Free Republic

The PRC has adopted a sustained coercive campaign against the Philippines to seize its sovereign territory. The world is witnessing this aggression today in the South China Sea. Awarning from the 20th century is that dictatorships tend to use aggression not first against great powers but against smaller states. Hitler pressured Austria and seized the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia before seizing the rest of the Czech Republic, turning Slovakia into a protectorate, and seizing Memel (Klaipeda) from Lithuania. After checking Japan in 1938 and 1939 in the Far East, Stalin aggressed against Poland with his ally Nazi Germany before turning to...

The BRICS summit is taking place in South Africa this week. BRICS started out as BRIC for Brazil, Russia, India and China but has since added South Africa. The group of nations doesn’t have much in common except a generalized sense of grievance over the US being the most powerful country in the world.The other BRICS nations have offered little to no protest of the Kremlin’s decision to rush to war. China and India stepped up purchases from Russia as Western sanctions started to bite. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suggested that the West was at least partially...

I recently wrote how public educators and unions were methodically killing public education. The best example this week comes from New York where a school board committee has solved the dismal math and reading scores for children in the system . . . they lowered the standards. This is not the first system to gut its standards rather than improve its quality of education. As teachers and unions object to school choice, they continue to make the case for private education. Parents are increasingly voting with their feet. The board is simply calling the lack of proficiency “the new normal”...

He called Ye a “free thinker” and says this isn’t the time to “condemn Kanye or cancel him.” Charlamagne told Diddy not to make excuses. Not long after Kanye West and his “White Lives Matter” advocacy went viral, the public began demanding for Sean “Diddy” Combs of Swizz Beatz to comment on the controversy. It was just about a month ago when West called out Adidas for copying his designs, and the complaints were widely supported by his equally as famous friends. Both Swizz and Diddy posted to their social media accounts, calling for a boycott of Adidas on behalf...

Billionaire musician and entrepreneur Kanye West was suspended from Twitter and Instagram this weekend after he made several antisemitic posts, including a warning that he intended to go to “death con [sic] 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” in subsequent posts. The trouble appeared to begin with West’s interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, during which he claimed that Jared Kushner brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab states solely because he appeared to be interested in making money. There is currently a congressional probe into an investment by a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund into one of Kushner’s...

He only returned to Twitter on Saturday for the first time since November 2020 after the Instagram ban. “Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!” Elon Musk, who might soon own the platform, said.

Celebrity rapper Kanye West, who has recently renamed himself and now appears as "Ye", threatened to go "death con 3 on the Jews" in an apparent antisemitic Twitter rant. Ye followed this up by claiming that he can't be antisemitic "because black people are actually Jew." "You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda," continued Ye. The Black Israelites cult, with a large following in the Israeli city of Dimona, as well as black supremacists consider themselves the "true" descendants of the Biblical Israelites. Based on Ye's statements, some have suggested the...

Conservative political commentator Candace Owens dismissed the charges that Kanye West was antisemitic in a recent tweet stating that he would "go death con 3 on Jewish people." Owens said that West's statement was not actually demonizing Jewish people. "If you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic," Owens, who works for the Daily Wire news site run by Jewish political commentator Ben Shapiro, said Monday. "You did not think that he wrote this tweet because he hates or wants to genocide Jewish people. This is not the beginning of a Holocaust." ..... "If you...

The recent ceremony of accession of four Ukrainian regions to Russia brought a speech from President Putin that outlined the reasons behind Russia’s current struggles, the character and identity of its foes and, more importantly, laid the groundwork for Russia’s next level of confrontation with the West beyond the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine. In his speech, Putin clearly defined the present fight as a worldwide battle in which Russia plays a leading role against the Deep State that ultimately runs the West and which uses all available tools – including military, economic, cultural, and social – in its attempt...

It started with Gazprom revealing that the Line B string of NS2 is intact; not only it escaped Pipeline Terror but may “potentially” be used to pump gas to Germany. That confirms once again that NS2 is an engineering marvel. In fact the whole system: the pipes are so strong they were not broken, but merely punctured. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak followed up, with a caveat: restoration of the whole system, including NS, is possible, and “requires time and appropriate funds”. But first, in Russia’s order of priorities, the perpetrators must be conclusively identified. Sources in Moscow confirmed...

