Free Republic

Next month the most important political book of the year, or perhaps the decade, will be published. It is called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet. To summarize: shocked by the arrival of Donald Trump in 2016, American government officials, the media, and the technology giants created a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. The media was complicit and will never fully recover. Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many...

The Boston Globe ran a poll last December which found that a full third of respondents were thinking about leaving the state because of the high cost of living.The Globe/Suffolk survey found that about one-third of Massachusetts voters have seriously considered leaving the state in the past year because of affordability pressures, even as a majority still believe the state is generally moving in the right direction. Inflation, health care costs, housing, taxes, and soaring utility bills topped the list of financial stressors.Boston.com asked their readers how they felt and and even higher percentage said they were looking to move....

New York City is expecting something like two feet of snow, and the city’s government, led by socialist/Communist Zohran Mamdani, is encouraging able-bodied New Yorkers to help shovel the city out after the storm. But only, of course, if they have proper identification: Lefty Mayor Zohran Mamdani opposes requiring ID’s to vote — but mandates no less than five forms of identification in order to shovel snow. The New York City Sanitation Department website says that in order to register as an emergency snow shoveler, an applicant must provide two small photos sized 1-1.5 square inches, two original forms of...

The online registration states that to be accepted for the position, applicants must be at least 18, eligible to work in the US, and able to perform heavy physical labor. To register for an appointment, those interested must present two small photos of themselves, two original forms of ID, and a Social Security card. The starting pay to shovel snow with the city is $19.14 per hour, increasing to $28.71 per hour after the first 40 hours worked in a week.

Marco Rubio considers it an "overused term" while Friedrich Merz thinks it "no longer exists". But while the US Secretary of State and German chancellor may not believe in the relevance of the rules-based international order, the concept — and its potential collapse — has been at the forefront of global geopolitics of late. The phrase caught the global attention in January after a rare speech, from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in which a world leader tackled the often unspoken concept head on. "We knew the story of the rules-based international order was partially false, that the strongest would...

San Francisco just dropped a $300,000 sprinkler mandate on 9,800 condo owners — and that’s just the beginning. California homeowners are now facing a stack of unfunded mandates that could cost half a million dollars per property. No vote. No public funding. No way out. In this video I expose how a failed San Francisco politician got a $300,000 per unit fire sprinkler retrofit mandate passed after it was defeated TWICE — by burying it in a routine fire code update. I reveal why the sprinkler fitters union is blocking repeal, how the national plumbers union is pushing this mandate...

Immediately ahead of tomorrow’s EU summit, French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for the introduction of Eurobonds. Collective debt financing would be the final salvo in the march of Brussels’ central planners.As the 27 EU heads of government convene today with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the stakes are high from a fiscal perspective. A decisive item on the agenda at Belgium’s Alden Biesen Castle is the so-called Draghi Plan. The question hovering above it all is as simple as it is explosive: How can the obvious productivity and growth weakness of the Eurozone economy be overcome? For...

Guess what the main topic of debate at the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week is. It is what the Euro-elites consider the most concerning issue of the moment: “State violence in Minneapolis and the rule of law in the United States.”This is a typical example of seeing the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in your own. The European Union is criticizing the rule of law in America, while there are indications that Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission has in the past two years actively tried to interfere in eight parliamentary and presidential elections on...

EU Europe is increasingly abandoning a civilized approach to dissenting opinions. The raid on the Paris offices of Elon Musk’s company X appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Today, those who resist are being attacked on multiple levels, while those who submit are largely spared. It is time to increase pressure on Brussels. Elon Musk’s communications platform X has become caught between systemic fronts. On one side stands the American understanding of free speech, which has experienced a political revival under Donald Trump’s new presidency. On the other, an increasingly repressive EU control regime is eroding the...

Let's see how things are going in the communist utopia of New York, a month after Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor. Nearly two weeks after a massive winter storm hit the Big Apple, mountains of garbage line the still snow-covered streets (but not around Gracie Mansion, of course), and at least a dozen homeless people have frozen to death after Mamdani refused to force them into warming shelters despite the bitter cold. There were also blackouts, which is great when it's freezing outside.Oh, and the number of antisemitic incidents in the city has skyrocketed, and Mamdani...

