Free Republic

At a recycling plant on the outskirts of Kyiv, a short drive from the site of a helicopter crash that killed 14 people (including Ukraine’s interior minister) a week earlier, a group of sorters, most of them middle-aged women, are ripping apart hundreds of Russian books. The cover of Tolstoy’s “Childhood, Boyhood and Youth”, days away from being reborn as a coffee-cup sleeve or an egg carton, goes into one garbage bag. The novel’s pages, destined to end up as paper for other books, in Ukrainian, or as cheap toilet-paper, go into another. Next comes a selection of poems by...

At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week, a European Union official predicted to a U.S. congressman that the U.S. would “soon” enact laws on “illegal hate speech” similar to those in the EU. Věra Jourová, the vice president of values and transparency for the European Commission, tapped Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton on the arm and laughed as she made the prediction. It came as she discussed whether AI is capable of moderating online hate speech. “For hate speech, well, we need the people who understand the language and the case law in the country, because what...

Seven militants have been arrested and charged with domestic terrorism following a deadly shootout with law enforcement at their "autonomous zone" in a wooded area south of Atlanta. They are all from out of state. On Wednesday morning, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies conducted a raid on the so-called autonomous zone at the site of the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Since June 2021, Antifa and other far-left extremists from across the US have occupied the area to prevent the construction of what they call a "cop city." The GBI says a Georgia State...

Progressive Democrats in Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.), are urging the White House to marshal all available organs of the regulatory state to impose rent control on the entire country. A letter authored by the two, and signed by 50 members of Congress, proposes seven actions of varying radicalism and legality that President Joe Biden could take to cap rent increases. "We urge your Administration to pursue all possible strategies to end corporate price gouging in the real estate sector," reads the January 9 letter to Biden. "Simply put, the rent is too...

U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday that the fight against climate change will only succeed if people around the world take on a wartime footing and accelerate action to curb carbon emissions. When asked if the world will meet the shared goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 Celsius by 2032, he said that target won’t be met given the current amount of effort being made. "We can’t hit 1.5," he said. "We’re not on track to do it now, and it’s not clear, absolutely clear that we will...

Texas Democrat Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a bill to combat "White supremacy" by criminalizing certain forms of hate speech. After the ill-fated attempt by the Biden administration to monitor Americans' speech online, Jackson Lee introduced the Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023 to assign criminal punishment for certain forms of hate speech. The bill's language is broad and could result in people facing criminal charges for sharing hateful content, including on social media.

The green energy group behind a study cited in Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr.'s call to ban gas stoves has partnered with the Chinese government to implement an "economy-wide transformation" away from oil and gas. Colorado-based nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, which published the December study that attributes 13 percent of U.S. childhood asthma cases to gas-stove use, is hardly staffed by an objective group of scientists. The organization is demanding "systemic change and economy-wide transformation" to address a climate crisis it says we must go to great lengths to avoid. In 2013, for example, the Rocky Mountain Institute...

It may be MLK Day, but Democrats aren’t here for all that “content of character” stuff. Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, long in the running for being the vapidest member of Congress (oops, did I just commit a crime?), has introduced legislation that could make political criticism by white people against minorities a federal crime. In what can only be called a convoluted mess, the bill proposes that a white person who “vilifies” any non-white person and has their words end up on social media, accessible by “persons who are predisposed to engaging in any action in furtherance of a white...

The Minnesota Legislature is on a roll.Of course, most politicians are embarrassing, so I shouldn’t be too shocked at how stupid and morally vacuous they can be. But still, I keep hoping that there are limits, and I keep getting disappointed.As I was perusing my local paper, the Star Tribune, I ran across this Op/Ed arguing that schools should provide menstrual products to students.I don’t have a problem with that. I have never been a teenage girl, but I can imagine the embarrassment of needing menstrual products and not happening to have one. While I usually scoff at the use...

(January 11, 2023 / JNS) The Israeli left has taken a page from the book of its American friends and denounced as “anti-democratic” the platform of their political adversaries. As in the U.S., the steps proposed by the right are attacked as full-on fascism. Nowhere is this more the case than regarding the proposal to alter the Israeli Supreme Court’s jurisdiction and method of choosing justices. And nowhere could the hysteria be more ridiculous. Israel has a unicameral legislature and no written constitution. Such a government structure is hardly unique, and in fact, the country that gave birth to the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A longtime executive for Donald Trump is expected to be sent to New York's notorious Rikers Island jail after being sentenced on Tuesday for helping engineer a 15-year tax fraud scheme at the former president's real estate company. Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's former chief financial officer, pleaded guilty in August, admitting that from 2005 to 2017 he and other executives received bonuses and perks that saved the company and themselves money. Those days will probably not be easy for Weisselberg, 75, at a jail known for violence, drugs and corruption. Nineteen inmates there died last...

