Free Republic

Houston has barely begun to dry out from Hurricane Harvey, and Florida faces a massive rebuilding effort after the Irma catastrophe. These two storms, among the most powerful in American history, are typical of the extreme weather events that are likely to become more common as the planet warms. So why isn’t the public heeding scientists and demanding climate action by politicians that could help deal with these destructive extremes? You can point fingers at the influence of fossil fuel companies, at misinformation from climate deniers and at political obstructionism, notably from a fragmented Republican party. But a much deeper...

Donald Trump travels to the U.N. on Tuesday to address the General Assembly. His speech will touch familiar themes, including condemnation of North Korea, Iran, and perhaps even Russia. He will also try to reassure delegates that he believes in an international system but will criticize the U.N. for its timidity on North Korea and its mismanagement and almost certainly urge other countries to do more to fund the organization. The U.S. is currently responsible for about 60% of U.N. funding, and Trump will lecture the delegates about failing to pay their fair share.

Amid a summertime swarm of hundreds of earthquakes underneath Yellowstone National Park, NASA is developing a plan to tame a “supervolcano” that some experts believe is well overdue for a catastrophic eruption. The scientists’ plan: cool down the volcano. Volcanoes erupt when a certain heat threshold is built up within the magma, meaning that if enough heat can be let out of the volcano, it will never erupt. NASA’s idea is to pump water into the volcano after opening up a path via drilling. In theory, the plan would extract heat from the volcano and could even provide a new...

Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George H. W. Bush have referred to U. S. Supreme Court decisions as "the law of the land." Actually, that distinction belongs to the document we celebrate today—the U. S. Constitution. If you want a good treatise on it, read The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition by M. Stanton Evans. "In fact, the Constitution was the work not of a moment, an hour, or even a lifetime, but of two millennia of Western thought, political struggle and hard-won knowledge about the state," Evans wrote. "The Constitution is an almost...

St. Louis activists who were protesting the acquittal of Jason Stockley are crying about being abused by the police after they blocked a police transport van and then started shoving police officers, and that’s their side of the story (videos below.) The Associated Press reports that around 2:40 PM on Friday, a group of the protesters stood in front of a police transport bus full of officers in riot gear, blocking it from moving. The bus tried to back up, but then a group stood behind the bus, blocking them in. The group then started throwing objects at the bus....

Tyler Tynes is a staff writer for the liberal blog SB Nation whose beat is sticking to the intersection of race, politics and sports. In other words, his livelihood depends on race hustling. Along with a few like-minded friends, Tynes just marched from Charlottesville to D.C. to "combat forms of white supremacy, inflamed by the presidency, which they see a resurgence of in this country." When your job is just sticking to race, politics and sports, there's no such thing as alleged racism and white supremacy. The debate ended before it began. Departing on the 118-mile trek, which at times...

We know, to the best of our senses and instruments, that the universe exists. How did it come into reality 13.8 billion years ago? In other words, what caused the Big Bang? Roughly speaking, there are two possibilities: “nothing” caused the universe to come into being or “something” triggered it into existence.

President Trump promised to bring fresh ideas and policies to Washington. Now Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue are doing exactly that in a critically important area: forest management and conflagration prevention. Their actions are informed, courageous and long overdue. Westerners are delighted, and I’ve advocated such reforms since my days on Capitol Hill in the 1980s. As of September 12, amid this typically long, hot, dry summer out West, 62 major forest fires are burning in nine states, the National Interagency Fire Center reports. The Interior Department and Ag Department’s Forest Service have already spent over...

A university president in Tennessee apologized Friday for hosting black students in his home, which displayed a cotton decoration. Randy Lowry, president of Lipscomb University, apologized for showing centerpieces bearing cotton stalks while hosting black students at his home in an email sent to the school Friday and posted on Facebook. “The content of the centerpieces was offensive, and I could have handled the situation with more sensitivity,” said Lowry. “I sincerely apologize for the discomfort, anger or disappointment we caused and solicit your forgiveness.” The president reported that multiple students confided in him about the cotton decoration displayed during...

The lethal violence of Charlottesville was instantly packaged as a narrative of violent racist Trump supporters killing innocent Americans. Defending that narrative becomes difficult when the facts start to be known, so the obvious response of the Mainstream Media has been to ignore the facts and keep pushing the old narrative. My friend Mark Fitzgibbons pointed out to me that, “still no major liberal news outlet other than Politico has reported the DHS warning to Charlottesville that both sides were preparing for violence, or McAuliffe’s involvement.” That piece of news crushes the narrative, as Mark explained half a month ago....

