Free Republic

...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...

...The unprecedented scale and speed of the autumn’s refugee crisis has forced even the Swedish political class to acknowledge that the ground beneath its feet has shifted forever. There is simply no more money, and no more housing, for everyone who wants to come, and for everyone who was entitled to do so under the old rules.

Apparently all of that “anti-imperialist” rhetoric from Caracas was just a farce for public consumption. As Venezuela’s economy implodes amid skyrocketing inflation and crippling shortages of practically everything, Socialist strongman Nicolás Maduro (shown) has a new plan to prop up his imploding regime: annex two thirds of neighboring Guyana’s territory and almost one third of its population. The area eyed by Maduro’s autocracy is especially noteworthy now that potentially lucrative oil deposits have been discovered offshore. Unsurprisingly, a powerful alliance of the region’s socialist strongmen and their allies has sided with the regime in Venezuela. Talk of war is escalating....

It’s the law of the jungle in Venezuela, as shopping for groceries becomes an increasingly dangerous activity. As the shortage crisis worsens, more and more angry mobs are raiding the nation’s supermarkets, looting whatever basic goods they can find.+ During the first half of 2015, the Venezuelan Observatory for Social Conflict (OVCS) registered no fewer than 132 incidents of looting or attempted looting at various stores throughout the country. In addition, Venezuelan consumers staged over 500 protests that condemned the lack of available products at state-run grocery stores, markets, and pharmacies.+ The OVCS has documented at least 132 incidents of...

The Socialist Utopia has come to Venezuela and so has triple-digit inflation. Inflation is soaring at about 65%, murder rates are the second highest in the world, they don’t have food, chocolate,cooking oil, sugar, beer, shampoo, chicken, beef or even toilet paper. Businesses put the blame on the socialist government’s economic policies and the government blames it on everyone else. A number of U.S. movie stars have gone to Venezuela many times to applaud their regime and compare their economy to ours. Sean Penn was one. ... American leftists cheered the Socialist government and the social justice he forced on...

In 1825 Welsh industrialist, Robert Owen, purchased a religious community on the frontier in Indiana, named Harmony. He renamed the village, New Harmony, and implemented a wide range of social experiments that seemed to hark of John Lennon’s 1971 song, “Imagine.” Things did not go as planned. The popular understanding of communism among North Americans is that its concept began with the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx then appeared in an extreme form with the advent of 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In fact, while living in England, Engels attended a Socialist “church” founded by Robert Owen. and...

That's the title of a new book by Fred Jerome, a compilation of essays from these and other noteworthies: This anthology features essays by revolutionary thinkers, activists, and artists-including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, civil rights activist Angela Davis, incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu Jamal, and economist Rick Wolff- addressing various aspects of a new society and, crucially, how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, living in a society that is truly fair and just. I suppose that's one way to describe their vision. I might ask the question, "fair and just for whom"?...

Saying that life is hard is kind of like saying the sun is hot, water is wet, or noting that politicians lie a lot. It's so obvious that anyone who's paying attention already knows that it's true. That being said, life's even harder when you're working under false assumptions that have been drilled into you by your teachers, college professors, Hollywood, and politicians in D.C. Much of what liberalism drums into the young skulls full of mush simply isn't true and millions of lives have been ruined by people finding it out the hard way. The good news is that...

4. Make Everything Owned by EverybodyHoarders blow. Take, for instance, the infamous one percent, whose ownership of the capital stock of this country leads to such horrific inequality. "Capital stock" refers to two things here: the buildings and equipment that workers use to produce goods and services, and the stocks and bonds that represent ownership over the former. The top 10 percent's ownership of the means of production is represented by the fact that they control 80 percent of all financial assets. This detachment means that there's a way easier way to collectivize wealth ownership than having to stage uprisings...

