Free Republic

A climate protest group backed by a cadre of Hollywood film-makers is preparing to take action against “cowards” and “criminals” of all political stripes as the 2024 election approaches. Climate Defiance, which disrupted events featuring a string of Biden administration officials this year, and targeted Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, in December, will consider protesting at events staged by both Democrats and Republicans on the campaign trail after concluding that its “very disruptive” action was bearing fruit. In an interview, Michael Greenberg, the group’s co-founder, told the Guardian it will also focus “more and more” on state-level demonstrations designed to...

Trump ignited a political firestorm yesterday during an impromptu press conference in which he said there was "blame on both sides" for the tragic events that occurred in Charlottesville over the weekend.    Now, the discovery of a craigslist ad posted last Monday, almost a full week before the Charlottesville protests, is raising new questions over whether paid protesters were sourced by a Los Angeles based "public relations firm specializing in innovative events" to serve as agitators in counterprotests.The ad was posted by a company called "Crowds on Demand" and offered $25 per hour to "actors and photographers" to...

These are busy — and profitable — times for rent-a-mobs. Just days after Black Friday protests against Walmart stores, many of the same agitators will be out again on Thursday protesting at fast-food restaurants in New York City and across the country. We’re all supposed to pretend these are “organic” worker “uprisings” against exploitative employers; in fact, they’re all bankrolled by Big Labor and its allies. At the forefront of this perpetual protest machine is New York’s Restaurant Opportunities Center, the union-founded “worker center” infamous for its protest shakedowns of nonunion restaurants.

President's side doing too little, too late to stop an increasingly violent and vocal surge of conservative opposition. With the opposition angry, growing, and getting ever-more extreme, with the polls tanking, with its own supporters disillusioned and confused, and with the Republicans smelling blood, President Barack Obama's administration appears to have abandoned hope of bipartisan compromise in health-care reform. “The Republican leadership has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama's health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, told...

FALLUJAH, Iraq - Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four foreigners — one a woman, at least one an American — through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Five American soldiers died in a roadside bombing nearby. The four foreigners were killed in a rebel ambush of their SUVs in Fallujah, a Sunni Triangle city about 35 miles west of Baghdad and scene of some of the worst violence on both sides of the conflict since the beginning of the American occupation a year ago. It was reminiscent of the 1993 scene...

JAKARTA (Reuters) - In a slum just a stone's throw from the gaudy mansions of Indonesia's elite, Rizal trades on human flesh and misery. Reuters Photo Crowds of angry students, the urban poor, the rural poor, supporters, opposers, can all be rented for a price. "Over the years, I've had orders for people from the parties of two presidents, but I'll work for anyone," says the 30-year-old Jakarta man, one of thousands of Indonesians who make a living arranging mobs. In the world's fourth most populous country, politics has traditionally been about crowds -- huge, noisy and sometimes violent masses....

I sat between this incredible guy who had been on death row for eighteen years before being freed by the Innocence Project at Medill Journalism school (the winner of this year’s $100K Puffin/Nation prize) and Joe Wilson, winner of this year’s Ron Ridenhour prize. I asked Joe why Powell had turned out to be such a wimp—failing to use any of his prized credibility to put the breaks on his lying colleagues, and instead telling all those falsehoods at the UN and convincing a boatload of gullible reporters of a whole mess of stuff that just ain’t so. Wilson—whose speech...