Free Republic

At the World Government Summit, Tucker Carlson told a gathering of world leaders that Moscow “was so much nicer than any city” in the United States. “It’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow,” Tucker went on. “I didn’t know that. I’ve learned it this week, to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we’re told they’re run and on what principles they’re run, are wonderful places to live -snip- If you’re wealthy, I imagine, Moscow is pretty great. This is true of most European cities. When you’re an American tourist, you...

In a string of remarkable coincidences, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has taken a keen interest in all things Elon Musk. The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is reportedly pursuing criminal charges against Musk, scrutinizing whether the Tesla CEO failed to disclose personal benefits he received from his car company. The Wall Street Journal reports that the new inquiry centers around Tesla’s “Project 42,” an alleged plan for a weird glass home and structure that Musk talked about constructing in Texas but never built. It is quite the happenstance that only last month, the...

"Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather hazard," is the first claim in this Washington Post piece warning about the deadly summer heat – and it is almost certainly false. Similar warnings about the deadly weather appear in virtually every mainstream media outlet. First off, the only reason "extreme" temperature kills more people than other weather hazards is that deaths from weather have plummeted over the century – even as doomsday climate warnings about heat, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts have spiked. All extreme weather accounts for only about 0.1 death for every 100,000...

Marjorie Taylor Greene says the country needs a national divorce. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” she tweeted. “Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”Generally speaking, I’m sympathetic to the idea that the political left is congenitally unable to accept a truly diverse nation. Virtually every legislative policy proposal from modern Democrats — and every policy issued by edict — strengthens federal power and economic control over states. Modern Democrats...

Blaming Conservatives For The Attack On Pelosi Is A Cynical Effort To Chill SpeechThe left’s insistence that every conservative personally “condemn” the actions of the mentally ill man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul has nothing to do with lowering the rhetorical temperature or averting violence, and everything to do with trying to compel Republicans to take responsibility for the incident.Forget the ugly, transparent cynicism of partisans like Joe Scarborough or David Frum or Bill Kristol. Take The Washington Post, which ran a triple-bylined, reported piece headlined, “Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her.” “Years of...

The Democrats' new reconciliation bill isn't just going to be the largest-ever expansion of a government agency. It's going to be the largest expansion of the domestic police state in American history. Only a statist could believe that a federal government, which already collects $4.1 trillion every year -- or $12,300 for every citizen -- supposedly needs 80 battalions of new IRS cops. The average American has less reason to be concerned about cops with guns -- though the IRS is looking for special agents who can "carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary" --...

Why would any Republican vote for that cynical, dishonest, anti-constitutional ‘contraception’ bill?When Democrats accuse Republicans of opposing “access” to birth control, what they really mean is that Republicans oppose forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for birth control or that Republicans oppose coercing people of faith to provide birth control (including abortifacients) against their consciences.The Right to Contraception Act, a bill that passed in the House yesterday, allows reporters and Democrats to manufacture panic by claiming Republicans voted against a bill that “protects access to contraception,” even though the actual legislation was crammed with enough poison pills to kill the...

The Hunter Biden email cover-up may not be the most contemptible example of the modern political media's corruption, but it is probably the most demonstrable. Politico reports that Ben Schreckinger's new book, "The Bidens: Inside the First Family's Fifty-Year Rise to Power," corroborates much of the New York Post's pre-election reporting on Hunter Biden's emails. Two of them stick out: The first is a 2015 missive from a Ukrainian businessman thanking Hunter for the chance to meet Joe Biden -- then, still vice president. The second is a 2017 email in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with...

Norm #1: When Democrats are in charge of both the Senate and the White House, they are free to nominate and confirm any justice they please, as quickly as they please, as they did in the cases of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Norm #2: When Democrats only run the White House, they are free to nominate any SCOTUS justice they please, and they also get to dictate whom Republicans are allowed to confirm, as they tried to do in the case of Merrick Garland — blessed be his memory. Norm #3: When Democrats run...

It remains something of a mystery why there's so little apprehension among liberal pundits and Democrats about the similarities between battleground state polling for the 2020 presidential election and 2016 contest -- which as you might recall did not turn out as expected. Consider the case of Wisconsin: The RealClearPolitics average had Clinton +6.5 in Wisconsin on Election Day in 2016. In August of that year, she had been +11.5. Not a single poll featured on RCP during the entire campaign showed Donald Trump winning the state. Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden has a +3.5 average right now -- which...

