Free Republic

Jeff Zients, the incoming White House chief of staff, met multiple times in 2016 with President Biden's son Hunter Biden who is facing criminal and congressional probes into his past business dealings. According to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and verified by Fox News Digital, Zients met with Hunter Biden twice in February 2016 and on another occasion in May 2016, just months before President Biden, the vice president at the time, was set to leave the White House. President Biden also attended the first two meetings which both took place at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the...

China has increased its reliance on food imports over the past two decades, prompting concerns among officials who worry that disruptions to food supply chains could trigger domestic unrest. In particular, this reliance has heightened China’s sensitivity to food supply disruptions caused by geopolitical tensions, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine. What is China’s current food security situation? With less than 10 percent of the planet’s arable land, China produces one-fourth of the world’s grain and feeds one-fifth of the world’s population. Data from the country’s National Bureau of Statistics showed that in 2022, China’s grain output reached a record...

Water insecurity. China is home to about 20 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its freshwater sources. Overuse has led to severe shortages, and industry along China’s major water sources has polluted supplies. Construction of hydropower dams along major rivers has also damaged ecosystems. The government released a plan in 2015 for preventing water pollution that included placing controls on polluting industries. The quality of surface waters—bodies such as lakes, rivers, and streams—has since improved. However, groundwater continues to fall short of targets, with more than 80 percent categorized as “bad to very bad.” Desertification. More...

Here is the entire memo... POTUS & POLITICAL WARFARE   May 2017   BACKGROUND.  The Trump administration is suffering under withering information campaigns designed to first undermine, then de legitimize and ultimately remove the President. Possibly confusing these attacks with an elevated interplay of otherwise normal D.C. partisan infighting and adversarial media relations, the White House response to these campaigns reflects a political advocacy mindset that it is intensely reactive, severely under-inclusive and dangerously inadequate to the threat. If action is not taken to re-scope and respond to these hostile campaigns very soon, the administration risks implosion and subsequent early...

A former American diplomat who served as a U.S. ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and accused of secretly serving as an agent of Cuba’s government, according to The Associated Press. Officials say Manuel Rocha, 73, was arrested in Miami on Friday on a criminal complaint. According to sources, more details about the case are expected to be made public at a court appearance Monday. One of the two people who came forward with the complaint said the Justice Department case accuses Rocha of working to promote the Cuban government’s interests.

“This is a sham. There is no special counsel investigation,” former chief assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy explained Friday, after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed U.S. Attorney David Weiss as special counsel to investigate First Son Hunter Biden’s dubious, multi-million dollar financial dealings with foreign actors. Weiss, U.S. attorney in Delaware, has already tried to give Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea deal regarding tax violations — but, was prevented from doing so when a judge rejected the unprecedented deal. The appointment of Weiss as special counsel isn’t just a sham, because of Weiss’ pro-Biden bias — it also violates federal...

Renewing America Representative Adam Schiff discusses Russia’s war in Ukraine, U.S.-China relations, the proliferation of artificial intelligence technologies, and emerging threats to the democratic process, including misinformation and deepfakes. SORKIN: Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting with Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California’s Thirtieth District and a candidate for the U.S. Senate. I’m Amy Davidson Sorkin, a staff writer at the New Yorker. And I will be presiding over today’s discussion, for which over three hundred CFR members are registered. So we’ve got a lot to talk about. I won’t spend much time on an introduction, as the...

Governments start wars in pursuit of various objectives, from conquering territory to changing the regime of a hostile state. Once a war begins, the stakes are immediately raised. It is one of the paradoxes of war that even as its original objectives drift out of reach or are cast aside, the necessity of not being seen as the loser only grows in importance—such importance, in fact, that even if winning is no longer possible, governments will still persevere to show that they have not been beaten. ...All of these dynamics are evident in Russia’s war against Ukraine. r Putin set...

