Free Republic

At the heart of America’s political and cultural turmoil is a crisis of trust. In the space of a generation, the people’s confidence in their leaders and their most important institutions to do the right thing has collapsed. The federal government, big business, the media, education, science and medicine, technology, religious institutions, law enforcement and others have seen a precipitous decline. As public faith in the performance, credibility and integrity of these institutions has collapsed, so too has mutual trust—the social glue that holds the country together. Americans have become suspicious of one another, distrusting their fellow citizens as much...

Are Hong Kong's liberties gradually being taken away? THROW a frog into boiling water and it jumps out; gently bring it to the boil, and the frog, never noticing the incremental increases in heat, allows itself to be cooked. Is Hong Kong a frog in a pot in Beijing's kitchen? If so, then on September 24th the temperature rose another notch. On that day, Hong Kong's government formally began—by circulating a consultation paper—the process of enacting a controversial set of laws against subversion, sedition, treason and other ills, as required by Article 23 of the Basic Law, the territory's constitution....

On an almost daily basis, I talk to friends who lead churches around the USA who are trying to understand what is happening in our culture and how to help the people in their churches to be faithful to Jesus in light of what is happening. It seems like the basic framework and foundations of our society are changing rapidly. But maybe it hasn’t been as fast as we think. The “Long March through the Institutions” was a phrase attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and then coined as a succinct mission statement by Marxist student activist Rudi...

Three weeks ago, we learned that Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson was confirmed to the US Supreme Court. Just like that, the SCOTUS has been further reduced in stature to an affirmative action hire giveaway program, rather like a DMV office that has the power to override laws. Anyone who’s been paying attention to trends in late-stage Weimerica shouldn’t be surprised by this, however. It has become a truism in modern America that our institutions - across the board - no longer function as they should, and that many of them barely function at all. While this can be partially attributed to...

China is preparing to launch its second space station cargo mission just as its Shenzhou-12 astronauts are set to return to Earth. The Long March 7 rocket carrying the Tianzhou-3 cargo spacecraft rolled out at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, south China, early September 16, China’s human spaceflight agency announced. Launch is targeted for September 20, according to local traffic restrictions. Tianzhou-3 is expected to carry supplies, equipment and propellant to the Tianhe space station core module in preparation for the arrival of Shenzhou-13. The three-crew, six-month-long Shenzhou-13 mission is set to launch from Jiuquan, northwest China, in October. Tianhe...

A simple visit to an obscure factory by Chinese President Xi on Monday is all it took to raise the specter that China could be contemplating cutting off supply of critical materials to the U.S. and potentially crippling large swathes of its industries. Also, fueled by political innuendo in Xi’s recent call for a new “Long March” in reference to a key founding tenet of the Chinese Communist Party, speculators are growing increasingly wary of Chinese export restrictions to the U.S., including rare earth minerals. As the world’s largest producer, the Middle Kingdom has a vice-like grip on rare earths...

Trans and LGBTQIAP activists will tell you that you have no right to question their ideology or actions. They are the keepers of the new and unassailable religion. Their religion is called Queer Theory and it’s adherents are radical misogynistic zealots that have created their own queer caliphate. Their god is perversity, transgender “women” are their high priestesses, and drag queens are their temple dancers. At their unholy altar of misogyny they sacrifice the dignity of women and sexualize children in their pedophilic fantasies. American women need to wake up and realize that Queer-Marxists are doing everything they can to...

This week, the House passed a reauthorization bill of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), but this bill falls short and fails to accomplish its namesake goal. From its inception, the purpose of VAWA has been to protect, support, and seek justice for women who have suffered assault or abuse. CWALAC fully supports that mission. The goal of the current VAWA reauthorization efforts should advance these objectives, not compromise them. The reauthorization must address misguided efforts to go beyond the scope of VAWA, which represent a fundamental threat to the privacy and safety of women and girls. Unfortunately, the House-passed...

It would be easy to dismiss the Green New Deal as an impossible progressive dream, but that would be a mistake. The Green New Deal is not the bucket list of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow travelers, but a blueprint to turn America into a socialist state. It is the culmination of a 90-year campaign, begun with FDR and the first New Deal. “The first obligation of government is the protection of the welfare and well-being, indeed the very existence, of its citizens,” presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt said at the 1932 Democratic National Convention. Roosevelt said that in...

The story of secret Russian agents effectively swaying the U.S. election, or colluding with Donald Trump, has petered out into nothingness. For months we heard dark suspicions recklessly spread by news organizations. We learned of selective leaks from inside the Deep State — Obama holdovers or NeverTrumpers determined to wreck his presidency.Now there’s almost nothing left. Democrats hope to impeach the president for procedural improprieties. For clumsily firing a waffling and partisan FBI director. Still have Putin on the brain? You’ll have to settle for fevered claims by the likes of Louise Mensch that the Russian president, not ISIS,...

