Free Republic

When anti-Israel activists swarmed the plant that prints The New York Times, The Post and other newspapers the other day, aiming to stop the papers’ distribution, cops passed on making arrests because this was supposedly “peaceful protest.” No: It was a forceful attack on a private enterprise (on private property, too), and on the freedom of the press. But city government refuses to protect the peace, and has even signed away its ability to restrain out-of-control “protest” mobs. Heck, City Hall agreed to pay $13 million to “protesters” — nearly $10K per rioter — arrested during the looting, arson, and...

Lower Manhattan’s iconic “Charging Bull” statue was defaced with the hateful message “Death to Israel” as protesters waving Palestinian flags marched through the area Thursday night. The graffiti written in black marker was located behind the ear of the bull, while “Free Palestine” was scrawled across its face, according to photos. he vandalism was spotted by The Post as a crowd of anti-Israel protesters passed by the tourist hot spot. Some in the group, including a man dressed in traditional Orthodox Jewish garb, climbed atop the bronze statue and waved Palestinian flags. The protesters eventually made their way toward City...

According to mythology, Hades made King Sisyphus roll a huge boulder endlessly up a steep hill in Tartarus. Unfortunately, the modern day version of Sisyphus is the middle class pushing a boulder endlessly up a steep hill while the top 1% (the elite class) horde more and more wealth. An example of the Sisyphus economy? The top 1% of earners (blue line) have seen an incredible increase in net worth, particularly after Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s big rate cuts (green line) from 2000 to 2004. Each subsequent rate cuts under Bernanke (2007-2008) and Yellen (who just kept rates too low...

After Hamas supporters were caught screaming “shame on you” at children receiving cancer treatment at a Manhattan hospital (“make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows”) some people wondered what they were trying to accomplish. Questions like that only reveal the vast gap between the pro-Hamas mob and everyone else. The pro-Hamas protests, allegedly in pursuit of a ceasefire, but in reality celebrating Hamas and now Houthi terrorism, have picked random fights with Starbucks, Christmas Tree lightings and Alec Baldwin to name a few. They are not so much for anything as they are against things. Reasonable people, usually...

The “October 2011” movement organizer Dennis Trainor tells me that he believes capitalism is “homicidal” and that the U.S. needs a revolution. “This is not a reform movement,” he said. He is part of the illegal occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. The “October 2011” movement is not part of, but endorses the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that began several weeks ago. Although he describes himself as new to professional agitation, Trainor runs the “No Cure For That” website and served as a writer/media consultant for Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign. Kucinich is the Cleveland Democrat perhaps best known...

The New York Police Department (NYPD) took down the “Occupy City Hall” encampment early Wednesday after protesters there had demonstrated against police brutality for about a month. Police dressed in riot gear removed dozens of people out of City Hall Park starting shortly before 4 a.m. Wednesday, after several homeless people had gathered at the encampment in recent weeks, The New York Times reported. Footage posted to social media showed police advancing with plastic shields. Officers arrested seven people during the clearing after outbursts between officers and those at the camp. Police tossed the tarps and makeshift tents that encampment...

Report from Young America’s Foundation, The leading conservative youth organization, looked at some 50 top colleges and found 250 examples of courses that question conservatism and Trump. Beyond the inane, identity- and intersectionality-obsessed topics, these classes advance a liberal agenda, malign conservatives and their values, and shut out ideological diversity,” said YAF spokesman Spencer Brown, author of the 25th annual Comedy and Tragedy Report. The reports on the courses, he said in a release, “peel back the shiny veneer colleges and universities place on themselves in the name of ‘higher’ education to reveal a stark reality: campuses devoid of intellectual...

The Green New Deal is like its predecessor, Occupy Wall Street. It came on the scene with a flash, then eventually faded away like it never existed If Donald Trump was a Putin puppet, they wouldn’t hold that information back (magically without leaks) for two years while Russia was supposedly taking over America through a traitor in the White House. If that were the case, the ones supposedly saving us from this “takeover” are doing one heckuva job, aren’t they? Wouldn’t they be going after the puppet instead of going after the puppeteer and cutting the strings they’ve attached to...

In the latter half of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, as Catholic immigrants poured in from Ireland and Eastern Europe, an anti-Catholic wave spread over a mostly Protestant United States. The majority slur then was that Catholic newcomers’ first loyalty would be to “Rome,” not the U.S. Anti-Semitism grew even more deeply rooted, marked by Ivy League quotas on Jewish applicants and exclusionary clauses against Jews in clubs and neighborhoods. It was no accident that the Ku Klux Klan often targeted Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans. In the late 19th century, with the influx...

Looks like the Libertarians who were Ron Paul Supporters and the Nevertrumpers have taken over the Republican Party of Texas. The Chairman was the leader of the "Free the Delegates" at the National Convention and tried to prevent Donald Trump getting the nomination. After he was elected by the State Republican Executive Committee, to fill out an unexpired term, he fired many of the regular conservative employees and hired only his Libertarian and NeverTrump brethren after he promised to maintain the same staff.

