Free Republic

If you follow the news with any diligence beyond reading the loudest early headlines and social-media clickbait, you are wearyingly familiar with the pattern of heavily-hyped “hate crimes” (ranging from violent crimes to nasty notes on restaurant receipts) that turn out to be “false flag” hoaxes, frequently perpetrated by the very sorts of left-leaning folks who make the stories go viral in the first place.

Why Baptists Should Support Muslims’ Right to Build Mosques Given the shift in American demographics, it might not be long before the Baptists are once again a powerless minority. And this time, it might be Muslims before whom they are pleading for ‘soul freedom.’

The billionaire brothers are pulling out all the stops in support of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Pity the interns who answer the phones in Colorado senator Michael Bennet’s office. Concerned Veterans for America estimates that as of March 2, it had connected with 80,000 Colorado supporters, urging them to phone Bennet’s office in an effort to convince him that he should support Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court. CVA is leading the Koch brothers’ network of libertarian-leaning advocacy groups in its effort to maximize pressure on senators to confirm Gorsuch.

If Orwell were alive today, he'd be more concerned with the world's genuine dictatorships than with the Trump administration. On April 4, almost 90 art-house movie theaters across the country will show 1984, the British film starring John Hurt, as a form of protest against President Trump's stated desire to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. The theaters say they "strongly believe in supporting the [NEA] and see any attempt to scuttle that program as an attack on free speech and creative expression through entertainment." The George Orwell novel on which the film is based, you'll recall, is the...

Ideas and values should matter more than tribal identity... Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort of binary thinking: If it angers the Left, it must be virtuous. Undoubtedly, that's a crude shorthand for political thinking. It means you never have to check the ideas of the speaker, you merely have to check how people respond to him. That's dangerous. It leads to supporting bad policies and bad men. The enemy of your enemy isn't always your friend. Sometimes he's your enemy. Sometimes he's just a dude sitting there minding his own business... The logic of "if he melts snowflakes,...

<p>As president, he cut a grandiose figure. He was a braggart and a frequent liar. He was suspicious of other countries, frequently saying, “Foreigners are not like the folks I am used to.” He had a reckless disregard for limits. He belittled and browbeat others to intimidate them and give him what he wanted. Historian Robert Dallek said that he “viewed criticism of his policies as personal attacks” and opponents of his policies “as disloyal to him and the country.”</p>

He did his country a great service, but he also broke the law. If Donald Trump doesn't understand now, he will eventually. Integrity and truth ultimately do matter, and if he wants to be a successful president, he's going to have to appoint people to high office who won't violate the public's trust. That means appointing more men like Neil Gorsuch and James Mattis. And it means keeping David Petraeus out of the White House... It's no understatement to say that by the September 2008 -- when he turned over command in Iraq to General Raymond Odierno -- he was...

Sorry #NeverTrumpers, but you don”t get to dismount your high horse and celebrate the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch today. This is NOT your victory, this is ours!There is a gobsmacking level of pontificating self-righteousness visible from the collective proletariat within your crony-conservative movement who made the decision to formulate their political argument from a position of opposition.Perhaps it would be different if you framed your antagonism from a position of advocacy, but that wasn’t the direction you chose. No, you chose a specific position of opposition as clearly evident within your chosen mantra “Never Trump”.Perhaps it would be...

I often thought they could teach me something. they are so clueless and marginalized. They hate it. Bye bye Nation Review.

Apparently Kevin Williamson at National Review has jumped over that deadly lemming cliff, along with millions of Trump-maddened New York liberals. Williamson writes in NR today that "My own view is that Donald and Ivanka and Uday and Qusay are genuinely bad human beings and that the American public has made a grave error in entrusting its highest office to this cast of American Psycho extras. That a major political party was captured by these cretins suggests that its members are not worthy of the blessings of this republic ..." ​Apparently NR editors didn't read this piece, or worse, they...