The Swedish Security Service’s crime scene investigation of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines has now been completed. The investigation has strengthened the suspicions of gross sabotage. The Security Service carried out the crime scene investigation, beginning this past weekend, with excellent support and cooperation from the Swedish Coast Guard, Armed Forces and Police Authority. The crime scene investigation has shown that there have been detonations near Nord Stream 1 and 2, within the Swedish economic zone, resulting in extensive damage to the gas pipelines. Certain seizures were made during the on-site investigation. The Swedish Security Service is...

Footage has emerged of a Russian propagandist being brutally arrested for speaking out against high-ranking Russian officials. Affiliates and members of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group have repeatedly criticised the Russian Armed Forces and its leaders on Telegram. Alexey Slobodenyuk, the head of media for a Russian mercenary group fighting in Ukraine, was pulled from his car by a special branch of the National Guard of Russia known for their unwavering loyalty to Vladimir Putin. Slobodenyuk has been accused of attacking defence minister Sergei Shoigu online, claiming that Russia’s current failings in Ukraine were in part due to organisational failures....

Aformer Russian commander said that the reason Moscow has seen a series of military failures in Ukraine is because Russian President Vladimir Putin has been misled by lies that have impaired his decision-making on the battlefield. "I don't think our Supreme [would] have made [inappropriate] decisions if he was retrieving accurate information about the real circumstances. The system of total lies brought us to this situation," Andrey Gurulyov, former deputy commander of Russia's southern military district, told television presenter and propagandist Vladimir Solovyov on Russian state media. The latest setbacks Putin has suffered due to a successful counteroffensive from Ukrainian...

Two Russians who said they fled the country to avoid compulsory military service have requested asylum in the U.S. after landing on a remote Alaskan island in the Bering Sea, Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office said Thursday. Karina Borger, a spokesperson for Murkowski, said by email that the office has been in communication with the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection and that “the Russian nationals reported that they fled one of the coastal communities on the east coast of Russia to avoid compulsory military service.” Spokespersons with the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection each...

A Russian-installed official in Ukraine on Thursday suggested President Vladimir Putin's defence minister should consider killing himself due to the shame of the defeats in the Ukraine war, an astonishing public insult to Russia's top brass. -snip- Kirill Stremousov, the Russian-installed deputy head of the annexed Kherson region, followed suit, publicly lambasting the "generals and ministers" in Moscow for failing to understand the problems on the front. "Indeed, many say: if they were a defence minister who had allowed such a state of affairs, they could, as officers, have shot themselves," Stremousov, 45, said. "But you know the word 'officer'...

The pencils of Russian commanders 😅 #RussianArmyPhoto 1Photo 2Photo 3You'll figure it out.

KYIV, Ukraine—Outside the Giraffe shopping mall on the western edge of Ukraine’s capital, a group of locals prepared to meet the Russian armored column thundering their way. It was late February, and the Russians, from an elite airborne unit, were riding atop their vehicles, as if expecting a warm greeting. One wore a Cossack woolen hat instead of a helmet. Another hadn’t loaded his rifle. The few dozen Ukrainians from the towns of Irpin and Bucha had other intentions, which they had written on the cement mixer and bulldozer that blocked the road: “Welcome to hell.” After Russia launched an...

"The truth is on our side and truth is strength!" Vladimir Putin boomed into a microphone on Red Square last week, after a grand ceremony at which he proclaimed four large chunks of Ukrainian territory to be part of Russia. "Victory will be ours!" But in the real world, things look very different. Even as Russia's president signed his illegal annexation treaties in the Kremlin, Ukrainian forces were advancing inside the areas he had just seized. Hundreds of thousands of men have been fleeing Russia rather than be drafted to fight in an expanding war. And things are going so...

A growing list of failings and defeats in Ukraine have spawned angry outbursts from Russia's elite, who still support the "military operation" but have gone as far as to suggest army chiefs should face the firing squad. Before September saw a series of battlefield reversals, public criticism of the army was rare. The offensive had been presented as a sacred, patriotic mission and speaking ill of the armed forces could lead to a long stay in prison. Today, nobody among the elite is calling into question the merits of Moscow's viewpoint or the operation against a neighbouring nation. But the...

Racing down a road with his men in pursuit of retreating Russian soldiers, a battalion commander came across an abandoned Russian armored vehicle, its engine still running. Inside there was a sniper rifle, rocket propelled grenades, helmets and belongings. The men were gone. “They dropped everything: personal care, helmets,” said the commander, who uses the code name Swat. “I think it was a special unit, but they were panicking. It was raining very hard, the road was bad and they drop everything and move.” After months of static fighting and holding the line under withering Russian artillery barrages, Ukrainian soldiers...