Nearly half of the Democratic National Committee's staff are now people of color and 51 percent are women, according to a new report to be published by the DNC Monday. The report was prepared as the party responds to criticism that it has taken minority voters for granted while overlooking them for jobs and contracts. The DNC became more diverse as it staffed back up after its post-2016 election lull, seeing a big jump in the number of Latinos (from 5 to 22) and smaller increases in the number of African-Americans (from 22 to 30), Asian-American/Pacific Islanders and LGBTQ people...

The One Percent on Wall Street must save the nation by taking political control from President Donald Trump, says former President Bill Clinton’s far-left labor secretary. “If the leaders of American business remain silent about what Trump is doing to American democracy, they will be complicit in its demise,” Robert Reich begged Wall Street CEOs in the April 26 San Francisco Chronicle. Reich, who was a progressive Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997, justifies calls for a virtual occupation by Wall Street of the White House, saying: As the Republican Party moves toward Trump’s looniness — his xenophobia, isolationism,...

Many of the exact same groups that participated in Occupy Wall Street and helped organize protest rallies in Ferguson and Baltimore are now promising to bring us “the largest civil disobedience actions in a generation”. I recently wrote about the trouble that radical leftists have caused by attempting to disrupt Trump campaign events, but now there is a very organized effort to turn this into a national movement. On March 19th, thousands of angry protesters will descend on Trump Tower in New York City to denounce Donald Trump’s “fascist policies”, and on April 2nd dozens of leftist organizations will join...

Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World by KATHERINE TIMPF July 9, 2015 A professor at the University of Texas at El Paso wrote a manifesto saying that animal-rights activists must rise up and commit “illegal raids” and “sabotage attacks” in order to save the world from a “mass extinction.” In a 2009 piece for the Animal Liberation Front titled “Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation By Any Means Necessary,” associate professor of philosophy Steven Best says that groups like PETA are just not radical or progressive enough. After all, they work with corporations (boo!) “in...

The Republican field is crowded, which implies that primary voters have little information about where some of the candidates stand. That is particularly the case this season, with a few relatively unknown contenders who lack legislative experience or a long history of campaign contributions that would allow researchers to precisely identify where they stand on the liberal-to-conservative political dimension.However, one characteristic all candidates share is that they have active and popular Twitter accounts. And as I showed in an article published earlier this year in the journal Political Analysis — now freely available online as an Editors’ Choice article —...

The movement that began in Zuccotti Park didn't disappear—it just splintered and regrouped around a variety of focused causes.On her first campaign stop in Iowa in April, Hillary Clinton struck a decisively populist tone, declaring that “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Later, she sharpened her rhetoric on income inequality by comparing the salaries of America’s richest hedge fund managers with kindergarten teachers. Clinton isn’t alone. Democratic presidential challenger Bernie Sanders has spent the spring railing against the excesses of Wall Street greed while calling for a financial transactions tax and a breakup of...

A new TV ad from the “super PAC” supporting former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland is titled “Wall Street’s Public Enemy No. 1.” But it seems the intended target of the ad is Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush. The ad from Generation Forward splices excerpts from Mr. O’Malley’s recent presidential announcement speech, centered around his suggestion that the head of Goldman Sachs would be “just fine with either Bush or a Clinton.” It then repeats his criticism that “the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth by you between two royal families.”

Wall Street wants Michael Bloomberg to run for president, but the billionaire isn't budging. At the Yale CEO Summit this week, the talk was of "drafting Bloomberg" however possible. The former New York City mayor seems like the perfect solution for Wall Street's problems with the current field of presidential candidates. The Street sees him as a centrist technocrat who adeptly managed one of the most complex cities in the world. They think he understands the global business community. Rumblings about a Bloomberg run are especially strong at several bulge bracket banks, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Merrill once...

Kristen Martin recalls her time as an intern for Bernie Sanders, in a contribution to the left's discussion of Sanders' campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.TO THOSE who have spent any significant amount of time in Vermont, it is clear that Bernie Sanders is widely beloved by his constituents. The support for "Bernie," as his supporters fondly call him, was clear on May 26 as thousands flocked to Sanders' presidential campaign kickoff rally on the edge of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont. The "People's Assembly," organized by a group including former Occupy Wall Street activists and environmentalists, spoke to a...

Hillary Clinton is moving so quickly to the left that it’s hard to keep up. Her aides are telling the New York Times she wants to “topple” the One Percent, she’s pledging solidarity with union bosses over lunch meetings at Mario Batali restaurants in Midtown, she supports a constitutional amendment to suppress political speech, she’s down with a right to same-sex marriage, she’s ambivalent over the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, she’s calling for an end to the “era of mass incarceration,” she wants to go “further” than President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty. It’s called pandering, but the press...