Free Republic

As the discourse rolls on regarding former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick‘s decision to take a knee during the national anthem–and the movement his protest ignited–support for the blacklisted athlete-cum-activist is sprouting up across the country. Yesterday afternoon, on Twitter, some of that support came from U.S. Army Infantry Officer and U.S. Military Academy at West Point alumnus, Spenser Rapone. Rapone posts under the handle @punkproletarian and is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Under the hashtag #VeteransForKaepernick, he tweeted an image of himself raising the left clenched-fist of solidarity, support and resistance as well as the message, “Communism...

Merkel’s bizarre rise from East German apparatchik to CDU/CSU leader has never made any sense, and comparisons to The Manchurian Candidate are common. It’s like a duller, but even more cynical Al Gore somehow got the GOP nomination for the presidency. Diminished by the election results or not, and with the socialist SDP ruling out a coalition government, Merkel is supposed to be forming a new government with the Free Democrats and the Greens -- the AfD supposedly being too controversial to be asked to participate.

A conservative UC Berkeley student group that had been working with right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to host a “Free Speech Week” on campus officially called off the four-day program on Saturday. But the former columnist for the “alt-right” Breitbart News doubled down on his promise to go through with the event, leaving university and law enforcement officials wading into an unpredictable, potentially violent showdown on Sunday.

Saint Louis is engulfed in civil disobedience, marching and window breaking. Just three years after Michael Brown’s death by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, the city is once again the center of racial division in America. The details of the case did not affect the rioters. The facts of the 2011 shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith, 24, does not matter to the participants of the civil unrest. I had a speaking engagement in the Saint Louis area the afternoon of the verdict. I knew there would be trouble and even warned my attendees to be careful going home. But...

Finally we have a president who is pursuing results rather than promoting deceitful ideologies with other aspiring-dictator friends around the world. Just as a lot of people are talking about today, I had anxiously awaited our president’s address before the UN. And my first response is absolutely that the loudest (but NOT the largest) portion of our nation doesn’t deserve to have this man at the helm. Trump and his supporters, as I often reiterate, are currently being ‘punished’ by the left for being where we are. But, regardless, Donald Trump is doing the presidency as he has done everything...

BERLIN — Americans can be forgiven for thinking Germany has already successfully thwarted Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Deutsch version of the right-wing populist movements pounding on the gates of Europe. When the overtly racist AfD’s numbers sank in the polls in March, observers across the West felt relieved to know that the European Union’s backbone and strongest advocate would not fall to the far right. Germans, however, feel little such relief. In fact, many are worried sick about the virtual certainty of a far-right party’s entrance to Parliament. That’s because even a small AfD presence in the Bundestag could...

Anti-fascist activists, or “antifa,” increasingly mobilized in the wake of President Trump’s election, are unapologetic about what they describe as the necessary use of violence to combat authoritarianism. While both experts on the movement and activists within it emphasize that not everyone who participates in anti-fascist activism engages in violence, they say the use of force is intrinsic to their political philosophy. “The justification [of the use of violence] is that Nazi ideology at its very core is founded on violence and on wielding power by any means,” said Mike Isaacson, who is one of the founders of Smash Racism...

Breakdown of the Connections Between The Working Family Party, SEIU, ACORN, The New Party, The DNC, Democratic Socialists of America, Tides, George Soros and The Obama Administration Patrick Gaspard, the current executive director of the DNC, former director of Obama’s Office of Political Affairs, was an organizer for the New Party, the executive vice president of the SEIU Local 1199, political director for Bertha Lewis the former president of ACORN and a co-chair of the Working Families Party. The New Party’s influential Chicago chapter began to formed in January 1995. Its members consisted mainly of individuals from ACORN, SEIU and...

On June 2, 2011, Judicial Watch released documents that show the Obama FCC’s collusion with a radical leftist organization to seize control over the Internet. This investigation caught the eye of congressional leaders, and now it appears a congressional probe of the matter is in the offing. ... The documents we uncovered show that the Obama FCC was deeply involved in discussions with the radical leftist organization Free Press in the run up to the December 2010 FCC vote. How deep? Free Press reached out to the FCC to invite FCC Commissioner Michael Copps to write an op-ed for the...

“I have a dream … where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers,” stated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Aug. 28, 1963, at the Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr., attended Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, Georgia, 1942-1944. Booker T. Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, wrote in Up From Slavery (1901): “I learned this lesson from General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, and resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what...

