Free Republic

Xi Jinping’s China is doubling down on its 70s nostalgia, reestablishing a Maoist system of social control that aims to have a policeman on every block and an informer in every social network. The Financial Times reports:

The idea of American exceptionalism has been embedded in our DNA for generations. It is the faith-based belief that, as Ronald Reagan put it, America is a “shining city on a hill.” Do modern liberals believe that? I almost never try to get into the other side’s head or ascribe ill motives to those on the left. They are, I’ve always believed, misguided, not malign. 20 Things Were Found on Earth & Some Still Can't Be Explained Obama signs $42.4B payout to a shocking group of people. Hint: It’s people who actually deserve it. 13 Child Stars Who Have Changed...

“It’s possible that Rome may betray us,” said Fr Dong, before he said Mass in the city of Shijiazhuang in Hebei province. “If this happens, I will resign. I won’t join a Church which is controlled by the Communist Party. “We are suffering like Jesus on the cross. We fight for religious freedom and follow the Gospel – but we are not supported by either Rome or China.”

Fraud: While the global warming alarmists have done a good job of spreading fright, they haven’t been so good at hiding their real motivation. Yet another one has slipped up and revealed the catalyst driving the climate scare. We have been told now for almost three decades that man has to change his ways or his fossil-fuel emissions will scorch Earth with catastrophic warming. Scientists, politicians and activists have maintained the narrative that their concern is only about caring for our planet and its inhabitants. But this is simply not true. The narrative is a ruse. They are after something...

In the summer of 1920, Russia seemed poised to take over Europe. Newly victorious in the Russian Civil War, but convinced that the capitalists were bent on strangling the cradle of Communism, the Bolsheviks looked for salvation. Their gaze fell on Germany, exhausted and embittered by defeat in the First World War, and now engulfed in civil strife between Communist revolutionaries and protofascist freikorps paramilitaries. If only the Red Army's bayonets could install a Bolshevik regime in Berlin, then the two most powerful states in Central and Eastern Europe would be united in a Communist monolith. And from there, perhaps...

Stop by your local post office and you might just see a poster of Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londono hanging next to the Most Wanted posters of bank robbers and fugitives. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about the Communist terrorist leader. But all the State Department had to do was ask Secretary of State Kerry. Obama did the wave with the Cuban dictator and Kerry met with Timochenko , the leader of FARC, a Marxist terrorist organization that appears on his own department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations a little above Al Qaeda. Timochenko is a...

Editor’s Note: Natalie Morales’ Op-Ed was written before President Obama announced his intention to travel to Cuba and is not in any way intended to be a response to the president’s remarks. Just last week, I was at my friend Michaela’s house dropping off a bag of stuff I’m sending to my family in Cuba. Her husband, Fred, is visiting Havana and was kind enough to be my courier. Among the things I sent with Fred were two packages of Cuban coffee. Yes, that’s right: I’m sending Cuban coffee to Cuba. It’s absurd and hilarious and I got a real...

States are moving to once again require able-bodied adults to put in work hours in exchange for food stamps, after the requirements largely were suspended by the Obama administration. The slow-moving reversal follows the administration pulling back on Clinton-era changes that required recipients to work for government welfare benefits. Signing the reform bill in 1996 alongside then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, then-President Bill Clinton said the goal was to make welfare “a second chance, not a way of life.” But during the last recession, President Obama allowed states to suspend a requirement that able-bodied adults without children work at least 20 hours...

Fraud: While the global warming alarmists have done a good job of spreading fright, they haven’t been so good at hiding their real motivation. Yet another one has slipped up and revealed the catalyst driving the climate scare. We have been told now for almost three decades that man has to change his ways or his fossil-fuel emissions will scorch Earth with catastrophic warming. Scientists, politicians and activists have maintained the narrative that their concern is only about caring for our planet and its inhabitants. But this is simply not true. The narrative is a ruse. They are after something...

