Free Republic

"Imagine if the US and EU were still aligned on the censorship-by-proxy strategy. Few people realize how close we were to global totalitarianism." —Michael Shellenberger. Norm Eisen, Lawfare Ninja Supreme Western Civ is choking itself to death with lawfare in the name of “democracy.” If you think just a little bit past the sale, you will realize that few will say what they mean by “democracy,” including the most ardent “democracy” cultists. What it supposedly means is legal outcomes that the political left wants, not what the law, or the truth, or justice requires. On the surface, the left pretends...

The US has released a new National Security Strategy which re-envisions the Monroe Doctrine for a new century. Bernhard at MoA covered it in full here for those interested in the thorough details. I’ll instead look at the bigger picture, as well as one specific, fascinating aspect of this major rethink of US foreign policy. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/world/europe/trump-europe-strategy-document.htmlNYT’s subheading reframes the new vision as a hatred for Europe: A new White House policy document formalizes President Trump’s long-held contempt for Europe’s leaders. It made clear that the continent now stands at a strategic crossroads. Well, why wouldn’t Trump hate the new Europe?...

In the history of American governance, few chapters will stain the pages as darkly as the utter failure of the Biden-Harris administration to safeguard unaccompanied migrant children. I must ask this question: If their goal was to intentionally traffic children into sexual slavery and forced labor, how would their actions have been any different? For four catastrophic years, vulnerable minors poured across the Rio Grande and were funneled into a system riddled with incompetence, willful blindness, and flat-out negligence. A report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) landed like a bomb and exposed the...

If you keep up with current events at all, it is unlikely that you have missed in the past week the explosion of the Minnesota Somali welfare fraud scandal into the national, and even international, news. Not that the enormous Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota is something new. The bloggers at Powerline, who are based in Minnesota, have been covering the subject since at least 2018. Here is a May 2018 City Journal piece by Scott Johnson (of Powerline), reporting on an investigation of Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis suspected of stealing millions by billing the government for inflated number...

Pete Hegseth “runs around on a stage talking about lethality and warrior ethos and killing people. … That’s not the message that needs to come from the Secretary of Defense,” complained Sen. Mark Kelly last week. The message, especially coming from a former Navy captain, is so bizarre it borders on satire. Nations have had organized armies since recorded history started around 3000 B.C. And, in the words of the late, great Rush Limbaugh, the whole point of having a military is to kill people and break things, even if that military is exclusively employed for defensive purposes. Surely even...

A border abandoned and laws ignored have turned public frustration into a sweeping backlash that now threatens even legal immigration. It is hard now even for Democrats to defend illegal immigration, given that the Biden administration allowed in more than 10 million entrants. Among them were an estimated 500,000 criminals. No one believes that was wise or should ever be repeated. Worse, the message went out that there would be few, if any, deportations and no real ICE kinetic activity beyond the border. The world’s poor, sick, both law-abiding and criminal, young and old, understood that anyone could now enter...

A few years ago, I penned a piece titled “Democratic Party Platform 2020,” which was viewed many times on several different “platforms,” including this one. (American Thinker always comes first.) As we approach the 2026 and 2028 elections, I thought it might be a good time to update said piece, especially given current events. Though Democrats don’t usually say much other than “Trump bad,” “Republicans fascists,” and “no one should ever have the right to disagree with anything we are — and aren’t — saying,” here is what the Democrats' updated platform appears to be, in a casual format: *We...

The European Union has moved this week to punish the social media company X and Elon Musk for allegedly “deceiving users” through certain company practices. On Thursday, X, which was formerly known as Twitter, was fined €120 million ($140 million) by the European Union for violating one of the international organization’s laws regulating technology companies. The move makes the social media platform the first company to be fined under the jurisdiction of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). “Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU. The DSA...

The ABA’s left-wing bias targets Catholic law schools, exposing the need for reform in America’s politicized legal education system. Last month, Florida Attorney General James Uttmeier made public a letter to the American Bar Association (“ABA”) accusing it of violating the First Amendment right to religious freedom when it said a Catholic law school did not meet one of its equal opportunity accreditation standards. The school is Florida’s St. Thomas University College of Law, and the standard is number 205, titled “Non-discrimination and Equal Opportunity.” The ABA’s finding did not specify how St. Thomas fell short. Standard 205 is distinct...

And its totalitarian assaults on free speech represent a national security threat to the United States. European civilization is dying. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy makes this clear. It has squandered its post-WWII economic and military assistance from the United States by investing in centralized, socialist bureaucracies and expansive welfare States. By chasing the “climate change” con as a means for European governments to justify total control over the drivers of economic growth, European nations have forsaken cheap energy exploration, private entrepreneurship, and technological innovation. By depending upon the United States to defend its territorial interests, European nations...

