Free Republic

In October 1917, Lenin's Bolshevik Party seized power and inaugurated the first communist workers' state, founded on the principles of Karl Marx's “Das Kapital.” Almost immediately, the race was on to turn antiquated, almost feudal imperial Russia into a communist utopia. It was a tall order in Russia: the vast majority of the population of the nascent Soviet state were illiterate peasants, for whom the traditions and tenants of Orthodox Christianity were the sole cultural and spiritual bedrock. Replacing it with the more complicated economic and social principles of Marxism took ingenuity, dedication and ruthlessness. The state embarked on a...

Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai Thursday that artificial intelligence should enable people to work 4 hours a day, 3 days a week, Bloomberg reports. Why it matters: It's a remarkable demonstration of Ma's faith in AI, given he's known for endorsing the Chinese tech sector's standard "996" schedule, which consists of a 72-hour workweek: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. The big picture: Ma appeared onstage at the event with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with whom he had a disagreement on whether humans can be outsmarted by computers.

I hear more and more frequently concerns about an impending civil war. It is certain that something momentous is taking place; the signs are all around us, but I’m not at all sure that the something will turn out to be two sides of the same country warring over principles, like the Civil War, which was mainly about slavery and states’ rights. Now, we’re up to our nose-piercings in politically polarizing problems and the leftist contingent of the country doesn’t even like America anymore. If we come to open warfare, it will be as two separate nations battling it out....

Why is Communism relevant today? Ignorance! Just ask around. You may be shocked to find that nearly no one under twenty-five has ever heard of Stalin, whose genocide exceeded Hitler's by a factor of five. Communism is being repackaged in this atmosphere of ignorance. Films like “Motorcycle Diaries” and “Young Marx” portray Che and Marx as wise, prophetic figures fighting for mankind's betterment. Idealistic youth is responding enthusiastically in their need for heroes. If you travel abroad, say to India or South America, you can see full-scale marches complete with red banners and portraits of Stalin. How do you get...

Presidential contenders are in a battle to out-give one another. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., proposes a whopping $50,000 per student college loan forgiveness. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., proposes free health care for all Americans plus illegal aliens. Most Democratic presidential candidates promise free stuff that includes free college, universal income, “Medicare for All,” and debt forgiveness. Their socialist predecessors made promises, too. “Freedom and Bread” was the slogan used by Adolf Hitler during the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) campaign against President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler even promised, “In the Third Reich every German girl will find a husband.”...

Most know by now to NEVER take a socialist at his words Where is the Utopia promised to the masses by lying progressives for the past century? Living rent-free in Bernie Sander’s head. Sooner or later millennials, even the most gullible among them, are going to realize that overt socialists like Bernie and covert ones like Kamala Harris aren’t going to cough up on all the free stuff promised—because no one’s willing to pay for it.

Monday on MSNBC’s “Live,” Breitbart News’ senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak discussed President Donald Trump’s plan for an executive order “requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars.” When asked if government intervention can change cultural problems on campuses, Pollack said, “I think the real answers are yes and no. So yes insofar as universities that have these speech codes, especially public universities, really shouldn’t have them—they’re arguably anti-constitutional. And as federal taxpayers, we should not want our money going to universities that do this kind of thing, especially if they are public universities. So...

A favorite Saturday activity of mine involves chatting with a merry band of socialists who clot on a main street near me. Dreadlocked, dreary, and decked in alarming red, they implore every passersby somehow to stop U.S. “imperialism” in Venezuela. From outside Starbucks a mere 4,738 miles away. Most of us drenched in false consciousness prefer shuffling around, buying things we don’t need, and documenting our largely pointless existence via Instagram. The apparent injustice roiling in South America doesn’t resonate..... Because the Venezuela of reality is now inconvenient. That’s why you won’t hear Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) talk much about...

RUSH: Laura in Louisville. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi. CALLER: Oh, my goodness, Rush, I’ve been waiting since 1996 to talk to you. RUSH: Well. CALLER: As a matter of fact, I have two phone numbers memorized and one is my husband and the other is 1-800-282-2882. So I’m gonna get to what my point is. What I don’t understand is why so many people do not see what hypocrites the Democrats are, and AOC is at the top of that list. She tells kids to shop at thrift stores while wearing $3,000 suits. When are...