A sweeping gun control proposal that critics say represents one of the most extreme assaults on the Second Amendment in New Mexico history is now headed to the Senate floor. Senate Bill 17, which would ban the sale of a broad range of semi-automatic firearms and impose heavy new mandates on federally licensed gun dealers, advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday night on a 6–3 party-line vote. An effort to strip out the bill’s semi-automatic firearm and standard-capacity magazine bans failed on a 4–5 vote, clearing the way for the legislation to move forward in largely intact form....

The House Judiciary Committee’s recent findings present a simple but unsettling conclusion. American speech is being curtailed in the United States, not because Congress has changed the First Amendment, but because foreign governments have learned how to route around it. Europe’s Digital Services Act, presented as a domestic regulatory framework, has in practice become a lever for global speech control. Its effects now reach deep into the American public square. To see how this happens, begin with a basic fact about the modern internet. Major platforms operate with global content moderation rules. They do so not out of ideology but...

A set of internal documents published by the Republican members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee (Judiciary GOP) has sent shockwaves through Brussels. Released under the title The EU Censorship Files, Part II, the investigation presents documentary evidence of a sustained strategy by the European Commission to influence public debate on social media and digital platforms, pressuring major tech companies to censor lawful content, alter their internal rules, and restrict certain political viewpoints. https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/2018683758006665352 The revelations go far beyond an abstract debate over content moderation. According to the material made public, the Commission has directly or indirectly intervened in at...

Say "NO!" to a Global Digital ID

JUST IN: Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler appears to suggest American citizens would be justified in shooting masked ICE agents. "What is really the major problem in this country today is the fascism in our streets." "The attacks on American citizens by masked hoodlums. If you were attacked by a masked person, you might think you were being kidnapped. You'd be justified in shooting the person to protect yourself."

President Trump joined Dan Bongino on the first day back on his show on Rumble and dropped some big news… He said something BIG will be coming out very soon on Fulton County about the 2020 election. In other words: “we have it all”? ... There's a lot from 2020 that people forget, but I haven't. Remember when it was rumored that the White Hats raided that server farm in Frankfurt, Germany and the rumor was that Trump won with 410 Electoral Votes? I remember. I think we may see that data again. And a lot more. Have you noticed...

“This is how tyranny looks in the modern world. It arrives dressed as dialogue, consensus, and expertise. It is imposed by people who sincerely believe they are doing nothing at all.” —DataRepublican. Davos — The World Economic Forum (WEF)— is toast. Trump, Bessent, and Lutnick exposed the wretched org of overcompensated squishes to too much light and heat and it flared into such a pathetic little smoldering cinder that its spoxpersons said the meeting might get moved out of Davos altogether next year to Dublin or Detroit. Closer to the people, you understand (except there are hardly any people left...

- New 4.3% sales tax on Uber Eats, Amazon, etc deliveries. - New sales tax on admissions to a wide variety of businesses. - Create two new higher tax brackets of 8% and 10% on people making over $600K. - A new 10% tax bracket for anyone making over $1M. - 3.8% investment tax on top of state income taxes. - Raise the hotel tax. - New personal property tax on landscaping equipment. - Ban gas powered leaf blowers. - Guarantee illegal aliens free education. - Make it illegal to approach somebody at an abortion clinic. - Extend the time...

Brussels doubles down on gender, diversity, and decarbonisation while Europe’s strategic and social problems are pushed aside. The European Commission has just made public its political priorities for 2026, and the result is hard to justify from any minimally realistic perspective. In an international context marked by war, geopolitical competition, energy insecurity, and internal social deterioration, Brussels has chosen to double down on an ideological agenda that appears utterly detached from the material reality facing Europeans. While much of the world is moving towards more pragmatic positions on foreign policy, defence, and economic sovereignty, the European Union insists on turning...

SCENARIO: COVID-19 RESPONSE (2020-2023) This demonstrates EVERY cognitive warfare technique from those documents: PHASE 1 - FEAR AMPLIFICATION: 24/7 death counters on every screen (emotional manipulation) Worst-case models presented as certainty (anchoring bias) Images of body bags, overwhelmed hospitals on loop (availability heuristic - if you see it repeatedly, you think it's common) Cognitive Technique: Amygdala hijacking - bypass rational thought with fear PHASE 2 - INFORMATION CONTROL: Dissenting doctors censored on social media (information environment control) "Fact-checkers" (narrative gatekeepers) label alternative views "misinformation" Google/YouTube algorithms suppress certain content Cognitive Technique: Controlling the information space so only approved narratives exist...