Free Republic

Greece’s Supreme Court has published the final list of parties that will compete in June’s European elections with the roster excluding the far-right party Spartiates (the Spartans). The ruling party New Democracy, along with opposition parties PASOK and New Left, filed a memorandum challenging the Spartans’ participation. The far-right group has been under scrutiny as a result of their associations with convicted members of the now-defunct neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, notably Ilias Kasidiaris. The prosecution process has been started against eleven Spartan parliamentary members for potential parliamentary and electoral fraud linked to their leadership roles. The electoral court has not...

Fifty-seven years ago, Ayn Rand predicted the red wave sweeping America today. The Left Cashes In On The Real Red Wave By Eileen F. Toplansky Indeed, there was a red wave but not the one conservatives had hoped for. It was, however, the continuation of the leftists’, Marxists’, and communists’ eternal obsession to destroy America and obliterate her values—and Ayn Rand predicted it in her 1965 seminal book titled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Frighteningly prescient, Rand understood the beginnings of the “intellectual disintegration” that is now front and center in most colleges. Fifty-seven years later, the Left is...

I know it’s racist to call LeBron James dumb, but what about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? The New York Democratic congressional candidate got at least some real questions during an interview this week on CNN. If weren’t for Ocasio-Cortez being an attractive minority, the rest of the media would be calling her the next Sarah Palin. Democrats, if they’re ethnic and look good on TV, typically get one question from the press: “Are you running for president?” It’s the sole reason Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey are considered “top contenders” for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Cuomo...

On Sunday, the day of the church massacre, cultural commentator David French tweeted, “The amount of anti-Christian hate on Twitter the same day Christians were massacred is stunning and chilling.” If ever there was a time when we might have expected sympathy for Christians, or at least restraint in attacking them, the opposite proved true far too many times. Why? On Fox News, Laura Ingraham noted that some of the reactions to the shooting pointed to “elite hostility to people of faith,” stating that “hostility to faith infects the popular culture.” She also spoke of a rising “militant secularism,” drawing...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

America more and more resembles a cross between the Vatican and Disney World. Church-state separation activists regularly mount attacks on Christian influences in our culture, and embrace the Enlightenment doctrine of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” while defenders of God bow before “I am that I am.” The media circus bolsters Darwinism against creation beliefs with hundreds of irreverent covers of popular magazines asking, “Is God dead?,” and drive home their point with models of dysfunctional homes, relating statistics about drug abuse, divorce, abortion and depression. “The world isn’t safe anymore,” is frequently heard. A prominent atheist gloats that...

How do student protestors today differ from their predecessors back in the 1960s? The latter were more well-read. "This is a post-literacy generation," Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) said recently at the Heritage Foundation. "They know how to read but don't read." Charles Kesler, editor-in-chief of the Claremont Review of Books, notes that the so-called New Left of the 1960s actually would occasionally quote Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, sources many current campus revolutionaries are unfamiliar with. "I don't want to romanticize the old New Left even though it looks admirable compared to the...

The illiberalism of student radicalism in the 1960s shaped the world we live in today.SDS leader Mark Rudd at a Columbia University protest, 1968It is now 45 years since that momentous year 1968, one of the turning points of contemporary world culture, if not quite of contemporary politics. Not unlike 1848–49 in Europe, 1968 was marked by events that involved student and political protests in several places. There was a dire sense of crescendo and momentum: the heightening of protest against the Vietnam War, the violent turn of the civil-rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the utopian libertinism...

...But there was never anything silly, nor light-hearted, nor casual, about Barack Obama's efforts to keep the public's eyes from the basic facts of his life, from birth to his candidacy for president. On the contrary, this opacity is a deliberate policy. Why? The presumptive answer, absent testimony from those involved, is to ensure that real facts interfere as little as possible with the image and narrative that he and his associates have carefully crafted for him. Distinguishing between reality and that narrative would require above all a skeptical attitude, sure to be characterized by Democrats and the media in...

