Free Republic

Add Pajama Media’s Bridget Johnson to the list of those summarily silenced by Twitter’s ongoing purge of conservative voices. According to her employer, Johnson, a long-time journalist with established bylines at, among others, USA Today, the Hill, Politico, NPR, and the Jerusalem Post, was removed from Twitter over the weekend without warning, cause or explanation. A link to Johnson’s cache’d tweets (from late September) shows nothing close to any of the flame wars, abuse, taunting, bullying or anything else that violates Twitter’s intentionally-cryptic terms of service. As someone who has known Bridget for going on 10 years (in the early...

"Keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe from harm is perhaps our strongest human motivation, deeply embedded in our very DNA. It is so deep and important that it influences much of what we think and do, maybe more than we might expect. For example, over a decade now of research in political psychology consistently shows that how physically threatened or fearful a person feels is a key factor — although clearly not the only one — in whether he or she holds conservative or liberal attitudes."

Overhauling welfare was one of the defining goals of Bill Clinton’s presidency, starting with a campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it," continuing with a bitter policy fight and producing change that remains hotly debated 20 years later. Now, President Donald Trump wants to put his stamp on the welfare system, apparently in favor of a more restrictive policy. He says "people are taking advantage of the system." Trump, who has been signaling interest in the issue for some time, said this past week that he wants to tackle the issue after the tax overhaul he is seeking...

Speaking with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Breitbart London Editor Raheem Kassam, Bannon said that on Thanksgiving, Americans and, specifically, populist-nationalist conservatives should be thankful that “we’re winning.”

Roy Moore's Christianity and conservatism represents something that scares the heebie-jeebies out of the establishment Can someone figure out who you are today by examining your actions from 39 years ago? I am not who I was 39 years ago, or 29 years ago, or 9 years ago. As human beings, we tend to learn, grow and mature. I do not believe Roy Moore is guilty of what he is being accused of, but isn’t it strange that all of this suddenly appeared within 30 days of an election regarding a guy who is not only a threat to the...

When Jim Zeigler, the state auditor of Alabama, invoked the Bible to defend Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore against allegations that he had inappropriate contact with underage girls while single and in his 30s (which Moore has sort of denied), it signaled perhaps the final stage in the corruption of American evangelicalism. Zeigler claimed there are many instances in the Bible where older men had sexual relations with young girls. He cites Mary and Joseph as one example. That the religious left has made similar analogies to advance their political agenda is no excuse. It proves my point. Religious liberals...

Many people over the age of thirty treat YouTube as sort of a joke. They use to use it primarily to watch clips of speeches or for how-to videos: how to fix a dishwater, how to set up a wireless printer. But in the past six months or so, older conservatives have begun to follow specific channels from a wide variety of perspectives – people with 1 million, 2 million subscribers and more. And they are now realizing that YouTube can be one of the greatest facilitators of communication in the world – a way for ordinary people to bypass...

On November 2, 1917, exactly 100 years ago, British foreign secretary Lord Arthur Balfour sent a private letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild. The letter was written not by Balfour, but by other ministers in Lloyd George's Cabinet – Lord Alfred Milner and Leopold Amery. In history, this letter became known as the Balfour Declaration. Both Balfour and Milner were true Britons. Rothschild was proud of being a Jew. Amery was a Jew who carefully concealed his Jewish origins. What united this quartet? All of them were, of course, to some degree, Zionists, but only to the...

<p>The typical conservative case against the genre amounts not to music criticism, but to the charge that it promotes dangerous behaviors in the culture. Rap group N.W.A.’s 1988 album Straight Outta Compton is the representative example. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and MC Ren, got together in the titular L.A. suburb and wrote a violent and political collection of songs that included “F**k the Police.” The album met with outrage from conservatives, and since its release the conservative mind has identified hip-hop with a rhapsodic glorification of violence. Most rap, the critique goes, feeds the violent loop that mars inner cities, whose residents scorn the justice system and settle scores outside it.</p>

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) has long been a cesspool of moral rot and corruption. My longtime readers will recall that the first speech I ever gave on a college campus was at UNCG in 2004. The university had just spent $3,000 the night before to fund a speech by a porn star that referred to herself as the “Queen of Anal Sex” (I promise I am not making this up). But they refused to fund my speech on the First Amendment because it was “too offensive.” To cap it off, UNCG told the College Republicans (CRs)...

