Free Republic

In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what...

One of the suspects accused of trying to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro using drones armed with explosives died under mysterious circumstances Monday. Venezuelan government officials say Fernando Albán, a 56-year-old city councilor in the capital of Caracas and Maduro critic, died by suicide after jumping out a tenth floor window of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, the country's top intelligence agency. Albán was arrested on Friday for his alleged involvement in the apparent assassination attempt on August 4, when armed drones flew toward Maduro during a speech at a military parade. Two loud explosions were heard and while Maduro escaped...

Stay right where you are. We know who you are and what you are doing at all times. And we're all for free speech, as long as it's not "hurty" speech, which will result in a lengthy It's George Orwell's utopian dream (aka, "nightmare") coming true much sooner than we could have envisioned just 5 years ago. We are on the verge of being arrested, tried and sentenced, not for actual crimes, but just for our very opinions and thoughts. Even in the midst of it all, do not lose hope. If your vertical alignment is right, it all turns...

President Trump has accused China of intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, protectionism, and driving a trade deficit. But these disputes obscure an embarrassing reality: America has voluntarily ceded its intellectual arbitrage to China by opening the U.S. up for total download without even attempting to return the favor. Information flows abundantly and freely eastward. Little returns west. Chinese investors, students, government officials, and corporations have mapped every inch of America. The same cannot be said for Americans. But this situation is not actually due to protectionism by the Chinese state. Rather, Americans have voluntarily chosen isolation. The flood of...

Trump administration officials have made thinly veiled calls for a military coup that would topple the Venezuelan dictatorship and pave the way for democracy. But some well-respected academics are warning that a military coup would more likely produce a Russia or China-backed anti-American dictatorship. Evan Ellis, a Latin America expert with the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, and Brian Fonseca, a professor at Florida International University who has written extensively about the Venezuelan military, are among those who believe that a military coup in Venezuela would probably lead to a pro-Russian or pro-China regime, rather than to a...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Peter Wang was asleep at his home in Beijing last Monday when police officers arrived before dawn to detain him, saying he had helped organize a protest planned for later that day. Across the city, others who had lost money investing in China’s online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms - including some who had traveled from as far away as Shandong and Shanxi provinces - got similar visits from police. By the time they were released, the demonstration they had planned using social media chat groups had fizzled amid a massive security response around the China Banking and...

<p>North Korea has not stopped its nuclear and missile programmes in violation of United Nations sanctions, according to a confidential UN report seen by Reuters on Friday (Aug 3).</p> <p>The six-month report by independent experts monitoring the implementation of UN sanctions was submitted to the Security Council North Korea sanctions committee late on Friday.</p>

The wave of violence unleashed during harshly repressed anti-government protests has left some 220 people dead. What had been a vibrant tourism industry has been devastated, with ripple effects on the broader economy in a country that was already one of the poorest in the Americas. Business closings have left 200,000 people jobless, and unless the crisis ends soon, some 1.3 million of Nicaragua's 6.2 million people "risk falling into poverty," according to a study by the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (Funides).

Thousands of protestors took to the streets in hundreds of cities across the U.S. Saturday, participating in "Families Belong Together" rallies and demonstrations. What protestors are hoping to gain: The immediate reunification of families that have been separated, the end of family detentions, and, more broadly, the dissolution of Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy.

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war. The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — North Korea said Friday it can't pay nearly $184,000 in dues to the United Nations because of U.N. sanctions that prevent the transfer of funds from Pyongyang. North Korea's U.N. Mission said sanctions imposed by the Security Council in early August on the Foreign Trade Bank of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which is in charge of international transactions, made payment impossible. The mission said Ambassador Ja Song Nam met Undersecretary-General for Management Jan Beagle Friday afternoon to request the opening of "banking channels" to make the DPRK's required $183,458 payment for 2018 for the...

