Free Republic

Police protect the rights of demonstrators objecting to the G20 summit this weekend in Hamburg, Germany, Mayor de Blasio said Saturday in an appearance before a protest rally of tens of thousands of people. “Our right to protest is directly related to the fact that our police protect us,” the mayor said. He began his speech by remarking at the size of the audience he spoke to: “We have a phrase in America we like to use: This is what democracy looks like.” De Blasio appeared on the outdoor stage in central Hamburg with his son Dante, a Yale University...

The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party. The last few years of the Obama administration and the 2016 primary season once again created a rush to the left. Identity politics, class warfare and big government all made comebacks. Candidates inspired by Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and a host of well-funded groups have embraced sharply leftist ideas. But the results at the voting booth have been anything...

Mark Zuckerberg has been traveling around the country meeting people while denying he has any intentions of running for office. And yet, here he is making what amounts to policy recommendation for the United States. You could call this the first major plank in his non-platform. From his Facebook post: Priscilla and I spent the weekend around Homer, Alaska as part of the Year of Travel challenge. It’s beautiful here. One thing that stood out to us is how different Alaska’s social safety net programs are in a way that provides some good lessons for the rest of our country....

German police used water cannon to disperse around 500 anti-capitalist protesters overnight in the port city of Hamburg where Chancellor Angela Merkel will host leaders of the G20 leading economies in a two-day summit starting on Friday. Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to march in the city this week against globalization and what they say is corporate greed and a failure to tackle climate change. German authorities believe around 8,000 demonstrators were prepared to use violence, the interior minister said on Tuesday. Some 20,000 police officers will be deployed. Hundreds of mainly young left-wing activists gathered and marched...

The militant left-wing group AntiFa plans to cause mayhem, violence and vandalism at Gettysburg National Park this weekend which has FEDS and the Park Service acting with an "abundance of caution." The Park Service says it is keeping track of numerous possible indicators of trouble at the Battle of Gettysburg anniversary from July 1-3 – including reports that AntiFa may be planning to damage memorials and even desecrate gravestones at the historic battleground where the Union turned the tide of war against the South in 1863, Fox reports. When contacted by Fox News the United States Park Police said that...

Marxist professors, including some of recent notoriety, are preparing for the upcoming “Socialism 2017” conference, where they will strategize to “build the left” and “fight the right.” More than 1,500 professors, students, and left-wing activists from around the country are expected to gather in Chicago from July 6-9 in hopes of “fighting injustice and oppression” while resisting the “political system that spawned Trump.”

CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia (Reuters) - The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims. Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979. "I saw Duch kneel in front of the trees where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed children to death," a policeman told reporters...

The Communist Cardinals of Pope Francis George Neumayr He keeps promoting them, both living and dead. In 1953, Manning Johnson, a former propaganda director for the Communist Party in America, testified to the U.S. Congress that Marxists had infiltrated Catholic seminaries. “In the earliest stages it was determined that with only small forces available it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries and divinity schools,” he said. “The practical conclusion, drawn by the Red leaders, was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the...

We were trying to count the people standing in a breadline when William Contreras arrived. The line was forming outside of a bakery in the Caracas run-down neighborhood of Catia, about 20 people long with a half dozen more sprinting past me and our photographer, Cristian Hernández. It was a perfect illustration of the desperate situation of a country that was, a few years ago, boasting of its oil-funded socialist prosperity. Contreras was our government minder, a bulky 50-year-old alderman with salt-and-pepper hair. When he pulled up to us, he seemed oblivious to the snaking line.

The legend of King Robert the Bruce, exiled from Scotland in a cave off the Irish coast in 1306, resembles a similar story in the Bible about King David when he was a boy. King Robert watched a spider finally manage to make a web after failing in several attempts. Thus the child’s rhyme: “If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again.” Our Lord’s parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1-8) is about a poor widow who persisted in getting the judge to hear her case. The refined translation says that the judge wearied of her importuning, but...

. . . One thing Ossoff has going against him: his persona doesn’t fit this Southern, suburban district. That was the consensus of today’s Morning Joe panel. Even former Obama spokesman Josh Earnest [now an MSNBC analyst] conceded that, for this district, Ossoff is not a candidate “from Central Casting.” Joe Scarborough had the unkindest cut of all, saying that Ossoff looks like “he could have been a walk-on in Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds,'” a movie about American Communists in Russia during the Revolution. Scarborough added that from the perspective of voters in the district, Ossoff looks like “he might be...