American conservatism is having something of an identity crisis. Most conservatives supported Donald Trump last November. But many prominent conservative intellectuals—journalists, academics and think-tank personalities—have entrenched themselves in bitter opposition. Some have left the Republican Party, while others are waging guerrilla warfare against a Republican administration. Longtime friendships have been ended and resignations tendered. Talk of establishing a new political party alternates with declarations that Mr. Trump will be denied the GOP nomination in 2020. Those in the “Never Trump” camp say the cause of the split is the president—that he’s mentally unstable, morally unspeakable, a leftist populist, a rightist...

t feels strange writing about this topic, some 25 years after I had it completely settled in my mind. But nothing is ever really settled, I suppose. The claim that I had long ago concluded was a basic historical and economic fallacy is back in a big way. The claim is that society needs homogeneity to be orderly and free. It is a core claim of the alt-right and its sympathizers (and, in a different way, of the alt-left). It is what leads them to reject freedom as a path forward and embrace state control of demographics. It’s completely wrong....

President Donald Trump told a gathering of pumped-up Christian conservatives on Friday that he’s keeping his promise to stop government intrusion into people’s faiths and return the country to more traditional values. “In America, we don’t worship government, we worship God,” Trump declared to a cheering crowd at the Values Voters Summit in Washington. "How times have changed," he added, " but you know what? Now they are changing back again, just remember that." Trump, the first sitting president to address the Values Voter Summit, cited the promises he's fulfilled, including the revocation of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibited religious...

When Palo Alto High School sophomore Jackson Druker wore his red "Make America Great Again" hat to school last year, he said he was bullied, harassed and even physically assaulted. Students took his hat and stepped on it. Others cursed at him. One student punched him in the back of his head, he said. Another told him "I literally want to shoot you right now if you don't take off that hat," he said during a class presentation on the experience. Druker's account with online schoolwork-management system Schoology was hacked and his contact information changed to hillaryclintonlover3@gmail.com, he said.

From now on, I'm no longer going to call myself a conservative. I am a proud "Normal"! Words have power and we've allowed the left to define terms of the debate for too long. By calling myself a "Normal", I'm declaring that the left, the sexual anarchists, the communists and all their ilk are "not normals". The right lost the marriage debate when we allowed the left to frame the argument in terms of "marriage equality." Time to change the debate.

I guess now we’re not supposed to be fighting culture wars anymore – man, it’s so hard to keep up with these ever-changing new rules! I’m old enough to remember way back to 2016, before Trump got nominated, and I could have sworn Conservative Inc., was gung-ho for the whole culture war thing. But then Trump actually fought it, taking on the big, soft target that is the spoiled, semi-literate athletes who like to rub their contempt for the flag we love in our faces in the guise of woke wokedness. Now we suddenly discover that fighting back is horribly...

Once upon a time Red State types were just like their Blue State brethren. They settled in for the night by watching Jay, Conan, Dave, or Jimmy. A few monologue jokes later, and they were off to dreamland with a grin on their faces. That was then, and by "then" we mean roughly five years ago. Today, some of the late-night faces have changed. Jay became Jimmy (Fallon). Dave gave way to Stephen (Colbert). And new talent like Trevor Noah, Jim Jefferies, and Chelsea Handler entered the arena. The entire tenor of late night changed, too. What was once a...

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles. Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative,...

Having refused to repeal Obamacare, the Republican Party is dead, as was the Whig Party in 1854 after it colluded in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which opened these territories to slavery. Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress as well as control of legislatures and governorships in 26 states veil the fact that, in 2017, there are no longer reasons to vote Republican any more than there were to vote Whig after 1854. The Republican Party’s successes in recent electoral cycles were due to the American people’s desire not to be governed by a ruling class, headed by...

Aug. 15 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his initial response that "many sides" were involved in the violent confrontation between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va. "You had a group on one side that was mad, and you had a group on the other side that was violent," Trump told reports at Trump Tower in New York. "Nobody wants to say that, but I'll say that." He noted it was a "fine statement" Saturday even though Republicans and Democrats criticized him for not specifically condemning those who staged the demonstration in the city. Trump said he...