Free Republic

LEXINGTON, MA — A Pride-parade picture book showing bondage gear and drag nuns is set to appear in Lexington’s 2025–2026 kindergarten social studies curriculum, sparking fury among parents who say the district has crossed the line between inclusion and age-appropriate teaching. The revelation was first reported by Massachusetts Informed Parents, a watchdog group that obtained lesson materials from Lexington Public Schools (LPS). According to their review, the Pride-themed book This Day in June is listed as part of a new “Social Studies” unit for five-year-olds — a class typically reserved for topics like community, geography, and basic civics. But the...

It is a celebration of the human spirit, which conquers the unknown in courageous exploration.Over the past two decades or so, we have witnessed a concerted effort by the woke educational and cultural establishment to reject traditional holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the 4thof July, and rewrite American history as a simplistic horror story of evil imperialist oppression. One of the worst-affected historical episodes in this regard is the European discovery of the New World.Until recently, young children in America were taught to revere Christopher Columbus’s persistence and courage, which ultimately brought Western civilization to the Western hemisphere and...

A dozen Bastiat's Window essays that followed the invasion of October 7, 2023[1] From Hitler to Hamas (and Hezbollah): Nazi Germany was the incubator for what would become Hamas and Hezbollah. You can’t understand Hamas without knowing that it’s a fervent local chapter of an organization whose early funding, rituals, and philosophy came directly from Nazi Germany. This essay offers a downloadable chapter (“Islamic Jihadism: The Legacy of Nazi Antisemitism”) from Professor David Patterson’s book, Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust: Making the Connections (Cambridge University Press, 2022). This chapter is the most compact, comprehensive account I’ve found of the historical, organizational,...

Did you ever wonder how the Democratic Party got so crazy? For example, how is it that the governor of Illinois is inciting violent mobs against federal immigration authorities and meanwhile, in Virginia, every Democrat is rallying to the defense of Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, who openly fantasized about murdering political opponents? To summarize briefly: Bad causes attract bad people. To understand the symbiotic relationship between toxic political movements and their toxic supporters, my advice is to first read Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic, The True Believer, especially Part 2: “The Potential Converts.” Next, you should read Friedrich Hayek’s The...

Mark Bray, a financier of international Antifa and the author of the Antifa Handbook, has announced he is fleeing to Europe (believed to be Spain). The announcement follows the U.S. government declaring Antifa domestic terrorists, and the intelligence community looking to establish the international links to declare international Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization.Without evidence, Bray says the reason is because of "death threats + doxing." Bray is one of the major financiers of the International Antifa Defence Fund, which also announced that it was shutting down to relocate its operations abroad in an attempt to escape U.S. prosecution.@RutgersU employs...

For years I clung to the belief that, despite the rise in hostility to the Jewish community, we could still build lives here. I had watched from abroad during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, when Jew-hate poisoned the party and seeped into wider politics. Yet, despite my deep disappointment, I still believed in this country enough to move back from Hong Kong in 2022. I wanted to believe the Jewish story here still had a future, and I was determined to be a part of it. October 7, 2023, changed everything. Hamas carried out...

Anti-Israel activism is neo-colonial arrogance in the drag of pacifism.I’m old enough to remember when being a peacenik meant you wanted less Western meddling overseas, not more. Seems things have changed. Exhibit A: the Gaza flotilla. These smug sea-farers pose as peace activists, like Mother Teresa in a keffiyeh. Yet behind the humanitarian pantomime there lurks a brutish neo-colonial urge to rally the mighty nations of the West against the uppity little state of Israel. Some on the flotilla are openly calling on powerful states to send their warships to help ‘break’ Israel’s blockade of Gaza. You can call that...

Troubling developments have highlighted Europe’s continued slide into political turmoil and totalitarianism. As we discussed last time, the EU has no choice but to sharply agitate for war in order to keep its frail political structures intact, because the war drums drown out the organic cries for change and liberation from the EU’s despotic rule. It is the age old tactic used by tyrants time and again, most recently by Netanyahu in Israel. All the while, new undemocratic measures are “slipped in” while the populace is distracted by the hysteria; case in point being the sudden push for national digital...

From Kurt Schlichter: “Quick, everybody care what a bunch of impotent, fussy foreigners think about us! No, really, we should give a damn that some herring-gobbling fjord jockey is mad about Donald Trump. Yeah, Norwegians totally matter. But not really. No foreigner matters. Not Canadians, not the English, not the Arabs (especially of the nonexistent Palestinian variety), not the Papua/New Guineans. Here’s the reality. Most foreigners are trash. Most people who aren’t Americans suck. And treacherous Americans who presume to leverage the puny outrage of second-rate cultures against ours deserve our contempt and mockery almost as much as the foreigners...

No Republican is safe from CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s wrath, not even former President and quintessential moderate George H.W. Bush. According to Colbert and actor Jeremy Strong on Thursday, “we risk losing essentially everything” to climate change, and it is Bush’s fault. Colbert teed up Strong, “You have a documentary about our burning world.” An appreciative Strong took the opportunity to promote the project, “Yeah, I executive produced an incredible documentary called The White House Effect that is coming out on Netflix at the end of next month. It’s coming out on Netflix on October 31,...

