Free Republic

A volunteer’s ‘SOCIALISM’ bracelet was a hint that New York City’s public turnout campaign for rent-control hearings might not live up to its own rules of neutrality. Against my better judgment and the advice of Oscar Wilde, I let socialism in New York City take up another one of my evenings. This time, I was curious to see a new, taxpayer-funded canvassing machine in action before this month’s crucial decision on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise to freeze the rent on the apartments where about 2.4 million New Yorkers live. Six weeks ago, Mamdani announced the launch of Organize NYC,...

Pennsylvania and Virginia recently passed legislation to increase their minimum wage to $15 per hour, closing the gap with Oregon ($15.55 as of July 1) and California ($17.90 in some places). In all, 34 states mandate a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The potential economic detriments of a minimum wage — namely, job losses — are well known. But the trend toward higher and higher minimum wages ought to prompt us to reconsider their purpose. The standard assumption about progressivism is that it’s intrinsically good — after all, who would oppose progress? Progressivism...

HER dusty file was one of hundreds of thousands of documents stacked in a house in a wealthy neighbourhood of Baghdad. Asma Rasheed married a pilot, lived comfortably in the presidential compound of Saddam Hussein and directed a microbiology programme that was not supposed to exist. Rasheed’s light blue folder has emerged from a huge archive seized by forces loyal to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which opposed Saddam. The archive — a dark who’s who of Iraq — reveals the tiniest details of blandishments and humiliations by a paranoid regime that shared the Nazis’ obsession...

By opening up to Western audiences and calling for a reconsideration of Islamic rhetoric and principles, Hizbullah is attempting to reintroduce itself as a representative of a moderate Islam of the future, distant from the atavism and political agendas of other fundamentalist groups. In a recent speech he gave in the Bekaa last week, the party’s secretary-general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said that it was unacceptable to make “generalizations and categorizations that would involve millions of Europeans who preceded the Islamic world in rejecting a war waged against it.” He said that opening up to millions in Europe and America should...

A controversial Israel-and-US-hating NYC college professor defended the murderous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as she clamored to bring down the US empire “by any means necessary” at a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America. Corinna Mullin, a radical political science prof once arrested for leading anti-Israel protests that resulted in $3 million in damage to the City College of New York’s Harlem campus, lauded Iran’s “phenomenal” military for depleting US weapons stockpiles in the Middle East, as she urged support for its armed forces. “Iran has won this war. . . . its indigenous military industry has produced phenomenal...

Neo-Nazi Links with Arab Palestinian Extremist OrganizationsFrançois Genoud: Financier Linking Nazi and Palestinian Militant NetworksFrançois Genoud (1915–1996) was a Swiss Nazi sympathizer, financier, and political activist who served as an important intermediary between former Nazis, European far-right networks, and Palestinian militant organizations during the Cold War. Rather than acting as a militant himself, Genoud used financial, legal, and political connections to support causes he viewed as aligned with his anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli worldview (Aarons & Loftus, 1991; Lee, 1998). Early Connections to Arab Nationalist and Pro-Nazi Networks Genoud's involvement with Arab nationalist causes predated the emergence of modern Palestinian militant...

While election night vote counts on Tuesday night showed City Councilwoman Nithya Raman far behind in the race for Los Angeles Mayor, as we go into the 4th day of counting her numbers are picking up and betting odds markets predict she will overtake Spencer Pratt for second place and qualify for the November runoff. Raman attributed her surge to her strong advocacy for bike lanes, saying "the people who mocked me will see that I have the winning formula for bringing the City back from the baleful performance of Mayor Bass and the whimsical delusions of low crime and...

Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, compressed here from Paragraphs 163-168, asserts that:“More than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Politics has the task of orientating economies and technologies to the common good ... to ensure equity: taxation, social protection and industrial policies must correct the imbalances created by the concentration of wealth and power” (emphasis mine). Can the Pope reasonably hope to achieve these aims by relegating Adam Smith’s invisible hand illustration to the dust bin of history? Pope...

Europe’s EU project has reached its limits: a centralized bureaucracy replacing politics itself, draining legitimacy, and pointing back toward sovereign, competitive states. Europe has reached the end of an era. Not the end of its history, but the end of its false form. For decades, the European Union served as the great substitute project of a continent that no longer dared to think politically. It promised peace without power, order without a people, unity without roots, and prosperity without cost. That was its founding lie, and it was a lie from the very beginning. Political order does not grow out...

Deregulation, tax cuts, and a fundamental trust in the power of private enterprise across the Atlantic stand in sharp contrast to the sluggish, apathetic-socialist policies of Germany and the European Union -- and not in Europe’s favor. While German industry is pulling up stakes and heading for greener pastures, the United States is experiencing a small investment miracle. Through its deregulation agenda, the American government is proving the thesis that prosperity is created exclusively in the private sector -- not through state regulation. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz appears disoriented, whiny-apathetic, and remarkably weak in leadership these days. Perhaps the chancellor...

