Free Republic

Below is my column in The Hill on how Democrats in some blue states are moving from censoring speech to compelling speech in renewed attacks on free speech. They are facing resistance in the courts despite determined efforts to force others to mouth approved viewpoints. Here is the column: More than five years ago, I wrote in these pages of a growing trend on the left toward compelled speech — the forcing of citizens to repeat approved views and values. It is an all-too-familiar pattern. Once a faction assumes power, it will often first seek to censor opposing views and...

How London was taken over by Muslims and transformed into a powerhouse of Islamism. In the annals of civilizational decline, few spectacles rival that of a once-mighty empire wilting under the weight of its own timidity. Britain, the cradle of parliamentary democracy, Magna Carta, and the Enlightenment’s unyielding torch, now teeters on the brink of self-inflicted oblivion. The antithesis of multicultural harmony, the year 2025 brings another pitiful surrender to the forces of Islamic extremism, a phenomenon chillingly encapsulated by Melanie Phillips in her prescient 2006 tome Londonistan. Phillips, a Cassandra of our age, warned of London’s metamorphosis into a...

Nancy Pelosi was recently asked by USA Today’s Susan Page if the Democrats would impeach President Trump a third time if they capture a majority in the House next year. Her answer was predictably coy: “The person most responsible for impeaching President Trump when I was speaker was President Trump.” When Page pressed Pelosi on whether she believed impeachment should be on her party’s agenda, she said, “No, there has to be cause. There has to be reason.” This is very similar to the way she tiptoed around the “I” word during the run-up to the 2018 midterms, knowing full...

Leftists excuse perpetrators and vilify victims. What started as a joke is no longer a laughing matter: Leftism is a mental illness whose sufferers include an inordinate number of narcissists and psychopaths. Anybody who has endured a leftist mob knows this to be true. In the name of “racial justice,” “climate justice,” “trans justice,” “justice for ‘Palestine,’” or whatever other cause du jour the woke-sters have adopted as the next life-or-death “social justice” fad, leftists block drivers on busy highways, scream in the faces of wary pedestrians, set fire to businesses and cars, and terrorize civilians. They threaten and harass...

As leaders equivocate and extremists unite left and right, open season on Jews spreads across the West—unchecked, unnamed, and certain to grow deadlier. Jews celebrating Hanukkah were just slaughtered by Muslim gunmen on an Australian beach, in an imitation of the October 7 massacres. At Brown University, two students were killed and nine wounded by an allegedly Muslim shooter. An inert Europe is canceling Christmas celebrations out of fear of threats of violence from Muslim minorities. In the West, when an Islamist shoots a Jew, politicians often offer two bizarre remedies: gun control or a task force to tackle Islamophobia....

America’s “deaths of despair” - fatalities from drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide - have climbed for more than two decades, reaching levels unseen in modern times. The long-run trend is stark. After mid-century stability, the curve bends sharply upward after 2000, driven first by drugs and later joined by alcohol and suicide. The data, drawn from the Senate Joint Economic Committee’s “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair” report shown below, are clear. The deeper question is why. COVID made a bad situation worse. Lockdowns and restrictions stripped away social contact, church gatherings, family support, and purpose. Economic uncertainty due...

Here we go again. It's Groundhog Day for gun control which we see after every tragedy. The ghouls of the gun grabber lobby have come out of the woodwork. Their repetitive calls for even more restrictions on our common-sense human right to own weapons are illegitimate and unconstitutional. It's the same playbook passed down from the brown Bolsheviks of the Third Reich that is being used by violent leftists today. As we said in the headline, the brutal truth about gun control is that it's never meant to work, and that there are several secondary issues that descend from this,...

The goal was allegedley ‘to lower public-facing crime rates’, regardless of if there was actually less crime. Leadership at the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) under former chief Pamela A. Smith (who announced on Dec. 8 she would step down at year’s end) reportedly “deliberately” suppressed or distorted crime statistics in the nation’s capital “to lower public-facing crime rates,” according to a 22-page interim report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Committee opened the inquiry on Aug. 25, 2025, after reports suggested that crime statistics were being manipulated downward. Oversight majority staff conducted eight transcribed interviews...

During a press conference on Wednesday, a Providence-area radio host, Chas Calenda, directly confronted Brown University officials and law enforcement with information he has received about the school intentionally disabling surveillance systems due to DEI concerns. The response from university officials and the Providence Mayor indicate Mr. Chas Calenda’s informed accusation and question is directly on target. WATCH: In addition to information we previously shared {GO DEEP} reflecting requests from various “civil rights” and “humanitarian” groups who demanded Brown University disable their surveillance system, additional information about the issue comes via the Rhode Island ACLU making the same demand in...

Conservatives can’t save the country by funding their enemies—defunding the Department of Education would return billions to taxpayers, cut grift, and let education compete. Help your enemies and harm your friends. That’s the kind of big-brain, third-eye-opened, decalcified-pineal-gland (real eyes realize real lies) type of thinking that made the post-war conservative movement into the political juggernaut it is today. I mean, just check out the Conservative Inc. plan to save America: Step 1: Hand out pocket Constitutions. Step 2: Give liberals huge sums of tax money. Step 3: Denounce Trump for being mean. Step 4: Save the Country. Brilliant stuff,...

