Free Republic

On Wednesday there was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by William Galston titled: "The Clear and Present Danger of Trump.” A bold insert said: His weekend Twitter outburst calls into question his ability to discharge his powers. The article starts off: In business, it is said, the customer is always right. Politics is more complicated, because citizens are called upon to be more than consumers. “The people commonly intend the public good,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 71, “but their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means...

"Treason" is a term occasionally bandied about but rarely discussed seriously. President Trump, in a recent speech, joked about it. Referring to the catatonic Democrats during the State of the Union address, "They were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, 'treasonous.' I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean, they certainly didn't seem to love our country that much." As leftists are prone to do, they took Trump's words literally – the opposite of how his supporters approach Trump's joking. Commenting on what someone else said – "yeah, I guess, why...

The Wednesday CNN town hall promoting gun bans and moderated by Jake Tapper was arguably a train wreck from the beginning. Between a student saying Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) reminded him of the shooter and shouts of ‘murderer’ at NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, it was out of control. But in the wee hours of Thursday morning, things got worse for the anti-gun network when the local Florida ABC affiliate WPLG-TV reported that CNN had been planting questions. The whistleblower was Colton Haab, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who heroically shielded his fellow students from the bullets with...

On ABC’s February 22 show, The View hosts addressed the White House listening session and CNN town hall that occurred the day before about the Parkland school shooting, but spread some misinformation along the way, as usual. Host Sunny Hostin began by complaining that President Trump’s response to the shooting was “more guns” not “less:” I was surprised that the president even after this listening session seemed to suggest that teachers should -- that the answer is having more guns rather than less. And he mentioned the teachers should carry weapons. And I just -- teachers are there to teach our...

A story about the times we live in, and assumptions we can make in our current political climate. The news tip a few days ago said: “Hi. Suddenly there is a Confederate flag flying in front of a house in my Greenwood neighborhood. It is at the north-east corner of 92nd and Palatine, just a block west of 92nd and Greenwood Ave N. I would love to know what this ‘means’ … but of course don’t want to knock on their door. Maybe others in the area are flying the flag? Maybe it’s a story? Thank you.” It was from...

CNN’s town hall last night on gun-related issues following the school shooting in Florida turned out to be a lively event. But there was one person who didn’t wind up taking part in it. That was Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab. He had been invited to appear and be one of the students asking a question but canceled at the last moment. The reason? He claims that CNN wanted to give him a scripted question and not let him say what he wanted, primarily focusing on the possibility of putting armed adults in schools to protect students...

The new Black Panther movie may have been sold as an anti-white screed dripping with racial hostility, but those who are looking for that kind of venom in this year's biggest biggest cinematic experience are going to disappointed. Anyone who has ever met Prince Albert, The World's Smallest Perfectly Formed Colored Midget, can tell you why. I got to know Prince Albert during my days in the carnival when my ride, The Round Up, was often located next to the freak show. In addition to the albino woman sword-swallower, Priscilla the gorilla woman, and her husband, the alligator-skinned man, Prince...

When I first heard about the terrible Florida school shooting, I knew that the American left (Democrats, fake news, and Hollywood) would shamefully exploit the victims the way they always do. The leftists' manual, Rules for Radicals, says, "In the arena of action a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication." In other words, "Never let a crisis go to waste." Always exploit the victim's pain and suffering to further the leftist agenda. We've seen leftists repeatedly use this insidious, heartless tactic. Every time a tragic incident happens, cold, calculating leftist operatives run to the victims with...

Remember the Whitney Houston song “The Greatest Love Of All”? The sappy 80s cover of the 70s George Benson hit starts:I believe the children are our are future Teach them well and let them lead the way Show them all the beauty they possess inside Give them a sense of pride to make it easier Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to beIt was cheesy and typical of pop songs at the time, as most of the music that came out of the 80s was. Now it’s the basis for how liberals view unalienable rights explicitly protected in the Constitution. The idea...

On Thursday, CNN will host a town hall with President Obama as part of his “final-year push to make gun control part of his legacy.” In addition to sitting down with liberal anchor Anderson Cooper, the network says Obama will “take questions from the audience.” Uh-oh. Get out your best pruning shears and trowels. In an age of micromanaged partisan stagecraft and left-wing media enablers, there is no such thing as a spontaneous question. CNN has a long history of allowing political plants to flourish in its public forums.

