Free Republic

The left-wing smear machine fired up again last week, this time to go after Riley Gaines for her outspoken defense of women’s sports and criticism of transgenderism. But all the critics succeeded in proving is that the woke mob no longer has the cultural influence it once did, and that sensationalist headlines can’t hide an utter lack of substance in bad-faith personal attacks. As a quick refresher, Riley Gaines was the University of Kentucky swimmer who became a national story after she tied with the University of Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas in the 200-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA swimming championships....

Opponents of a pair of radical California “green” mandates were handed a mixed bag in court last week as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily paused implementation of one state law but allowed another to remain in place for now. The brewing court battle could have serious implications for businesses nationwide – and the entire U.S. economy. The first law in question, SB 261, titled “the Climate-Related Financial Risk Act,” requires companies operating in California with more than $500 million in annual revenue to publish a report outlining their “climate-related financial risks.” Critics argue that SB 261 effectively compels...

A pair of hasty, snarky opinions by Judge Cameron Currie once again illustrate an out-of-control judiciary increasingly seizing executive authority to sabotage the will of the people. Judge Cameron McGowan Currie in what is probably an old photoDescribing acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan as “a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience,” Judge Cameron McGowan Currie today dropped the criminal cases against New York Attorney General Leticia James and former FBI Director James Comey pending in the Eastern District of Virginia. “I agree with Ms. James that the Attorney General’s attempt to install Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S....

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak." —Sun Tzu. CIA Director John Ratcliffe in a pensive momentYou understand, don’t you, what the aim was of the “Seditious Six” politicians who made last week’s now-notorious video suggesting that US military personnel should refuse the president’s orders if they deemed them to be “illegal?” This was the old Lefty game of provoking the authorities to react intemperately so they can be labeled “fascist.” It’s like the old schoolyard game of the kid who goes I’m touching you. . . I’m touching you. . . until the touched...

Two-tiered ‘justice’ protects Democrats and renders Republicans defenseless. By now everyone is aware that six Democrats in Congress created videos in which they openly encourage members of the U.S. military and Intelligence Community to mutiny against the commander in chief. They couched their seditious statements in the pretense that they are interested only in protecting the Constitution, but their message is unmistakable: Resist President Trump’s lawful orders, and we’ll have your backs. Americans whose minds have not been pickled by leftism are not impressed. The Democrat instigators have been called “TikTok Traitors,” the “Seditious Six,” the “Idiot Six,” and worse....

A comprehensive communication-scanning regime would allow national authorities to identify political opponents far more quickly -- a tool capable of making life hell for anyone inconvenient to those in power. It is Ursula von der Leyen’s personal flagship project: the surveillance of private chats. All signs suggest that as early as Wednesday, the EU will make a renewed attempt to establish a dedicated spying authority. Wednesday could mark a turning point in the history of the European Union. As MCC Brussels and MEP Martin Sonneborn warned on Monday, a decisive vote on the EU’s proposed “chat control” is scheduled for...

Over the weekend, we learned that the Golden State loses one taxpayer to another state every minute, and faces an $18 billion budget shortfall, which is $5 billion higher than was projected just a few months ago. We also learned that only now, 10 months after wildfires destroyed thousands of buildings in the Los Angeles area, has the first home been rebuilt. These stories are yet more evidence of a completely dysfunctional state captured by ideologues who couldn’t care less about the harm their policies cause. Will voters there ever learn? The National Taxpayers Union Foundation used IRS data to...

John Stuart Mill said the peculiar evil of silencing expression is that it robs the human race. The EU’s decided that’s not a bug—it’s a feature. They’ve taken the marketplace of ideas and turned it into a monopoly where the only supplier is… the EU. America’s Founders knew something these Brussels bureaucrats apparently skipped in history class: the answer to speech you don’t like is more speech, not less. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the First Amendment wasn’t written to protect popular opinions—because those don’t need protection. I present twenty monuments to the idea that Europeans fought two world...

Democrats now celebrate the very nullificationist tactics they once decried, embracing a neo-Confederate defiance of federal authority to undermine a president they despise. Is Jeff Davis the Model?Who is the real, or fictional, inspiration for the new insurrectionary wing of the Democrat Party? The fictitious Hollywood insurrectionist, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “James Mattoon Scott” (Burt Lancaster), who in the 1964 film Seven Days in May attempted to overthrow the presidency? Or perhaps Jefferson Davis? He ultimately ordered the attack by South Carolina state forces against the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, which ignited the Civil War. Or...

America’s leftists have gone from a reverence for Europe’s socialist institutions to a subtle but complete nullification of the United States Constitution and American law. Leftists always adored Europe’s soft socialism. They wanted socialized medicine, practically free pharmaceutical drugs, six weeks of paid vacation a year, one year of parental leave for both parents (not that leftists actually want people to have children), subsidized housing, etc. Pointing out that all of this came about because of American taxpayers who funded building Europe back up after WWII, who absorbed all of Europe’s defense costs, and who pay the costs of all...