UK’s Labour Censorship InitiativeAs economic and cultural suicide stalk Western Europe, it has initiated efforts to hobble America's technological advantage and diminish our freedoms. The first documented attacks on our open dialogue came from the UK and began in 2018 when Morgan McGreevy, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff (then Labour Together’s managing director), began and funded an outfit called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Recognizing that the online news purveyors could best be silenced by depriving them of funds, it first targeted UK outfits, but moved on in an attempt to starve U.S. outfits like American Thinker, Breitbart, Zero Hedge,...

A “color revolution” (sometimes called a “soft coup” or “regime-change operation by non-kinetic means”) is a modern form of orchestrated political upheaval designed to replace an existing government without traditional military invasion or civil war. The term arose from events in the early 2000s, such as Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution (2000) and Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003). These operations follow a remarkably consistent playbook, refined over two decades by Western NGOs, intelligence-linked foundations, and State Department-affiliated entities (Open Society Foundations, USAID, etc.). Authors describe seven stages of a color revolution. The stages include these tactics, which I’ll list in approximate chronological order:...

I used to believe that Democrats had limits. Recent events have forced me to accept a different reality. Democrats really have no limits. They happily accepted USAID money laundered through foreign agents. They yelled, but weren’t all that unhappy when USAID was eliminated. It was just one pathway to taxpayer money. They had Somali agents in Minnesota diverting billions (with a B) to terrorist organizations, most likely with a bit of backsheesh diverted to support local Democrat operations. It was so obvious and outrageous that even the New York Times has reported on it. And now several outlets are reporting...

On the campaign trail, Vice President JD Vance repeatedly chastised the Biden administration for allegedly losing track of some 320,000 minors who had crossed the border unaccompanied. “Our government, under the policies of Kamala Harris, has lost thousands of innocent children to sex trafficking, to drug trafficking, to human trafficking,” Vance said. One year later, the fate of most of those children remains unknown. While the Trump administration has all but stopped the crush of migrants that occurred during Biden’s term, neither the government nor the nonprofits that were largely responsible for resettling this vulnerable population of unaccompanied minors have...

Pete Hegseth is facing a calculated smear campaign because he threatens the entrenched establishment reshaping America’s military into something weaker and more political. I have had enough. I can no longer sit still while the Deep State does its very best to smear Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and have him removed from his post via lies, rumors, propaganda, and innuendo. It feels exactly like version 2.0 of the “Trump/Russia Collusion” disinformation campaign, and it needs to be called out for what it is. Enough. I am here to defend the best Secretary of War/Defense since Caspar Weinberger. What we...

It's funny how much of the Democrat modus operandi resembles that of scam artists. Holiday scams are rising as many rush for deals yet discount due diligence. The left employs its own kind of political phishing, creative, yet driven by emotions such as vanity, guilt, and vengeance. Regardless of how it is done, liberalism often disguises its true political aims. Comparing even those political tactics to more nefarious holiday hustles could be useful. A growing fraud is the non-delivery scam. According to the FBI, this is “where you pay for goods or services … but you never receive the items.”...

The American left doesn’t look at the United Kingdom and see a cautionary tale, it sees a template to follow.It’s easy to look at a collapsing civil society in a foreign country and comfort ourselves that, despite all our problems, we’re not as bad off as those people. Americans are especially apt to do this with our cousins in Great Britain, whose country is now in a state of precipitous and probably irreversible decline, and whose political leadership is openly hostile to the native population. But it’s a mistake to comfort ourselves this way, partly because the corruption of a...

[Germany] The founding congress of the new AfD youth division, Generation Deutschland, drew thousands of Antifa rioters and other leftist protesters to Gießen. Leftists flood the streets of Gießen Saturday in yet another anti-AfD protest.Saturday saw one of the larger police actions in the history of the Federal Republic, as 5,000 officers deployed against a leftist mob numbering 25,000 or more. The Antifa network Aktionsbündnis Widersetzen (“Action Alliance Resist”), Social Democrat-aligned labour unions like DGB and Verdi and an array of “civil society organisations” took to the streets of Gießen to protest the founding congress of the new Alternative für...

Newsom readies a presidential run while presiding over a state buckling under sky-high costs, mass exodus, and crumbling basics—leaving little to brag about beyond attacking Trump. As California Governor Gavin Newsom gears up to run for president, what in the world will he run on? Californians know that Newsom will not boast, “I will do for America what I have done to California!” Why not? Count the reasons. California’s astronomical gas prices and taxes remain the highest in the continental U.S. Ditto the state’s trifecta of the highest electricity rates, the costliest home prices, and the fourth-highest home insurance costs....

In the “old days,” proud leftists mocked Christians for their social concerns by theatrically asking, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” The rhetorical barb was meant to portray non-leftists as being easily duped rubes who are always hyperventilating over some imaginary “moral panic.” These days, it is leftists who are constantly overreacting to Trump administration policies as if each one guarantees that the world will end. Before President Trump even entered office back in 2017, the leftist press corps blob ran a glut of stories promising Americans that the outsider politician would start WWIII. After Trump used his time...