Free Republic

Author, educator, and widely published journalist Alex Newman returns to LibertyAndFinance just before flying to cover the UN Climate Change Conference. Newman warns of the ulterior goals behind globalist initiatives, and why we should be wary of signing on to the surface campaign, but instead look behind the curtain to avoid being snared into lives of subservience, surveillance, indoctrination, powerlessness, and poverty.

Were Sam Blumenfeld (AlphaPhonics) & Alex Newman (Crimes of the Educators) wrong that miseducation was deliberate, just because they were John Birchers (New American)? I know a duplicitous guy who writes for the New American (John Birch Society). I looked up his articles; they were transparently manipulative, clumsily so. But not Blumenfeld or Newman. (My John Birch acquaintance is a real stinker, he divorced and remarried, on the pretext that his Catholic marriage to his wife was performed by a priest of "schismatic" Catholic group SSPX. But SSPX has been rehabilitated and now has full sacramental faculties. So where does...

Neocon Tobin Dupes NY Post & Haaretz Readers on Birch Society In a column calling for conservatives and Republicans to distance themselves from racists and anti-Semites, neoconservative columnist Jonathan Tobin deceived readers of the New York Post and the fringe left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Legislation to shut down the controversial and unconstitutional U.S. Department of Education was introduced in Congress this week by Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a leading constitutional conservative. The bill, H.R. 899, would help President Donald Trump follow through on his campaign statements suggesting a desire to abolish the department as well as the Obama-backed “Common Core” school standards. The legislation was introduced on the same day U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was confirmed by the Senate.If and when the bill is passed into law, the one-sentence measure would give the powerful U.S. Education Department until the end of 2018 to wind down...

State officials in Louisiana tried to deceive citizens last week by approving what amounts to, essentially, a glorified name change for the deeply unpopular Common Core education standards pushed by the Obama administration. Basically, policymakers re-branded the scheme as “Louisiana Standards,” while pretending that there had been some “revisions” to the widely loathed education-nationalization effort. However, according to experts and activists involved in the process, the politically toxic national education standards imposed on state governments with federal funding and pressure remain almost entirely intact in Louisiana, despite the new name. Similar scams by government officials have taken place in states...

Further illustrating what would at least appear to be the incredible absurdity of what passes for U.S. government "foreign policy," Sunni jihadist "rebels" in Syria backed by al-Qaeda and the Obama administration have been battling against Shia militias that have also been backed by Obama. Both sides are fighting with American weapons, according to news reports. How much money U.S. taxpayers forked over to arm the two warring Islamic factions was not immediately clear. But the enormous human tragedy on the ground is getting worse quickly.The latest battle between feuding Obama-backed forces was first reported by the far-left Daily Beast,...

After years of running up against unconstitutional federal education mandates imposed on states using bribes and bludgeoning from Washington, D.C., a group of parents and grassroots education activists from across America is launching a fresh effort to shut down the U.S. Department of Education once and for all. The mission: "Stop Fed Ed." In the crosshairs is everything from dumbed-down "standards" such as the Obama-backed Common Core nationalization of schooling and associated federal testing regimes, to the deeply controversial federal data gathering and data mining encouraged and financed largely by the feds. The group hopes to pressure Congress into ending...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has made a major mess of the Animas River in Colorado and beyond, and now, some analysts are suggesting it may have even been a deliberate plot to bilk taxpayers and shut down mining in the region. Critics of the EPA are pointing to a letter by geologist Dave Taylor, published a week before the toxic spill, warning residents to protect themselves from the EPA and predicting a similar disaster in the same area purposely caused by the controversial agency. Now, almost as if on cue, the EPA is seeking more money and more power...

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.” For the U.N., it does not matter that the report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change shows that human activity is not causing climate change. Climate change is actually about changing capitalism.

Common Core is not a benign set of federals standards meant to make your children smarter, warns an educator who says it looks more like an indoctrination program to push students toward “green” jobs for a “green economy.” Alex Newman, coauthor of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children,” pointed to speeches by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “He gave one to UNESCO in 2012, for example, and he bragged that he was using these standards and our government schools to create green citizens to take their place in the green world order with...