It was quite a week. The biggest story was the indictment of James Comey, about which I have reservations. But the indictment was a boon to memesters, who recalled Comey’s earlier art project featuring seashells. Much more happened, too. The Trump administration adopted recommendations by the Harvard School of Public Health on the use of Tylenol by pregnant women, which were immediately denounced by leftists, even though it turned out that the manufacturer of Tylenol said the same thing. Jimmy Kimmel returned to television and garnered massive ratings in his first show back, mainly due to people tuning in to...

Well, I feel obliged to post this here because I have now been the victim of fraud three (possibly four) times in the last month. The first and second incidents took place in Dallas at the end of August. I did not know until I looked at my bank statement that my debit card had been used at a Dallas area restaurant. My husband's debit card had been used at a different Dallas area restaurant. We live in San Antonio, so it's not like we were in the Dallas area and forgot that we stopped for bites to eat. My...

Two days ago, Chuck Schumer threatened Donald Trump with a good time. Now, the White House threatens to make the good time permanent. Literally. The deadline for a government shutdown is fast approaching, and Schumer tried to play hardball this week. He and Hakeem Jeffries demanded a meeting with Trump to negotiate, which Trump initially accepted, but canceled after the pair demanded a massive list of concessions before the meeting took place. Schumer then told the press that Trump was "chicken" and that any shutdown would be his fault -- even though the House had already passed the clean CR...

Why is anyone surprised that Allah-fearing Koran-bashers and genderfluid Westerners are struggling to get along?Remember when leftists chanted, ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud / Turn another ship around!’, goading the medieval anti-Semites of the Houthi movement to bomb merchant ships in the Red Sea? Well, now those same people are blubbing like babies because Israel allegedly pumped some ABBA on to their flotilla of boats heading to Gaza. So it’s fine for a racist militia to rain missiles on the hard-grafting men of merchant ships, but heaven forbid that the Jewish State subject the lily-handed activist class to a bit...

And it’s never coming back…“I’m so awesome I’m singlehandedly holding back the wave of long-anticipated-but-never-seeming-to-arrive-tidal-wave-of-white-male-right-wing-domestic-terrorism! I’m so noble, no one will ever know it was ME holding them back, getting them caught, defusing their bombs...because I’m so awesome!” - The SavantThis TV show needs to be preserved and kept in the Smithsonian as a benchmark of our strange times, in which ONE PARTICULAR NATIONAL POLITICAL PARTY was making EXTENSIVE USE of highly organized, violent, very dangerous and blatantly anti-American radical revolutionary groups loosely referred to as ANTIFA in order to try to DICTATE SOCIAL POLICY via threat against the public...

When I write about our favorite president, I often recall the CNN headline from May 11, 2017, “Trump gets 2 scoops of ice cream, everyone else gets 1.”2 presidencies, everybody else not named Grover Cleveland gets 1. President Trump went to New York to address the United Nations. He is footloose and carefree. Trump was among the leaders of nations speaking at the UN this week.He was the only world leader.Eli David tweeted:Priceless: Police in New York stop Macron’s car because the street is closed for Trumps convoy.Macron calls Trump to allow him to pass, but Trump humiliates Macron and...

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul thinks backing an antisemitic mayoral candidate will help get her re-elected. Others in the party are wondering and wavering.Was it a sign of growing confidence that his victory in November was inevitable, or merely just another indication of the strength of his hatred for the State of Israel and the Jews? Perhaps it’s a bit of both. Either way, it’s clear that Zohran Mamdani feels no need to feint to the center or water down his fervent anti-Zionism.When the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City promised to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...

Whatever Happened to Just Going Out for Family Fun? Now that I’m retired, with more time behind me than ahead, I find myself looking back a lot more than forward. I’ve been reflecting on the changes I’ve seen — not just in the world at large, but right here at home, in the way families like mine spend time together. When I was young, family fun meant something simple. Back in the 1950s, when money was tight for most folks, we didn’t need expensive outings to enjoy ourselves. A picnic at the park, a day at the beach, just a...

The title to this essay is a line from Tolkien. But I'm also reminded of two distinct lines from Star Wars, paired:If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.I dunno, I can imagine an awful lot.Charlie Kirk was a powerful force. He went from campus to campus and he talked to people. Generally when he was debating, he would put his microphone down, to reassure his partner that he wasn’t going to talk over them. He was respectful, and he was highly effective. He played a major role in winning over Gen Z...

Edgar Vincent, the first (and, as it happens, the last) Viscount D’Abernon, once remarked that “An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” He died in the dark days of 1941 and so did not live to observe how events seemed to corroborate his maxim. For anyone contemplating the fate of Great Britain today, the primary question would be whether that “almost” is still justified. There are, we think, two interrelated set of problems. One is the rapid Islamification of Great Britain. The other is the triumph of political correctness, the intolerant ideology of “wokeness.” The two...