Free Republic

Emmanuel Macron has hacked away at civil liberties, with heightened police repression and ministers promising to root out “Islamo-leftism.” Marine Le Pen would be much worse — she’ll wage all-out war on France’s democratic institutions. Spirits were low last Tuesday at the Dorothy, a café and community space in Paris named after Catholic American labor activist Dorothy Day. Two days earlier, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing France Insoumise, had finished third in the first round of France’s presidential election, a little over 400,000 votes shy of qualifying for the runoff. The reality was sinking in that on April 24,...

Mattox, whose job as program director included inviting speakers to the CI, realized he could run an experiment — a kind of stress test of academic freedom at the institutes — to see how much influence Beijing really had over their programs. To do so, he invited James Millward, a respected historian of Central Asian history, to give a lecture at NMSU sponsored by the CI. (NMSU didn’t respond to requests for comment about most of the details in this story.) Over the past decade, Millward had become academia’s most outspoken critic of the CCP’s treatment of Uyghurs, a Muslim...

French Nationalist Marine Le Pen has been gaining in popularity since her defeat in 2017, where she lost by a whopping 33% margin to globalist Emmanuel Macron.While Macron is still projected to win in recent polling, he is projected to win by a much smaller margin than in 2017.Le Pen faces a unique challenge in this election. She had to face off against a candidate to her right in the first round of elections; both candidates viciously attacked each other while campaigning. Her opponent, who endorsed Le Pen last week, only got 7% of the vote in the first round...

It was a tumultuous news cycle this week, with scores of candidates to choose from for the week’s top knucklehead. Our Commander-in-Chief allowed himself to be manhandled by the Easter Bunny, and his lady in waiting, Vice-President Kamala Harris, waxed poetic about how exciting space is. Yet neither of those options even receive an honorable mention this week. Ultimately, we could not ignore the imbecilic decision of former Fox News host Chris Wallace, whose defection to CNN has been looking worse with every passing day. This week’s announcement that CNN+ is closing its doors less than a month after they...

It is Earth Day 2022 — always falling on Lenin’s birthday, amusingly enough — the official theme of which this year is Invest In Our Planet™. As with every previous Earth Day, we will be bombarded with innumerable web sites both infantile and mendacious, crude propaganda exercises, myriad pleas for networking, virtue signaling as a central dynamic, mindless recommendations for localism and other useless, wasteful, and environmentally destructive silliness. And — of course — there will be the usual shameless groveling by a long queue of spineless corporate officials and public relations gasbags desperate to advertise their environmental bona fides...

The 2020 Election was the largest election steal in US history. It was a mess. But with all the theft, not one single complaint came from one party – the Democrats. In fact, all the Democrats have done is block and attack anyone who brings up election fraud and then play the victim when they get caught. Democrats from the beginning have not had one material complaint about the 2020 Election. This along with their other actions indicates obvious guilt. We’ve seen Democrats attack any legitimate efforts to uncover 2020 Election fraud. They’ve blocked doors to counting rooms and forcefully...

he Ukrainian military claimed on Saturday that it destroyed a Russian command post in the southern region of Kherson, which has been largely under Russian control since the early days of the war.

The United States is in the worst shape it has been in a generation. What has happened since Joe Biden took over is frightening. It’s really bad. President Trump summed up the horrific state of the United States today – leader Biden is ‘taking orders from the Easter bunny”: Trump on Joe Biden: "We have a President that shakes hands with air and is taking orders from the Easter Bunny." This is true. Last week Biden was being bossed around by the Easter Bunny on the White House lawn. It was a disgrace and a disaster. Biden also was at...

Europe has an energy crisis. Factories are halting operations in the face of soaring energy prices; families are paying 50% more for heating (or opting to freeze in their homes), and Europe as a whole continues to destabilize its political position by making itself dependent on Russia for natural gas. Europe shows what happens when you adopt policies based on false ideas—myths about energy that all but guarantee high prices, power blackouts, and a crashing economy. Here are 6 of them: Myth 1. The world is transitioning to solar, wind and batteries Myth 2. Solar and wind are the best...

