Free Republic

From Howard Zinn’s teaching assistant to an agent of a Shiite terrorist state. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. When the New York Times and the Washington Post wanted Iran explained to them, they turned to Kaveh Afrasiabi. So did at least one member of Congress who is only listed as “Congressman-1” in the FBI’s application for Afrasiabi’s arrest as a foreign agent of Iran. Afrasiabi had started out as Howard Zinn’s teaching assistant. The notorious Communist revisionist historian was the Iranian...

The Capitol Hill riot made for some colorful photos, but despite some theater had no actual effect and posed no threat to members of Congress. Unlike the time that James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders supporter, opened fire at a Congressional charity baseball game while carrying a hit list of Freedom Caucus members. The Democratic National Committee announced that Resistance Summer would begin in June. James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders volunteer, delivered by opening fire on Republicans playing baseball. Hodgkinson had spent the weeks before the shooting staring at the site of his future attack and working on his laptop. What...

Why couldn’t Congress’ private police force of 2,000 protect it from a mob of hundreds? The Capitol Police have over 2,000 sworn officers. A police force dedicated to protecting Capitol Hill has more personnel in its service than the police forces of most of the country. Congress' private cops are the 19th largest police force in the country. It’s a larger force than the police forces of Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, or Milwaukee with a massive $460 million budget. It’s the only legislative federal force in the country that is answerable exclusively to Congress. While Democrats advocated defunding the police, their...

Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services. AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place. Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe...

Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services. AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place. Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe...

Back when Parler was first taking off, I warned that its app-based dependency meant that two companies, Apple and Google, can eliminate it anytime they like. It was only a matter of time. The transition from desktops and laptops to Android and IOS devices mean that users are operating in a walled garden run by two very lefty companies. Those companies can do with the garden what they please. Those users who choose to jailbreak their devices have more options, but most don't. Conservatives can try to distribute the knowledge more widely and encourage that kind of self-empowerment. But the...

Timing in politics is rarely accidental. Certainly not on the international stage. China's massive arrests of pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong is no accident. It's perfectly timed to be overshadowed by the protests in D.C. and, more significantly, by the Communist regime's expectation that it won't have President Trump to deal with anymore and can expect a smooth ride from Beijing Biden. The crackdown isn't coincidental. Neither is the message. The People's Republic of China is taking advantage of the chaos in this country, but it's also building up to the larger crackdown in Hong Kong and against domestic and...

And added a Broken Glass Belt to the Rust Belt. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Americans have $1.3 trillion in personal savings. A study published in The Economics of Disasters and Climate Change found that the coronavirus pandemic will result in between $3.2 trillion to $4.8 trillion in GDP losses. That approaches the economic output of Japan. Much of those losses were caused by the lockdowns which could result in a 60.6% fall in GDP. Governors, most of them Democrats, destroyed...

There is a certain historical irony in the same movement that fought to give every rapist and killer the right to a free lawyer is now working to take away the right of people they don't like to be able to pay for a lawyer. But that is the basic trajectory of the Left. 1. Turn a legal right into an entitlement 2. Make the entitlement dependent on a political test rather than an objective service The steepness of the rate of descent is all the more notable when you consider that four years ago the right to an...

In March, Governor Cuomo's administration ordered nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients and prohibited even testing incoming patients for the virus. The same month that Cuomo began the process of infecting countless nursing home residents with the virus, he also began freeing thousands of criminals from prison to protect them from the virus. Over 3,000 criminals have been freed from New York State prisons to protect them from the virus, and New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio freed 1,500 criminals, and they swiftly began committing a variety of crimes, but despite the media hype claiming that prison was...

Rep. Omar asked for privacy when her father died over the summer. And that seemed fair enough since she didn't politicize his death beyond a brief Islamic social media tribute. But Omar can't stop being her own usual horrible self for very long and so she decided to blame President Trump for her father's death. "My father and over 300,000 people have lost their lives because of dangerous criminal neglect by Trump and his administration," she told MSNBC. "I agree with Clyburn that it is not enough for us just to issue subpoenas, we have to investigate and prosecute...