Seattle’s lefty Mayor Katie Wilson admitted she was wrong to slam Starbucks and push for a boycott of the mega-coffee chain birthed in the Pacific City. Wilson, 43, issued a terse mea culpa to the New York Times this week as questions swirl about whether the liberal Northwest city can attract and retain businesses, including Starbucks, which recently chose to expand its footprint in Tennessee. The democratic socialist made waves last fall when she joined a barista union rally as mayor-elect and expressed her disgust with one of Seattle’s most recognizable businesses. “I am not buying Starbucks, and you should...

On a scorching hot afternoon in Havana, the line outside the state bakery stretches down the block. Inside, the shelves are almost bare. A man in a faded baseball cap tells me he’s been waiting for two hours for bread that might not arrive. Across the street, a gleaming black SUV with tinted windows idles outside a hotel mostly reserved for foreigners. Its lobby is stocked with imported whiskey; the air-conditioning is turned up to Arctic levels. This is not an unusual juxtaposition in today’s Cuba. I walk through Central Havana with Antonio Rodríguez, a 60-year-old university history teacher who...

Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism.” Although the Left frequently exaggerates and overemphasizes the evils of corporate America, proponents of the free market often find themselves in the awkward position of defending the status quo of state capitalism, which is in fact a common adversary of the free marketer and the anti-corporate leftist, even if the latter misdiagnoses the problem and proposes the wrong solutions... Indeed, corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts...

Elf Aquitaine, until its privatisation in 1994, was much more than a oil company - according to prosecutors at the trial of Elf's top managers. They claim the state-owned firm worked as an unofficial arm of France's murkiest diplomacy. The close relationship between Elf and French officials is well-documented, and goes back to the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle. As the company expanded into Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, Elf paid secret "commissions" to African officials with the blessing of French governments. By the 1980s Elf had operations in Gabon, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, Angola and Nigeria - which,...

FORT WORTH, Texas — A teenager arrested in connection with a string of south Fort Worth car arsons has been linked to a viral social media video developed overseas by an extremist hate group, police said Tuesday. The Fort Worth Police Department (FWPD) said, on Jan. 6, it became aware of a concerning video shared across multiple social media platforms, which depicted an individual wearing a hockey mask delivering explicit threats of mass violence, stating intentions to kill indiscriminately, and expressing a lack of regard for human life. Fort Worth police, in coordination with the Fort Worth Arson Unit, determined...

In 2002, my classmate Graham Platner ran for student-body president of John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor. I remember watching him in our auditorium debate his fellow candidates. He was the radical, wearing a revolutionary proletarian costume: overalls and a red armband... I don’t recall the issues they discussed, but I do remember Platner proposing collective action to overturn some school policy — saying something along the lines of, “They can’t suspend us all.” The history teacher serving as moderator interjected to remind Platner and everyone else that, yes, in fact, they could... Students elected the safe candidate, a...

...Exhaustion helps explain why ideas once treated as radioactive — socialism, in particular — are now discussed less as utopian fantasies and more as possible exits from a stalled national project. For younger Americans, the appeal is less ideological romance than hunger... They face unaffordable rents, unstable work, medical debt and student loans that metastasize faster than they can be paid down... When people can’t eat, can’t save and can’t think clearly, the abstractions of “free markets” lose their magic. Systems are judged not by theory but by outcomes. Right now, the outcomes for average Americans are brutal. This is...

A stunning new poll by The Heartland Institute’s Glenn C. Haskins Emerging Issues Center and Rasmussen Reports reveals that 51% of young Americans who are likely to vote in the next presidential election would like to see a democratic socialist in the Oval Office. The survey found that nearly three-in-10 young Americans who voted for President Trump in 2024 would prefer a democratic socialist win the presidency in 2028. Those earning less than $100,000 per year and those earning $200,000 or more also voiced strong support for a democratic socialist in the White House whereas the only income cohort to...

The full nationalisation of British Steel is expected to be announced in the king’s speech this week, a year after the government took over the daily running of the loss-making business from its Chinese owner. The steelmaker, which employs 3,500 people at its plant in Scunthorpe, came under government control last April amid fears that its owner, Jingye, was planning to shut down the site. British Steel operates the last two remaining blast furnaces in the UK, but its economic control remains with the Chinese company, which bought it out of insolvency in early 2020. An announcement confirming the plans...

Two Republican terror groups opposed to the Good Friday Agreement have denied they are involved in any plot to kill Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The Irish National Liberation Army and the Continuity IRA said this weekend there are no plans to assassinate Sinn Fein leaders. They also condemned any threats to the two Sinn Fein MPs even though they were political enemies. The INLA and its political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, described claims by Adams that he and Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly were under threat as 'nonsense'. An INLA spokesman told The Observer that the allegation...