Free Republic

On this date in 1374, mayor Tile von Damm was beheaded by rebel populares in his home city of Braunschweig (Brunswick). One of northern Europe’s great Hanseatic merchant cities, Braunschweig enjoyed a rich history of civic unrest — the Braunschweiger Schichten. (Literally shift, but also carrying the sense of rebellion.) The Great Rebellion in Braunschweig, by Alfred von Schüssler (mid-19th century). One of its most outstanding installments — the one recalled as the Große Schicht — kicked off on April 17, 1374. (Most of the information about this incident is in German, as are most of the links in this...

On this date in 1567, Wilhelm von Grumbach was dismembered along with two of his followers in the marketplace of Gotha. Grumbach (English Wikipedia entry | German) was the cantankerous German instigator of the aptly-named Grumbachsche Handel, a messy clash of rights and prerogatives at the hinge of the old feudal order and centralized princely authority. Grumbach was a knight who’s invariably described as an “adventurer”. As a young man he fought in the Peasants War, but as he headed into middle age he became your basic penniless minor nobleman chafing at the failures and obstructed opportunities life threw at...

BREAKING: O’Keefe Media Uncovers who is really running the White House. Undercover cameras catch Special Advisor call former Board Member @ZientsJeff27574 “the second most powerful person in Washington” where “whatever this guy says, it’s what the President says.” Asked by OMG’s American Swiper Citizen Journalist “is Jeff [Zeints] more powerful than Kamala,” Robinson confirms “Yeah.” @VP @KamalaHarris . Robinson also states that @BarackObama and @HillaryClinton are still involved behind the scenes at the White House. Tyler Robinson, Special Advisor to the Chief of Staff of Administrator @SBAIsabel Guzman, details how @WhiteHouse directs @SBAIsabel Guzman to campaign for @POTUS so constantly...

French adventurer Bolo Pasha (English Wikipedia entry | French) was shot at Fort Vincennes on this date in 1918 as a World War I German agent. Paul Bolo was his proper name, and a striving, wandering soul was his fatal curse. “A rolling stone that gathered no moss,” says this chronicler of the Great War’s spies, “and for sheer audacity, bold resourcefulness and indifference to fate his career matched, if it did not surpass, the strangest characters depicted by the master pen of Dumas.” He’d spent his youth in Marseilles, and subsequently Lyon, repeatedly going bust in several attempted businesses...

April 16, 1947, was the hanging-date of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Not to be confused with the Rudolf Hess, the Nazi party defector held by the British in lonely confinement in Spandau until 1987, Höss was true to the swastika from beginning to end. A World War I survivor, our guy joined the right-wing Freikorps paramilitaries and scored NSDAP party number no. 3240 in 1922 — soon thereafter proving a willingness to shed blood for the cause by murdering a teacher suspected of betraying to the French the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter. Höss served only a year in...

Already under fire for misspending most of the money donated to the March for Our Lives PAC he co-founded, gun control activist David Hogg was unable to make a coherent response to Lily Tang Williams' criticisms of his gun-control efforts. Ms. Williams immigrated from China, became a US citizen and is now running for Congress in New Hampshire. "You say no one should have the right to own a gun," Ms Williams said. "Well, in China, no private citizen is allowed to have guns. No one has an effective self-defense against government tyranny. The communist government murdered millions of its...

A stunning new video has been delivered that makes the case for ONLY President Donald Trump as commander-in-chief. The Gateway Pundit explains it is the "most powerful pro-Trump ad of the year" – "It is that good." It is from Claremont Institute chairman Tom Klingenstein, a philanthropist, public speaker, writer, and playwright.

April 15 is usually Tax Day in the United States – the day by which your individual federal tax return has to have been filed, if you’re to avoid a late penalty. And if you’re in one of the many states with its own statewide income tax – 43 at last count – that usually shares the same deadline. By what right does the government take this money from us? That’s an easy one. The Constitution says it can. To be specific, the 16th Amendment authorized the federal government to collect income taxes, so it’s been legal for 110 years....

Anything that comes out of the Democrat’s mouths is pure projection. This is particularly true with what Joe Biden said in early 2020, claiming Trump will get us into a war in Iran. Four years later, Biden is in office, and the United States is on the verge of World War Three after Iran’s recent drone attack on Israel. More than 300 drone and missile strikes bombarded Israel on Saturday. Watch VIDEO at link........................ While Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted most of the drones, they said they would retaliate, which will inevitably escalate the ongoing war in the Middle East and...

Real Time Sinking Animation.

