Free Republic

Finland’s Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) is questioning a government proposal to raise the VAT value-added tax on sweets and chocolate. The THL, a Finnish research and development institute which is attached to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, announced that it did not agree with the decision to raise the tax from 14 to 25.5 percent. Talking to STT, the Finnish news agency, a senior THL investigator Heli Kuusipalo explained that the institute would prefer to see a sugar taxation system that was health-based rather than a direct VAT hike. The higher the sugar content in any...

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Wednesday on his show “Morning Joe” that some supporters of former President Donald Trump have a “sickness” because they want authoritarianism. Tuesday, during a Fox News Channel town hall, host Sean Hannity asked, “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Trump said, “Except for day one.”

With every hour that passes, Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination grows tighter. Every day in which his opponents aren’t gaining ground on his position is a day in which he gets nearer to appearing on the ballot next November and nearer to possibly being inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.

Mayor Eric Adams is leading a coalition of 62 mayors across the nation in calling for US House Speaker Mike Johnson to pass a ban on assault weapons following the mass shooting in Maine. During a news conference on Thursday, Adams pointed to the massacre in Lewiston, where 18 people were killed, as the latest example of why the federal government needs to revive its former assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004. “Eighteen Mainers were stolen from us by yet another disturbed man, wielding an assault rifle that had no business on our streets,” Adams said. “Mass shooting deaths...

Victor Davis Hanson, speaking to host Dan Proft on American Greatness’ “Counterculture” podcast, said that it’s necessary to “clean up and break up” rogue government agencies that “lie with impunity.” “How do you stop the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, the local prosecutors from doing what they’re doing?” Hanson asked Proft. “James Comey, Anthony Fauci, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe — that lie with impunity?” “You’d have to go through and completely clean out and break up those agencies.” This full interview is available on Rumble, YouTube, and Spotify. In his interview with Proft, Hanson offered an analysis of the current...

The Tyranny of AuthorityAs they reinstate mask mandates at colleges and at TSA, one really must recognize that everything they told us before has been proven a lie. Everything you were told about masks, about vaccines, about safety, about mandates were all BS, all of it. Some of us knew that immediately, could smell the rat. A lot didn’t, many fell for some part of it, others for all of it and some just did it to get along without making waves. Well, this is the result of being afraid to rock the boat. Without any evidence, without any medical...

In my last post, I argued that we’ve developed a two-tiered justice system, in which ordinary people have to take their losses in court and adjust their behavior accordingly, but Our Masters on the Left can just blow by their losses and, with utter impunity, keep right on keepin’ on. I noted two examples: President Biden’s determination to continue his gigantic loan “forgiveness” program still without the Congressional approval the Supreme Court held is constitutionally required; and his and his allies’ continued, if not even more aggressive, determination to persist with anti-white racial balancing by hiding it or calling it...

It is easy to get caught up in the current state of American politics, but it is essential that we also keep an eye on the future, especially as authoritarians on the left are aggressively trying to influence the next generations to buy into their statist ideology.A recent survey conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek revealed that almost half of millennials support the idea of misgendering someone being considered a criminal offense. This means that a huge chunk of Americans in this age group want to use the government to force people to censor themselves, which is a...

This article is a pre-amble to the main point. Authoritarianism in America is becoming more like authoritarianism in Communist China. This first phase has focused on using government power against conservatives. If the present trends continue, those who used the system of government against conservatives will soon find themselves becoming victims. To be smarmy, swatting will increasingly look like American authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics. What that begins to looks like is described below.

Abstract In two pre-registered studies, we investigated the relationship of left-wing authoritarianism with the ego-focused trait of narcissism. Based on existing research, we expected individuals with higher levels of left-wing authoritarianism to also report higher levels of narcissism. Further, as individuals with leftist political attitudes can be assumed to be striving for social equality, we expected left-wing authoritarianism to also be positively related to prosocial traits, but narcissism to remain a significant predictor of left-wing authoritarianism above and beyond those prosocial dispositions. We investigated our hypotheses in two studies using cross-sectional correlational designs. Two nearly representative US samples (Study 1:...