The following quote is the opening salvo from an article titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo, both with the Manhattan Institute: Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots. [snip] In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal...

It was only near week’s end that things started really hopping. Oh, sure, there was another D.C. federal district judge issuing a ridiculous order -- this week one of them enjoined the President from power washing the Executive Office Building that sits nearby the White House. I must have missed the constitutional provision providing that, for historical if not aesthetic reasons, our federal buildings must be grime covered. And yes, the media was still trying to confect out of the juvenile blatherings of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes a major split in MAGA.(More likely in my opinion Carlson engaged in...

The 90 second video from Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Chrissy Houlahan, and Maggie Goodlander looks innocuous at first viewing. A few elected officials, all veterans or national security professionals, appear on camera and remind American troops that they must refuse unlawful orders. The script is familiar. Every recruit learns some version of that principle. Yet context matters. These same lawmakers have spent months describing President Trump’s actual, ongoing orders as unlawful. They released their message in the middle of live litigation over those orders. They did not speak in hearings or white papers but in a...

In Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, there is an unusual library. The Library of Conservatism (Bibliothek des Konservatismus or BdK) was founded in 2012, based on Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing’s extensive private collection of right-wing and libertarian non-fiction books. Today, it has a catalogue of roughly 35,000 titles from German and European writers—including early prints from authors such as Roger Scruton, Edmund Burke, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt. Soon, though, none of these titles will be accessible to many German academics and researchers. Without any explanation, the BdK is being thrown out of the Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund (GBV), one of the largest library networks...

“. . . the Democrat Party is no longer a political party. It is an insurrectionist crime syndicate that will torch the Constitution to stay in power.” —Stephen Miller. The old joke goes: A-list actor is having lunch with studio chief. Studio chief says, Didja hear so-and-so (well-known Hollywood agent) dropped dead this morning. His heart. A-list actor says, Gee, I didn’t know he had one. Kind of brings to mind the late Veep Dick Cheney, who actually did have a heart, but one so grotesquely diseased that he had his first near-fatal infarction at age thirty-seven, followed by surgeries...

Mollie Hemingway -- author, political pundit, frequent guest on Gutfeld!, as well as editor of The Federalist, recently appeared on FOX News and stated that the Democrat party’s base is now primarily made up of angry women. Hemingway is clearly correct, as any honest person who hasn’t lived incommunicado in a wikiup deep in the Brazilian rainforest for the past, say, 30 years, would have to admit. Whenever I see a Prius Subaru vehicle on the road with more than four bumper stickers, I know there is a 95% chance its owner is a member of the far-left community. If...

Jasmine Crockett calls out Republicans for accepting donations from a “Jeffrey Epstein” — but it was a complelety different person than the pedophile Democrat donor we all know and loathe. Someone in Rep. Crockett’s staff got this one seriously wrong—I assume that it was her staff because she told us that “they” found the reference to Epstein contributing to GOP campaigns. Here is the story: Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett was called out for dropping the names of a series of Republicans who took donations from Jeffrey Epstein, but she got the wrong Jeffrey Epstein. The Texas lawmaker and rising star...

For the first time in France, a private television channel, CNews, has been convicted of ‘climate misinformation’. The debate on climate change is no longer a matter of conflicting arguments or scientific controversy; it is now an official doctrine that cannot be questioned or even discussed without breaking the law. Meanwhile, on public service television, falsehoods and inaccuracies on the same subject are repeated without any contradiction. This is a first in France: the news channel CNews, owned by conservative Catholic billionaire Vincent Bolloré, has just been ordered by the council of state to pay a fine of €20,000 for...

Remember Arabella Advisors? Eighteen months ago, Scott Walter literally wrote the book on the dark-money organization that sought to remake America into its preferred Marxist image. ARABELLA: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America explained how billionaires, inside of America and out, supplied massive amounts of financing to supposedly "grassroots" organizations on the hard Left, using various issue-related "storefronts" to hide the high-level coordination by the oligarchs that the Left supposedly opposes. At the time, Arabella Advisors got its financing through names like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Hans-Jörg Wyss, and more. These billionaire activists needed...

As support grows to impeach Trump's biggest nemesis on the federal bench, the embattled D.C. chief judge plans to resume contempt proceedings against the administration. Are Republicans finally preparing to oust Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg? This week, six Republican senators asked Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. circuit court, to suspend Boasberg pending potential impeachment proceedings in the House against the embattled Obama appointee. Senators Eric Schmitt, Mike Lee, Tommy Tuberville, Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, and Kevin Cramer want Srinivasan to sideline Boasberg indefinitely; earlier this month, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) filed articles of impeachment against Boasberg following...