When should you file a lawsuit over an election? If you're a Democrat, the answer is at any time. But if you're a Republican the answer is never. Here's February, 2020. A federal judge, this week, ruled against Gov. Brian Kemp in a lawsuit filed against him in 2018, while he was still Secretary of State. According to the suit, Kemp, in his role as secretary of state, was accused of using a racially-biased methodology for removing as many as 700,000 legitimate voters from the state's voter rolls during a period between 2016 and 2018. In her conclusion, the...

Ever since ACB joined the Supreme Court, there's been a dramatic reversal of the treatment of religious worship in the coronavirus era. Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. New York was the first real pushback, but the SCOTUS majority is using it to carve out more territory for religious freedom in two cases, one involving the High Plains Harvest Church in Colorado, and the other involving a Catholic church and Orthodox synagogue in New Jersey. The Colorado case is interesting because one of the arguments involved the different treatment accorded to Black Lives Matter riots. In addition to these...

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Two of the most notorious bigots in the House of Representatives signed a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that he “eradicate anti-Muslim bigotry from Facebook”. The three-page letter signed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, as well as 28 other left-wing House members, spends a great deal of time demanding the removal of what it calls "anti-Muslim content" without ever specifically defining it. That's convenient considering Omar and Tlaib's own history of racism...

However the presidential election turns out, one thing is clear, half the country will believe that the man officially sitting in the White House is an illegitimate pretender. And that’s the way it’s been throughout this century. The crisis of presidential legitimacy really kicked into gear in 2000. Before that people might hate the president, but the opposing political party wouldn’t insist on his illegitimacy. Afterward every president has been treated as an illegitimate criminal to be opposed and driven out. Twenty years later, the Democrat strategy of presidential illegitimacy has brought the country to the brink of civil war....

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. When California store owners turned to voters to criminalize shoplifting again with Proposition 20, they never had much of a chance once Patricia Quillin threw in $2 million against them. When Quillin paid $1 million to support Proposition 16, Asian-American opponents of the proposition, which would legalize racial discrimination against them in the form of affirmative action, protested outside her husband’s job. Her husband is the CEO of Netflix. Netflix doesn’t have to worry about shoplifters...

While the Biden campaign was announcing a slate of radicals sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood to stack its foreign policy desk if it ever takes over the government, a very different sort of trip was underway in the middle east that clarified how wrong and dangerous they were. In an event that would have been inconceivable under Barack Obama, the Shillman Fellows of Reservists on Duty, an organization founded by Israeli military veterans that tours college campuses to speak about the realities of fighting terrorism, were on their way to Dubai. Dubai, as part of the United Arab Emirates, had...

1. Black Hebrew Israelites are not Jews, they are a racist and antisemitic hate group that preaches hatred of white people whose members carried out two recent murderous attacks against Jews in New York and New Jersey. They were also responsible for the ugly hate in the Covington incident even as the New York Times and Washington Post defended the racist hate group and whitewashed their ugly track record. 2. These attacks were made possibly by pressure from Democrats, including Senator Cory Booker and Senator Kamala Harris not to have the FBI monitor "black identity extremists". 3. The widespread...

Why does Hollywood get a pass on lockdowns from Cuomo and Newsom? Follow the money. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Before Thanksgiving, Los Angeles imposed a curfew and, in a shocking oversight, asked Hollywood to follow it. While the entertainment industry isn't as big a part of the local economy as it would like you to think, its producers, directors, and stars provide a disproportionate share of the capital that the Democrats politicians who run the place use to get elected...

If you like your ballot harvesting fraud, you can keep your ballot harvesting fraud. Absentee ballot drop boxes, used for the first time in 2020 in Georgia, will be in place for the January runoff as well. The State Election Board extended the emergency rule regarding drop boxes to cover the Jan. 5 runoff. It also extended the rule permitting counties to begin processing absentee ballots two weeks prior to Election Day, and actually mandated that counties begin doing so one week before the election. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says he hopes this will help reduce the backlog of...