Free Republic

So we are to imagine that those who objected to Biden's having stolen the election are responsible for the violence at the Capitol? And that, going forward, any public official who questions Biden's win should be removed from office, and that any corporate leader who objects should be fired? All this when the truth is that Trump in all likelihood won the election. It is the perfect example of Orwellian speech. In his classic essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell spoke of the condition where "words and meaning have almost parted company." If that "almost" is a measure of...

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be...

On the heels of the breach of the U.S. Capitol, Big Tech companies have swiftly censored the President, the emerging social media platform Parler was effectively shut down, and there are growing calls for no-fly lists. Does the assault on the Capitol warrant such a response? “We’re living in a gigantic lie that is reminiscent of the Reichstag fire,” argues talk show host Dennis Prager, founder of Prager University. This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Imagine the uproar had the Republicans given a platform to a violence-inciting, terror-endorsing, right-wing bigot at their 2020 convention. Joe Biden never stops casting President Trump and his supporters as Nazi sympathizers. After years of falsely accusing Trump of praising Nazis who showed up in Charlottesville, he re-emphasized the point by running a campaign ad featuring Nazi imagery. Now he's at it again, falsely blaming Trump for inciting extremist violence, and accusing Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley of behaving like Nazis. Biden condemned the Capitol invaders as “a bunch of thugs, insurrectionists, antisemites” (plenty of evidence supports this claim),...

When O'Brien, the interrogator from the Thought Police in Orwell's 1984, holds up four fingers and asks Winston Smith, an imprisoned member of the underground opposition, how many he sees, poor Winston persists in saying he sees four. But that is not what O'Brien wants to hear. "No, Winston, you are insane. There are five fingers." The interrogations continue until Winston, wracked with pain and exhaustion and persuaded of his insanity, agrees finally through his tears that he was lying to himself, that he had always been lying to himself, and admitted that he saw five fingers. He understood that...

It’s interesting to watch the Democrats constantly making historical analogies to Naziism because, at every attempt, they display their astounding ignorance of history. At his press conference on July 8, Joe Biden offered a rather bizarre interpretation of history, in which he likened Ted Cruz and his challenge to some electoral votes to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the “Big Lie.” Biden illustrated his point by referring to the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 in which, he said, “250 or 2,500 people” were killed. And yet Joseph Goebbels inflated the number to 25,000, even 250,000, thus perpetrating...

BEIJING - President Xi Jinping is asking former CEO Howard Schultz of Starbucks to help repair U.S.-Chinese relations that have plunged to their lowest level in decades amid a tariff war and tension over technology and security. A letter from Xi to Schultz reported Friday by the official Xinhua News Agency was a rare direct communication from China’s paramount leader to a foreign business figure. Schultz opened Starbucks’ first China outlet in 1999 and is a frequent visitor. Xinhua gave no indication whether the letter reflected an initiative to ask American corporate leaders to help change policy after President-elect Joe...

WARSAW, Poland, January 14, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The prime minister of Poland has delivered a blistering denunciation of Big Tech censorship, following the recent ban of President Donald Trump and others by virtually all social media giants. On Tuesday afternoon, Mateusz Morawiecki, 52, published a post defending internet freedom in both Polish and English on Facebook. He said that Poles are “so attached to freedom because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it.” “For close to 50 years we lived in a country in which censorship was practiced, in which Big Brother told us how...

Leftists love to throw around the word “fascist,” although half the time they don’t appear to even know what it means. Usually, it’s just a way of insulting someone unenlightened enough to disagree with them. At best, they’re calling the person a big meanie, an authoritarian. But that’s not exactly (or at least not entirely) what a “fascist” is. Perhaps, for our leftist friends, a brief primer is in order. Fascism is a political and economic system that arose in Europe following World War I. It has three primary characteristics: extreme nationalism, authoritarianism, and a state-run economy. Indeed, in terms...

We are frighteningly headed to playing out a real life scenario of the classic Star Trek episode when Kirk and company fall into the middle of a war between the Yangs and the Coms. It is uncanny how today's events are mirroring the takeover of the United States by communist infiltration. We conservatives who actually study history know full well what the communist and Nazi regimes did to acquire power. It all starts with the media and control over the information medium. I will never forget the only thing I remember from my "Introduction to Mass Media" class in college....

A former Trump worker allegedly lost his job simply because a pro sports league refused to work with a company that would employ Trump workers. Dawson Buchanan, a young Trump supporter, left a very disturbing thread on Twitter. He asserts that he was all set to begin working for a company called Private Jet Services. However, shortly before he was to begin, PJS fired him. He finally learned from the owner that PJS had a contract with the National Hockey League. When the NHL learned that PJS had hired someone who had worked for the Trump company, the NHL said...

