Free Republic

There’s a wrinkle in how the United States talks about climate change in 2017, a tension fundamental to the issue’s politics but widely ignored. On one hand, Democrats are the party of climate change. Since the 1990s, as public belief in global warming has become strongly polarized, the Democratic Party has emerged as the advocate of more aggressive climate action. On the other hand, the Democratic Party does not have a plan to address climate change. This is true at almost every level of the policy-making process: It does not have a consensus bill on the issue waiting in the...

A Peruvian farmer won a small but significant legal victory on Monday when a German court said his appeal against energy giant RWE, which he accuses of contributing to climate change that is threatening his Andean home, had merit. After hearing oral arguments from both sides, the higher regional court in the western city of Hamm said Saul Luciano Lliuya’s demand for damages from RWE was “admissible”, paving the way for the case to proceed. Luciano argues that RWE, as one of the world’s top emitters of climate-altering carbon dioxide, must share in the cost of protecting his hometown Huaraz...

Washington, DC – Today, Club for Growth President David McIntosh issued the following statement as the House Ways and Means Committee continues to mark up the “Tax Cuts and Jobs” bill:“While the corporate tax cut will lead to some increase in our nation’s GDP, the rest of the provisions on individual taxpayers fails the pro-growth test,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh stated.“Republicans must correct at least four serious shortcomings of the House bill to follow through on campaign promises and to bring our nation closer to a tax reform proposal that is truly pro-growth.“1: millionaires’ tax rate: House Republicans...

Here is how many times keywords were spoken: Wall Street: 23Tax: 20Inequality: 9Wealthy: 7 Now, compare the number of times other national concerns were mentioned: ISIS: 4Terror/ists/ism: 2Defense: 2Military (excluding Jim Webb): 1Freedom: 1Debt (national): 0Liberty: 0Strength: 0Armed forces: 0Islamist/Islamic: 0

Despite antiseptic portrayals throughout American media, Antifa are more than ‘anti-fascists.’ Antifa provide the violent complement to academic neo-Marxism. In the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville violence, several prominent figures—including CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic—equated left-wing “Antifa” activists with the thousands of Allied soldiers who stormed Normandy’s beaches to invade Adolph Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” on D-Day. A more appropriate equation would be with the thousands of soldiers in the Red Army, who brutally marched toward Berlin, where they would establish Soviet hegemony in the so-called German Democratic Republic after defeating Hitler. Antifa returns to...

The world is in the crucial third phase of a 30-year war to combat global warming, and we can still win. The outcome will depend on this current phase and our ability to invest dramatically more money in clean and green energy quickly, thereby developing a new era of climate infrastructure. Success will depend on our capacity to invest sufficient institutional money for profit, and there's growing reason to be optimistic. The first two phases of the war have been won. Progress is being made on the third phase, but much more needs to be done. Phase One was led...

A group of feminist professors will publish a new anthology in November extolling the merits of the emerging field of “queer feminist science.” The anthology, Queer Feminist Science: A Reader, will be released on November 16, and is edited by a team of Women’s Studies professors including New York University’s Cyd Cipolla, Wake Forest University’s Kristina Gupta, South Florida University’s David A. Rubin, and Mount Holyoke College’s Angela Willey, who specifically teaches “feminist science.

Editor's note: The lost condemnations of communism prepared for the Second Vatican Council but later discarded and forgotten are now being made available to the public in an English translation for the first time by LifeSiteNews. The translations, by LifeSite's Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, are based on the drafts of documents contained in the official acts of the council’s preparatory commissions. The documents contain an extensive plan for a coordinated and global effort to counteract the influence of Marxism and communism worldwide and “shatter its audacity.” However, following the takeover of the council’s commissions by the ultra-liberal “Rhine group” bishops, the...

According to a new study published by Yale, Americans are willing to pay a carbon tax that would increase their household energy bills by $15 per month, or about 15%, on average. This result is consistent with a survey from last year that also found Americans are willing to pay an average of $15 to $20 per month to combat climate change. Another recent Yale survey found that overall, 78% of registered American voters support taxing and/or regulating carbon pollution, including 67% of Republicans and 60% of conservative Republicans. This raises the question – with such broad support across the...

