Free Republic

Pushed to the limits of his tolerance by 19 straight weeks of street protests against high taxes and low wages, French President Emmanuel Macron has given permission for government troops to used deadly force “to quell this annoying resistance to modern life. The teargas, baton charges, and water cannons we have been using have proven insufficient. It’s time we raise the stakes for those who seek to discredit the government’s right to rule them as we sit fit.” The one limit that Macron has imposed is “to refrain from shooting any of our Muslim residents lest we escalate the violence...

The media has been so quiet on the Yellow Jackets in France that you could be excused for thinking my title refers to some kind of invasion by weird wasps. Well, for the record, it doesn’t. It refers to the ongoing revolt in France by various groups, but mostly, honest, middle-aged, middle-class people who are setting fires to things and making life hell in the ritzy districts of Paris (and elsewhere). snip . . . They don’t want us to know that resistance is possible, even in Europe, where they’re far more advanced than we are. In fact, I believe...

As hundreds of supporters queued in Red Square to lay flowers at the grave of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, on the 66th anniversary of his death this week, two young activists mingled with the crowd beneath the Kremlin’s walls. “Burn in hell, executioner of the people and murderer of women and children!” shouted Yevgeny Suchkov, before snapping a red carnation and hurling it at a granite bust of Stalin. Police and Kremlin security officers reacted instantly, seizing him in a neck lock and dragging him away. While all the attention was on Suchkov, his fellow activist, Olga Savchenko, stepped...

One of the nation's largest neo-Nazi groups appears to have an unlikely new leader: a black activist who has vowed to dismantle it. Court documents filed Thursday suggest James Hart Stern wants to use his new position as director and president of the National Socialist Movement to undermine the Detroit-based group's defense against a lawsuit. The NSM is one of several extremist groups sued over bloodshed at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Stern's filing asks a federal court in Virginia to issue a judgment against the group before one of the lawsuits goes to trial. Stern replaced...

You don't often hear about protests in Cuba, despite the hellish conditions of that socialist dictatorship, but I suspect that's going to change, and maybe pretty fast. Alberto de la Cruz at Babalu blog reports that protests are breaking out on the communist island dictatorship in the wake of Venezuela's popular fight for freedom: Video from Cuba shows hundreds of Cubans marching on the streets of Havana this Saturday in protest of the communist Castro dictatorship. This rare show of massive dissent in Cuba comes on the eve of the Castro regime’s sham referendum vote to ratify a new communist constitution....

A Salisbury University student has been charged with illegal wiretapping after prosecutors said he streamed a meeting with a congressional staffer for Maryland Rep. Andy Harris via Facebook Live without permission. Jake Burdett, 20, was charged last week with two felony counts of making an illegal recording and distributing the video filmed during a Maryland Marijuana Justice rally at Harris’s Salisbury office in October, the state prosecutor’s office announced Thursday. Marijuana legalization protesters have long tangled with Harris, who in 2014 worked to block full legalization of the drug in the District of Columbia. A protest outside the Republican’s Capitol...

Anti-government protesters in their thousands took to the streets of Belgrade on Saturday night for the tenth weekly demonstration of its kind. The protesters are a mix of citizens movements, opposition parties, from both left and right, academics, students and ordinary people. They are united in the belief that Serbia with president Aleksandar Vucic at the helm is sliding towards autocratic rule and that the country is gripped by political violence and a climate of fear. After more than two months of weekly protests people are still coming out in huge numbers and many political analysts believe the protests are...

BELGRADE – Weekly protest walks, taking place since 8 December 2018, have become the most serious challenge to the rule of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic so far. The protests, which are supported but not formally organised by the opposition parties, have spread to more than 20 cities and towns across the country... One of the protests took place in Kosovska Mitrovica, the largest city of the Serb-majority Northern Kosovo, which is governed by Vucic’s political allies. The protests, organised under the title “One of the five million” (a reference to the initial reaction of President Vucic, in which he said...

EXCERPT: We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities. But actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. Not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in...

There is a growing feeling of distrust in governments and the media among the general population, according to the Edelman report. It states that there has been a 3 percent increase between 2018 and 2019 in the level of distrust towards the government and the media. Overall, the general feeling of distrust has hit a record high this year from 2017. There is also a clear difference between mass population and the informed public, with the return to the largest-ever trust gap between these two, since 2017. This trust gap is particularly evident in developed countries, including the U.K., Canada,...