"It Can't Happen Here" was a successful novel by Sinclair Lewis, written as a warning to Americans that their nation could easily follow the path of Weimar Germany. It Can't Happen Here chronicles the fictional devolution of America into a rightwing fascist hellhole via the election of an unscrupulous demagogue as President. Lewis, of course, wrote his book as a warning to Americans that their nation could easily follow the path of Weimar Germany where Hitler and his Brownshirts threatened and manipulated their way to power in a shamed, defeated, and angry nation. This unhappy novel was resurrected by the...

Democrats are gaslighting Trump's supporters, telling them to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. Is the Capitol siege just another hoax? Don’t get me wrong, we know it occurred. But, there is more and more evidence coming out that it was pre-planned…and not instigated by Trump supporters. There is absolutely no evidence that President Trump encouraged or fomented the violence. He has—repeatedly—talked of “peaceful” protests, and condemned lawlessness of any sort. Yet the media treats the brief, tragic, incursion as an “insurrection.” Democrats portrayed it as on par with the Night of the Long Knives. And then they voted...

The anger and frustration that the Republican base is feeling right now has been years in the making by the Democrats ongoing manipulation of voting laws and regulations culminating in the highly suspect 2020 election. Traditionally, when one’s candidate loses the election for the presidency of the United States, feelings of anger and depression arise. It is in our nature to root for our team, our player and our candidate. SNIP The Democrats committed numerous actions during their campaign that led even the most skeptical voter to conclude that Democrats had engaged in less than ethical behavior to win an...

In China, we are seeing forced televised confessions, a mass surveillance state, the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs, and what many are calling a genocide of the Uyghur people. 83 global brands, including major U.S. companies, are tied to Uyghur forced labor in China. Over in Hong Kong, 53 pro-democracy activists, lawmakers, and lawyers were arrested on Jan. 6 under the draconian national security law. Despite all this, the EU recently announced a major trade deal with China. American Thought Leaders interviews human rights activist and writer Benedict Rogers, founder of Hong Kong Watch and deputy...

"Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty." —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago COVID and the resulting restrictions on our essential freedoms have been crippling — to the economy, to education, to the psychological well-being of millions of Americans. The communist tactic so clearly depicted in books like Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and Orwell's 1984 is in play: the indoctrination of the masses by fear in order to effect the wholesale subjugation of the people. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all ruled by fear. The merest expression of disagreement with those regimes would...

The Hollywood crowd has abandoned any pretense for protecting the arts. Thus, "one Hollywood producer told PEN America that suggestions for projects critical of China aroused the fear that 'you or your company will actively be blacklisted, and they will interfere with your current or future project. *snip* Moreover, one would think that the media would be daily headlining the horrors being dealt upon China's minority in its far west, its Uighurs. After all, "the detainees, from the province of Xinjiang, are treated to a strict 're-education' program that includes what one escapee described as horrific physical abuse, including forced...

Big tech censorship is out of control and it's getting Orwellian. It happened in a hurry. The Left is, apparently, attempting to impose the complete destruction of First Amendment rights of roughly half of America’s citizens. In cases large and small, massive multinational corporations with no particular allegiance to the United States are colluding with members of the media and Democratic politicians to permanently silence dissent and cement their own power. To wit: LeeAnn Miller founded PatrioticMe, an online retailer that sells patriotic clothing items, in September of last year. The business advertised on Facebook and was quite successful from...

How much of the past year was about the actual coronavirus rather than a political weapon to damage President Trump and remove him from office? The answer is obvious. How much of the past year was about the actual coronavirus rather than a political weapon to damage President Trump and remove him from office? The answer is obvious. We have had viral pandemics before, including a seasonal influenza, without mask mandates, social distancing, business closures, travel restrictions, and hysterical media coverage. Much of the hair-on-fire reporting is over cases and deaths. As I have previously written, a positive test is...

Democrats and progressives should wipe the superior smirks off their faces. What Big Tech and Big Commerce are doing, with their banning of still-President Trump, their attacks on Republicans who supported him, their censorship of negative news about Democrats, and their shutdown of social media site Parler, smacks of collusion, censorship, anti-trust, interference with interstate commerce, and breach of contract. It is sickening to see fellow Republicans falling all over themselves, denouncing Trump as they grovel before the Democrats and liberal press. They have no principle or shame. Joe McCarthy would be so proud. The rest of the world is...