In its zeal to undo the legacy of our 44th president, the Trump administration is now undoing the future of our children and grandchildren by repealing the Clean Power Plan, a policy designed to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that make our climate more and more inhospitable. It’s clear that our unstable climate is putting bigger and bigger burdens on our economy. It’s also clear that the White House is determined to remove regulations on the use of dirty fuels contributing to that unstable climate. The best answer is for Congress to pass legislation that would put the market to work...

The hard left has always claimed the high moral ground by portraying itself as the advocate of the have-nots of the earth. The labels shift, from “proletariat” to “third world” and, more recently, the “99 percent” (no less) of the global population. With such grandeur of purpose, the radicals of the world fiercely take on their favorite evils, namely what they call the “oligarchies,” the “one percent,” and, of course, “imperialism.” Whenever and wherever a leader or political movement touting such a shibboleth takes power, the members of the hard-left, self-proclaimed revolutionaries, rally cheerfully and uncritically in support. We have...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

I’ve been struggling with this question for a month. A Democratic state legislator rose after a speech and asked me a simple thing: What should Democrats do now? What should their message be? I had no idea how to answer that. Indeed, as internecine fighting loudly fractures the GOP, Democrats quietly struggle with a civil war of their own. Largely shut out of power at the state and federal levels, the party is torn between pragmatists who want to chase Donald Trump’s voters with a centrist economic agenda and insurrectionists a la Bernie Sanders who want to move hard to...

Colin Kaepernick and his supporters may not realize it, but their ideas originate in a nineteenth-century German who interpreted the world as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed. When Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem in 2016, he probably had no idea what he was starting. But Kaepernick also probably had no idea where his own ideas originated. Like so many left-wing beliefs, Kaepernick’s intellectual odyssey begins with the nineteenth-century German philosopher Karl Marx. Marx explained the world through exploitation and oppression. A struggle between oppressor (evil) and oppressed...

The long-term tax legacy in America is as such: the second and third items of the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx – the progressive tax and the inheritance tax – are fully and legally implemented. Trump's plan leaves the second item of the Communist Manifesto intact (a progressive tax with some modifications) but terminates the third item – the tax on inheritance.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the world’s richest nations to have a greater sense of urgency about climate change. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook (WEO), released overnight, has dedicated an entire chapter to the impact of weather shocks and climate change on global economic activity. It warns coping with climate change will be one of the “fundamental challenges” of the 21st century, saying richer countries must help low-income economies adapt to rapidly increasing temperatures. “Climate change is a negative global externality of potentially catastrophic proportions and only collective action and multilateral cooperation can effectively address its causes and...

Bashing Christopher Columbus has long been de rigueur among the liberal elite. Today, it has infiltrated our nation’s classrooms and poisons our public discourse. You know the mantra: Columbus was a greedy and egomaniacal villain who brought slavery, disease, “genocide,” and ecological ruin to a previously undisturbed land. Rather than honor this legacy of “hate,” the argument goes, Americans should celebrate the peaceful indigenous peoples who populated this hemisphere long before their lands were stolen by European explorers. The war against Columbus is cloaked in the lexicon of “diversity” and the rhetoric of “inclusion.” But what many of its foot...

Throughout the 20th Century, Karl Marx’s visage often appeared on communist banners in the guise of a mighty, bearded prophet, the first and greatest in an array of great thinkers that also included Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. So it may be slightly odd and amusing to think of him in his mid-20s living in Paris as the editor of a magazine. Digging into the letters and writings that Marx produced in those years, and the writings of those who knew him, always turns up something interesting—and occasionally something utterly fascinating. The year was 1844. Hoping to unite German and...

They hate you. Leftists don’t merely disagree with you. They don’t merely feel you are misguided. They don’t think you are merely wrong. They hate you. They want you enslaved and obedient, if not dead. Once you get that, everything that is happening now will make sense. And you will understand what you need to be ready to do. You are normal, and therefore a heretic. You refuse to bow to their idols, to subscribe to their twisted catechisms, to praise their false gods. This is unforgivable. You must burn. Crazy talk? Just ask them. Go ahead. Go on social...

Ministers should tighten the UK's official climate change target - or face the courts, the government's former chief scientist has said. Prof Sir David King is supporting a legal case forcing ministers to shrink carbon emissions to zero by 2050. He says the current government goal - an 80% emissions cut by the same date - is too weak to protect the climate. Ministers have promised more ambitious climate policies in their forthcoming and long-delayed Clean Growth plan. But Prof King told BBC News the government knew the 80% target cut behind that plan was too weak. Some 18 months...