Free Republic

Billionaire Peter Thiel stunned a largely liberal audience Tuesday at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival with a warning that democratic socialists are taking over the Democratic Party. During a panel discussion about the direction of humanity, Thiel lamented the cultural, technological and economic “stagnation” that has taken place in recent years, something he considered to be “very destabilizing” in the long term. He argued that the “haywire” effects of that stagnation trickled into politics. “My generation was the first one where things felt really stuck,” Thiel said. “I think millennials are doing less well than their boomer parents. It’s even...

Rep. Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent, is facing her most serious primary challenge yet from lawyer and PhD student Melat Kiros on Tuesday. Melat Kiros was born in 1997, the year her representative in the U.S. House, Democrat Diana DeGette, took office. On Tuesday, Kiros hopes to unseat her. The next frontier of the fight for the Democratic Party is in Denver, where DeGette, a 15-term incumbent and longtime progressive, is facing her most serious primary challenge yet from Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist and first-time candidate. Democrats’ widespread dissatisfaction and anger with their party leadership and a push for...

I used to love New York City. You could go there and walk around, unmolested, and enjoy the sights and sounds the city had to offer. Now, the aroma of urine and weed permeates the streets like a poorly ventilated cigar bar on its busiest night. There is no real punishment for crimes short of murder. Walk into a Duane Reade, a pharmacy and convenience store chain owned by Walgreens up there, and you will see less security than in a bank. As leftists insist, “People need to steal to feed their families,” you can’t help but notice that the...

Vandals scrawled swastikas and Hitler graffiti on multiple homes and Jewish religious sites across Queens in an antisemitic spree on Monday – including a synagogue started by refugees fleeing the Holocaust. At least four people spray painted swastikas in red and black on the sides of at least five locations across the world’s borough, according to City Council Speaker’s Office and law enforcement sources. The rabbi for Congregation Machane Chodosh in Forest Hills, which was hit by the hateful graffiti, called it “very upsetting” and noted the synagogue was actually formed by German-Jewish refugees who reached the Big Apple to...

Last month, activists packed the Chicago Teachers Union Center for the annual conference of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression (NAARPR). Attendees gathered to discuss fighting ICE and confronting the Trump administration. Despite NAARPR’s relative obscurity—it was founded in 1973 to agitate for the release of Angela Davis and has since become a catch-all activist organization—the group’s conference featured several high-profile speakers, including Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who claimed to have inherited a “white supremacist system.” The event was hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union, one of Johnson’s most aggressive backers. Johnson’s appearance, along with that of several...

For conservatives and Republicans pouring over Tuesday's election returns looking for anything – no matter how small – to be happy about, take heart: the commie who wanted to be mayor of Minneapolis lost his race, coming in second to the incumbent mayor, Jacob Frey. Omar Fateh, a sitting Minnesota state senator who's been called the "Mamdani of Minneapolis," was a disaster of candidate, even by Minnesota standards. An avowed Democratic Socialist who's officially a member of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Fateh, a Muslim, embraced a series of radically leftist policies that painted a picture of a candidate looking to...

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, defended his politics in a Monday interview in response to President Trump repeatedly labeling him a “communist.” CNN’s Erin Burnett played a compilation of clips of Trump calling Mamdani a communist and asked Mamdani directly, “Are you?” “No. I’m a democratic socialist,” Mamdani said. “I’ve said that time and again.” Mamdani said it reveals something about the state of American politics that Trump is dissatisfied with amplifying Mamdani’s true identity of “democratic socialist” and instead continues to call him a communist. “I think it reflects the fact that… whereas...

The ‘House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party’ was in session when a Code Pink activist disrupted it by holding up a sign reading, “China Is Not Our Enemy.” “The United States needs collaboration, not competition, with China,” she insisted. Collaboration was the correct term. While most people stopped paying attention to Code Pink in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the leftist anti-war group never went away, but beyond the backing for Venezuela, Iran and the other usual terror states, it’s become a vocal defender of China. The level of collaboration between Code Pink and China is unusual...

AOC says she won’t be attending Trump inauguration because she doesn’t celebrate rapists

The next acting mayor of New York City — if federally indicted Eric Adams were to step down — would be Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a lefty Democrat who is often critical of cops and once ran a failed campaign for governor. Williams, a self-described activist-politician who began his tenure as public advocate in 2019, has held elected office since 2010 when he first served on the City Council. The 48-year-old Brooklynite, who lives on an Army base, has pushed for numerous liberal causes during his nearly 15-year career in public service.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday said that former President Trump should “tone it down” in an interview on MSNBC, following a post on X by Trump that blamed Democratic rhetoric for political violence. “I would suggest to Donald Trump: tone it down. Let’s have a debate on issues, let’s have honest disagreements, but don’t start calling people terrible names or suggesting that people are communists,” Sanders said in the interview. In Trump’s post on Monday, he wrote,” Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” Trump’s post came after an apparent...

