Free Republic

On November 7 the world will mark a grim anniversary: One hundred years since the small but devout faction of Marxists called the Bolsheviks lost a popular election. It was the last one Russia would see for 70 years. Instead of accepting the peopleÂ’s will, the Bolsheviks overthrew that countryÂ’s fledgling provisional government. That revolution unleashed a nightmare: a vicious civil war, the mass killing of clergy and religious believers, the slaughter of businessmen and landlords, and the building of concentration camps, 20 years before Hitler. In a single day, the Bolsheviks were known to boast, they killed more dissidents...

The late-night comedy show took yet another surprising stance of late, criticizing the anti-fascist collective for its tactics. Occasionally, The Daily Show will surprise its (mostly left-wing) viewers by echoing the overheated rhetoric emanating from the right-wing echo chamber. This week, for example, the late-night comedy program defended Melania Trump’s decision to wear designer stiletto heels to tour the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas. (Of course, the tony first couple ended up comforting a grand total of zero survivors, and the best evidence the White House could muster to back Trump’s assertion that he’d witnessed “first hand”...

Long before most people in Europe or North America were familiar with the word ‘jihad’, left-wing terrorism ravaged much of Western Europe. Groups like West Germany’s Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Gang, America’s Symbionese Liberation Army, Italy’s Red Brigades, Spain’s First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups, Portugal’s FP-25, Action Directe in France and the IRA in Britain were left wing terrorist groups who committed numerous atrocities including targeted killings, bombings, kidnappings and torture on a wide scale. At a time when most people correctly thought of Mosques as places of peace and holiness, these far-left groups put fear into the hearts of...

Staunton was trying to exit through the front door of Rohrabacher’s office to visit a restroom when, according to Rohrabacher, a protester yanked the door open, causing her to fall and hit her head. The door also pushed over a 2-year-old child who was apparently brought along with the crowd, but she was not injured, the congressmen said. Staunton, who has managed Rohrabacher’s office since his first term in 1989, was treated by paramedics and taken to a local hospital, Rohrabacher said. ... “I am outraged beyond words that protesters who mobbed my Huntington Beach office violently knocked down my...

America is in the throes of crisis. Polling as the least popular starting President in history, Donald Trump has taken the reins and intends to force his agenda on the world by brute force. Alongside him, outright white supremacists are coming out of the woodwork, convinced that their time has arrived. Millions who once counted on the Democratic Party are losing faith in the entire political system. Can anything be done to halt the rise of tyranny? This is the context in which anarchists are once again returning to the stage of history and the front page of the New...

The deputy speaker of the Russian parliament intimated that Jews are using their positions in the media and government to continue the work of ancestors who “pulled down our churches.” Peter Tolstoy at a news conference Tuesday on plans to move a cathedral in St. Petersburg appeared to blame Jews for anti-religious persecution under communism. He referred to the descendants of people who on 1917 “jumped out of the Pale of Settlement” in the churches statement. The Pale of Settlement was an area of western Imperial Russia beyond which most Jews were not allowed to settle. This changed after the...

The campus culture war is a religious war, a so-far largely peaceful counterpart to the violent purges and revolutions of jihad. One faith has been expunged, relegated to the margins of the academy, and now another fills the vacuum. Out with the Christianity that spawned American higher education, in with a ferocious new faith — a social-justice progressivism unrestrained by humility and consumed with righteous zeal. Contemporary Americans — educated in the kind of revisionist history that dominates our educational system from top to bottom — forget that higher education was initially a thoroughly Christian enterprise, in keeping with the...

HEAR, HEAR: From left, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie and Rand Paul are among the candidates in last night's GOP presidential debate, during which Cruz took issue with media treatment of the candidates. Hillary Clinton’s coronation by a “fawning” media salivating over her Oval Office ambition has finally taken a hit, thanks to Ted Cruz.Cancel the new dishes for the White House makeover. Cruz just smashed the china when he blasted CNBC moderator John Harwood last night for his left-leaning questions.Harwood would never speak that way to Hillary — who’s never run a billion-dollar empire, earned the presidential...