U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) disagrees with the Navy's decision to name a cargo ship under construction in San Diego for California farm labor leader Cesar Chavez. The decision, announced Tuesday, "appear[s] to be more about making a political statement than upholding the Navy's history and tradition," Hunter said in press release....

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

NEW ORLEANS, La. – The Revolutionary Communist Party USA has announced a "Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America," and members say they are planning for a "revolution" against capitalism, with violence if necessary. The "present capitalist-imperialist system" should be replaced with a "radically new economic system," they say. Carl Dix, a founding member and spokesman, believes that the federal government bailouts, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, are just one instance where they propped up what he calls the "capitalist class." His party is "building a revolution" and under the proposed constitution all "natural resources...

I. International Revolution The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world. The development of this contradiction is promoting the struggle of the people of the whole world against US imperialism and its lackeys. Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People's War! People ask, what is the nature of the revolution that we talk about- Who will it be made by, and for, and what are its goals and strategy- The overriding consideration in answering these guestions is that the...

. . . the so-called New Left of the 60s was really just a rehashing of the Old Left of the 30s and 40s. It was simply a case of the same tired doctrines being arrayed in new garb. As one heavily involved in the New Left at the time, I am fully aware of how we were simply seeking to breathe new life into an old ideology. And as all ideologues, we were blind to the realities of our own position. We willfully chose to ignore or excuse the ugly Soviet expression of the socialist creed. We chose to...

El Salvador has officially joined the Red regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. South America is turning Red, dark Red, and little is being said to alert North Americans of the encroaching Red plague. Perhaps that's because North America is moving in the same direction. The President of the United States has surrounded himself with socialists, and some of those closest to him have had a part in turning South America Red. According to the Associated Press (March 17, 2009), Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate of the Farbundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) is the new head of...

SNIPPET: "Like Hoffer’s Western pro-communists, when the truth emerges about what life is like under fundamentalist Islam, many leftists publicly deny the reports -- as much of the Left did when it first learned about the horrors Pol Pot inflicted on Cambodia. Privately, Glazov argues, the Leftist approves of what has taken place. Indeed, Glazov emphasizes, the violence and horror is what “attracts him in the first place.” They know that without it, the eventual earthly paradise will never be born. After all, as the Bolsheviks used to argue, “you can’t cook an omelet without breaking eggs.” Glazov mentions the...

Democrats, more concerned with saving their party than saving America, would like you and I to forget the old saying “you are known by the company you keep”. We are not to know that Barak Hussein Obama’s official website attracts hateful psychotics: Socialists for Obama, Muslims for Obama, Black Panthers for Obama, or Jemaah Islamiyah’s statement on the website “ We are a group that supports social justice for our oppressed Muslim brothers all over the world.

Americans are well acquainted with presidential candidate Barack Obama’s legendary pledges to bring “change” to America’s political and social landscape. (For example, see here and here and here.) Indeed, “Change We Can Believe In” is the slogan that adorns the homepage of his campaign website and so many of the placards displayed by the supporters who attend his speaking engagements. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, is also well practiced at issuing calls for change. Her “Change and Experience” ad campaign was but an outgrowth of her 1993 declaration, as First Lady, that “remolding society is one of the great challenges...

Radicalism is no longer taught only in college; many younger students are getting a head start. Schools traditionally emphasized the “three Rs” – reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic. Recently a “fourth R” seems to have entered the American schoolhouse: radicalism. “When you go into a class where you’re supposed to learn about government or geography,” high-school junior Sean Allen says, “you expect to learn what the truth is.” He found out last year that some teachers don’t share his expectation. An Accelerated World Geography class at Overland High School in suburban Denver featured diatribes against the United States, capitalism and President...

Breezing through the bookstore at Reagan National Airport the other day, I came across a new volume with the intriguing yet subtle title, American Fascists – The Christian Right and The War on America by former New York Times' correspondent Chris Hedges. But, as the saying goes, tell us what you really think. No hyperbole here. In the introduction, Hedges makes it clear that he actually is comparing evangelical opponents of abortion and gay marriage to the monsters who burned books, ran death camps and plunged humanity into a world war that left 63 million dead. Except it’s Hedges who...