AOC said some Israel criticism has crossed into antisemitism in conversation with Jewish expertsThe Democratic Socialists of America on Wednesday pulled their conditional endorsement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for reelection after she hosted an online panel discussion with two leading Jewish experts on antisemitism. Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, acknowledged in a June livestream with Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and Stacy Burdett, a former senior executive at the Anti-Defamation League, that there had been instances where criticism of Israel had crossed the line into the spectrum of antisemitism. The DSA’s national political...

David Gilbert, a founding member of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society and member of the Weather Underground, sits in a maximum-security prison in upper state New York in the Wende Correctional Facility. He is serving a, 75 years to life, sentence for being a member of the Weather Underground group who along with members of the Black Liberation Army, robbed a Brink's truck on October 20, 1981. Two Nyack, NY police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady and Brinks guard Peter Paige were murdered during the robbery. Prison has apparently not mellowed Gilbert. He has a book out...

Not that we needed any further confirmation of Bernie Sanders's deep-seated contempt for the United States and its heritage, but a monumentally significant tweet that he sent out on Tuesday made it crystal clear that his political agenda has nothing whatsoever to do with defending the Constitution of the United States. Rather, it is entirely about gaining limitless power and dominance over the lives, the actions, and even the private thoughts of every living American. In a manner reminiscent of Barack Obama's pledge to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” during his presidency, Sanders tweeted: “Our campaign is not...

(PHNOM PENH, Cambodia) — Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians, died Sunday, the country’s U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal said. He was 93. Nuon Chea was known as Brother No. 2, the right-hand man of Pol Pot, the leader of the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The group’s fanatical efforts to realize a utopian society led to the death of some 1.7 million people — more than a quarter of the country’s population at the time — from starvation, disease, overwork and executions. Researchers believe Nuon Chea was...

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) has joined the long list of Democrats who’ve entered the 2020 presidential race. “I’m running for President to build a strong and safe country, create the jobs of the future, and elect leaders we can be proud of,” the former Marine said on Twitter Monday morning. "I'm running because we have to beat Donald Trump, and I want us to beat Donald Trump because I love this country. We've never been a country that gets everything right. But we're a country that, at our best, thinks that we might," he said in his video announcement. “Decades...

NYU student Senator-at-Large Rose Asaf tweeted that student senators would propose a Boycott, Divest, and Sanction resolution (BDS) against the state of Israel at the university senate meeting on Nov. 1. This proposal comes on the heels of a resolution, passed last semester, which urged the university to “review its nondiscrimination policies for Palestinian, Middle Eastern, and other affected students traveling to the State of Israel and attending NYU Tel Aviv,” according to NYU Local. The final vote on the resolution is scheduled for Dec. 6 and votes will be cast anonymously, with only NYU students permitted to attend. During...

Until just weeks ago, Hillary Clinton was the face of the Democratic Party. She was quoted ad nauseam in liberal publications, appeared regularly on MSM shows and newscasts, and, as the last Democratic nominee for president, was held up as a righteous woman wronged by the horribly wrong system (Oh, America!) But all that’s changed. The new face of the Democratic Party is a 28-year-old former bartender. On June 26, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocked off the No. 4 Democrat in the House in a primary in New York’s 14th Congressional District, defeating Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley. Since then, she’s been...

Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., tried to ease the tensions between himself and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the insurgent Democrat who defeated the 10-term congressman in last month’s primary, after she bashed the incumbent last week for not getting his name off the ballot in the general election. “I don't want to take anything away from her win,” Crowley said Sunday on CBS News’ “Face The Nation.” “I did not do as I preached. I didn't remind folks of my accomplishments. I just took that for granted I think.” Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter on Thursday accusing Crowley of purposely staying in the race,...

Mayor de Blasio is a big fan of presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders — because the Vermont senator is a proud “Democratic socialist.” [Snip] De Blasio was quick to correct CNN’s Carol Costello after she called Sanders a “socialist,” telling her the senator is a “Democratic socialist.” “I think there’s a lot to like in that title,” he gushed.