Free Republic

Assuming they can take a break from bitterly clinging to their guns and religion for a few minutes, I’m going to set a bona fide goal for those liberty-loving Americans out there with a passion for our founding principles and the Constitution. What may surprise some in that camp is that it’s the very same goal toward which those on the political left strive. At first blush, some of these patriots – perhaps many – will find this goal rhetorically indelicate, if not undemocratic, or even (dare I say it?) – “extreme.” By the time they’re done reading this, however,...

Jim Webb, Reagan’s former Secretary of the Navy, former Virginia Senator and oft mentioned Democrat candidate gets it right regarding the great battle flag issue. You see, other than his political history, Jim is a historian. I read his book “Born Fighting," a book which gives the history of prominent Scots Irish people in our nation’s history. Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jackson among others. He respects history and he and I exchanged emails after I congratulated him on his work. Here are some of Mr. Webb’s comments. It is a brave moment for Mr. Webb but also a refreshing one. He...

Due to some combination of activist journalism and corporate conscience, major retailers such as Amazon, eBay, Target, and Wal-Mart are removing Confederate flags and other types of Confederate memorabilia from their shelves. Let’s pause for a moment and applaud the Left for its dramatic about-face on the question of corporate morality. Just one year after denying that corporations can have a conscience when that conscience dictates opposing abortion, the reversal is now complete. Corporations — as instruments of the people who run them — do indeed exercise First Amendment rights and do indeed express a moral point of view in...

Many Catholics, especially conservative ones, obviously aren’t thrilled with the pope’s new encyclical. I find myself once again spending a lot of time explaining to non-Catholics why the current pope is either not a Marxist or is being yet againmisunderstood for the 999th time. Frankly, I’ve lost most of my credibility with these folks, who surely see me as a hopelessly blind Catholic. Pope Francis from behind This constant defense-mode has been unique in the case of this particular pope. Sure, much of the fault is with those looking to remake this pope and this Church in their own image,...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)One of talk radio's leading Republican voices says Hillary Clinton is the "prohibitive favorite" in the 2016 election, and in a new book, "The Queen, the Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second Clinton Era," provides some campaign advice. Among his suggestions: if the nominee is Ted Cruz, don't debate him. "Senator Cruz has won nine Supreme Court arguments, John. You don't do that because you're lucky. You win nine Supreme Court arguments because you're really, really smart. And I advise in 'The Queen' if he's the nominee that [Clinton] should simply reject debates with him because...

The UN report into possible war crimes in last summer’s Gaza conflict should not be taken to the Security Council or used in other United Nations work, the US said on June 23, challenging the fairness of the Human Rights Council that commissioned the inquiry. State Department spokesman John Kirby said that Washington viewed the UNHRC as having a “clear bias” against Israel, tarnishing the report released on June 22, which accused both Israel and Palestinian militants of possible war crimes during the 50-day Operation Protective Edge last summer. “[W]e challenge the very foundation upon which this report was written,...

Over the next week, the only opinion people will care about on marriage is the Supreme Court’s. But as more surveys show, the backdrop for that ruling is a country still very much divided on the issue — with one exception: Millennials. America’s 18 to 29-year-olds, raised in an age of LGBT saturation in schools, Hollywood, and social media, are the most enthusiastic about redefining an institution that half of their parents aren’t even a part of. Lately, though, what’s newsworthy isn’t the younger generation’s support for same-sex “marriage,” but their older siblings’ growing opposition to it. wedding photo In...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: My friends, not one to let things go, I have dug deep, and I have found out practically everything there is to know about the science advisor to Pope Francis on this encyclical. And the main thing you need to know, the guy's an atheist. The word for it in the story that I found, one of the most credible stories, is a pantheist, which is a variation of atheist. A pantheist is somebody that believes the earth is a living organism that has the equivalent of a brain and reacts to horrible things done to it...

Two years into his reign, Pope Francis has emerged as an extreme socialist obsessed with the usual phony leftist problems such as manmade global warming, American institutional racism, and income inequality. Muslims are indiscriminately slaughtering Christians around the world while Christianity itself seems on the verge of being eclipsed globally by Islam, but these things barely register with this pope. This pseudo-intellectual pope keeps on spouting the same misanthropic Marxist platitudes as he hitches his papacy to global warming, the new international totalitarian cause. Sounding like Mao Zedong, Francis said a “bold cultural revolution” was needed to save the planet....