The following 19-point time line lays out the data points obtained from whistleblowers, the “Laptop from Hell,” James Comer, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and the Senate 2020 report on the family. One:

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis is raising money at a $6,600-a-head luncheon at the Yale Club in New York, hosted by former George W. Bush administration officials including William Heyman and Nick Sinatra.Heyman, formerly of Citigroup, was appointed director of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) by Bush, and sits on a Federal Reserve Bank of New York committee and the neocon Council on Foreign Relations. Sinatra, a real estate developer, was an associate political director at the Bush White House.DeSantis’s fundraising in New York is not just controversial for his association with these “GOP throwbacks”, as POLITICO describes them. He...

Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members for decades have shaped US foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known Council member famously explained, they transformed the American republic into a global empire, albeit a “bene­volent” one.Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration depicts for the first time the extensive media network...

Monday, March 6, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd announced that Florida was resigning from ERIC, the phantom address storage system. Just one week before, he had told some of the state’s citizens who had proven ERIC’s foibles to Tallahassee – that they should “just forget it”, that Florida was “never going to get out of ERIC”. Across the state, in a number of counties, there had been a rising movement to hold county Supervisors of Election responsible for the bad addresses on the rolls, and to get out of ERIC. However, Tallahassee still loved ERIC, and they made that...

This is the first part of a...series about self-styled 'disinformation' tracking organizations that are cracking down on conservative media and part of a lucrative operation that aims to defund disfavored speech. Well-funded "disinformation" tracking groups are part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars, a Washington Examiner investigation found. Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly "nonpartisan" groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online "disinformation." These same "disinformation" monitors are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to ad companies, with the aim...

The World Economic Forum wasn’t simply the brainchild of Klaus Schwab, but was actually born out of a CIA-funded Harvard program headed by Henry Kissinger and pushed to fruition by John Kenneth Galbraith and the “real” Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn. This is the amazing story behind the real men who recruited Klaus Schwab, who helped him create the World Economic Forum, and who taught him to stop worrying and love the bomb.

The Atlantic last week hosted a conference titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” at the University of Chicago, where I’m a student. Barack Obama, Amy Klobuchar, Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ben Smith, Brian Stelter, and other boldface names studded the program, alongside many lesser-known members of the prestige press. They would gather, as a news release put it, to explore “the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.” The Atlantic gabfest was billed as a space for rigorous dialogue, where the light of truth would scatter the darkness of disinformation. But the dialogue and criticism, it...

President Biden, the former Senator from Delaware, addressed the Business Roundtable on Monday afternoon. "We're at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy, not just the world economy, the world, that occurs every three or four generations," the president said. "[A general told me that] 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946 and since then we've established a liberal world order, and it hasn't happened in a long while."

President Biden on Monday confirmed that Russia launched a hypersonic missile in Ukraine over the weekend and said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s may launch cyberattacks against the US and use chemical weapons in Ukraine next because his “back is against the wall.” Biden said Ukraine’s military is “wreaking havoc on the Russian military,” making Putin increasingly desperate in his nearly month-old invasion of Ukraine. “The more his back is against the wall, the greater the severity of the tactics he may employ,” Biden warned at a Business Roundtable event

A credible deterrent is designed to alter a potential aggressor’s calculations of risk and reward. Vladimir Putin determined that the potential cost of invading Ukraine was relatively low, and on Feb. 24 he attacked. It will be the job of historians to try to understand why deterrence failed. Deterrence involves two factors: capability and will. Capability means having the military strength to deliver intolerable damage to an adversary. Will is the determination to use that strength and deliver that damage. .....snip..... By signaling that the U.S. had no intention of using its capabilities, the Biden administration seriously weakened their deterrent...

With the eyes of the world on Vladimir Putin, questions are being asked about the Russian leader's state of mind after he announced the invasion of Ukraine in 'rambling, terrifying, apocalyptic' fashion. Rumours surrounding the Russian leader's health have been swirling for years, with repeated reports suggesting that he is suffering from cancer and Parkinson's disease. On top of that, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on both the President's physical and mental health can't be underestimated, and it's been suggested that brain fog as a result of Long Covid could be impairing his cognitive function. Although it's not clear...

Far-right extremists are attempting to incite an insurrection to hasten the downfall of what they see as a deeply corrupt U.S. government. Some could resort to deadly acts of terrorism.