Get ready for eight minutes of solid gold response from Ben Shapiro to Antifa and the radical Left at UC Berkeley for their attempts to shut him down on the basis of his supposed service to white supremacy and the Donald Trump administration. “To believe this,” Ben says of these nonsensical accusations, “you’d have to have your head so far up your ass that you can see your own colon first-hand.” The real thugs, Shapiro says in this PG-rated speech, are those claiming to be fighting “intellectual thuggery,” a premise Shapiro demolishes with glee in his speech (some language NSFW):

Sunday, September 10, was Melbourne Inspiration Day. One of its four key speakers was Anthony Hinds, celebrated father of six, Christian, and a gay man. The tag line to his profile on the Inspiration Day website describes his story as “Hiding to Living in Truth”. A month before, he was interviewed on ABC radio about coming out after over 30 years of marriage. The program was titled “Conflict, Courage and Coming Out”. His warm reception by the presenter, Libbi Gorr, was evident in her continual reference to his decision as an “act of courage”. He likewise described how his journey...

Back in 2013, Barronelle Stutzman, the owner of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington, refused to provide flowers for a gay friend’s same-sex wedding. The legal battle that ensued has now ended: The Washington State Supreme Court just unanimously ruled that the florist violated the state’s anti-discrimination law. The case has given rise to some misconceptions about discrimination. Here is the back story. In 2012, the state of Washington enacted Senate Bill 6239, which recognized same-sex marriage. Gay men Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, who had been a couple since 2004, decided to get married in September of 2013. At the...

Since they can’t sell electric cars — not enough of them, anyhow — and not without subsidies so huge they amount to outright bribes — the solution appears to be to outlaw all cars except electric cars. This is no joke. There are IC engine No Go Zones in Germany and France. The Brits have just decreed a ban on the sale of internal combustion-engined vehicles period, beginning in 2040. This sounds like a long time from now but isn’t — because car companies begin designing cars about ten years before they see the light of production and so the...

Anti-fascist activists, or “antifa,” increasingly mobilized in the wake of President Trump’s election, are unapologetic about what they describe as the necessary use of violence to combat authoritarianism. While both experts on the movement and activists within it emphasize that not everyone who participates in anti-fascist activism engages in violence, they say the use of force is intrinsic to their political philosophy. “The justification [of the use of violence] is that Nazi ideology at its very core is founded on violence and on wielding power by any means,” said Mike Isaacson, who is one of the founders of Smash Racism...

Most people might describe the American Dream in terms of career success, monetary wealth, or accumulation of things. For me, it is not that simple. My American Dream is to wake up one day to discover I no longer have to fight. My dream is a victorious end to the constant attacks on our Constitution and Bill of Rights by our own citizens and an out-of-control government. Our Founders envisioned this internal war that many citizens today fail to see or refuse to fight. Upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a group of citizens what sort...

Let’s play the word association game. I’ll say a word and you respond. Me: “White.” You: “Black.” (Older folks like myself will have seen a Chevy Chase/Richard Pryor version of this that would never be on TV today.) Liberals shouting from far away: “PRIVILEGE!!!” Yes, my how times change. No longer do we accept the antonym response. That makes too much sense. Now, liberals demand that the word white be associated with privilege. In the liberal world, which is located just slightly left of the Twilight Zone, everyone white must have privilege! A quick Google search delivers almost laughable results....

Three creatures on earth are impossible to get rid of: lice, cockroaches and Clintons. Hillary Clinton spent a third of her miserable adult life trying to get into the White House. Now the nation’s failed Harridan-in-Chief is determined to spend her remaining years blaming everyone, from Matt Lauer to the Electoral College, for having to live out the rest of her life in flat broke poverty in the eleven rooms of her Georgian Colonial mansion (and the neighboring mansion in their cul-de-sac too).

The university that has proudly proclaimed itself to be the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement may also become its graveyard. "In a letter addressed to the UC Berkeley campus and the larger Berkeley community, 76 faculty members from various departments have called for a complete boycott of classes and campus activities during the so-called 'Free Speech Week' to be held on campus September 24-27," Hank Reichman writes in the Academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "The week is sponsored by the Berkeley Patriot, a conservative student newspaper, and includes 'Feminism Awareness Day' and a...

#Scarfoyle is back on. Unless of course they were never off. The weather may be cooling off as we barrel into fall, but things are heating up for former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci and Fox News’s Kimberly Guilfoyle. The pair were spotted together in Rome last week at Celebrity Fight Night, which benefits The Andrea Bocelli Foundation and The Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center. Photographs were taken of them at the rooftop party on September 10. The Mirror viewed a video of the event in which #Scarfoyle sat together at the same table. They wore white as did everyone...