The self-styled “Islamic State,” the gaggle of medieval savages and barbarians often referred to as ISIS or ISIL, is now infamous worldwide for its unrestrained brutality. The al-Qaeda offshoot exploded onto the scene in 2014 amid its gruesome and bloody effort to build an Islamic “Caliphate,” exterminate “apostates,” and overthrow the “apostate” regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. America and the West are supposedly next — at least that is what the public is being told. Ever since ISIS emerged seemingly out of nowhere, Americans and people around the globe have been treated to a steady TV diet of beheadings,...

So-called global-warming alarmists are in a frenzy after the latest climate data confirmed the Earth actually appears to be entering a potential cooling trend, sea-ice cover in Antarctica is growing to record levels, tornadoes and hurricanes are at record lows, and more. According to experts, the most recent revelations continue to make a mockery of alarmist claims — debunking United Nations theories about human-caused global warming and the wildly inaccurate supposed “climate models” used to forecast doom and gloom by forces seeking carbon taxes and more centralized government. Proponents of what is known as “anthropogenic global warming” theories, which...

As global-warming theories continue to implode in the face of growing evidence that Earth might even be entering a cooling phase, the Obama administration appears to be doubling down on the alarmism. Vowing to “act on climate change” without Congress if necessary, the administration is also launching a full-blown witch hunt aimed at crushing so-called “climate deniers” — scientists and other skeptics, including lawmakers, who question largely debunked United Nations claims about humanity’s alleged impact on global warming. From seeking to purge government employees who question the supposed “science” to viciously targeting lawmakers who express skepticism about UN climate...

Despite not being a member of the European Union, Switzerland is under intense pressure from Brussels to raise taxes as companies flee high-tax EU welfare states in favor of more business-friendly Swiss cantons. And if the nation refuses to bow down soon, so-called “eurocrats” are threatening retaliation. The Swiss government has been in discussions with EU bosses for over a year regarding Switzerland’s non-compliance with the “EU Code of Conduct for Business Taxation.” The EU’s goal, according to the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, is to eliminate what the supranational regime in Brussels calls “harmful tax practices” — low taxes which attract...

Concern over the H1N1 swine flu has inundated the airwaves and the newspapers since active swine flu was first identified in Mexico in April. And though the panic has waned slightly in recent weeks because this variant of the flu is not living down to its deadly predictions (in fact, it’s not even as deadly as the seasonal flu), for many people, if not most people, perception trumps facts and statistics, and so there have been mass mobilizations to combat the contagion.  The campaign has included classes to convince people to avoid unnecessary contact with others; a huge expenditure to...

Death from the flu is often heartrending for those who have to watch: the victim, having been weakened from the flu virus, contracts pneumonia from bacteria or viruses that have taken hold in the lungs, and he or she struggles for every breath.  The victim’s breathing is often raspy, and it is abnormally fast, like the panting of a worn-out dog. As the victim’s body fights the lung infection, the lungs fill with pus and other fluids, cutting off the flow of oxygen and causing the victim to turn colors — from shades of gray to a bluish purple. The...

Recently declassified documents obtained by Wired magazine reveal a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data mining operation. It already possesses over 1.5 billion records from government and private-sector sources. That figure is expected by the FBI to balloon to over 6 billion within a few years. And it is not just terrorists they are after.  According to the documents, the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is being used to pursue multiple types of non-terrorism domestic investigations. It is also meant to be able to sort through the data — everything from health and travel records to credit card...

A report released this month by the U.S. Joint Forces Command is warning of the potential for “rapid and sudden collapse” of the Mexican government due to the corrupting influence of criminal gangs and drug cartels. The Joint Operating Environment 2008 document (pdf) also lists Pakistan as the other of two large and important states that “bear consideration,” explaining that these would be “worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world."“The Mexican possibility may seem less likely [than the possibility that Pakistan's government collapsing], but the [Mexican] government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained...