Free Republic

The nuclear plant at Gundremmingen once produced a quarter of all the power generated in Bavaria. That was before we shut down its reactors in 2017 and 2021, in the course of our insane and totally purposeless nuclear phaseout. In theory anyway, we could have reactivated Gundremmingen in as little as four years. Instead, yesterday at noon exactly, we detonated the plant’s cooling towers. As the ecologically-minded Bayerischer Rundfunk reminds us, we can be grateful that light rain kept the dust pollution to a minimum. RWE, Gundremmingen’s erstwhile operators, have all kinds of plans for the site. When they finally...

As has been made shockingly clear since the assassination of peaceful activist Charlie Kirk, Democrats now don’t even bother to rein in rhetoric that celebrates and incites violence against their political opponents, whom they justify hating and killing by declaring them fascists and Nazis. Veteran Democrat strategist James Carville’s recent outburst, for example, demonstrates that they are ready to bring back the most disturbing excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Wednesday on his Politics War Room podcast, the 80-year-old cadaverous crank Carville unleashed a chilling vision for retribution against those he deems “collaborators” with President Donald Trump. “You know what we...

Americans are so tired of being called “racists.” This has been the Democrat party’s go-to rhetorical weapon for half a century. Rather than debating policies on their merits, Democrat politicians just accuse their opponents of being Klan members and call it a day. This is particularly galling since it is the Democrat party in the United States that fought a civil war to defend slavery and then established a Jim Crow system of enforced racial segregation that endured for another century. Democrat party activists are always toppling statues of historic Americans accused of being insufficiently opposed to slavery centuries ago....

Will we finally see justice against all the malefactors of the Obama and Biden administrations? Since Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard started releasing hidden records from the Biden administration, we’ve begun learning that there are no limits to what the Democrats will do to cement one-party rule. Obama started what looks like a conspiracy, when he had a Clinton campaign dirty trick included in an Intelligence Community assessment (ICA). The ICA eventually triggered a formal federal investigation, known as “Crossfire Hurricane,” targeting Donald Trump. Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and Jack Smith cooked up an operation in support of their January...

Somehow, Rep. Eric Swalwell has appointed himself the enforcer of the entire Democrat party. So now he's issued this marching order to his fellow Democrats: Don’t even think of seeking the Democratic nomination for president unless you pledge to take a wrecking ball to the Trump Ballroom on DAY ONE. — Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) October 26, 2025 Which is pretty grotesque. Democrats are planning to appeal to voters on this selling point? It seems a little ... unimportant, given the kinds of problems created by Democrats that President Trump is now solving. What's more, it's a bad idea --...

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, October 20, 2025. Evaristo Sa / AFP. The persecution of ordinary citizens on behalf of the LGBT movement will be funded by the state—that is, by the taxpayers being targeted. President Lula da Silva’s Brazil has taken another step towards totalitarianism with the launch of a massive platform designed to streamline the prosecution of those who criticize LGBT ideology. With Orwellian irony, it has been called the ‘Platform of Respect.’ “The Ministry of Human Rights, in partnership with the NGO Aliança Nacional LGBTI+, launched a platform aimed at holding legally accountable authors of...

At a meeting with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Rep. Robert Garcia announced that the House Democrats on the Oversight Committee would be launching a ‘Master ICE tracker’. This follows the previous removal of ICE trackers by Apple and Facebook after the apps and sites tracking activity by immigration law enforcement personnel led to multiple violent confrontations with illegal alien activists, ugly acts of violence and at least one death so far. These confrontations are not just the work of random extremists, but of a leftist activist base supported by top Democrats and the media which have promoted ICE trackers,...

It's not just their sanctimony and humorlessness. It's their insistence on feel-good nonsolutions to real problems. The backlash is only beginning. Wir schaffen das! In English, the words mean: We can do this! So said Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor from 2005 to 2021, as she hectored her citizens to accept 2 million refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries. Observe, though: as calls to action go, Merkel’s was watery. Not: “we must do this” — a categorical demand that might raise the question of why Germany, or any country, should have to house and feed another country’s citizens without limit....

Much is being written about how leftism is really a religion since its adherents cling to their dogma in spite of the obvious contradictions constantly being presented by the real world. This was really brought to mind in the chapter about the Communist Second International (1889) in Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World. At that time, Eduard Bernstein, who had been Karl Marx’s protégé while they both lived in exile in London, had by the mid-1890s broken from the pack. Bernstein eventually saw through the web of deception that was Marxism. Rather than resulting from the proposed seizure and authoritarian...

The crimes of illegals are not just numbers, they are grotesque in scope. If there's any doubt about the horror of Joe Biden's open border, and the righteousness of President Trump working to stop it, a look at the new innovations in crime and thuggery brought to our shores should disabuse them of that romantic notion. Here are some fresh pickings from illegal aliens who never should have been allowed within ten miles of our country: Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh 🚨 BREAKING: Florida police just busted a COLOMBIA THEFT RING run by illegal aliens, disguised as "landscapers." "5 suspects now sit...