On March 25, New York governor Andrew Cuomo made one of deadliest mistakes of the coronavirus crisis, signing an executive order forcing nursing homes in his state to accept patients who tested positive for coronavirus. Around 4,800 New Yorkers died from COVID-19 in those nursing homes from March to May — approximately 25 percent of all fatalities in the state. Many medical professionals opposed the policy. A report by ProPublica, certainly no right-wing outlet, found that deaths had spiked after Cuomo’s order. States issuing similar policies — Michigan and New Jersey — saw similar disasters unfold. By any standard, the...

Recently, I ran across a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lays out four racist words and phrases that should be banished from the English language. It begins like this: "Editor's note: Please be aware offensive terms are repeated here solely for the purpose of identifying and analyzing them honestly. These terms may upset some readers." Steel yourself, brave reader, here they are: Peanut gallery Eenie meenie miney moe Gyp No can do The same grammarian who authored the piece had previously confronted the "deeply racist connotation" of the word "thug," noting that President Donald Trump "wasn't the least bit...

I’m sorry, but you have no constitutional “right” to vote by mail. You have no constitutional “right” to vote six days after an election is over. Nor do you have any “right” to censor information related to an election. Not even during a pandemic. This week, the US Supreme Court ruled that a lower federal court couldn’t overwrite Wisconsin’s election laws and force the state to accept ballots without any postmark deadline nearly a week after the election. Likewise, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Gov. Tony Evers didn’t have the authority to arbitrarily suspend in-person voting. If these dictates had...

No matter how poorly you ­believe President Trump treats women, no matter how inappropriate you find his tweets and no matter how excessive you find his accusations of “treason,” there are serious unanswered questions about Lisa Page’s conduct at the FBI. The former FBI lawyer is, at the very least, someone whose unprofessional behavior compromised the integrity of an investigation into the president. Yet her canonization is fully ­underway this week, led by liberals who were once concerned about law-enforcement abuse.

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, a group that has often infiltrated news organizations to uncover liberal bias, has released an explosive “hot mic” video of “Good Morning America” co-host Amy Robach venting about ABC’s decision to spike a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious activities three years ago. “I had this interview with [Epstein victim] Virginia Roberts,” Robach is seen saying in the video, “we would not put it on the air. The [British royal] Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. We were afraid we wouldn’t be able to...

When House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the United States had been plunged into a “constitutional crisis,” a large swath of the media took to plying this fantasy for them. “Ever wonder what a constitutional crisis looks like? Well, open your eyes,” CNN’s Don Lemon explained to his viewers. “The president of the United States is just blowing right through our system of checks and balances, the very thing that is supposed to keep our Congress, the judiciary, and the executive branch working, which means our country working.” None of this is remotely true. Our...

... The Republican party is not a direct democracy. It crafts its own rules, and it can change them. Here are questions that Republican delegates should be asking themselves: Is it worth upsetting a bunch of angry, marginally conservative voters who often have a minor fidelity to the doctrines of your party? Or are you prepared to put your political infrastructure and full weight behind a cartoonish George Wallace–like character who’ll probably inflict more damage than you could ever hope to repair? RNC chairman Reince Priebus says that he expects every GOP presidential candidate to uphold a pledge to support...

The article appearing on the magazine's website Friday written by David Harsanyi reveals just how far National Review is willing to go to continue the war. It's title: "Why President Trump Would Be a Bigger Disaster Than President Clinton." "Whether you're an ideological conservative, a proponent of limited government, or someone who believes that the president has too much power already, you shouldn't think of this matchup as a contest between horrifying candidates," Harsanyi writes.

There's still time to turn it around, of course. But now that many conservatives are moving from the bargaining phase to the depression phase of the Kubler-Ross model, we can begin to grapple with the prospective reality of a Trump-vs-Hillary general election. Whether you're an ideological conservative, a proponent of limited government or someone who believes that the president has too much power already, you shouldn't think of this matchup as a contest between horrifying candidates. Rather, you should ask yourself which scenario would be more damaging? I'm pretty sure you'd find that Donald Trump is the form of the...

This incessant clamoring by voters and punditry for better "leaders" and more "leadership" is one of the most unsavory, dangerous, and un-American tendencies in political discourse. When Donald Trump was asked last week by Joe Scarborough what he made of an endorsement from Vladimir Putin -- a thug who's probably murdered journalists and political opponents and more -- the GOP presidential front-runner responded, "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country." Then he offered an incredibly dumb moral equivalency about how the United States also does "plenty of killing." There was...