While Charles de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws was an oft-cited source during the federal convention of 1787, his observations weren’t limited to the balance of powers in government. He also touched on the nature of educational systems in republics and despotisms. Parents and educators form our first impressions. They prepare people for civil life in republics and for servitude in despotisms. From previous chapters, Montesquieu had explained the springs, the forces which propel nations. Public Virtue is the propellant in republics, while the bayonet of fear prods despotisms. Education in despotic countries debases the mind. The mind of...

On this date in 1560, the son of Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano was beheaded for murdering his — the son’s — wife. While Cardano pere was one of the great intellectuals of his era, and has been covered in these grim annals via his interest in a genius composer executed for sodomy, the fils earns notice merely for his famous relations. The latter, Giambatista Cardano by name, committed nothing but a shabby domestic murder, dosing his wife Brandonia di Seroni — “a worthless, shameless woman” in Gerolamo’s estimation — with arsenic when he had tired of her infidelities. Still, it...

At an anti-Israel demonstration in Dearborn, Michigan, Tarek Bazzi led the crowd in chants of "death to America." When Fox reporter Hillary Vaughn asked Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich) about this the Congresswoman called the chant "a legitimate viewpoint. If my constituents feel this way it is my duty to honestly represent their views in Congress." "The whole world knows that Israel is the instigator of most of the world's problems," she added. "The October 7 attack was a justified response to these instigations. Israel has been illegally occupying Palestinian lands since 1948. Any actions taken to try to persuade the...

This week, former football star, accused murderer, and convicted armed robber OJ Simpson died of cancer. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre expressed condolences saying "our thoughts are with his family during this difficult time. In many ways, he led a tragic life. On the one hand, there were the glories of his achievements on the football field and in the movies he starred in. On the other, there was the tragic murder of his wife Nicole. He was left as a single father of his two young children after a jury found him not guilty of murdering their mother."...

The five ordinary Londoners pictured above had been snitched out by neighbors for shirking the Catholic Mass under Queen Mary — the offense that Protestants would call recusancy when the mitre was on the other bishop. They had the sturdiness one would attribute to men and women of the common clay, and also the theological unsophistication; our martyrology caveats of their interrogation that “some of them attributed the title and honour of a sacrament to the holy estate of matrimony” — the standard Anglican and also Lutheran position was that there were only two sacraments, baptism and eucharist — but...

REFERENCED VIDEOS AT LINK..................... Last year, a man in his mid-20’s named Dexter Reed was charged with three counts of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and one count of possession of a firearm with a revoked “Firearms Owners Identification Card,” which is required in the state of Illinois before you can possess a weapon or ammunition. Because no one really spends time in jail in Illinois anymore, Reed was free on pretrial release for these felony charges as recently as this past March. It goes without saying that at that point, any functioning member of society who somehow found...

On this date in 2015, Bangladesh hanged the former assistant secretary-general of the militant Jamaat-e-Islami party, Mohammad Qamaruzzaman. He’d been sentenced for crimes against humanity during the 1971 war of independence that separated Bangladesh — the former “East Pakistan” — from Pakistan; his was just one of several high-profile 2010s prosecutions (and the second execution) by a special tribunal to settle scores from that bloody parting. Jamaat-e-Islami’s party history traces back to the British Raj and versions of it exist in each of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. In the 1971 war, that Islamist party was ferociously anti-independence, collaborating with the...

On this date in 1959, Leonard Shockley was gassed in Maryland. The appeals court that considered his case found it “perfectly clear that Leonard killed the victim in an attempt to perpetrate a robbery or a rape,” during a heist committed jointly with Leonard’s older brother. On that basis, young Shockley achieved the distinction of being the second-last person ever put to death for a crime committed as a 16-year-old. For a very long while, it really looked like he might be the last, but Oklahoma’s 1999 execution of Sean Sellers usurped the claim. While it makes little ethical difference,...

Not only are you being lied to, your own tax dollars are being used to accomplish the deception. For all of the left’s faux concern about ‘misinformation and disinformation’ they’ve got their own sordid little information laundering scheme going on. It’s an incestuous little circle of politicians, bureaucrats and media who all share the same political goals (big government) for their various, and sometimes conflicting reasons, but each works hand in hand to push the same agenda: push a public narrative that puts the Biden administration in the best possible light, so that Dems can keep control of government and...

In New York, Marly Hornik teamed up with election and cybersecurity expert Harry Haury to form the New York Citizens Audit to investigate their state's 2022 voter roll data. They found 1,467,399 illegal duplicate registrations with 449,856 votes cast, 16,623 votes cast by voters with a blank address, and 35,312 more votes counted than voters who voted. "It was clear to me that the premise that our elections are honest and accurate is not substantiated," Hornik said. "So we founded a nationwide group, United Sovereign Americans (USA), to share our expertise with over 25 state groups to help them investigate...