It’s well known that left-wing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was a psychopath, a dark status that led to his exterminating 20 million human beings. Yet the people who help vault such tyrants to power — sometimes pejoratively called “useful idiots” — are well-meaning but naive sorts, right? Perhaps not always. In fact, a new study informs, Stalin has much psychopathic (and narcissistic) company among leftists, including among today’s variety. Moreover, the researchers found that authoritarian-minded left-wingers often don’t care a whit about the altruism and “social justice” they trumpet, but instead “use political activism to endorse or exercise violence against...

Managed Dehumanization And The Global StateIn 1941 James Burnham published his book The Managerial Revolution in an attempt to explain the fundamental transformation that the world around him was undergoing. To most observers it appeared that communism, fascism, and liberal democracy were the three major systems competing for supremacy on the world stage. Burnham noted, however, that these three systems shared one trait: a class of highly specialized managers operating a network of large bureaucracies with the goal of standardizing and planning their societies from the top down. Initially this was easier to observe in the hard totalitarian states that...

-snip- Under the law, the Russian government now considers individuals legally summoned for military duty if a message has been sent to their personal accounts on Gosuslug, the state public services website, or if their name has appeared on a publicly available online list of those summoned. -snip- Simultaneously, the law calls for the creation of an electronic registry of all people required to serve. The registry will collect extensive personal data, such as name, address and passport details, as well as medical, education, tax, criminal, voting, and employment records from numerous government organizations, including the police and communal services...

Just in case you’re not celebrating diversity enthusiastically enough yet, here is more reason to start waving those diversity pom-poms: a new bill in Massachusetts would give Muslims privileged status. Here we see it yet again: “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts are inherently and in always and every case a gateway to the preferential treatment of the Left’s favored groups. “Islam must dominate, and not be dominated,” said Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood ... In line with the fact that Islamic texts and teachings frequently exhort Muslims to subjugate Infidels (who must be made to “pay the...

The woman (Rita Bellew) whose racist rant in a Montgomery County pizza shop went viral was charged with ethnic intimidation and harassment Friday, according to the Hatboro Police Department......Bellew’s case is being prosecuted in Montgomery County by Assistant District Attorney Tanner Beck, per the release from Hatboro police.

Irely on experts. Everyone should. Sick? Visit the doctor. Tooth trouble? The dentist. Car trouble? The mechanic. Climbing Mount Everest? Hire a guide. Want to come closer to God? A church near you meets at 10:30 or 11 this Sunday. Experts are indispensable aides to lives well-lived. Trust Us, a new documentary from the Pacific Legal Foundation, discusses experts in a wholly different role. These experts do not offer advice. They issue commands. The documentary considers the role experts assumed in the twentieth century: figuring out what you should do and how you should do it. You aren’t just to...

American supporters of Washington’s Ukraine policy often portray Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky as a noble champion of democracy who deserves even more U.S. military assistance than he has already received. The political and media love-fest accompanying Zelensky’s address to a joint session of Congress in late December 2022 was a recent example of such hero worship. Voice of America published an article comparing Zelensky’s appearance to Winston’s Churchill’s address to Congress in December 1941. David Frum, writing in the Atlantic, asserted that Zelensky recalled us to ourselves and our democratic values. Frum added that the Ukrainian president “came to the...

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy ” – Chris Hedges The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernible motives. For now, it just looks...

Ottawa, Canada - Fresh on the tail of banning handguns, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has initiated a ban on poutine. Poutine, a staple in Canadian diets, is French fries covered in gravy and cheese curds.A spokesman for Trudeau issued the announcement, "Now that we've eliminated handguns, we need to look at the real big killer in Canada, eh. Far more people are dying of poutine-related heart disease than were ever killed by guns. We Canadians are usually too polite to shoot each other, but we're also too polite to say 'no' to a second helping of poutine."Opposition leader Pierre...

[H/T McGruff]SNIP"The notion that Ukraine was such an appealing democratic model in Eastern Europe that the country’s mere existence terrified Putin may be a comforting myth to U.S. politicians and pundits, but it is a myth. Ukraine is far from being a democratic‐​capitalist model and an irresistible magnet for Russia’s groaning masses. The reality is murkier and troubling: Ukraine has long been one of the more corrupt countries in the international system. In its annual report published in January 2022, Transparency International ranked Ukraine 123rd of the 180 countries it examined, with a score of 32 on a one to...