There’s nothing ‘right-wing’ about defending the Bill of Rights. Being called “right-wing” or “fascist” is detestable. The label implies a preference for dictatorship, authoritarianism, and government supremacy over personal freedom. The exact opposite is true. I would describe myself as a supporter of autarchism in the sense that we should rule ourselves and not be ruled by others. As someone who believes strongly in individual liberty, self-reliance, and self-government, I distrust all repositories of power -- whether such power resides in government, corporations, or social institutions. As Lord Acton advised: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In...

There is an old American promise that has always been more fragile than we like to admit, and today it is being broken in plain sight. The promise was never that everyone would succeed. It was that everyone would be allowed to compete under one set of rules, and that those rules would not be rewritten midstream to punish someone for what he is rather than what he has done. When Americans say they reject caste, they mean that no class of people is preemptively marked for exclusion. That promise is now being quietly revoked. Over roughly the last...

Mercosur and the Green Deal have become the symbols of fierce citizen discontent. A placard on a tractor that reads “Without agriculture you die” seen during a farmers’ protest in Brussels, Belgium on December 18, 2025 - Javier Villamor / europeanconservative.com. Brussels woke up once again this Thursday to the roar of agricultural engines. Coinciding with the opening of the final European Council meeting of the year, thousands of farmers and livestock breeders returned to the EU capital to denounce what they see as the European Union’s systematic neglect of the primary sector—now further exacerbated by political pressure to finalise...

Dhillon made the remarks in the wake of recent revelations that the FBI admitted it likely lacked probable cause to raid President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach in 2022. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told Just the News on Wednesday that federal and local officials involved in the prosecutions of President Donald Trump may face legal action if the Department of Justice identifies a conspiracy to deprive him or his followers of his civil rights. "The Department of Justice is at the heart of considering these issues right now, so I can't really talk about the specifics, but...

Josh Shapiro is routinely described as a popular and formidable political figure -- a rising star within the Democratic Party whose appeal is said to extend well beyond Pennsylvania. The claim is repeated so often that it has hardened into assumed fact. Yet when examined closely, it does not hold. What Pennsylvania and the nation are being shown is not a strong candidate buoyed by organic support, but a carefully engineered projection -- a political hologram sustained by money, messaging, and controlled conditions. Like all holograms, the image appears solid from a distance. It occupies space, commands attention, and seems...

This Muslim Christmas market terrorist plot should not be confused with the previous French Christmas market terror alert that led to the shutdown of the New Year’s Eve celebration or the 5 Muslims busted in the German Christmas market terror plot. This one took place in Poland. But they’re all reading from the same Koran though. Polish authorities said on Tuesday that they had arrested a 19-year-old university student on suspicion of plotting an attack on a Christmas market and seeking contact with the self-styled “Islamic State” terrorist group. A spokesman for Polish special services, Jacek Dobrzynski, said that the...

Since 1912 and the election of Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat Party has been America’s left-wing political party. Nonetheless, over the decades it has maintained tenuous ties to the basic tenets of the nation’s founding. In the 1930s, beginning with what was a de facto “cult of personality” centered around Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrat party establishment began wallowing in myopic party loyalty. It was that myopic party loyalty extended to Barack Obama together with a psychotic obsession with Donald Trump that has led to the Democrat party evolving into America’s Marxist/socialist political party and the greatest internal threat to the nation...

If Europe’s elites want war, they should pick up a rifle and fight. After the European Commission levied a several-hundred-million-dollar fine on Elon Musk and his social media platform X earlier this month, journalist Michael Shellenberger wrote a damning post in which he excoriated Europe’s rank censorship and state-sponsored propaganda. He accused the commission of engaging “in a deception campaign aimed at confusing” Europeans and Americans into thinking that European elites’ “goal” is anything other than “to censor the American people.” Shellenberger pointed out that Musk’s fine came while European governments are demanding backdoor access to all private text messages...

Before handing Gavin Newsom the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, Democrats may want to pause and consider his long record of failure in California. From his mishandling of the January wildfires to his coddling of illegal immigrants, his poor governance has led to a collapse of public confidence and a mass exodus from the Golden State. But buried beneath the broader criticism is an often overlooked central failure: Newsom’s policy decisions have made California an increasingly hostile state in which to conduct business. And few industries have suffered more under California’s regulatory assault than fossil fuels, where relentless overreach...

The long march through the institutions: From Trotskyist entryism to civilizational conquest of Europe by the Muslim Brotherhood. The twentieth century taught the revolutionary Left a bitter lesson: frontal assaults on power fail when the state commands loyalty and firepower. Supposedly, the reason Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks triumphed in 1917 was that the Russian state had already collapsed; elsewhere, such as Hungary and Germany in 1919 and 1923, respectively, insurrection was crushed. From this defeat emerged a subtler doctrine—“entryism”. Instead of “storming the palace at once”, as it were, revolutionaries were advised to patiently infiltrate every institution shaping public opinion and...