Free Republic

The best AR-15s cost less now than the cheapest ones will, if the Democrats’ gun-ban legislation gains steam. After I suggested reasons to own AR-15s and to fight Democrats’ new attempt to ban them, some readers wrote to request recommendations for the best AR-15s to have and the best ways to equip them. Because self-defense is the primary reason Americans buy guns, including a million AR-15s every year, here are, I believe, the top 10 characteristics of AR-15s configured for defensive purposes and the top 10 components they should have. Top 10 Characteristics 1. Caliber U.S. Special Operations Command will...

Rush Limbaugh's December 2018 Limbaugh Letter has an article titled "Demonizing White Men." It highlights -- with actual quotations from people in the media, academia and the political and entertainment arenas -- the attack on white men as a class. You can decide whether these statements are decent, moral or even sensible. Should we support their visions? Don Lemon, a CNN anchorman, said, "We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them." Steven Clifford, former...

During the attempted electronic lynching of the Covington Catholic high school boys on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the mask hiding the Left’s genocidal rage slipped and was momentarily visible. The reality of the confrontation was inverted 180 degrees by the duplicitous mainstream media so that a smiling white teenager was made to face the wrath of an Orwellian two-minute hate that stretched on for days, even after the factual record was corrected. Accelerated by social media, the virtual lynch mob called for, among other horrors, MAGA-hat-wearing teenage boys to be fed headfirst into wood chippers, or for...

Subtitle: Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs. On january 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise. Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and...

The partial government shutdown is about more than a shutdown. It’s civil war. There are not guns or violence, at least not yet. The U.S. military has not turned against any portion of the citizens. Nobody has openly called for secession yet, at least to the point where it can credibly happen. Not just yet. Yet all these things are just beneath the surface. Any one of these things could happen, almost at any time, although — for perfectly understandable reasons — most of us prefer not yet to know it. Donald Trump came along in the midst of this...

Sarah Hoyt has yet to come to terms with the fact that it is her "born American in Portugal" civic nationalism that has led the United States to the brink of civil war: But is it better if the rough music plays and civil war breaks out? Civil war is not impossible. Despite the fact that we’re emulsified, red and blue living side by side (but not in harmony), civil war is not impossible. It’s just not the civil war we’ve read about in history books, the stories of the grey and the blue and neat armies on the field....

Civil division and its conquests are the true makers of America, and continue to shape its national progress—or threaten its undoing. Indeed, the very founding of the United States advanced the principle of civil conflict over all others. Our very identity, from the start, was framed as triumph over the “other.” We cast them out, like France cruelly expelled their heretic Huguenots in the 17th century. For our part, we drove out 100,000 loyalists we once counted as blood brothers. This civil war itself lasted 20 years, from 1763 to 1783, but the ensuing cold war and residual battles with...

The nation is deeply divided, with each side seeing the other as “the enemy.” I began my journalism career covering a civil war in Lebanon. I never thought I’d end my career covering a civil war in America. We may not be there yet, but if we don’t turn around now, we will surely get where we’re going — which was best described by Senator Jeff Flake on Monday: “Tribalism is ruining us. It is tearing our country apart. It is no way for sane adults to act.” Sure, we’ve experienced bouts of intense social strife since the American Civil...

Strong rhetoric and violence on both sides of the political spectrum are reaching a fever pitchIs the United States on the brink of a new civil war? According to Newsweek magazine’s polling, a third of all Americans think such a conflict could break out within the next five years, with 10% thinking it “very likely to happen.” Plenty of experts agree. Back in March, State Department official Keith Mines told Foreign Policy magazine: “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.” He rated the odds of a second American Civil War breaking out within...

We don't know exactly where the 10,000 person caravan from Guatemala is targeted for crossing the border, but we know they are headed North. The Caravan is getting a lot of publicity., Maybe we should do the same? We could create a counter caravan (of pickup trucks?) to head for the presumed border crossing point, to protest the failure of the government to protect us from invasion seems like a good idea.

Yes, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court. Rue the day. Rend your garments. Then, step back, view the entirety of the battle in which you are engaged, and understand that Kavanaugh is just one part of a much larger plan by conservatives to fundamentally change the American political structure so that it enshrines and protects white male power even after America’s changing demographics and mores move away from that power. This, for them, is not simply a game about political passion and political principles. This is a game of power, pure and simple, and it’s about whether the people...