This question is directed to Obama and his admin, all dhimmicrats, GOPe RINOs like Rubio, McCain, McGrahamnesty, Kascich, Bush, and the usual cheap labor lobby traitors: You say you want to keep us safe and that we have to sacrifice our rights for security, and that you can't tell which Muslims are radical vs which will remain peaceful (until they too are radicalized), but why then do we allow the bloodthirsty enemy to infiltrate into our country? Would not the prudent thing be to place a moratorium on importing people from Muslim countries and immediately cease allowing refugees in? It's...

All across the political blogosphere, you can read endless inquiries into the oncoming demise of the Republican Party. As far as the intellectual elite are concerned, the GOP will be doomed by polarization. The top representatives have supposedly moved so far to the right that they will soon be a non-factor in national elections. The scary thing about this analysis is that it may well be correct. In a way. Because conservatives do have a problem, and it is that the country is moving slowly but surely to the left. And Democrats are way out ahead of the curve, dragging...

The first thing to notice is how rapidly Elon Musk's SpaceX is altering the market for government-sponsored rocket launches. Witness how frequently the words "to compete with SpaceX" appear in industry statements and press coverage. To compete with SpaceX, say multiple reports, the United Launch Alliance, the Pentagon's traditional supplier, is developing a new Vulcan rocket powered by a reusable engine designed by Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Because of SpaceX, says Aviation Week magazine, Japan's government has instructed Mitsubishi to cut in half the cost of the Japanese workhorse rocket, and China is planning a new family of kerosene-fueled Long...

The anti-Benjamin Netanyahu V15 political action group declared Wednesday it is “here to stay” and will continue the “long march” toward victory and change. V15 has drawn international attention for partnering with One Voice, a U.S.-U.K. nonprofit that has received funding from the State Department. OneVoice’s offices in Tel Aviv were being used as the campaign headquarters for V15′s anti-Netanyahu effort, as WND was first to report. It was OneVoice that hired 270 Strategies, a consulting firm whose senior leadership is comprised mostly of former top staffers for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Last Sunday, Fox News quoted a source...

Antonio Gramsci is a figure of high importance to the development of the left, both in Britain and the United states. While looking into Gramsci, I came across James Joll's book, a clear exposition of Gramsci’s ideas by a fan of the Italian Marxist. Thus it can be said that the text is a fair account of Gramsci's ideas. And if there is any bias in the texts I've chosen, it's bias in favor -- rather than against – Antonio Gramsci.

The traditional Marxist theory of power was a very one-sided one based on the role of force and coercion as the basis of ruling class domination. This was reinforced by Lenin whose influence was at its height after the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Gramsci felt that what was missing was an understanding of the subtle but pervasive forms of ideological control and manipulation that served to perpetuate all repressive structures. He identified two quite distinct forms of political control: domination, which referred to direct physical coercion by police and armed forces and hegemony which referred to both...

Why has the American society changed so drastically in the past few decades? How did the feminist movement get started? How did Obama get elected? Why are there so many single parent families? Where is God?

The Great Debate Oddly Is Not OverWe are still in a great public debate between capitalism and socialism, and individual freedom versus statism — odd since hundreds of millions worldwide have escaped poverty the last 30 years due to the spread of Western-inspired free markets.Many choose sides in the debate based on their own predicaments. Sometimes the more independent and secure who have thrived under capitalism promote it, the more dependent who have not - detest it.At other times the realist mind is opposed to the idealist.  And we can also envision the split as an age-old dichotomy between the...

  Current 2002 2001 2000 1990s     November   2000THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY THE EDITOR A few months back, during social chit-chat which turned with predictable concern to the modern plague of clerical apostasy, a venerable member of the Society of Jesus recounted various word of mouth histories of Communist infiltration of the Jesuits. These included two men sent to join the Society in Italy and Spain by their respective national Communist Parties - the former having left to return to the Party in the early 1950s after more than a dozen years of study and actual ordination; the...

S. Steven Powell wrote in his 1987 book, Covert Cadre, that the revolutionary activity advocated by Marxist Antonio Gramsci involved the need to “infiltrate autonomous institutions—schools, media, churches, public-interest groups—so as radically to transform the culture, which determines the environment in which political and economic policies are played out.” Or, as Carl Boggs, author of Gramsci’s Marxism wrote, “the role of revolutionary theory is to create the foundation of a new socialist order precisely through the negation and transcendence of bourgeois society.” This “transcendence of bourgeois society,” Boggs explains, was the basis for Gramsci’s first priority—“the multi-dimensional transformation of civil...