Free Republic

“There are going to be beatings and probably shootings, and shooting at police”. Former CIA officer Kevin Shipp warns that leftist violence is going to get “very very bad” over the next two years in response to President Trump indicting the plotters who tried to remove him from office. During an interview with USA Watchdog’s Greg Hunter, Shipp, a former manager of high risk Counter Terrorism Center protective operations with the CIA, predicted that there would be arrests of deep state figures who were involved in the scandal. “This was a coup. It was a conspiracy. It was criminal activity....

We and the Left are now two nations within one country. This is undeniable. We are now so different that we cannot even agree on what a country is, or on the merits of a country having a border. The number of people who still say, "I just don't care about politics" dwindles. It is still possible to hate both sides — but it is getting hard to be indifferent and still be breathing. How many people can just take or leave infanticide? How many people are entirely flexible about the idea of the government having authority over anything and...

Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those who dissent from the accumulating theses of “Progressive” orthodoxy. (A particularly worrisome aspect of this is that those theses are in constant leftward motion, so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today — the effect of which is...

Social media has been full of the Democrats talking about the Stormy Daniels affair with the joy and sniggers of three-year-olds who just discovered there’s a word for what you do on the potty. This is predictable and not at all upsetting, because if these people had any political sophistication and understanding of history, they wouldn’t support a party that is more fully behind the full-on communism that has killed a hundred million human beings in the 20th century and bids fair to at least an attempt to continue its work in the twenty-first. Also, most of them have the...

The cast of MSNBC's Morning Joe like to view themselves as the defenders of truth and justice in an age when such ideals are supposedly under attack by President Trump. Any presidential hyperbole is condemned as a lie, while their own hyperbole is speaking truth to power. As part of their panel on the Michael Cohen testimony, the morning show had on Cohen's friend Donny Deutsch who resurrected the old, evidence-free talking point that if Trump were to be impeached or lose in 2020, he would not go peacefully. Deutsch declared that in 2016, "When he thought he was going...

When Obama went on his world apology tour, he wasn’t apologizing for America, he was apologizing for Americans. This is the essence of this second civil war. Leftists are demi-gods who believe they are America and that anyone who does not believe in them cannot lay legitimate claim to this country as their own. Yes, this war has begun. The opening skirmish was the Obama presidency itself, The war’s second battle was the 2016 presidential election when Hillary Clinton, Obama’s chosen successor, lost to a television personality Trump’s presidency has been the third battle and with his string of successes,...

At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred last week on one point, nearly unthinkable until recently: The country is on the verge of "civil war." First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump. "We are in a civil war," he said. "The suggestion that there's ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It's going to be total war." The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned...

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War. In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War. This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs...

Commenting on the double standard the political left and the liberal media play -- conservatives are pilloried and leftists are coddled -- former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova explained that America is in a "civil war" now and that things will get much worse before they get better -- "total war." DiGenova, who also served as special counsel to investigate the Teamsters and as counsel to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, made his remarks on the Feb. 21 edition of The Laura Ingraham Podcast. During the discussion, Igraham noted how the left and the liberal media work hand-in-hand to spin and...

Michael Walsh has this excellent piece on the passing of Pat Caddell. I cannot add much more to Walsh’s spot-on comparison of Pat to an Old Testament Jeremiah, but I’ll try. Pat deserves as much applause as he can get. Pat and I spoke at many of the same events. I had the pleasure of dining with his daughter’s family at one back in 2011, and from there, Pat and I struck up an intermittent conversation over the years about election issues and projects. When I was in Charleston, we found a steakhouse somewhere to conspire. The last time...

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) on Friday suggested a future Democratic president could confiscate citizens' guns based on the precedent of President Donald Trump's national emergency announcement regarding the border wall. Nadler, the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, appeared on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time" to discuss Trump's announcement earlier in the morning. Trump declared it "necessary" to build the wall on the southern border. Host Chris Cuomo asked Nadler if enough Republicans would come out against Trump, prompting him to say, "I think so" and that he believes Republicans are terrified of unintended consequences. He speculated about other...

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...