Free Republic

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values. The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs. But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the left. The left...

Sara Carter at Axios broke the story that McMaster, the NCS's master of disaster, had written a letter protecting Susan Rice's access to classified information ... Why does Susan Rice, who is alleged to have participated in the Obama eavesdropping on Trump people, need access to classified information? What national security purpose is served by it? The answer given in Carter's article is that it's an effort to provide cover for Susan Rice over the unmasking allegations. In a June tweet, Trump called the revelation that Rice and other Obama senior officials were unmasking members of his team the “big...

A few months after lefty activists crowded Washington D.C. for the Women's March, activists from many of those same organizations went to bat for a serial rapist and murderer. Ledell Lee's victims were all women.  While he was on trial for the rape and murder of Debra Reese, the testimony of three of his rape victims was presented. Lee had made a habit of knocking on doors and asking to borrow some tools to see whether a woman's husband might be home. Debra Reese called her mother and told her that a strange man had tried to borrow some tools....

What does #Resistance really mean? It means the overthrow of our government. In this century, Democrats rejected the outcomes of two presidential elections won by Republicans. After Bush won, they settled for accusing him of being a thief, an idiot, a liar, a draft dodger and a mass murderer. They fantasized about his assassination and there was talk of impeachment. But elected officials gritted their teeth and tried to get things done. This time around it's "radically" different. The official position, from the Senate to the streets, is "Resistance." Leftist media outlets are feeding the faithful a fantasy that President...

Friday, November 18, 2016 You Are Being Lied To Posted by Daniel Greenfield Media schizophrenia. Every quantum leap in mass communications also made possible a vast improvement in propaganda techniques. Nazi and Soviet propaganda looks as crude to us as a Babbage calculating machine. Virtual reality isn't something that's coming. It's here. It's been here for a while. The potent combination of media budgets and crowdsourced social media distribution has allowed for a previously unparalleled level of propaganda that creates and inhabits its own virtual reality. There's a name for that sort of thing. Schizophrenia. What happens when the schizophrenic...

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has supported forms of immigration reform since he was a House staffer in the 1990s, declared that he would "debate anybody" who calls the current bipartisan effort "amnesty." "Earned legalization is not amnesty," Ryan said during a forum on immigration sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers. "I will debate anybody who tries to suggest that these ideas that are moving through Congress are amnesty. They're not. Amnesty is wiping the slate clean and not paying any penalty for having done something wrong." I think that's a fine position Paul Ryan has...

You’ve probably never heard of Sebring, Ohio. Despite tainted water, which the EPA knew about for months before the public did, shipments of water bottles for the angry residents, two EPA employees being put on leave, and all the other elements of a scandal, it was missing something.

Mickey Fearn, the National Park Service Deputy Director for Communications and Community Assistance, made headlines when he claimed that black people don’t visit national parks because they associate them with slaves being lynched by their masters. Yellowstone, the first national park, was created in 1872 in Wyoming. Slavery was over by then and no one had ever been lynching slaves around Old Faithful anyway. But false claims of racism die very hard. Now Alcee Hastings, an impeached judge, and a coalition of minority groups is demanding increased “inclusiveness” at national parks. High on their list is the claim that, “African-Americans...

In a world where things seem to be falling apart, it may be that things are actually falling into place just as God planned, and just as He warned us in Scripture. In this week's update entitled "Falling Apart / Falling Into Place" John looks at things that seemingly do not make sense. Men in women's bathrooms, a failing global economy in a crude oil glut, increased persecution of the Jewish state and an attempt to take back the Golan Heights and even massive shipping vessels being sold for less than the price of a Starbucks "vente" coffee. And then...

Let’s Create a Real Palestinian State It’s not a nightmare if you can make it come true. April 14, 2016 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that. The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth. We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was...

Let’s Create a Real Palestinian State It’s not a nightmare if you can make it come true. April 14, 2016 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that. The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth. We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was shot up...