ESPN recently re-aired a three-part documentary about the long rivalry between two storied NBA basketball teams, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, and their two marquee players, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, respectively. After another devastating Laker loss, this time in the 1984 finals, Laker star Magic Johnson said he felt so disappointed, in part, because he let down blacks. So many black fans were pulling for him, including, he discovered, many black residents of Boston. As a Los Angeles native, I, too, wanted the Lakers to win. But how did the Lakers of the era become the...

Remember me? I'm the guy who, in the middle of the Khan imbroglio in August '16, predicted that Trump would win the presidency. And I did so again after the release of the Billy Bush tapes in October. Well, I'm here to make another prediction: In the last four days, the Democrats just forfeited their shot at winning the House or the Senate in 2018. In fact, Democrats have made such a grave political miscalculation that only quick action by Republicans can save them from defeat. The story begins in 1994, when President Bill Clinton gleefully signed a ban on...

Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir Putin's Russia is zero. Some of the Russians' Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller's team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election's outcome. But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does. Is it now time...

Last Friday, a federal grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C., indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian corporations for conspiracy and for using false instruments and computer hacking so as to influence the American presidential election in 2016. The indictment alleges a vast, organized and professional effort, funded by tens of millions of dollars, whereby Russian spies passed themselves off as Americans on the internet, on the telephone and even in person here in the U.S. to sow discord about Hillary Clinton and thereby assist in the election of Donald Trump. Though an indictment is a charge only, it presumably...

I want to tell you about my night at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend with President Trump. We all hear all kinds of stories about President Trump...and all kinds of opinions about him...but few have ever actually met him, let alone spent quality time with him. I have. Two takeaways up front. First, as Don King would say, "ONLY IN AMERICA."Second, this is the story of the real President Trump- up close and personal. He's nothing like the one portrayed by the hateful, liberal  "fake news" media. I was born a S.O.B. (son of a butcher). My dad David Root was a blue-collar...

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. In a year and a few months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have spent more time at the helm of the Israeli government than any other man. The other man is David Ben-Gurion, the Socialist leader who repressed Zionist nationalist movements in Israel by fiat, by law and, as in the Altalena, by murder. That factoid may not matter much to most people, even most Israelis, but it matters a great deal to the remnants of...

When "presidential politics experts" ranked all presidents, past and current, the headlines typically focused on Trump’s position at the bottom of the list. After one year—a year with a booming economy, increased business and consumer confidence, and significant gains on the foreign policy front—they have concluded that Trump is the worst president of all time. There’s no chance of any partisan bias there, right?Trump's record is certainly up for debate, but even famed liberal pollster Nate Silver wrote off the rankings as partisan garbage in a tweet. "It speaks poorly to the field of presidential scholarship that political scientists have Trump...

I argue for a living. I often deal with hacks, liars, and agenda-driven fanatics. But never in a quarter century of being in court rooms have I faced such a blizzard of constitutional illiteracy, technical ignorance, flabby reasoning, and outright lies as I have dealing with people who think our Second Amendment rights are up for debate.Our rights are not up for debate. But, as a courtesy, because talking is the way a free people should endeavor to solve problems, we should debate them anyway. Rational discussion beats the alternative – many of us are vets who saw the alternative...

Dear Montana Representatives:On February 13th, I had the opportunity to speak in Dennison Theater at the University of Montana (UM). Events leading to the speech as well as events occurring during the speech made it clear that the Montana legislature must act to restore respect for freedom of speech on its publicly funded university campuses. I write today to ask that you pass specific free speech legislation we have already adopted in my home State of North Carolina.Prior to my speech, in a bizarre statement to the entire university community, UM president Seth Bodnar stated, “Ours is a university driven...

MSNBC’s Katy Tur has a glaring habit of letting her anti-Republican hatred run wild while confronting and slamming GOPers on issues she knows little about. The same was true when she hosted the 2:00 p.m. hour of MSNBC Live on Wednesday when the network’s cameras were in Florida Governor Rick Scott’s office documenting anti-gun protestors screaming at the receptionists while he wasn’t there. Tur declared Scott was “refusing to speak” with them, but was later educated by his office and forced to report he was attending a funeral for one of the students slain in the Parkland shooting. “This is...