Free Republic

Alexey Navalny, a Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, warned that dictators will use Twitter’s decision to permanently ban President Donald Trump from its platform as a pretext to silence their political opponents. Navalny would know. When the Russian government prosecuted him for embezzlement, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the cases violated Navalny’s right to a fair trial, but Russia prevented him from running for president of Russia in 2018 due to these convictions, anyway. Navalny claims his name cannot be mentioned on Russian television. Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses to refer to Navalny by name and...

Remember the Trump-hating Lincoln Project? That was the big-dollar NeverTrump group that included among its luminaries George Conway, the unhinged Trump-hating husband of the unfortunate Kellyanne Conway. They included many Dubya Bush administration operatives who'd been left out of the Trump administration and wanted revenge. Their loathing of Trump only got greater after that, and they threw their support to Joe Biden, raising $78 million and creating extremely nasty presidential campaign ads to take down Trump. They worked closely with Democrats and took their money, promising to help peel away Republicans to help Joe Biden. When that didn't happen and...

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on winning the US presidential election — after weeks of holding out until the vote was officially confirmed. “For my part, I am ready for interaction and contact with you,” Putin’s message for the former vice president said, according to a statement released by the Kremlin on Tuesday. The message came a day after the Electoral College affirmed Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election on Nov. 3. The Russian president previously said he would not recognize Biden as the president-elect until the results were “confirmed in a legitimate, legal way.” In...

‘It is my absolute wish, and that of my colleagues, to allow a little more human closeness for Christmas,’ the Belgian Minister of the Interior claimed. ‘At the same time, we must take the alarm signals from hospitals very seriously.’ROESELARE, Belgium, November 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Belgium’s Minister of the Interior warned that police would “ensure compliance with health measures at Christmas,” knocking on doors to assess if families are breaking COVID-19 restrictions. Speaking to Belgian weekly newspaper De Zondag, Annelies Verlinden announced that over Christmas, police will “monitor compliance with the measures.” “Enforcement is very important,” Verlinden said. “And...

Georgia GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler clapped back at former President Barack Obama’s defense of anti-American Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The former president justified Rev. Wright’s infamous “G-d damn America” sermon, claiming his words were taken out of context, and dubbed Rev. Wright as a "supremely gifted preacher." "In national politics, if you can take out a bunch of sound bites that say 'God damn America,' even if the context of it is prophetic and biblical and he's trying to describe you know how somebody might feel – he wasn't promoting the notion that God was damning America," the former president said....

"God damn America!"—nuanced, yeah: like a punch in the nose! When it comes to attempting to explain away the unexplainable, nothing's more hackneyed than claiming the offensive statement was "taken out of context." To be sure, Jason Johnson trotted out that cliché while guest-hosting MSNBC's AM Joy Sunday morning in excusing Rev. Jeremiah Wright's infamous screaming "not God Bless America! God Damn America!" But give Eddie Glaude credit. The Princeton prof and frequent MSNBC guest came up with a somewhat more original excuse: critics of Wright's damnation of America fail to understand the reverend's "theological nuance." Right. There's "nuance" in...

Walk away founder Brandon Straka and other local Michigan grassroots groups organized a rally to show their support for President Trump in front of the TCF Center in Detroit, where the crooked process of counting absentee ballots took place for the past 3 days. 100 Percent Fed Up reports – Shortly after Trump supporters arrived, they were told by Detroit Police that they had to leave because there was a bomb threat at the TCF Center. The group moved to the Detroit City Hall, where they reorganized and began to show their support for President Trump when they were told...

During 26 years at the CIA, Marc Polymeropoulos spent a lot of time in rough places, like war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he never suffered any harm until December 2017, when he was sound asleep at a Marriott Hotel in Moscow near the U.S. Embassy. "I was awoken in the middle of the night," recalled Polymeropoulos, 51. "I just had incredible vertigo, dizziness. I wanted to throw up. The room was spinning. I couldn't even stand up without falling down. I had tinnitus ringing in my ears." He suspected a bad case of food poisoning and carried on...

The Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees on Wednesday released an interim report on their monthslong joint investigation into Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings and his alleged “extensive and complex financial transactions.” Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said their investigation has “faced many obstacles” from Democrats on their committees and that executive agencies “failed to comply with document requests.” The chairmen added that “there remains much work to be done” in their probe. Hunter Biden is the son of the Democratic presidential nominee...