The Atlantic magazine has come up with a creative but laughable way to defend the extreme doxxing by Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz, who once was a staff writer at their periodical. Their tactic is to broaden the definition of "doxxing" to make it fluid enough to serve the purposes of liberals. Therefore, according to the Atlantic's semantics game, what the Libs of Tik Tok did by presenting unedited videos uploaded by liberals to the very public TikTok platform was somehow "doxxing;" but when Lorenz exposed the name and other personal information of the creator of Libs of TikTok that...

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson on Sunday became the latest Republican to publicly toy with the idea of running for president in 2024 -- potentially setting up a fierce battle within the GOP if Donald Trump attempts another White House bid. 'I’m not ruling it out. That’s something that is a consideration, an option,' Hutchinson told Fox News of a possible presidential campaign. 'I’m certainly not ruling it out, because this is too critical a time for our nation and it’s a defining moment and I want to not only engage the debate now but keep my options open down the...

Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is taking a major legal step to ban the use of Dominion voting machines in Arizona’s 2022 election. On Friday, Lake announced that she has filed an injunction with a federal court to prohibit electronic voting machines in the Grand Canyon State ahead of the midterms.

If record-high food prices weren’t enough. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has choked off the world of sunflower oil supply, forcing the largest supermarket in the UK to begin rationing. The Guardian reports that Tesco, with more than 4,000 retail stores, placed buying limits of three cooking oil bottles per customer. It follows Waitrose and Morrisons, other supermarket chains that set limits of just two per customer. The UK’s biggest retailer is experiencing sourcing issues with cooking oil, especially sunflower oil, which much of it comes from Ukraine. As retailers panic about sourcing edible oils, it has driven retail cooking oil prices...

A detailed list of the destroyed and captured vehicles and equipment of both sides can be seen below. This list is constantly updated as additional footage becomes available.

When Russian troops first streamed across the Belarusian border into Ukraine for what they had assumed would be a lightning assault on Kyiv, they were intending to rely on the region’s extensive rail network for supplies and reinforcements. The Russians hadn’t taken into account the railway saboteurs of Belarus. Starting in the earliest days of the invasion in February, a clandestine network of railway workers, hackers and dissident security forces went into action to disable or disrupt the railway links connecting Russia to Ukraine through Belarus, wreaking havoc on Russian supply lines.

It warrants mention that Rep. Greene is currently facing the most ridiculous legal challenge imaginable in an effort to kick her off the ballot in her district. This is modern liberalism’s way. It refuses engagement on philosophies, platforms, and policies, as eventually even it grows tired of the lies necessary to portray failure as truth. Instead, it embraces Alinsky by relentlessly assaulting the individual. Rep. Greene has no inclination to back down. The standard cliché about Marjorie Taylor Greene is that she is both dumb and bonkers. While she can and does produce enough “She said what?” moments to make...

The famous 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' painting, which hung in the White House from the 1970s to 2014, is coming up for auction next month, when it is estimated to fetch about $20million. The 1851 oil painting is one of three versions painted by Emanuel Leutze of the man who was to be the first U.S. president leading troops during a key moment of the American revolution. Only two survive. The first version was destroyed during a World War Two air raid in Germany, said American Art specialist Paige Kestenman at Christie's New York. 'The second is the monumental work...

David Zaslav had been CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery for all of a few hours when he learned he had a problem. On April 11, the day his newly merged company began trading on Nasdaq, Zaslav greeted New York employees with pasta and ice cream bars, delivering an impromptu rallying cry to his new charges. He was on his way to Washington, next stop on the coronation tour, when a call came in. His team had just gotten its first look at data from CNN+, the much-promoted subscription streaming service started two weeks before, and the news was grim. Fewer...

First, to take care of some business I did send Jim some $$ for posting a vanity. I haven’t posted much recently for various reasons but I read FR daily to keep up and continue to be a supporter both personally and financially. I feel compelled to post about an event that happened here in North Texas last Wednesday. It was put to me that a group of veterans was going to escort a few Medal of Honor winners from DFW to Gainesville for some events over the upcoming week. I was off so I figured I would ride along....

First Lady Jill Biden was against choosing Kamala Harris as her husband Joe Biden’s running mate after she attacked him during a primary debate, according to an upcoming new book. The first lady’s vexations were revealed in a bombshell new book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns titled “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” due to be released in May.