The American withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to fight climate change came as the bunk about impeachment and collusion of the Trump campaign with the Kremlin dies down, and on a day when the United States moved to all-time stock market highs as measured by Dow-Jones, NASDAQ and S&P, and the Commerce Department posted stunning 3.8 per cent annual economic growth figures. snip Having been routed in the Cold War, and domestically in the West by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the international left retreated into the unsuspecting arms of the 1980s environmentalists: butterfly and bird-watchers, the Sierra Club, Ducks...

Police in Seattle and St. Paul, Minnesota, made arrests after fighting broke out during a series of marches across the U.S. on Saturday against Sharia, a strict form of Islamic law, that were confronted by counter-protests. Police in Seattle used pepper spray and made several arrests for assault after a brief scuffle near the city's Occidental Square, according to ABC affiliate KOMO-TV.

Venezuela cardinal says Socialist regime leaves people ‘cruelly repressed’ In InterviewsInés San MartínJune 8, 2017 VATICAN CORRESPONDENTVenezuelan Jose Antonio dos Santos carries the flag of his country that reads "Virgin of Fatima, I ask for freedom for Venezuela," before the canonization Mass of Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto celebrated by Pope Francis at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal May 13. Several Venezuelans camped out all night at the shrine to pray for peace in their country. (Credit: Paul Haring/CNS.)Ahead of a Thursday meeting with Pope Francis as part of the country's bishops' conference, one of Venezuela's...

A pro-immigration advocate says the hard-hit mostly white working-class communities in the United States must be wheeled into “political hospice care,” and a Washington Post columnist commended his solution “as a way forward.” “Economic dislocation and demographic changes are fueling discomfort and desperation among white working-class voters,” wrote WashPo columnist and editorial board member Jonathan Capehart, continuing: While [university professor and author] Justin Gest says that both Republicans and Democrats have exploited these voters, he sees a way forward. “The only way of addressing their plight is a form of political hospice care,” [Gest] said. “These are communities that are on the...

Over the weekend we covered the demonstration at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, where opponents of the M-103 anti-blasphemy motion gathered to protest the encroachment of sharia in Canada and declare their support for free speech. Predictably, the “anti-fascists” came out in even greater numbers to confront the peaceful protestors, and there were at least two significant incidents of violence. One of them, as I mentioned earlier today, was an attack on the journalist Kevin J. Johnston, who nearly lost the top of his ear to an antifa knife. His cameraman was beaten and seriously injured. As I mentioned in one...

Just a few weeks ago, it seemed almost certain that Prime Minister, Theresa May would be returned to Parliament with an increased majority and that the Labour Party would be on the Brink of collapse. However, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seems to be defying the odds and narrowing the poll gap faster than anyone thought possible. Previously, it was OK to ignore his somewhat colourful past, and his less than appetizing current crop of political associates, but as the election looms closer, many in the UK are worried that Corbyn may actually be within striking distance of the top spot....

The Black Lives Matter social justice movement has been recognized with a global peace prize that in the past has highlighted the work of South African civil rights activist Desmond Tutu, renowned philosopher Noam Chomsky and former Irish President Mary Robinson. The Sydney Peace Foundation announced last week it will give Black Lives Matter its 2017 peace prize during a ceremony scheduled in November for Sydney. The award recognizes the work of the founding leaders of the social justice activist network, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, who began working together after Florida neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted...

Assemblyman Bonta is doing the communists’ dirty work for them. He should be publicly held to account for his communist sympathies, his lies and subterfuge In May, anti-communist California State Assemblywoman Janet Nguyen (R -Santa Ana), pushed back hard against Assembly colleague San Francisco Democrat Rob Bonta‘s Assembly Bill 22. Bonta’s bill was intended to amend an existing statute for removing a public employee who “is knowingly a member of the Communist party” or a member of an organization that “advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States or of any state by force or violence.” Bill 22...

Former House Speaker John Boehner said earlier this week that Donald Trump’s presidency has been “a complete disaster” thus far and that the billionaire-turned-commander-in-chief is still learning on the job. “Everything else he’s done [in office] has been a complete disaster,” Boehner said during a question-and-answer session at a conference in Houston on Wednesday. “He’s still learning how to be president.” ~snip~ He seemed content with his life as a retired politician and was quick to shoot down any talk of a future presidential bid. “I wake up every day, drink my morning coffee and say hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,” Boehner...