Free Republic

Funny how the environmental objectives of the "Save the Planet from the Flying Global Warming Monster" squad and that of Marxism line up so neatly. Of course you shouldn't have personal autonomy or private property. It's bad for the 'planet'. And by the planet, we mean the red planet. So it's no surprise that The Nation, where the synergy of the red and the green meet, should roll out a story like this, "If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership." ... And give up...

LeBron James said he thinks Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey "wasn't educated on the situation at hand" when he tweeted in support of Hong Kong. James told reporters Monday that people need to be careful about what they tweet and say as there can be ramifications. "I don't want to get into a ... feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand and he spoke," James said. He added that people could have been harmed "not only financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually." LeBron tweeted later clarifying his comments saying he did not...

Students at a leading London university have been condemned as blind to reality after defending the system of Soviet Gulag labour camps where thousands perished as “compassionate” places of rehabilitation. Trans rights campaigners at Goldsmiths University described the Gulags as benign places where inmates received education, training and enjoyed the opportunity to take part in clubs, sports and theatre groups. In fact most historians agree they were a brutal network of labour camps used by Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship to incarcerate internal opponents and so-called "enemies of the state", resulting in the death of more than an estimated 1.05 million people....

Mukhtar Dzhakishev is by all accounts in miserable shape.Languishing in a “harsh” Kazakhstan prison colony that was once part of Stalin’s gulag system, he suffers from hypertension, hardened arteries and kidney disease likely triggered by a severe beating.“His life is constantly at risk,” one human-rights group warned in September, as it urged the international community to advocate on Dzakishev’s behalf.Largely unable to communicate with the outside world, the former head of Kazakhstan’s state uranium conglomerate has made one thing clear: he blames his arrest and 14-year prison term at least in part on a Canadian company’s corporate dealings.More specifically, Dzakishev...

The case was over the abduction of Dong-Shik, a South Korean who was a permanent resident of the US and had spent seven years providing aid and proselytizing to North Korean defectors. An Israeli NGO announced on Monday that a US federal court in Washington, DC has granted it a historic $330 million default award judgment against North Korea in a civil damages trial for wrongful death, torture and kidnapping. The judgment, only announced Monday, but written on April 9, included $15 million dollars each to the son and brother of Reverend Dong Shik Kim, presumed dead, as well as...

She characterized half of Trump supporters as people to “empathize with.” She characterized the other half as “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”Speaking to donors on Friday night, Hillary Clinton outlined what she sees as the two types of Trump supporters. First, there are those in the “basket of deplorables” — who include racists, xenophobes, and homophobes, and make up about “half” of Trump’s supporters, Clinton said. She called this group “irredeemable.” Second, there are the people who “don’t buy everything he says,” but want desperately to see change. She said this group was worthy of...

Remembering the Forsaken Written by Francis Slobodnik    Tuesday, 12 January 2010 18:51   A Review of the book The Forsaken, An American Tragedy In Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis     In times of social and political turmoil, it is not uncommon for men to grasp for what appear to be easy solutions. Oftentimes, these impulsive decisions can have disastrous consequences. There is nothing meritorious about change in and of itself. The virtuous person prayerfully reasons through the options before making decisions. Men with little virtue grab desperately for anything that, on the surface, appears will improve their...

Ahead of resident Obama's historic visit, Castro's Cuba is more oppressive than ever. An Afro-Cuban dissident who spent time in Fidel Castro’s gulags, Oscar Biscet is one of many people that represent the real Cuba, the people who will be hidden from sight as resident Obama visits this week. While the resident basks in the Cuban sun and in photo-ops with its heavy-handed dictator, the fate and freedom of political resisters like Biscet remains grim. Biscet is free now in technical terms, but in reality, he remains among a cohort of dissenters who still live in an invisible prison: a...

Germany said on Tuesday that Facebook, Google and Twitter have agreed to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours, a new step in the fight against rising online racism following the refugee crisis. The government has been trying to get social platforms to crack down on the rise in anti-foreigner comments in German on the web as the country struggles to cope with an influx of more than 1 million refugees this year. The new agreement makes it easier for users and anti-racism groups to report hate speech to specialist teams at the three companies, German Justice Minister...

MONTGOMERY, Alabama, October 7, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has labeled Liberty Counsel, the law firm representing and supporting Christian Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who famously went to jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, a "hate group." Pointing to evidence that Liberty Counsel supports Christian beliefs on homosexuality, SPLC placed the group on a list of "hate groups" alongside other organizations such the Ku Klux Klan, the ultra-violent New Black Panther Party, and neo-Nazi white supremacist groups. On a page explaining the "hate" designation, the SPLC include quotes by Liberty Counsel founder...

