Free Republic

A talking head on MSNBC has called for a post 9/11 style government crackdown as a means of winning “a battle for hearts and minds” of Americans who might turn against the leftist mindset and become overly patriotic. Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and Righteous Media compared the “threat” of such a scenario to the “number one threat” after 9/11, effectively suggesting conservatives and Trump supporters are akin to terrorists. “A lot of Americans are up for grabs. I wouldn’t dismiss it as just something only people on the right or watching Fox News latch...

Art Pawlowski set to return to court on Aug. 9.. Pastor Artur Pawlowski's troubles with the Canadian authorities began long before his sermon to commercial truckers encouraging their peaceful defiance against what he thought were "oppressive" public health mandates for COVID-19. In 2005, he began serving and ministering to downtown Calgary—Alberta's poor and downtrodden. "In other words, feeding the homeless and praying for them, which is now illegal," he described to The Epoch Times in a telephone interview while under house arrest in Calgary following his court conviction in May for inciting mischief and violating his release conditions. The police...

The government of Hong Kong is offering a bounty of up to $1 million to anyone who can help find eight activists who fled to other countries and continue to fight against its authoritarian government. I am not one of the eight, but all of us who fight for democracy in Hong Kong are in danger from a Chinese government that is chasing us for showing that it has broken its promises to keep Hong Kong a vibrant and free city-state. I became an activist for democracy in Hong Kong at the age of 14, when I started participating in...

A former NYPD sergeant is accused of helping Chinese spies embedded in New York and New Jersey track down dissidents on behalf of their government and threaten to harm their families unless they returned to the 'homeland' to go to prison as part of a program dubbed Operation Fox Hunt. Michael McMahon is on trial in New York City along with Zhu Yong and Zheng Congying as acting as Chinese agents to track down dissidents who had fled and intimidate them into returning. The trial began today with opening statements from US federal prosecutors. McMahon was working as a private...

A judge on Thursday issued a furious order targeting a Chinese billionaire and ally of Steve Bannon, a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle, ordering him to either pay $134m or face arrest for his violation of a previous court order. In a ruling, a judge from the New York County Supreme Court excoriated Guo Wengui for hiding billions of dollars’ worth of assets around the US and elsewhere including in the form of a superyacht named the Lady May. Judge Barry Ostrager faulted Mr Guo in his ruling for hiding the craft outside of US jurisdiction in the Bahamas...

The owner of a wine and beer bar who openly flouted Gov. Tim Walz's executive orders to shut down last winter during the COVID-19 pandemic was found guilty of six criminal misdemeanor counts Thursday by a Freeborn County jury. A jury of three women and three men took only an hour of deliberation to convict Lisa Hanson, the 57-year-old bar owner, after a three-day trial punctuated by Hanson's repeated attempts to argue that Walz's orders were unconstitutional. Judge Joseph Bueltel followed the reading of the verdict with a scathing denunciation of Hanson's behavior, explaining why the governor's orders were legal....

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The owner of a bar in Albert Lea was found guilty Thursday of six criminal misdemeanor charges and sentenced to 90 days in jail for defying Gov. Tim Walz’s executive orders to close her business last winter. The jury found Lisa Hanson, 57, guilty after deliberating for an hour, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported. Prosecutors had asked that Hanson be fined $500 and jailed for several days, but Judge Joseph Bueltel gave her a 90-day jail sentence and a $1,000 fine, saying he wanted to send a message to people who violate executive orders. “You wanted to make...

Chinese dissenter and artist Ai Weiwei warned that political correctness has begun to show shades of similarities to Mao Zedong’s infamous Cultural Revolution in China. Weiwei sat down for an interview Friday with PBS reporter Margaret Hoover on "Firing Line" to discuss authoritarianism in China. During the discussion, Hoover noted a quote from his book when he referenced former President Donald Trump.

The NSC ignores Islamic terrorism and joins the Obama-Biden jihad against ordinary Americans. h=550 "This National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lays out a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat while safeguarding bedrock American civil rights and civil liberties – values that make us who we are as a nation,” explains an introduction attributed to Joe Biden in the document, released last month by the National Security Council. This strategy, readers learn “is narrowly tailored to focus specifically on addressing violence and the factors that lead to violence.” As it happens, this “narrowly tailored” approach is nothing new. The strategy...

A young Chinese dissident on the Chinese Communist Party’s wanted list is seeking help after being held incommunicado for a month in the United Arab Emirates, with the prospect of being sent back to China to face torture. Dubai police arrested Wang Jingyu, a 19-year-old from Chongqing city in southern China’s Sichuan Province, during his transfer flight to New York on April 6. Wang, who says he has done nothing wrong, has been in custody since with limited contact with the outside world. “This is 100 percent linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” he said in an interview with...