Alexei Navalny, the man seen as one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top critics in the country, was allegedly poisoned during a flight from Siberia to Moscow and has since been hospitalized. The 44-year-old is said to be in a coma and on a ventilator in a hospital intensive care unit after falling ill on a flight back to Moscow from Tomsk, a city in Siberia.

Clarksville, TN (CU) - The locals and Marine Corp called it the birdcage. The US Navy referred to the location as Site #3. Before 1965, even the guards at Clarksville Base weren’t aware of what they were guarding. Operated by the US Navy and guarded by the US Marine Corp, Clarksville Base was layered with intense security. The parameter included four spaced fences with at least one being electrical. In addition to the four fences surrounding the perimeter, there were armed marine patrols with orders of “shoot to kill” attempts to breach the base. Three deaths were recorded at the...

After I wrote the article titled "The Soviet Plan for 'Ideological Subversion' Describes Our Current Turmoil," Charles Cole, author of In Russian Wonderland: An American's Odyssey in Soviet Russia, contacted me. His memoir recounts his time in 1972 as a Russian-speaking American "guide" in various Soviet cities where the "Research and Development in the USA" exhibit was on display. He chronicles the lives of average Soviet citizens at that period and describes how people lived under the tyranny of an omnipotent government. He is exhorting Americans to perceive the lessons of the failed communist experience. Like others who have reviewed...

Return to The New Australian The Left's war against America By James Henry Few people appreciate the power of ideas. When they experience the social and economic effects of intellectually inspired long-term trends, many tend to ascribe the process to a conspiracy of some kind. (If only that were so). More than 160 years ago J. S. Mill wrote of how the ideas of a few writers can eventually influence the thinking of a nation's intellectuals. Keynes made a similar point when he wrote: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic...

Vladimir Putin is heading for victory in a referendum that could extend his rule until 2036 as Russia enters its final day of voting today. The Kremlin strongman would normally reach his term limit in 2024, but voters are set to back a plan to reset his tally to zero and allow him to run for two more terms. The package of constitutional changes would also increase Putin's powers to dissolve parliament and expand his influence over courts and prosecutors.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russians opened the door to Vladimir Putin staying in power until 2036 by voting overwhelmingly for constitutional changes that will allow him to run again for president twice, but critics said the outcome was falsified on an industrial scale. Official results published on Thursday, after 100% of ballots had been counted, showed that the former KGB officer who has ruled Russia for more than two decades as president or prime minister had easily won the right to run for two more six-year terms after the current one ends in 2024. That means Putin, 67, could rule until...

Breaking news from 100 years ago: Russia wants to meddle in our affairs. After a century of Soviet efforts to infiltrate our government agencies, our nuclear and technology programs and institutions in our country from cultural to political, Robert Mueller’s assertion that Russian operatives posted Facebook ads to taint the 2016 elections is pretty pathetic. Mueller alleges, "The nationals had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election." Well, the entire Russian hierarchy has been thus engaged since its inception. It’s ironic that the Democrats have finally latched onto something they can demonize...

This is old but frighteningly relevant.

“Progressive” ideology always rests on a conviction that the current “regressive” system is comprehensively unjust and must be destroyed by exploiting its weaknesses. The most famous proponent of such tactics in recent years has been the late Saul Alinksy, the intellectual godfather of the modern Democrat Party, but former Soviet journalist and KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov laid out an even more concise strategy for subversion in a 1984 interview.Alinksy’s seminal book specified 13 Rules for Radicals, but Bezmenov had only four “stages of ideological subversion,” and they will sound very familiar to anyone following the current wave of left-wing riots,...

The father of the founder of the conspiratorial site filed a criminal complaint against me in Bulgaria. Then things got weird.About a week before Christmas, I received a most unwelcome email. A criminal complaint had been filed against me in Bulgaria, a country I have never visited and with which I had no personal connection. I stood accused of defamation; attempted censorship; illegally spreading personal, family, and business information; and insulting the memory of someone’s parents and grandparents. MOST POPULAR The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism Joe Biden’s Sketchy Climate Record What Happened to Jordan Peterson? What If Biden Is Simply...

The Jerusalem Post said the Soviet secret police last year secured the release of three kidnaped Soviet diplomats in Beirut by castrating a relative of a radical Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head. The incident began when four Soviet diplomats were kidnaped last September by Muslim extremists who demanded that Moscow pressure the Syrian government to stop pro-Syrian militiamen from shelling rival Muslim positions in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. The militiamen, the Jerusalem paper said, did not cease their attacks, and the body of one of the...