10th straight week. This is big and it isn't limited to Paris. Macron is in trouble.

A 28-year-old Frenchman has been sentenced to six months in jail after he published a Facebook post attempting to organize a ‘Yellow Vest’ blockade of a local petrol refinery, according to local reports. Hedi Martin was arrested in Port-La Nouvelle, southern France on January 3, shortly after publishing the post on Facebook, la Dépêche reports. In his post, Martin called for a ‘Yellow Vest’ blockade of the petrol refinery in the coastal town, urging people to “stand up to the CRS [riot police],” according to WSWS. State prosecutors noted video footage of Martin on his Facebook page at several Yellow...

FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron has been branded “irresponsible” for suggesting the introduction of “annual quotas” on migration as a topic for part of the three-month national debate aimed at mollifying yellow vest protesters.In a sweeping letter to the French pubic, Mr Macron said he had heard the public’s anger and shared its impatience for a “more prosperous country and a fairer society”. He then mentioned the possibility of introducing annual immigration quotas, saying it would not apply to asylum status. He said: “As regards immigration, once our asylum obligations have been met, would you like us to be able to...

In late November, as the Gilets Jaunes—or Yellow Vests—protest movement took hold in France, Martin Goillandeau and Makana Eyre wrote for CJR that participants were harassing, and even assaulting, journalists. Since then, the protests have become a weekly occurrence. So, too, have threats against reporters. “The harassment and violence have got worse,” Eyre told me this morning. “I went to the Saturday protests in Paris to shoot photos and see how big it would get. This was the first time that I really felt nervous with my camera… I saw people interfering with broadcasts, shouting at media teams, and getting...

Imagine having to pass protesters on your way into court, where a judge is ready to deal with your divorce application, because some people believe marriage ought to be "till death us do part". Or how about having to make your way past a blockade to access a family planning clinic? What if you had to face down people with reproving placards beside a chemist's shop stocking emergency contraception? How about trying to get by pickets outside a hospital which does sterilisations or gender reassignment? How would you feel about demonstrations outside venues conducting same-sex marriages? There will always be...

A French government spokesman was evacuated from his office as violence broke out during "yellow vests" protests in Paris and other cities. Benjamin Griveaux said he and his team had had to escape through a back door after a construction vehicle was used to ram the building's entrance. There were clashes between police and protesters on what was the first protest of the new year. President Emmanuel Macron condemned the violence, urging "debate and dialogue". What began as a protest about a fuel tax back in November has escalated into widespread anger at rising living costs. The march in Paris...

<p>There is a mass movement in France that is spreading around the world. The French government of President Macron is reeling. The protests have been successful in stopping implementation of a “green” tax on fuel. Police have been out in mass.</p>

Yellow Vests have now spread to Portugal! A few hundred “yellow vest” protesters took to the streets throughout Portugal on Friday in an attempt to stop traffic, inspired by the French revolutionary “gilets jaunes”. There were roughly 100 protesters crossing with police at a central square in Lisbon with other access roads blocked in the northern city of Braga earlier. One protester, Joao Viana, 50, tells why she is protesting: “The reason why I joined this protest today is because this really is the voice of the people. “The movement is not aligned to any political party and we simply...

After recent events in London over the past week The British Yellow Vest Movement has spread to the north of England. Patriots in Manchester reacted over the weekend, coming together and setting up a Facebook page, later embarking on the BBC, Media City in Salford Quays sending the security guards into a frenzy claiming they were not allowed to be on public property outside of the Beeb’s premises. In just a matter of hours the group had swelled to significant numbers with messages of support being received from America, Canada, Australia and The Netherlands.

The Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) represent a broad cross section of French rural, working and middle classes. They are butchers, bakers and automobile makers. They are the folks who grow the food, drive the trucks, build the buildings and fix what breaks. They are France. They have had enough....Climate taxes on fuel to pay for inefficient, variable wind and solar power and other climate fantasies are wasteful job killers, and the folks in the yellow vests know it. They refuse to redistribute more of what they earn through their long, hard labor … in the name of global warming.