Fidel Castro responded Monday to President Barack Obama’s historic trip to Cuba with a long, bristling letter recounting the history of U.S. aggression against Cuba, writing that “we don’t need the empire to give us any presents.” The 1,500-word letter in state media titled “Brother Obama” was Castro’s first response to the president’s three-day visit last week, in which the American president said he had come to bury the two countries’ history of Cold War hostility. […] Obama’s visit was intended to build irreversible momentum behind his opening with Cuba and to convince the Cuban people and the Cuban government...

By Oleg Atbashian | First published in the American Thinker Have you heard of the shocking and terrifying diaper gap that is now dividing this nation? It is said to be so dire that the White House is urging immediate government assistance to buy baby diapers. Philosophically, this puts disposable plastic consumer products in the category of inalienable rights guaranteed by the government: among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Diapers. When I lived in the USSR, our Soviet Constitution also guaranteed that our basic needs be provided to us by the caring socialist government. As a result,...

Taiwan’s China-friendly Nationalist Party has elected its first female leader after ousting her as its presidential candidate ahead of January elections that were won by pro-independence rivals. The Kuomintang had ditched Hung Hsiu-chu as her abrasive style and strongly pro-China positions were seen as alienating voters. The veteran legislator and former teacher was elected as leader over three other candidates Saturday and likely faces a difficult time rebuilding the party after its January electoral defeat. […] Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated Hung from Beijing, saying he hoped the two parties would continue to oppose “Taiwan independence,” according to the official...

Donald Trump would consider allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals instead of depending on the U.S. for their protection against North Korea and China, he said in an interview with The New York Times published Saturday. “There’ll be a point at which we’re just not going to be able to do it anymore,” Trump said, pointing at what he calls a “severely depleted” military. “We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape,” he said. “They don’t even know if they work.” “If the United States keeps on its path, its current path of...

The FedEx founder and CEO reflects on how deregulation and opening markets have wrought astonishing changes and prosperity over 50 years. During our years at Yale, the world was a different place. Foreign travel was exotic, expensive and rare among the population as a whole. While some young Americans had been abroad, by far most Americans had not—and those who did go abroad most likely traveled by sea rather than air. In the early 1960s, flying over the oceans was mainly for the affluent. Long-distance telephone calls were expensive, international calls prohibitively so. From furniture to TVs and appliances, and...

VIDEO AT LINK Barack Obama told an audience of Argentinian youth that the differences between socialism and capitalism make interesting conversation but just pick whatever works. The ideological-left US president suddenly doesn't have an affinity for ideology. He said in the past there was a sharp division between communists, socialists and capitalists but that is merely an intellectual argument and it's not so today. The Marxist in the White House is erasing the lines between two dangerous ideologies and the one that made the US great, just as he erased our borders. This is a man who would be at...

In a speech to Argentinian youths, President Obama characterized the long-running battle between capitalism and communism as "an interesting intellectual argument that should have no bearing on public policy. Rather than get hung up on the supposed moral differences between these rival ideas we should focus on what works." "Whether an unequally shared abundance is superior to a universally shared poverty is not a settled issue," the President asserted. "The United States has historically opted for free enterprise and individual rights, but can we really say that it has made its people happy? I just visited Cuba, which chose a...

the President BARACK OBAMA: "I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don't have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory -- you should just decide what works." Buenos Aires, Argentina / March 23, 2016

In oral arguments in the Supreme Court yesterday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked an attorney representing East Texas Baptist University, Southern Nazarene University, Geneva College and the Little Sisters of the Poor whether the United States government would ever be able to function if it could not demand that people do things that those people believe will cause their souls to “be damned in some way.” “Because every believer that’s ever come before us, including the people in the military, are saying that my soul will be damned in some way,” said Sotomayor. “I’m not naysaying that that is a very...

AN interesting obituary appeared in The New York Times recently, though the death of its subject last month was largely unnoticed beyond his family and friends. That’s not surprising. Delmer Berg wasn’t a celebrity. He wasn’t someone with great wealth or influence. He had never held public office. He was a Californian. He worked as a farmhand and stonemason. He did some union organizing. He was vice president of his local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. He protested against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. He joined the United States Communist Party in 1943, and, according to The Times, he remained an “unreconstructed...

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