"The people controlling Joe Biden have just erased the Constitution for good. All that is now required for a citizen to lose all rights to own property or conduct business in any way is a simple accusation of Russian ‘involvement.’ The American Thinker explained: Executive Order Canceling the Constitution On April 15, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation. Contrary to its title, this EO is not about Russia. It is designed to allow the Biden administration to deprive American citizens and organizations of...

SHIAWASSEE COUNTY, MI -- The Owosso barber who became a figurehead for those opposed to executive orders issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer nearly a year ago, is facing a $9,000 fine for giving unlicensed hair cuts on the steps of the state’s Capitol and sanitation and equipment violations. Individual fines of $4,500 were ordered against both Karl W. Manke, 77, and his barbershop, Karl Manke Main St. Barber & Beauty Shop -- totaling $9,000 -- to be paid to the state of Michigan within 90 days following a Michigan Board of Barber Examiners’ Monday, March 29 review, according to the...

If Americans choose to fight the coming authoritarian leviathan, they should examine the history of other political movements and the resulting lessons learned at the edge of liberty and tyranny. It is considerably less painful to learn from the mistakes of others than from your own, and it is less costly to learn from the successes of others, versus your own trial and effort. As we consider how to resist the looming effort of the authoritarian Left to transform our system of republican self-governance into an autocratic unitary state, we should examine the experiences of other resistance movements. Two ongoing...

If the DHS bureaucrats apply the label "domestic extremist" to you, kiss your right to travel good-bye. Now that the Department of Justice and FBI are using the 1/6/21 Capitol incursion to demonize all who attended the massive rally that day, imputing “insurrection,” “white supremacy,” and “extremism” to them, massive political repression may be coming. Consider this from Politico: The Department of Homeland Security is considering monitoring the travel of domestic extremists and expanding its use of the No Fly List, law enforcement sources told POLITICO. The discussions are part of the Biden administration’s strategy of treating domestic terror as...

Until Lambs Become LionsRight now, we are 80 million couch potatoes and keyboard warriors with rifles in our bedroom closets. This is not a force to be reckoned with.We are locked in a zero-sum game rebellion of the elites, who are intent on fundamentally transforming America into an authoritarian state with a single ideology and ruling class. In order to defeat this rebellion, we need to understand the terrain we are operating on and the strategy and tactics of our enemy. Even more important, we need a strategy of our own to guide our struggle and return to a functional...

Microsoft has teamed up with a number of tech and media companies to create a system of tracing content around the internet that could destroy online privacy and anonymity, radically transforming the nature of the web. Against stiff competition, the alliance of tech and media giants has devised a plan that may constitute Big Tech’s most brazen power-grab yet. According to Microsoft’s press release, it has partnered with several other organizations to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Put simply, the purpose of this organization is to devise a system whereby all content on the internet can...

On December 4, Moscow’s Kuntsevsky District Court continued hearing the case against 21-year-old Higher School of Economics (HSE) student and libertarian YouTube personality Egor Zhukov. Zhukov stands accused of issuing public calls for extremism: Prosecutors have argued that his videos on nonviolent resistance were motivated by “political hatred and enmity to the constitutional structure extant in the Russian Federation” as well as a desire to destabilize the country’s social and political order. Zhukov’s case, one of many that were brought forward during this summer’s wave of election protests in Moscow, has attracted widespread attention throughout the Russian opposition. Many of...

In a symbolic gesture on August 25, 1968, that launched the political dissident movement, eight people demonstrated on Moscow’s Red Square against the Soviet authorities sending tanks into Prague.. Most of those eight demonstrators — Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pavel Litvinov, Viktor Fainberg, Vladimir Dremlyuga, Konstantin Babitsky, Larisa Bogoraz, Vadim Delaunay and Tatiana Bayeva — paid a high price for their protest. Gorbanevskaya, a translator and poet, and art critic Fainberg were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals — she for two years and he for five — and forcibly treated with antipsychotic drugs. Dremlyuga, an electrician, and Delaunay, a poet, were sentenced to...

The woman found slumped on a shopping centre bench alongside a former Russian agent convicted of spying for Britain is his daughter, it has emerged. Yulia Skripal, in her 30s, and father Sergei, 66, are critically ill in hospital after being found unconscious in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on Sunday. UK police are trying to find out what "unknown substance" harmed the pair. A number of emergency services workers were assessed immediately after the incident - and one remains in hospital.

Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that his company had taken down the account of Chinese dissident Guo Wengui, who lives in the US, on the strength of a report filed to the tech giant by the Chinese government. Guo, a billionaire living in New York City who is a harsh critic of the Chinese government, published on Facebook “sometimes outlandish tales of deep corruption among family members of top Communist Party officials,” the New York Times wrote a month ago, as it reported that Guo’s account had been taken down. Republican Sen....