If you wondered about the deplorable state of American mis-education, all you have to do is look at the historical revisionist indoctrination in the textbooks, the classroom-forced Islamization of students, the Common Core standards that are dumbing down students across the board, and the Bolshevik-style cultural purge of Civil War monuments and heroes that are taking place around the country with the full approval and instigation from academia, the MSM, politicians, the current administration, and American citizens. Identity politics is the new front to fight and change the face of America forever into the Bolshevik state that the socialist Democrats...

Leftists like British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have long had warm words for Venezuela's chavistas. But as famine has racked the country and President Nicholás Maduro has turned dictatorial, those words are coming back to bite them. PAMPLONA, SPAIN—An inspiration, a hero: these are the words leftists in Europe lavished on the late Hugo Chavez for his “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. For British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and left-wing parties like Syriza and Podemos in southern Europe, Chavez’s ascendance was long the clearest challenge to inequality in Latin America, neoliberalism in Washington, and austerity at home. Today, it's a decidedly...

The Democratic National Committee is jumping into the ongoing waves of protests that have followed Saturday’s events in Charlottesville, launching a #RiseAndOrganize campaign to direct activists toward electoral politics. “In addition to calling on Republicans to denounce Trump, the next step is getting people to commit to vote,” explained DNC chief executive Jess O’Connell. “This is a galvanizing moment.” The DNC has spent weeks on a “Resistance Summer” campaign, one of several simultaneous national efforts to galvanize protesters and get them working on achievable political wins. The #RiseAndOrganize campaign, explained O’Connell, would involve Democrats finding the best opportunities to grill...

It turns out last weekend’s violent white-power protest in Virginia was spurred in part by an ex-con and one-time Silicon Valley resident who’s about to bring his bare-knuckled activism back to the Bay Area. Nathan Damigo is not a techie. But the former Marine infantryman and convicted armed robber who founded the Oakdale-based white-nationalist group Identity Evropa grew up and went to school in San Jose before following a path into alt-right power politics. Damigo, who made the news after he was arrested for punching a woman in the face during the so-called “Battle for Berkeley” on April 15, now...

FULL TITLE: Deadly 'super heatwaves' of 55°C will sweep across the US east coast, China, India, South America and Europe if global warming goes unchecked. This summer, a heatwave nicknamed 'Lucifer' has swept across Europe, with temperatures reaching 44°C (111°F). But a new study suggests that things could get much worse, with a bout of 'super-heatwaves' reaching 55°C (121°F) predicted to hit several areas if global temperatures rise by just 4°C (39°F). Experts say that these heatwaves will be particularly humid, and could leave more people vulnerable to health risks, including sun stroke and hypothermia. As a result, if global...

In what should be Democrats' strongest moment since November, a series of emotional and racially charged clashes are forcing the party to once again confront the problem that has plagued it for a year: How to incorporate the supporters of Bernie Sanders. The Vermont independent senator himself is winning battles over the direction of the Democratic Party. He has emerged as a messaging leader on health care, appeared on a "unity tour" with the party's new chairman and helped craft a populist economic agenda for the midterm elections. Many Democrats even concede the possibility that Sanders could enter the 2020...

Concern about the political effects of a deeply unpopular county pop tax — on top of recent state and city tax increases — on Thursday hung over the first day of Cook County Democrats' endorsement session for next year's primary election. Northwest Side Ald. Nicholas Sposato, 38th, said he expects some backlash against the pop tax "down the road in the election next year." People complaining to him about the tax "are blaming the Democrats," he said, adding that the income tax increase would compound the problem. Democrats last month overrode Gov. Bruce Rauner's veto of a state income tax...

... There are lots of reasons the partisan division has become so lopsided in favor of the GOP. The Democrats and their friends in the government departments of elite universities and on the editorial desk at the New York Times will say it's because the legislative district maps are drawn unfairly, because the votes of non-whites are suppressed in the South and in rural areas, and just about any other excuse they can think of to suggest the Republicans are cheating. In truth, the voters just aren't buying any more what the Democrats have to sell. The Democrats, from FDR...

When Democrats think about their party’s problems on the political map, they tend to think of President Trump’s ability to win the White House despite losing the popular vote and Republicans’ potent efforts to gerrymander congressional districts. But their problems extend beyond the Electoral College and the House: The Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913. Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty...

Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London, has blamed the turmoil in Venezuela on Hugo Chávez’s unwillingness to execute “oligarchs” after he came to power. ... “One of the things that Chávez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. There was about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela,” Livingstone told Talk Radio. “He allowed them to live, to carry on. I suspect a lot of them are using their power and control over imports and exports to make it difficult and to undermine Maduro.”