...author Jeff Guinn, who wrote the 2017 book The Road to Jonestown. ...Guinn expressed some regret that the Jonestown massacre has become such a ubiquitous reference point, inspiring such oft-heard phrases as, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” “First of all, it wasn’t Kool-Aid,” he notes. “And second, let’s face what the connotation is; it’s used to mean, ‘Don’t be a mindless zombie who just automatically follows orders from an obviously demented leader.’... ...We spoke with Guinn about the details that are often left out when Jonestown is discussed, and what parallels he sees between Jim Jones and a leader like Donald...

Professor Ying Fuk-tsang, director of the divinity school at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says that during the early years of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) some Christians became disappointed with church institutions. They thought God had taken away the power of Christianity to save humanity, so they joined the CCP as secret, or underground, members. He cited Yan Baohang, who was baptized when studying at the Fengtian (now Shenyang) Normal School and served as a trainee student secretary in the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). He was later sent to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland for further...

Imagine a world where millions of people abandon the land to live on the sea. On their floating habitats, and free from governmental overreach, people can dine on sustainable algae and live in harmony. They can sail from their own artificial island micro-nation to whatever country they’d like to be part of for a day. Plus, the people would trade exclusively using the cryptocurrency Varyon. But this isn’t just a strange thought experiment. The Floating Island Project is a very real collaboration between the Seasteading Institute and Blue Frontiers. The latter intends to build floating island habitats after selling enough...

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of high schoolers gathered across the country in a “March for Our Lives” rally. Organized and financed by anti-gun nuts and other left-wing outfits, and ornamented with Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the spectacle was filled with the emotional exhibitionism and juvenile policy recommendations one would expect from the most pampered and worst-educated cohort of young people in American history––the perfect shock troops for progressive propaganda. Progressivism, like its totalitarian cousins, is an ideology of melodrama and moral exhibitionism. The complexity and mystery of a flawed human nature and its actions are...

Venezuela — Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death. His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals. Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend...

A real estate investment firm owned by Bill Gates recently bought a giant plot of land in Arizona for $80 million to be developed into a “smart city.” Arizona-based Belmont Partners, one of Gates’ investment firms, purchased close to 25,000 acres of land in Tonopah, around 50 miles west of Phoenix, to create a “smart city” called Belmont, KPNX reported.

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city". I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes. It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own...

There’s a persistent trope in science fiction and fantasy about a society consisting solely of women. It’s a peaceful and prosperous society, free from all violence. There may be some female warriors, who are somehow better than all male warriors everywhere despite having no real pressure or battles to harden themselves on. As a female reader with a strong taste for rational thinking, I am begging authors to stop doing this. Every female over the age of seven knows that a planet full of only women would not be peaceful. Every female Odd will picture this situation as The Special...

Betty La France found a way to deal with a doctor who demanded she pay her entire bill upfront because the state could not be counted on to pay insurance reimbursement: She stopped going. While IL leaders waged a two-year budget battle, the state fell years behind in reimbursing medical providers for their services, skimping physicians and dentists even if their patients were up-to-date with their premiums. At public universities, officials and workers say some doctors and dentists, particularly those outside an insurance plan's provider network, increasingly asked patients to pick up the state's tab during the impasse. Some physicians,...

For the last 15 years, I have been making good educational use of Lennon's famous song "Imagine." In one of my classes, analyzing the song helps Japanese students think critically about song lyrics. The song is very well known and popular in Japan, in part because Lennon's wife was Japanese. Yoko Ono's leftist beliefs also left their mark on the content of the song, a fact that will probably soon receive official recognition by the National Music Publishers Association. The song's doubtful assumptions and internal contradictions make it an instructive instance of the sloppy, shallow thinking we often find in...

Stalled: Luciferian Elites' attempts to enslave the US population into a Communist "Utopia" The corrupt and criminal Clinton Cartel (includes virtually most Democrats and a few RINOs) are acting like a group of nasty, insane and furious Ferengis (see video below if you are one of the very few who never watched Star Trek TNG) and they want us all to join them in their madness. These creatures hate President-Elect Trump and his supporters. They want all of us to hate him and ourselves for having the unmitigated temerity to have voted for him, too! We-the-People stalled the Luciferian Elites’...