I’ve been writing about this for a while. It’s good to see it being said openly. Especially now that Obama tried to fake yet another diplomatic crisis because of another manufactured Israeli “insult”. […]As an example of such a crisis, (Michael) Oren cites the infamous diplomatic dustup during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel in March 2010, calling it a “fabricated crisis” intentionally created by the Obama administration regarding a routine approval announcement for construction inside an established neighborhood in Jerusalem.Obama manufactures these crises, these “insults” by Israel to make him seem like the victim so that when he...

The US Didn’t Create ISIS -- Assad and Saddam Did Dictators pay a price for allying with Islamic terrorism November 4, 2015 Daniel Greenfield 314 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. The Russia-Iran-Assad axis and its useful idiots in the West claim that the United States created ISIS. Some of the loonier conspiracy sites that gleefully repost Russian propaganda allege that the Caliph of ISIS is a Jewish Mossad agent named Elliot Shimon or a CIA agent named Simon Elliot.  Elliot doesn’t exist, but ISIS’ Deputy Caliph...

One of the few interesting items in the New York Times' whitewash of Hillary and Obama's illegal Libyan war is the confirmation of weapons shipments. ... The story blames the problem on Qatar aiding Jihadists and Obama's unwillingness to defy the terror oil state. But the claim that we had to arm terrorists to fight Qatar's arming of terrorists doesn't hold up too well. Furthermore we already know that US forces were told to turn a blind eye to Qatar's weapons shipments. We could have blocked them instead. ... Qatar was backing the Muslim Brotherhood. Just like Hillary and Obama.

Will Black Voters Leave Hillary's Plantation? Keeping them on the plantation is the only way she can win. February 22, 2016 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. In her desperate scramble to the top every Hillary victory is accompanied by a setback. The corrupt Democratic machine that has kept her going this far eked out a victory in Nevada, but took down her minority firewall.  In earlier primaries, Hillary had lost women and young voters. In Nevada, she lost Latinos. The last and only element...

Thursday, January 21, 2016 Trolling is the New Politics Posted by Daniel Greenfield Your classic troll was an amoral sociopath or played one on the internet. His only cause was his own amusement. He advocated horrible and contradictory causes because it amused him to infuriate people. If he could get an entire group howling for his blood, he won. If an outraged media reported on his antics, he was a prince among trolls. Chaos and absurdity were his only agendas. But eventually the trolls who did it for the "Lulz" gave way to the "Moralfags" sincere trolls who were sincerely...

Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the...

How Putin is Winning and Losing Syria No one is in Syria because of ISIS. October 8, 2015 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. The Russian line is that they’re in Syria to fight ISIS. But the Russians, like the Turks, Iranians and Europeans, don’t care about ISIS. By declaring itself a Caliphate, ISIS made itself non-aligned. The fighting in Syria isn’t about ISIS. It predated the rise of ISIS as a major player. It’s about Syria. ISIS has become a convenient excuse for...

After several brutal Muslim terror attacks in Jerusalem, in contrast to many American mayors, the mayor of Jerusalem is saying that more guns are the answer. Although such an announcement has not been made publicly or explicitly, Walla! News reports, police and local authorities have unofficially given instructions to civilians to carry personal weapons. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat has however issued an official statement urging residents of the capital to carry licensed firearms to increase their personal security. "The mayor encourages licensed gun owners to carry their weapons to increase security. He himself serves as a personal example of this,"...

Hygiene isn't Halal Immigration is all about diversity and cultural enrichment. And this Muslim eatery enriched the UK with a new strain of Ecoli that sent customers to the hospital because handwashing was Haram. A teenage girl almost died and more than 140 others were taken severely ill after contracting a E.coli in a filthy takeaway where staff did not wash their hands after going to the toilet. 142 customers who ate at the Khyber Pass in Hyson Green, Nottingham, suffered with nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea after the outbreak last June, and a 13-year-old girl was left so ill that...