Russian police wrestled opposition leader Alexei Navalny into a patrol wagon on Sunday, moments after he appeared at a rally to urge voters to boycott what he said would be a rigged presidential election in March. Video footage posted on social media showed Navalny appear on Moscow’s main thoroughfare, a few hundred meters (yards) from the Kremlin, to join several hundred supporters taking part in the protest, which the authorities had said was illegal. He had only walked a short distance when he was surrounded by helmet-clad police officers. They wrestled him to the ground on the pavement, and then...

Former US President Barack Obama is set to visit Chinese Leader Xi Jinping this Tuesday while on a five-day trip to China, India and France. A statement from Washington's spokeswoman has told CNN that former President Barack Obama is set to meet with his former counterparts during his trip, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. Obama, who will be arriving in Shanghai to deliver remarks at the Global Alliance of SMEs Summit, will meet with Xi for the first time since September 2016, when both leaders ratified the Paris climate agreement in their respective countries. Just recently, current US President Donald...

Jerry Brown is the elected Governor of only one state within the 50 United States, not the Sovereign of The People's Republic of California As California Governor Jerry Brown burnishes his climate change credentials on his crusade to Rome for talks at the Vatican, his adoring California media are ignoring what he is really doing. “Absent a seat at the negotiating table, Brown has a role organizing state and local officials from around the world who are increasingly seeking to craft their own climate deals, independent of what their nations’ leaders do,” CalMatters wrote.

A group of men identifying themselves as Venezuelan soldiers published a video on social media calling for an overthrow of the socialist regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro, shortly before the government announced it had quelled an uprising in Carabobo state on Sunday. The incident, which Maduro claims was orchestrated by the American Department of State and unspecified Colombian agents, has added more intrigue to the increasingly chaotic situation in what was once Latin America’s wealthiest state, following Maduro’s imposition of a parallel socialist legislature tasked with drafting a new constitution more favorable to his regime.

At least one person has been shot dead while waiting to vote in an unofficial, opposition-organized referendum in Venezuela. Men on motorbikes killed a woman and wounded three others in Caracas. One news agency, Reuters, is reporting two people died. Video from the scene showed people rushing away from the gunshots. Many fled to a church. Venezuela is in crisis and more than 100 people have died in political clashes since April......

Cuban President Raúl Castro denounced President Donald Trump’s tougher line on relations with Havana on Friday, calling it a setback but promising to continue working to normalize ties between the former Cold War rivals. Castro’s comments to Cuba’s National Assembly were his first on Trump’s June announcement of a partial rollback of the Cuba-U.S. détente achieved by then-President Barack Obama. They contained echoes of the harsh rhetoric of the past. “Any strategy that seeks to destroy the revolution either through coercion or pressure or through more subtle methods will fail,” Cuba’s president told legislators. He also rejected any “lessons” on...

A new film in Mexico opens this week (3 years ago) about corruption and collusion with drug traffickers in Mexican politics. In 'The Perfect Dictatorship,' the plot of political corruption and media collusion is close to reality. A new movie playing in Mexican theaters not only has a provocative title and an equally incendiary plot but incredible timing too. "The Perfect Dictatorship" is a political black comedy by Mexico's controversial filmmaker Luis Estrada. It opened last week, as the real life story of 43 kidnapped students abducted by corrupt cops working for crooked politicians, dominates the news there. (SNIP) UNIDENTIFIED...

There’s a predictable checklist for meltdowns in socialist countries, and it’s playing out with tragic regularity in Venezuela. Nationalize agriculture? Check. Start government-enforced rationing when the food supply dries up? Check. Seal the border when people try to flee to buy food elsewhere? Check. The next step, and usually one of the last before total collapse, is runaway inflation. That’s what we’re starting to see in Venezuela. Rapid inflation, called hyperinflation by economists when it gets really bad, is one of the deadliest poisons for any economy. The spiral is usually triggered when a government prints too much money to...

Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell said on Friday that Barack Obama has acted more like a dictator than a president, and that President-elect Donald Trump should make it a priority to “restore the rule of law.” “We have been living under a dictatorial tyrant for the last eight years,” Mitchell said at the Conservative Women’s Network event, co-hosted by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “And one of the most important things that Donald Trump can do as president is to restore the rule of law,” Mitchell said. …