Many Christians are fearful of the changes they see around them. What are the prospects of a thriving church if our culture continues to grow more hostile? “We must neither panic on the one hand nor assume persecution is always good on the other,” Tim Keller explains in a new roundtable video with Don Carson and John Piper [audio]. “Persecution is inevitable, but there is no way to simply say it’s good or bad for the church.” We must think in “far bigger, biblical categories than mere number-based, pundit-generated trend analysis,” adds Carson, author of Christ and Culture Revisited (Eerdmans,...

A recent poll [2] found that 51 percent of Democrats supported criminalizing hate speech. It also found that the same number of self-described liberals supported its criminalization.Liberal self-identification has hit its highest mark [3] in decades while the ranks of the moderates have declined. And while the idea that the liberal and the moderate are opposites may be a troubling one to those who still think of liberalism in classical terms, the modern liberal is really a leftist in denial.When William Voegeli writes in the Claremont Review [4] about the crisis of political correctness, it is about a clash between...

Hillary Clinton on Tuesday ventured to Florissant, Missouri, not far from Ferguson, Missouri to talk about the “hard truths” about race and racial injustice in the wake of the church massacre in Charleston South Carolina. One of those hard truths is that one of her role models was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, someone who believed, as did the shooter at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, that the black race should be exterminated.

WASHINGTON: Following outcry from several groups, a prestigious American university has decided to rescind its suspension order against a student who displayed a Hindu swastika on his residence hall's bulletin board. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) welcomed the move to rescind the interim suspension order by the George Washington University (GWU). HAF associate director of public policy, Harsh Voruganti, said that the decision reflects the facts of this case and the efforts by Hindu organisations to educate campus officials about the sacredness of the Indian swastika. The small, bronze, swastika was displayed by the student on March 16 on a...

In a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say there is a link between political ideology and the ability to exert self-control. In a series of three studies with more than 300 participants, the authors found that people who identify as conservative perform better on tests of self-control than those who identify as liberal regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender.

Pope Francis’s aversion to air conditioning may be red hot, but he himself is comfortably cool. In his encyclical Laudato Si’, published today, the pope lambasts wasteful consumerism and unchecked human economic activity as a root of climate change, singling out one product in particular for censure: the air conditioner. “A simple example [of harmful habits of consumption] is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning,” Francis writes. “The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.” But ironically, Francis probably...

I had no intention of commenting on the recent shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina church.........Alas, the Huffington Post, in the person of veteran propagandist Terry Krepel, forced my hand. In an article published Monday, “Did Right-Wing Media Influence Dylann Roof,” Krepel cites me first and foremost among Roof’s influences. For the record, he also cites WND and the American Thinker.

During Monday’s episode of the ABC daytime talk show “The View,” Whoopi Goldberg and the crew were fooled by a fake news website that claimed pastor John Hagee of San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church wanted women prosecuted if they said “God” during sex.

Obama had the opportunity to bring solace and comforting words to a nation, a people, and a state in the aftermath of the Charleston, South Carolina, mass murders. But that would have been expecting Obama to at least pretend to be something other than the pernicious charade and anti-Constitution neo-Leninist he is.

Watching this video of Justin Sullivan says a lot about self-training for an ISIS lone wolf, something we have continually warned about. The Morganton teenager told an undercover FBI agent he planned to kill as many as 1,000 Americans in support of ISIS, according to documents released Monday. Neighbors now reveal that Justin Nojan Sullivan, 19, was training to become an ISIS lone wolf and was arrested Friday at his home, according to a release from the North Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office. Sullivan’s destructive pattern of statues(?) and his desire to kill his parents is not foreign to Islam where...

The Undercurrent posted a clip of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush taking question while walking through the hall at the Road to Majority Conference sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in which he said he “embraces” the current “reduction of carbon emissions.” When asked about his climate change position Jeb said, “I continue to embrace the reduction of carbon emissions that have taken place.”