Free Republic

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner sat down with former US Secretary of State and long-time diplomat Henry Kissinger. They discussed the pandemic's effects on global politics, China's rise as a world power, and the future of the European Union... Kissinger: In this country, the majority of people have had health and safety concerns that they've never experienced before. And they have been very occupied with maintaining a lifestyle that they used to take for granted. At the same time, there are groups who are systematically urging a new governmental and national philosophy. And while they are not the majority or...

Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services. AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place. Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe...

VIDEOIn the wake of the obscene crackdowns on free speech by the social media monopolies and their open antitrust destruction of competitors which just happened to Parler, we the people need a way to strike back. And one way to strike back is with a strike against YouTube which is owned by the Google monopoly. Therefore I am again calling for a YouTube Strike Day on the first of April, April Fools Day, in which creators decline to upload any videos that day and everybody else refuses to go on YouTube that day.If you want to upload a video or...

Republicans love to wail and gnash their teeth at the concept of a single payer for healthcare. And they should — the U.S. government would certainly destroy the quality of our medicine and shorten lives. The miracle of American healthcare today would be long gone with the creation a vertically integrated system run by Uncle Sam. As Ronald Reagan used to joke, the scariest words in the English language are, ‘We’re the government and we’re here to help’. However, hypocrisy is not something to be lost on any politician. So, it does not come as a surprise that the GOP...

The crowdfunding website GoFundMe canceled a fundraiser supporting the defense of South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O'Neill, the white police officer who shot and killed Erick Logan, a 54-year-old black man. O'Neill alleged that Logan was breaking into cars with an 8-inch knife and threatened him before the officer had to shoot in self-defense. O'Neill was wearing his body camera but did not turn it on. Black Lives Matter activists have called for O'Neill to be fired. The police union accused Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is running for president, of accusing the police of racism for political gain. They have...

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Sunday proposed a sweeping agriculture and rural investment plan to break up big agriculture monopolies and shift farm subsidies toward small family farmers. “I think a farmer that produces the food we eat may be almost as important as some crook on Wall Street who destroys the economy,” Sanders said during a campaign event in Osage, a town of fewer than 4,000 people. “Those of us who come from rural America have nothing to be ashamed about, and the time is long overdue for us to stand up and fight for our way of...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of their sensationalism and often hard-left socialist agendas, they at least brought public attention to price fixing, product liabilities, monopolies, and the buying of politicians. No such progressive zealotry exists today in Silicon Valley and its affiliated tech spin-offs. And the result is a Roman gladiatorial spectacle with no laws in the...

Perhaps it is too much West Coast air, or perhaps because the vast wealth of their owners keeps them insulated from the working class, but with few exceptions (such as Pay Pal founder Peter Theil), tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon all share a left-leaning, Kumbaya-like corporate culture; one that will protect itself with all the vengeful vigor of any social justice warrior on a college campus. This corporate culture war has pushed many conservatives to view these companies and their enormous clout as a threat in the market place and in politics. This is, of course, much the...

My parent built a second house on their property in Sacramento in 1954 for my grandmother to live in. Pacific Gas & Electric ran a gas line and installed a meter for that second house. They tapped the gas from the main gas line that was at the front house which had my parent's gas meter attached to it. That extra gas line to the second house ran about 80 to 100 feet farther to my grandmother's house. Sometime in the 1970s the PG&E meter reader got tired of walking that extra 160 to 200 feet to read my Grandmother's...

"As it stands, taxpayers, like you and I, fund the free broadcast of an extremely partisan cable news network in airports around the country. In America we aren’t supposed to have state-sponsored media. CNN’s biased propaganda is being piped into the subconscious of America’s traveling public and all taxpayers are paying for their opinion." Click link for the survey.

This festive season – made all the more festive by our Republican victory – marks the one-year anniversary of CNN’s Don Lemon sourly cutting my mic on air because I refused to stop pointing out Hillary’s all-encompassing evil. Sure, when discussing her myriad misdeeds and cover-ups and how they dwarfed the unproven accusations against Donald Trump, my description of her hubby’s intern depredations was a bit colorful. But I didn’t get cut off for being colorful. I got cut off because I refused to abide by CNN’s official narrative. And now President Trump will have to make a decision about...

Monopolies were and are considered universally evil except when it comes to unions. We hear quite a bit about inequality today. This seems to be the mantra in the waning of the Obama Administration with the President saying, “Income inequality is “the defining challenge of our time.” This is all code for another of President Obama’s descriptions of the same policy, the need to, “Spread this wealth around,” or in other words “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Let’s spread the wealth around and end inequality. One of the President’s and the Democrat Party’s...

The sixth time was the charm as British-based brewer SABMiller on Tuesday accepted in principle a $106 billion takeover offer from Anheuser Busch InBev that will create the world's biggest beer company and bring together top U.S. brands Budweiser and Miller Genuine Draft.

The costs of solar energy are plummeting, and now are about on par with the electricity generated at big power plants. This new reality intensifies a long-running business and regulatory battle, between the mainline electric utility companies and newer firms that provide solar systems for homeowners' rooftops. Sometimes the rivalry looks more like hardball politics than marketplace economics. The way rooftop solar typically works, the homeowner leases rooftop panels from a company that owns and installs them. It can be an expensive proposition, but the homeowner saves some money by drawing less power from the utility company's electric plants, and...

Chris Pope observes in a new report from the Heritage Foundation, however, the Affordable Care Act has if anything exacerbated the problem of monopoly pricing power in medical care. Yet the story of government’s role in driving provider concentration is not primarily about the Affordable Care Act. The bigger culprit is Medicare, the single-payer health system that represents just over a fifth of all health expenditures in the U.S. Read More …

In light of the ongoing net neutrality battle, many people have begun looking to Google and its promise of high-speed fiber as a potential saving grace from companies that want to create an "internet fast lane." Well, the fact is, even without Google, many communities and cities throughout the country are already wired with fiber—they just don't let their residents use it. The reasons vary by city, but in many cases, the reason you can't get gigabit internet speeds—without the threat of that service being provided by a company that wants to discriminate against certain types of traffic—is because of the giant...

Does IQ correlate with power? How many powerful people in the U.S. are actually geniuses, and how much does intelligence really affect success? In one of my research papers published last year, Investigating America's Elite, I set out to address these questions. I collected data on some key groups that greatly influence society: Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, federal judges, Senators, and House members. Individuals were deemed to be in the top 1% of ability if they attended an undergraduate or graduate school that had extremely high average standardized test scores that put the typical person well within the top 1%....

Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read Back in 1983, approximately 0 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who...

WASHINGTON — USDA says it will close 259 domestic offices, make other changes to save $150 million per year.

For the next several days, I will publish letters and Essays by Vladamir Lenin On the United States. Examine Bolshevik views on the US way of life and free market. I hope you all find it very interesting EXCERPT The sharpening of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is to be observed in all the advanced capitalist countries. The tendency is the same everywhere, though it manifests itself differently in accordance with the difference in historical conditions, political systems and forms of the labour movement. In America and Britain, where complete political liberty exists and where the proletariat...