tried to question him after he was seen jaywalking. The man, whose name was not disclosed, was convicted of sexism, slander and threatening a police officer, and fined 3,000 euros, or $3,725. He did not appear in court, and he can appeal the conviction, but failure to pay the fine could land him in prison, officials said.

President Trump delivered remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC.

Senator Elizabeth Warren made a surprise appearance at the National Congress of American Indians Wednesday morning, forcefully responding to President Trump’s derisively calling her "Pocahontas" and addressing her claims of Native American heritage more directly - and far more expansively - than she ever has before. [Snip] She did not apologize for her claims that her mother’s family had Cherokee blood — instead, reaffirming: "My mother's family was part Native American. And my daddy's parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped." "The story they lived...

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters described an eight-hour speech given by her colleague House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as "the most profound one minute," Wednesday. Waters, of California, praised Pelosi for refusing to yield her minute on the House floor and for speaking eight hours on the importance of voting on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

Amy Wax Amy L. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she has received the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. She has a B.S. from Yale College, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She is a former assistant to the United States Solicitor Genera. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on December 12, 2017, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. There...

LIVE Stream: President Trump URGENT Speech at 2018 House and Senate Republican Member Conference VIDEO

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This would not be the expected bipartisan speech about infrastructure. Trump instead treated the United States Capitol like a campaign rally at a hockey rink in Wheeling.... His speech called firefighters and coast guard rescuers and Corey the welder “heroic” and “beautiful” and “a great welder.” He scolded the politicians in the room: “These are the people we were elected to serve.” In a city where every square patch of grass is named to honor a politician, he gives politicians demeaning names and honors ordinary citizens. That, right there, is the chewy Tootsie Pop center of Trumpism.

Vice President Mike Pence’s address to the Knesset Monday afternoon, the first by a senior American official in a decade, was praised by a number of Israeli officials from across the political spectrum, who noted the Vice President’s pledge to bar Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and a time-table for the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, however, expressed a more personal reaction to the speech, saying that he had been so touched by it as to have been moved to tears.

Wilson joins Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.; and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., in boycotting the event..."Rather than listening to another destructive, divisive speech by Trump, I will not attend this year’s annual address to Congress," Blumenauer said in a statement. "Instead, like I did during his inauguration, I'll be working at home listening to Oregonians about what they think about the State of the Union."

It is an honor to be here tonight as the recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award. As surely almost everyone here well knows, DeMille’s last—and his most successful—film was The Ten Commandments. This 1956 epic is a motion picture classic and one of the most popular films of all time. In the “opening card,” the words of DeMille himself read, “Our modern world defined God as a 'religious complex' and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter, came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood drenched, bitter world – no...

Loose dentures? More like loose screws. Donald Trump was slurring his words pretty good last week for a guy who fancied himself an expert when it came to Hillary Clinton's alleged brain damage. What would he make of his own slurred speech and bizarre behavior? Brain damage from inhaling too much hairspray? A brain tumor from the weight of that massive combover sitting on top of his head like a live farm animal? Simply slurred speech because his thoughts are so fantastic that his mouth can't keep up? Maybe it's a pesky case of dysphasia, the condition Trump's used-to-be-spokesperson Katrina...

Popular tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others—have strongly protected free speech online, a policy widely associated with the legal norms of the United States. American tech companies, however, operate globally, and their platforms are subject to regulation by the European Union, whose member states offer less protection to expression than does the United States. European regulators are pressuring tech companies to control and suppress extreme speech. The regulators’ clear warning is that, if the companies do not comply “voluntarily,” they will face harsher laws and potential liability. This regulatory effort runs the risk of censorship creep, whereby a wide array...

So, after eight-plus years of silence by a former Republican president, and eight-plus months of silence by the former Democrat president, what prompted both to come out after President Trump, on the same day? After eight years of political silence, what prompted former President George W. Bush’s speech on 29 October 2017, at the “Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World” event in New York, described, in the words of CNN, as “a major smackdown on Trumpism?” “Smackdown” is a gross exaggeration. It was less than that. And it was more than that.

Given its prominence in current public discourse, one would think that hate, not love, is a many-splendored thing. The perfectly good word, which oozes out of every media pore, is now so overused that it means next to nothing. Every time you turn around, someone is accused of “hate” merely for expressing disagreement. This is not just a matter of semantics. It’s serious. When you cheapen a word, it discourages honest discussion and leads to more confusion and conflict, which is how the devil likes it. We have it on good authority that the underworld thrives on mayhem. One large...

An important message from President Trump on Making America Great Again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmo4kolTFjk

The campus free-speech crisis is escalating. Last night’s disruption of Charles Murray’s speech at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor means that every working day for the past week has seen a significant shout-down. Disruptions are coming at a substantially higher rate than in the second semester of last academic year. The targets are also expanding. Now, in addition to suppressing visiting conservatives like Charles Murray, disruptors are silencing liberal speakers, university presidents, and teachers in their classrooms. The failure to properly discipline shout-downs of conservative speakers has licensed attacks on any event that demonstrators may choose to squelch.

When you have a student-on-student shouting match, the First Amendment may be stretched to the breaking point. When professors join in the fun, as happened recently at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, it may well tip the balance, for better or for worse. "On August 25, University of Nebraska–Lincoln sophomore Kaitlyn Mullen set up a literature table outside the student union to promote Turning Point USA, a libertarian/conservative campus-based organization," David Moshman writes on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "PUSA proclaims its support for free speech but maintains Professor Watchlist, a blacklist...