Free Republic

In what has since become known as his first “major” speech, Abraham Lincoln famously warned the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois in 1838 about the dangers of “mob rule.” As reprehensible as are the immediate consequences of mob rule, however, Lincoln’s larger strategy in the speech is to use our revulsion at the actions of the mob to draw our attention to the long-term dangers of what he calls “the mobocratic spirit.” These dangers move in two directions. In the first place, “the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no...

Last week, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot three men – two of which have died – during a riot in Kenosha. The teen is being charged as an adult and faces two counts of first-degree homicide, one count of attempted homicide, recklessly endangering the safety of two other victims and possessing a weapon while under the age of 18. According to Pierce Bainbridge, the law firm representing Rittenhouse, his attorney was justified in using deadly force because Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) and Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian failed to protect the residents in the city. Although Rittenhouse lives 30 minutes...

Renowned priest calls on pro-life Americans to ‘make it their first priority…to re-elect President Trump’ MP>TITUSVILLE, Florida, July 27, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – On Sunday, July 26, which marked the 100-day point until the completion of Elections 2020, Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, called on pro-life Americans to “make it their first priority, as it will be mine, to re-elect President Trump.” “With 100 days left until Election Day, November 3, 2020, I call upon all of my fellow patriots who embrace pro-life and conservative principles to put aside, as much as possible, all other activities and...

Fr. Rutler: Stalin, Mao, and The Young Enemies of Statues Stalin, killer of at least 20 million people, said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” In mid-nineteenth-century China, the civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion cost upwards of 30 million lives.The feast of Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and his 119 companions, on July 9, is a reminder that the persecution of Christian missionaries and native Chinese, begun in the mid-17th century, continues into our time. Augustine had been a soldier assigned as a prison guard for the French missionary bishop, Louis Gabriel Dufresse,...

The war on history has spread across our country and has even spilled over to other parts of the Western world. Now, on a daily basis, we see scenes of lawless mobs attacking and tearing down statues, and defacing monuments of every type—often as authorities stand idly by. But this violence has hardly been reserved just for statues. After toppling a statue of an abolitionist who gave his life to the cause as a member of the Union Army, a mob in Madison, Wisconsin, mercilessly beat a Wisconsin Democrat state senator who supported the protests. Mob rule is indeed coming...

The following is the statement from the "CHOP Solidarity Committee". Read it and laugh. They are giving up.

This guy is very insightful. He talks about the ascendance of BLM in recent polls, the hypocrisy of the Left, the cowardice of Republicans, and aloofness of the elites. Key takeaway: Elihu Yale, founder of Yale University, was a major slave trader! Why are they not going after him and the elitist universities? Who is really behind this movement? See video at link.

Video at link, no written excerpt available. A public trial put on by organization Detroit Will Breath. There were no judges and no defense.

As I was talking Thursday with John Heubusch, the brilliant and dedicated executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, it was really driven home to me what a dangerous period we are living through. ~snip~ It is the ignorance of the mob which allows its members to smear American heroes and destroy the memory of key personalities in the rise of freedom. In Boston, the ignorant and the hateful damaged the statue dedicated to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the 54th Massachusetts. As anyone familiar with American history – or who has at least...

USA : Santa Monica Black Lives Matter taking whites from their cars, beating them then stealing the cars They’re doing this because they’ve been given a green light by every single government & official in the west. You wondered when it’d be open season on whitey?

In Seattle this week, a group of assorted Democrat activists (some Antifa, some BLM, some veterans of earlier radical groups like Occupy, and of course some garden-variety looters and thugs) took over an eight block section of Seattle and declared it the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, imagining themselves a new and independent country. The establishment of CHAZ has naturally inspired an endless number of jokes, from comparisons of the area to Sonny and Cher’s daughter of the same name, to humor at their first action: shameless begging for vegan food and comfortable pants for today’s fashionable radical. But this is...

In revolutions, the second generation, the one that’s been weaned on the revolution, is always truer and purer in its beliefs than the first generation. Like all true believers, these children of the revolution will brutally purge heretics, which is why revolutions always eat their own. The most famous recent example is Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which saw students violently destroy anyone who deviated from Maoist doctrine. We’re witnessing that now across corporate America, especially in the media, as college grads destroy the woke leftists who hired them. China’s Cultural Revolution began in 1966. When it ended a decade later,...

And the democrat run cities and states where it's happening are actively allowing and even encouraging it to happen. They want change (fundamental transformation of America, ie, throw out our system and replace it with socialism) and they want it now! They've been trying for four years to take down Trump and have failed. So now they're going to burn it all down if they have to. Scorched earth. Even an attempted direct assault on the White House tonight. If this continues unabated, the president may have to call out the troops to put down rebellions.

Retired federal judge Janice Rogers Brown warned Tuesday about the perils of the mob that views politics as all important and ignores objective truth. President Donald Trump has had to contend with a fired-up “resistance” of political opposition that will not recognize his presidency as legitimate, Brown suggested. “Prior to the 2016 election, America had a cherished tradition of peacefully transferring power. No riots in the streets. No military coups. George Washington himself set the standard,” Brown said. “However, we now know elections have consequences only when the correct candidate is elected.” Brown, who served on the U.S. Court of...

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, seen as a possible swing vote in President Trump’s impeachment trial, announced on the Senate floor Tuesday that she will not vote to remove the president. “This decision is not about whether you like or dislike this president or agree with or oppose his policies or approve or disapprove of his conduct in other circumstances,” Collins said. “Rather, it is about whether the charges meet the very high constitutional standard of treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanors.”

Watergate is the ur-text for how Americans imagine the defeat of a sitting president, but it shouldn’t be how to think about the impeachment of Donald Trump. Watergate was a formative political experience for many of the older Democrats who run the House of Representatives these days. And the semi-fictionalized version of the scandal portrayed on film in All the President’s Men is an emotional and intellectual touchstone for many journalists. To this day, it’s conventional to denote the existence of a political scandal by appending “-gate” to a noun, as if “Watergate” had to with water rather than originating...

Nevada could joins 14 other states and Washington, D.C. to award its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote during a presidential election. The Assembly passed AB186 in a narrow vote of 23-17. "I think it's going to increase voter participation," Assem. Tyrone Thompson, D-North Las Vegas said. "This is where we would know that people really will fell like that vote counts even more. It's just that more reason to go to the polls and to make sure that your voice is your vote." Nevada has six electoral votes, which go to the candidate who gets...

There is no shortage of issues upon which Republicans and Democrats can respectfully disagree. We’re silly people sometimes though, and respect seems to come at quite a cost. There are a handful of issues, however, on which Democrats are so profoundly and dangerously wrong that I find myself incapable of empathy. Beto O’Rourke, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and more have come out for eliminating the Electoral College. This is an unequivocal deal-breaker for me. It seems one of the only Democrats with any sense is the anti-establishment progressive, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who...

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles officials agreed Thursday to drop all criminal charges against one of the city’s most visible Black Lives Matter organizers as part of a negotiated arrangement, after hundreds of activists filed petitions, filled courtrooms and led rallies in recent weeks accusing prosecutors and police of using the charges to silence a critical voice.

In the shallow world of modernity, we throw around a word like “democracy” as a stand-in for “things that I like.” Many in popular culture and elite institutions promote democracy as a cure for all that ails us—an unquestioned and unqualified blessing. Still others turn on a dime and hope for its demise as soon as it produces outcomes they don’t like. While democracy often plays a good and necessary role in a self-governing society, we have lost the healthy skepticism of its worst excesses that the Founding Fathers understood when they established the governing institutions of the United States....