Free Republic

Four years ago, government officials told us, "Stay home!" We have "15 days to slow the spread." Days turned into months and then years, while officials chipped away at our freedoms. I have long been wary of politicians, but even I was surprised at how authoritarian many were eager to be. Some demanded police to go after people surfing. They took down the rims of basketball hoops. Children's playgrounds were taped up like crime scenes. They told people in rural Utah and Wyoming to stay in their homes. In the name of safety, politicians did many things that diminished our...

Residents of the Evergreen State will soon be able to report their neighbors for expressing “bias.” The governor of Washington is poised to sign a bill that ends free speech in certain counties – and the rest of the state probably sometime thereafter. Recently passed by the Washington state legislature, this measure creates a “bias incident hotline” to the State Attorney General’s Office. You read that right: American citizens in the northwestern state will soon be able to turn in their friends, neighbors, family members, or even strangers for not only physical “hate crimes” but also expressions of “bias.” Substitute...

A YouTube video presents the story of the El Salvadoran dictatorship that has eradicated the criminal gangs, which, for decades, tormented families in that small nation. A lawless nation has, for now, been tamed by a lawless government. Will it happen here? Must it? In El Salvador, the problem of gangster crime had become unbearable for most of the population. The murder rate was extremely high and growing. The killers were unspeakably brutal. Tortures were often gruesome beyond description. Rapes were all too common, even in public places. Extortion was breaking the back of private enterprise. Children were sometimes killed...

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that former President Donald Trump had a dangerous “authoritarian approach.” Romney said, “I do think you can look at his record as president and particularly in the last months of his presidency and say, ‘This is a dangerous approach. It’s an authoritarian approach.’ That gives me far more concern than him playing to the crowd as he did.” He continued, “I think if you can look at the last few months of his presidency, you’d suggest that that’s the kind of thing you might see. That he would not...

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has told Der Spiegel that Ukraine is moving towards authoritarianism, seemingly making a veiled criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky."At some point we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man," the former heavyweight boxing champion said in a Dec. 1 interview.Despite being the mayor of Ukraine's capital, Klitschko said he hasn't talked to Zelensky since the full-scale invasion began.

America and the Fourth Political TheoryThere is no progression from the founding of the United States. Every step away from the founding principles of individual rights and freedom is not a progression, it is a degradation. The mistake that so many people have made is to believe that there has to be some form of updating the founding principles in order to move forward, but all of it goes backward. In one sense there is the recognition that the nation has modernized, but what it has done is drift backwards, towards the fiefdoms of Britain, the Lords and Commoners. America,...

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley called for an end to anonymity on social media during a television appearance on Nov. 14. “Every person on social media should be verified by their name,” the 2024 presidential hopeful said while fielding questions from voters on Fox News’s “The Faulkner Focus,” hosted by Harris Faulkner. “First of all, it’s a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden, people have to stand by what they say. And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots. And then you’re going to get some civility, when...

Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said over the weekend. "There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position," Lukashenko said. "They're there head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying." -snip- "We need to sit down at the negotiating table and come...

The Heritage Foundation is suing the Department of Homeland Security for withholding information about a grant of more than $350,000 it gave to a university program that linked the conservative group, Fox News and the Republican Party to militant neo-Nazis, according to a copy of the filing exclusively obtained by The Post. Heritage filed the civil suit on Tuesday in Washington, DC, federal court, alleging that DHS failed to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about $352,109 provided to the University of Dayton for research on “domestic violence extremism and hate movements.” “DHS repeatedly failed to respond...

With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.

Planet Earth is plagued with terrible governments, most notably those of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. It is not difficult to argue that one of these is the world’s worst. My vote, however, goes to the current US government for this reason: When the most powerful and influential country in the world has a dysfunctional government like the one run by Joe Biden, the equilibrium of the entire world is threatened. We have the most powerful economic engine and the most lethal military machine. Such a colossus should demand a government of equivalent power and capability. No such luck....

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Sunday warned of an “authoritarian expansion of power” by the Supreme Court after it released several controversial opinions in it’s last week of the term. “The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN’s “State of the Union.’

The Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) filed a public civil action on Tuesday that seeks to strip conservative news network Jovem Pan of its three radio broadcasting licenses. MPF accuses the network of allegedly having spread a “disinformation campaign,” broadcasting content that “attacks democracy,” and advocating for military intervention during the 2022 presidential election through three of the shows produced by the network. The action would also require some Jovem Pan networks to air government-created content.

Cultural guerrilla warfare means hitting the enemy with precision and effective labelling that destroys their propaganda in one fell swoop. Everyone on the pro-freedom right knows that we are in a cultural battle that is going to be a knockdown, drag-out fight with the forces of evil, better known as the anti-liberty authoritarians of the far left. We are on the side of liberty and individual rights in the marketplace of ideas, while the sinister set is still pushing the failed concepts of collectivism, concepts that have failed for centuries. This isn’t the place to detail why they are doing...

Former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) telling his state “what you can and can’t do” in their education system “sounds like big government and authoritarian.” In a press conference, DeSantis said, “Go read books like ‘Genderqueer’ and see what’s in there. It’s inappropriate. So we’ve armed parents to object to that and having sure they’re having education and not indoctrination.”

The Chinese government newspaper Global Times celebrated radical leftist New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as a “politician who truly understands international politics” on Thursday following her announcement she would resign next month. While the Chinese Foreign Ministry abstained from remarking on Ardern’s departure as head of government – aside from declaring Beijing “ready to work with New Zealand” generally – the Global Times cited regime-approved alleged “experts” who applauded Ardern for her efforts to bring her country deeper into Chinese Communist Party influence and weaken ties to America and the greater West. Ardern, who has served as prime minister...

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that the Republican Party under former President Donald Trump is “a paranoid cult of an authoritarian personality.” Raskin said, “I felt, you know, a measure of closure and satisfaction about the question of individual accountability. And, you know, justice in an individual case like that, anybody who has suffered, you know, a crime or lost a loved one to a crime, that kind of justice never equals the sense of sadness and anger that you go through. This is not equal to the immensity of the crime against American democracy,...

The Woke want us to eradicate our culture as we know it and replace it with a simplistic worldview in which everyone is either an Oppressor or the Oppressed. “We reject woke ideology. We will never ever surrender to the woke agenda. Florida is where woke comes to die.” So said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis when he won a thumping majority in the mid-term elections. That political use of the term “woke” still has many Australians puzzled.

In 1986, the International Olympic Committee voted to split the Winter and Summer Olympics so they would alternate every two years instead of occurring together every four years. The new tradition began in 1994 with the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, site of the infamous showdown between figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. The IOC initiated the split schedule in part to bring greater attention to the winter events, and while this move did bring them out from the shadow of the more popular summer games, it also locked the Winter Olympics into permanent competition with an even bigger quadrennial athletic...

MSNBC presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Wednesday on “All In” said that if Republicans take the majorities in Congress, American democracy will end, and “our children” will be jailed and killed by a “brutal authoritarian system.” Beschloss said, “Six nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country. There’s signs that may happen, may God forbid. That losers will be declared winners by a fraudulent election officers, or a secretary of state candidates, or governors, or state legislatures. We could be six days away from losing our rule of law and losing a situation where we...