One of the dangers of the the social internet is the potential to destroy someone. We have seen it with liberals attacking conservatives over issues. But, rarely have we seen it when one group attacks itself. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today about how a person at the Brookings Institution think tank was deliberately attacked by Senator Elizabeth Warren. What’s pretty clear is that it was organized behind the scenes and launched. It wasn’t random. You might have read about thought police in science fiction. They aren’t science fiction anymore. What was his crime? Using cost-benefit analysis, Robert...

The Soviet Union may have collapsed, but its decades’ long reign of terror shall not be forgotten. The 20th century was marked by intense tragedy due to the pernicious ideologies of National Socialism and global communism that killed over 100 million people. Millions suffered and died under the tyrannical rule of both Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, respectively. While the former usually receives resounding condemnation, the latter – particularly the Soviet variant – is wholly ignored by many today. That is why it is imperative to celebrate Black Ribbon Day on August 23rd,...

A human rights activist and writer is dismayed that there are no laws that allow the imprisonment of those who state certain offensive positions, such as Bill Maher and Phil Robertson. If the United States were a "civilized country" like those in Europe, Tanya Cohen wrote for Thought Catalog, then Robertson, a reality show star on A&E's "Duck Dynasty," "would have been taken before a government Human Rights Tribunal or Human Rights Commission and given a fine or prison sentence for the hateful and bigoted comments that he made about LGBT people." Among the types of speech that should be...

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Arutz Sheva on Tuesday in time for International Holocaust Memorial Day that the battle over the Holocaust lives on—and is being waged on the field of public memory. According to Zuroff, aside from the widespread scourge of Holocaust denial, a new phenomenon has reared its head recently in eastern Europe, where there are attempts to minimize the genocidal horrors committed against the Jewish people and revise history. “This phenomenon should worry the state of Israel and the Foreign Ministry,” emphasized Zuroff. “In post-Communist eastern Europe, they’re trying...

The totalitarian impulse is all too familiar: since I represent Progress (and, of course, everyone who acts in the political realm fervently believes that he represents Progress) those who stand in my way are retrograde–evil, really–forces, that belong in the dustbin of history. Therefore, I might have to lock them up or kill them to ensure that Progress prevails. Until recently, the totalitarian impulse has been blessedly absent from American politics. Now, however, the American left has caught the totalitarian bug that infected Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and so many others. A case in point:...

When the IRS revokes tax-exempt status of a 501(c)(3) organization, the sanction is considered so severe that tax practitioners refer to it as the “death penalty.” The IRS recently gave the death penalty to the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. As reported at The Blaze, “The IRS said the group forfeited its status by promoting regularly politically charged articles written by Patrick Henry Center founder Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent.” Aldrich is a best-selling author, considered a hero or an enemy, depending on one’s view, for exposing Bill Clinton’s escapades. He’s also a friend to many constitutional conservatives....

Yesterday was a significant day in the IRS abuse scandal. The scandal evolved from being about pesky delays in IRS exemption applications to a government conniving with outside interests to put political opponents in prison. Emails obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act reveal Lois Lerner cooking up plans with Justice Department officials to talk about ways to criminally charge conservative groups that are insufficiently quiet. Larry Noble, a law professor now with the Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center , was cited in the emails as someone agitating to jail conservatives who “falsely” report on IRS forms that...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

Li Zhongying was freed from a Chinese labor camp ahead of schedule in September because, guards told her, the government was scrapping “re-education through labor”, a heavily criticized penal system created in the 1950s. Several hundred other inmates were not so lucky, she said. Like Li, they were held without trial and forced to do factory work under what she called “cruel” conditions. They remained because they were drug offenders, she told Reuters. Many of China’s re-education through labor camps, instead of being abolished in line with a ruling Communist Party announcement this month, are being turned into compulsory drug...

China is to relax its policy of restricting most couples to having only a single child, state media say. In future, families will be allowed two children if one parent is an only child, the Xinhua news agency said. The proposal follows this week's meeting of a key decision-making body of the governing Communist Party. Other reforms include the abolition of "re-education through labour" camps and moves to boost the role of the private sector in the economy. The BBC's Celia Hatton, in Beijing, says most of the changes have already been tested in parts of the country. Officials announce...