Speaker John Boehner’s office ripped John Podesta, the incoming counselor to President Barack Obama, for comments he made to POLITICO, comparing House Republicans to followers of Jim Jones, who murdered five people, including then-Rep. Leo Ryan, before committing mass suicide in Guyana in 1978. “For those who’ve forgotten, a Democratic member of Congress was murdered in Jonestown and a current one, Rep. Jackie Speier, was shot five times during the same incident,” Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said in a statement to reporters. “If this is the attitude of the new White House, it’s hard to see how the president gets...

A plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into multifamily housing offers a test case of whether land-use bureaucracies nationwide, encouraged by the Obama administration, should be allowed to transform American lifestyles under the pretext of combating climate change. Currently, 56 percent of households in the nine-county Bay Area live in single-family homes. That number would drop to 48 percent by 2030, under a high-density development blueprint called Plan Bay Area, recently enacted by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Plan Bay Area has already drawn several legal challenges, and...

South Africans are being asked to quit drinking for the month of October as part of a campaign to raise awareness about alcohol abuse. The idea behind the OcSober campaign is simple - stay sober in October. Instead of drinking away their cash, participants are encouraged to donate it to a charity of your choice. Organisers hope that the initiative will help to reduce the number of alcohol-related fatalities on roads. Charity organisations have given the campaign the thumbs up. “It’s new for us, but I think if you talk about a campaign like this and you can really market...

Many Democrats are genuinely puzzled about Republicans’ continuing opposition to Obamacare. It is the law of the land, these Democrats say. Critics should accept it, as critics accepted Medicare. They should work constructively and across the aisle with Democrats to repair any flaws and make the law work to help people. Historical analogies are often useful, but they can be misleading. The Medicare analogy is certainly misleading: Republicans, like it or not, are behaving differently from the way they behaved after the passage of Medicare in 1965. To understand why there is continued resistance to Obamacare and why majorities of...

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government. It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have...

There Aren't Enough MillionairesThe rich can't fund our deficits. This may sound like a liberal parody of conservative economic thinking, but let me put it out there: America’s problem is that the rich don’t have enough money. There, I said it. Let’s rumble. When it comes to the Scrooge McDuck set, the problem isn’t that they’re not rich enough, it’s that there aren’t enough rich — not enough to do what liberals want to do, anyway, which is to balance the budget by increasing taxes on them. Let’s deploy some always-suspect English-major math: There are lots of liberal definitions of...

But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable. Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work...

Insane, self-righteous lib says she would strangle handicapped (BBC) Virginia Ironside of London's Independent newspaper sparks outrage

Law would apply to sales of cats, dogs, hamsters, rats, birdsIt could soon be illegal for pet stores in San Francisco to sell pets. The San Francisco Animal Control and Welfare Commission will take up a proposal tonight that would ban the sale of all small animals from the City's pet shops. Only fish would be allowed to be sold under the ordinance, which is believed to be the first of it's kind in the country. The proposed law is designed to encourage people to rescue animals from the shelter instead of buying from a pet store. Supporters say it...

California, with its complex mélange of cultural, demographic and economic forces, may be, some observers contend, just a concentrated microcosm of the United States, telling the rest of the nation what it can expect as the 21st century unwinds. If that's true, Los Angeles is a microcosm of California. That makes the city's budget crisis not only a reflection of the state's own chronic fiscal woes, but also a case study of the countervailing political forces. Los Angeles is contending with budget deficits of $600 million-plus over the next 18 months. But it has a liberal mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, and...

Democratic Socialist Jan Schakowsky never heard Obama utter anti-American rhetoric. Honest. As the Olympics head to Rio, unemployment edges toward ten percent, and Tehran barrels toward a nuclear weapon, the Left continues its "Question the Patriotism of Conservatives" tour '09. In one of the more unlikely scenarios of recent television history, MSNBC's "The Ed Show" compared President Obama's perpetual criticism of his country favorably against Rush Limbaugh. The episode was outstanding for its audacity and the light it shed on where the Left really pledges its allegiance. Shortly after slamming conservatives' "lack of patriotism" and insisting opposition to Obama’s...