Journalist Paul Sperry is not going quietly into the night — as we reported, he’s been calling out the effort by Rep. Adam Schiff’s office to silence him, to get him suspended from Twitter as well as to shut down his reporting about things that Schiff didn’t want to be exposed. In articles for RealClearInvestigations, I outed his anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with one of Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment...

Issa Basil Bandak (عيسى باسل البندك; 1891 – May 1984) and his 'Sawt al- Sha'b:* Promoted Nationalism over Religion.* Defended anti-Christian Muslim 'YMMA' with propaganda.* Bandak promoted Muslims' rights even when on the expense of Christians'.* In 1933 he went to Paris to 'receive instructions from a group of Germans and Arabs on conducting Nazi propaganda in Palestine.* In 1948, allied himself with Hitler's ally, the infamous Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini.Haiduc-Dale, N. (2013). Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917-1948. United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press.p.81:...the Islamic reform movement founded by figures such as Jamal al- Din al-...

The World Economic Forum has joined the cancel campaign against Twitter to protest the new free-speech policy on the platform, and is urging users to download Chinese state-controlled social media apps instead. Twitter is noticeably absent from the entities listed on the WEF’s “How to follow Davos 2023” social media pamphlet, and that appears to be no accident. The Dossier reports: To stay up to speed with all that is happening within the invite-only doors of the ruling class confab, the WEF recommends following along through a handful of social media sites. They include the U.S.-based narrative-compliant Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram,...

Russia detained at least 20,467 people for political reasons in 2022, according to end-of-year statistics published last week by OVD-Info, one of Russia’s leading independent human rights watchdogs. At least 19,478 of those were detained for speaking out against Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Other detentions occured at ecological and workers’ rights protests and protests against a November law banning “LGBT propaganda.” Women accounted for nearly 45% of all those detained for expressing an anti-war position, according to the watchdog. Russia passed a total of 22 new repressive laws in 2022, and there were just 29 days of the year...

VOLOGDA, Russia -- Shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his country’s military into Ukraine in late February, Vladimir Rumyantsev began posting and even broadcasting news from independent media about the invasion from his apartment, highlighting many of the atrocities Russian troops were alleged to have committed. Rumyantsev, who lives in Vologda some 500 kilometers north of Moscow, says he is no admirer of Putin or his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. He says he began his posts and broadcasts because Russians needed independent information -- much of which contradicts the official narrative -- “to evaluate the actions of the authorities.”...

The latest installment of the “Twitter Files” in which Elon Musk is releasing deep-seeded documents from executives at Twitter before he accumulated the company is quite juicy. The sixth installment of the expose series reveals that between January of 2020 and November of 2022, over 150 emails were exchanged between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth. In a multi-part series of tweets, journalist Matt Taibbi goes into further detail. One tweet reads: “The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded...

A lawyer who works at a firm involved in a litigation against MSG Entertainment has been booted from a Radio City Music Hall in New York after she was targeted using facial recognition. Kelly Conlon, 44, was chaperoning her nine-year-old daughter's Girl Scout troop to see the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular last month when she was flagged and asked to leave the venue. The girl scout mother was then forced to spend 90 minutes wandering around outside in the rain while her daughter watched the show despite holding a ticket, the New York Post reported. Madison Square Garden CEO James Dolan...

Adam Schiff popped up on CNN’s “State of The Union” show Sunday morning to issue barely veiled threats to Elon Musk for trying to restore free speech on Twitter. Ostensibly, the lame-duck chairman of the House Intelligence Committee joined Jake Tapper to crow about expected charges against Donald Trump on Monday from his January 6 star chamber. But Schiff moved on to complain about the “big problem right now with social media companies and their failure to moderate content and the explosion of hate on Twitter, the banning of journalists on Twitter.” Then he suggested ominously that Twitter and social...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed officials in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania, asking for communications with or involving former President Donald Trump, his campaign aides and a list of allies involved in his efforts to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The requests, issued to Milwaukee and Dane counties in Wisconsin; Wayne County, Michigan; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, are the first known subpoenas by Smith, who was named special counsel last month by Attorney General Merrick Garland. The subpoenas, first reported by The Washington Post, are the clearest indication...