Ted Cruz Rants About Media Bias During CNBC Debate (Watch the video at the link) Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won some of the biggest cheers of the first segment of the Republican presidential debate Wednesday with a vigorous attack on the media in general, and the CNBC moderators in particular. Cruz, asked about the debt limit, diverted to assert that the questions posed in the first half-hour of the debate "illustrate why the American people don't trust the media. This is not a cage match." The first-term senator went on the paraphrase what he argued were excessively hostile questions...

For all the horror of the reports coming out of the ‘Islamic State’, there seems to have been a fairly widespread assumption that ISIS is, if not beaten at least contained, and that in due course it will burn out/be burnt out. Historical parallels are dangerous to draw and they often lead to some wildly incorrect conclusions, but ISIS’s position in Syria and Iraq reminds me more than a little of the situation in which the nascent soviet state found itself during the early years of the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks were encircled by hostile forces, who, on paper,...

By Tuesday night about 90 million Americans will have cast ballots in an election that’s almost certain to create greater partisan divisions, increase gridlock and render governance of our complex nation even more difficult. Ninety million sounds like a lot, but that means that less than 40 percent of the electorate will bother to vote... The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has on average...

STALIN - UKRAINE'S GENOCIDE BY FAMINE Eighty years later, there’s no denying the Soviet atrocity. By Alec Torres NRO 11/9/2013 ‘We went to a field. We had nothing to eat. Everything was taken from us. So my mother decided we would go to the field, find some half-frozen potatoes, some kind of vegetables, to make a soup. At that time the Soviet Union was teaching people to report on each other, to spy on each other. Somebody saw that we came with some vegetables, half-frozen, and they arrested my mother. That was the last time I saw her.” So Eugenia...

The gun control PAC of Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, is launching a new initiative, "Veterans for Responsible Solutions." According to CNN, the new initiative "will support Giffords and Kelly's wider efforts by bringing to bear the experience of military veterans who've sworn to defend the Second Amendment."

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

Lenin pointed out: “The task of the Bolsheviks is to overthrow the Imperialist Government. But this government rests upon the support of the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who in turn are supported by the trustfulness of the masses of the people. We are in the minority. In these circumstances there can be no talk of violence on our side.” The essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was. –...

The Bolsheviks, according to historians, robbed banks before they rose to power in Russia. That foreshadowed their economic policies. The Marxism they implemented once in power was just an extension of their armed robbery. Today's redistributionists in America don't have bank robbery in their pasts but they do accept organized theft as the norm of politics. They see all wealth belonging to the state automatically, which is why they count all tax cuts as "government spending" and why they feel entitled to hike up taxes whenever a self-inflicted "crisis" appears. Taxpayers didn't cause the "fiscal cliff" emergency; derelict pols did....

At his daily briefing, White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the administration is “disappointed by the Pussy Riot verdict. While we understand the group’s behavior was offensive for some, we have concerns about the way these young women were treated by the Russian judicial system.”

As regular readers in this column know, my reporting senior and lawful sovereign is His Imperial Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II. When I finally report in to that great Oberste Heeresleitung in the sky, I expect to do so as the Kaiser’s last soldier. Why? Well, beyond Bestimmung, the unhappy fact is that Western civilization’s last chance of survival was probably a victory by the Central Powers in World War I. Their defeat let all the poisons of the French Revolution loose unchecked, which is the main reason that we now live in a moral and cultural cesspool.

Proposal for a Coordinated West Coast Port Shutdown, Passed With Unanimous Consensus by vote of the Occupy Oakland General Assembly 11/18/2012: In response to coordinated attacks on the occupations and attacks on workers across the nation: Occupy Oakland calls for the blockade and disruption of the economic apparatus of the 1% with a coordinated shutdown of ports on the entire West Coast on December 12th. The 1% has disrupted the lives of longshoremen and port truckers and the workers who create their wealth, just as coordinated nationwide police attacks have turned our cities into battlegrounds in an effort to disrupt...

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) -- Police in Vermont's largest city say a 35-year-old man is in grave condition after he was shot at an Occupy Wall Street protest. Burlington Deputy Chief Andi Higbee says the public is not believed to be at risk after Thursday's shooting at City Hall Park. But he says the circumstances are still being investigated.