The primary objective of any people who find themselves in the throes of a revolution is to find ways of diverting its logic from its worst conclusions. [....] The logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior. With Newtonian necessity, each such exercise causes a corresponding and opposite reaction. The logic’s force comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands. If that were the case, acquiescing to or compromising with them could cut it short. Rather, it comes from that which moves, changes,...

New York Times columnist Charles Blow delivers a genuine polemic, a "warlike speech," in reaction to the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh. Apart from the declaration of hostilities in the title of the piece, it concludes with this admonition to liberal foot soldiers: "Stop thinking you're in a skirmish, when you're at war." In elucidating the "war" to which he refers, Blow explains that "Kavanagh is just one part of a much larger plan by conservatives to fundamentally change the American political structure so that it enshrines and protects white male power even after America's changing demographics and mores move away...

Bear spray, bloody brawls at Patriot Prayer 'law and order' march in PortlandA demonstration billed as a march for "law and order" in the streets of Portland descended into chaos as rival political factions broke into bloody brawls downtown Saturday night. Members of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer and their black-clad adversaries, known as antifa, used bear spray, bare fists and batons to thrash each other outside Kelly's Olympian, a popular bar on Southwest Washington Street. The melee, which lasted more than a minute, ended when riot cops rushed in and fired pepper balls at the street fighters. The Portland...

FFar-left activists associated with Antifa and other radical hate groups attacked the Republican Party headquarters in New York City late Thursday evening; vandalizing the historic building and warning the incident was “merely the beginning.” The New York GOP released shocking images immediately following the assault; writing “The New York Republican New York City headquarters at the Metropolitan Republican Club was physically vandalized last evening with broken windows, spray-paint and more TThe attackers left an ominous note at the scene, saying “The U.S. government has established concentration camps around the country for Latino people, shamelessly murdering black people, and continues its...

We are in the midst of a cold civil war. The crux? Realizing politics is part of life, one side believes America is fundamentally a good country requiring some prudent improvements upon which reasonable minds may differ. On the other side, the Left, thinking politics is life, believes America is a hopelessly unjust nation requiring “fundamental transformation” and this is a point on which no reasonable minds can differ. The Kavanaugh confirmation evinces the political abyss between us; and the bathetic depths to which this divide drives the Left to “win.” Employing the subjective term “credible” for an accusation that...

Communist agitators took to Twitter this week to brainstorm strategies for a violent armed insurrection against their perceived enemies. “Dr. Bones," the co-host of the far-left podcast The Guillotine, started the conversation going with his 5,000-plus Twitter followers. Bones (@Ole_Bonsey on Twitter) asked: “Hey quick little question for military minded lefties: should leftists train/organize in a 'insurgent' focus where they blend into a civilian population for potential attacks or a more 'militia' structure focused on holding/maintaining turf?” Bones went on to suggest that fellow travelers organize "hidden cells" and focus on ambushes and assassinations to bleed "right-leaning forces" dry. He...

It is my contention that we are just one bad event away from a shooting civil war in America -- and in fact if you ask Steve Scalise it may have already started.The political process is often fraught with severe language, money and hard-fought contests.  But in the end there are winners and losers; a person who loses by one vote still lost, while the person who wins by one vote still gets the office.  The margin is immaterial and, in the context of a Presidential Election, the popular vote doesn't matter; it is the electoral vote that counts and thus all candidates tailor...

Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps. It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure and freedom in the history of civilization. The ancient historian Thucydides called the civil discord that tore apart the fifth-century B.C. Greek city-states “stasis.” He saw stasis as a bitter civil war between the revolutionary masses and the traditionalist middle and upper classes. Something like that ancient divide is now infecting every aspect of American life. Americans increasingly are either proud of past U.S. traditions, ongoing reform...

An uneasiness has overtaken the body politic. There is a sense that a terrible clash is about to occur. The establishment’s contempt for Donald Trump, and their machinations to remove him, are validated by the president’s intemperate counterattacks and the glee that his supporters take in his barbs. These two groups do not simply disagree; they consider each other to be illegitimate and unconstitutional outlaws. It is true that Trump’s behavior is not befitting his office and that a certain decorum and dignity in the White House is not only desirable but essential. Democracy is no different from any other...