We have no idea how the government shutdown, now in its fourth week and the second longest in history, will end, or how. But what is increasingly clear is how badly Democrats miscalculated on this one. Consider three bits of news from this week: First, the shutdown isn’t hurting Republicans. In fact, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that President Donald Trump’s approval rating has ticked up by two points to 42% since the shutdown started. Other polls find it unchanged. The Real Clear Politics average shows Trump’s disapproval at 52%, which is down a point from the day before the shutdown...

Department of Justice Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Thursday warned top California Democrats to “stand down or face prosecution” after Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatened to have federal law enforcement agents operating in her district arrested. Pelosi stated in a press release Wednesday that San Francisco police may arrest federal agents if they are found violating state law during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Blanche stated on Friday that any officer who lays a hand on federal law enforcement will be committing a crime. The former speaker issued the press release in reaction to “reports of a...

In the early days of this blog — say, prior to about 2020 — I made a regular sport of heaping scorn on the New York Times. Every week or two I would take a particularly preposterous article and attempt to analyze whether it represented incomprehensible ignorance of the world versus intentional deception of the readership. Or maybe both! More recently, the Times has gotten so crazy, and the craziness so widely recognized, as rarely to justify such an effort on my part. But then, sometimes I can’t stop myself. Take today’s Times. As background, yesterday was the occasion of...

Going back 250 years, the enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy the fledgling experiment of a democratic republic that our Founding Fathers had envisioned. It was and continues to be clear to them that America’s strength is a function of three phenomena: - A fervent belief in the God Who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire’s armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes. - An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of freedom. Men...

If only the peasants would just surrender! When I saw this headline in the opinion pages of the WSJ, I had high hopes that some scientist pointed out that politicians and bureaucrats can’t control the climate: We Can’t Stop Climate Change, So We Need to Prepare for ItSadly, I was wrong. The article was a pure piece of garbage, essentially claiming that despite the work of green pushers to scare everyone into capitulation to the radical green agenda, people just won’t cooperate. The writers complain that, “Around the world, people are giving priority to higher living standards, economics, and access...

“‘This is Ireland, this is our country, get them out, get them f***ing out,’ roared a woman through a loudhailer.” So opens Conor Lally’s October 22 article in Ireland’s establishment newspaper, The Irish Times. His subject, a rowdy anti-immigration protest in Dublin County. Not until the 19th paragraph does Lally mention what triggered the protest, namely the arraignment of “an African man” for “the sexual assault on Monday of a 10-year-old Irish girl.” The first 18 paragraphs were dedicated to the “thuggery” of the protestors and fawning praise for the “well-drilled lines of gardaí.” The gardai—the Irish word for police—“quickly...

Zohran Mamdani’s radical ties, antisemitic record, and allegiance to Tehran’s ideology make his NYC mayoral bid less about leadership—and more about loyalty. New York City’s 2025 mayoral race has thrust Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist and New York State Assembly member, into the spotlight as the Democratic nominee. His candidacy, while historic as potentially the first Muslim and Indian-American mayor, raises serious concerns due to his (1) adherence to the Shi’a Twelver sect, (2) support of Hamas jihadist terrorists and its parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood, (3) rabid antisemitism, and (4) devastating economic implications of his socialist policies. Mamdani’s...

In response to last week’s editorial “None Dare Call It A Republic,” one reader said I&I prefers “the term republic over democracy because” we “like the Republican Party” and “don’t like the Democratic Party.” Therefore we refuse to use the word “Democratic” because it “sounds just like the word ‘democratic.’” We can’t say we like the Republican Party, but we can say we despise the Democratic Party. Read on and we’ll tell you why. First, though, take a look at the reader’s full comment, found here. He calls us ignorant, which is fine – he’s entitled to his opinion. But...

When the long march through the institutions gives destructive and ridiculous people control of the institutions, the institutions become destructive and ridiculous, and then they become destroyed and ridiculous. The law professor Glenn Reynolds has talked for years about the premise, in public policy, that people can be brought into the middle class if you give them the markers of middle-class status. Having a college degree is middle class, so make it easier to get a college degree. Owning a house is middle class, so lower the barriers to homeownership. 1.) Make it all much easier. 2.) Give people way...

Ben Domenech has a very interesting take on Vice President Vance in an essay on The Transom. [T]he truth is: They hate him because they view him as a traitor to their class, after they welcomed him with open arms. He recounts the rapturous response Hillbilly Elegy received upon publication and the instant celebrity conferred upon Vance, in so small part because it satisfied a need of “people on the center left trying to make some sense of (or offer some dismissive explanation for) the Trump phenomenon.” Vance went all-in (something he has done as Trump’s number two as well):...