Rolla, Mo. - There are many summer camps, something for everyone. But there's no other camp quite like this: an explosives camp. A hands-on explosives camp. Such a thing would seem impossible in modern America. These days, kids ride their trikes in protective gear. So, the very idea of explosives camp is thrilling... Explosives Camp is an offering of Missouri University of Science and Technology -- formerly known as the University of Missouri-Rolla, formerly known as the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. Rolla is midway between St. Louis and Springfield (Springfield, Mo., that is)... Here in Rolla, the explosives...

One particularly tough and indigestible nugget of talk-radio stupidity afflicting the guts of conservatism is the idea that there is some sort of fundamental difference between bribing a business with tax cuts and bribing it with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The Trump-Pence bailout of Carrier’s operations in Indiana provides an illustrative case... Republicans might have had a little bit of a point in the question of general tax cuts: A tax cut and spending are different things, even if the budgetary effects are exactly the same. But in the matter of industry-specific or firm-specific tax benefits of the sort...

Populism? No thanks. I am not now, nor will I ever be, a populist. Evidently, that separates me from a growing number of commentators, including some conservatives, wistfully engaged in Washington's latest fad: over-interpreting Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election. The normally sensible Mike Lee, Republican senator from Utah, took to our pages to plead the case of "principled populism" -- which is akin to calling for a sober Bacchanalia. Not surprisingly, Senator Lee's brief doesn't get very far before strangling in its own illogic, as odes to populism inevitably do. The "characteristic weakness" of populism, he tells...

The elevation of the former Breitbart CEO to the Trump administration is cause for concern. Let’s start with some sense: Steve Bannon is not Josef Goebbels. That is how Bannon was described recently by French cable news network La Chaîne Info (The Info Channel), and American media have taken up the comparison, particularly in light of Bannon’s appointment as the president-elect’s “chief strategist and senior counselor.” The Huffington Post wailed representatively: “A White Nationalist Is the New White House Chief Strategist.” About Bannon’s personal attitudes, this is hyperbole. Julia Jones, Bannon’s screenwriting partner in Hollywood for nearly two decades, told...

Desperate Democrat Angie Craig is accusing Jason Lewis of justifying rape and slavery. Rarely has an electorate been subject to such a brazen and transparent example of raw political ambition and outright duplicity than those unfortunate souls living in Minnesota’s second congressional district. While the race for the hotly contested open seat, which covers the southern half of the Twin Cities metro region and areas to its southeast, remains a “toss up” between Republican Jason Lewis and Democrat Angie Craig, according to the Cook Political Report — it has been the campaign of Craig and her Democrat surrogates at the...

Given two terrible choices, a depressing number of voters have responded in the worst way. Yes, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are terrible presidential candidates, but not all of the blame for this thoroughly depressing election year can be placed at their feet. The primaries gave the general electorate two bad, disliked, dishonest, vindictive options . . . and in far too many cases, the general electorate responded appallingly, making a crummy situation worse.

National Review youtube video Thesis is that FBI let Hillary off because Obama was complicit in emailing classified info to Hillary on open channels. Taking down Hillary would have implicated Obama and so the whole thing was cooked

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Yes, we will likely survive 8 years of President Obama, but the country does have a BREAKING POINT. And we are there. Losing one more election tips the Supreme Court into Democrat hands (along with what’s left on our side on the lower courts). At that point our side will simply have NO RECOURSE to stop Hillary. Congress has already been reduced to an ‘advisory’ role by Obama - he considers the laws passed by Congress to be suggestions, open to his interpretations, with his right to enforce, re-write, or ignore as he wishes. With the courts in their hands,...

Moderators, I hope you'll permit the vanity. I wanted to solicit opinion from FReepers on the remaining NeverTrumpers. What amuses me is the degree to which the NeverTrumper disdain for Trump seems to be personal. It goes well beyond the superficial pettiness of a faculty lounge dispute, and seems bitter and vindictive. With some evidence (not much of which I can post here), I'll posit three motives: Personal slight against one or more NeverTrumpers, perhaps an ancient slight Trump has not paid sufficient fealty to the Conservo-sphere of writers and political consultants He has not hired Mike Murphy or Matthew...