Free Republic

On Friday, large crowds in Tehran and other Iranian cities burned American flags and chanted “Death to America!” On Saturday, Iranian media outlets reported that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had instructed university students to “continue the struggle against arrogant powers” – with the United States at the top of that list. On Tuesday, President Obama announced an historic agreement between Iran and the United States. It would be comforting to believe that the last of these developments mitigates the first two – that with an agreement in place, Iran’s “struggle” to bring about America’s demise will begin at least to...

Obamacare! The War on Drugs! A War on Poverty! Prohibition! The idea that government will bring social progress isn't new. Europe's monarchs believed in big government long before there was a Soviet Union or a welfare state. Eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire praised "enlightened" monarchs like Prussia's Frederick the Great. Since the nineteenth century, so-called "progressives" have wanted government to get ever larger. They got their wish. The results were not so good for people. Today pundits and protesters moan about fiscal "austerity" in nations like Greece. But if austerity means cuts in government, there hasn't been much of it. Sure, Greece...

Donors have given just $30,000 to Lincoln Chafee’s Democratic run for president, leading him to acknowledge that Democratic competitor Bernie Sanders is filling the role he hoped to play in the 2016 contest. Chafee lent his campaign $364,000, according to federal campaign finance filings. The former Rhode Island governor trails by a wide margin in fundraising. The campaign for Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton said it raised $45 million since mid-April, while Sanders, a Vermont senator, has raised $15 million since he joined the race in late April. “I always thought that there was fundraising potential for an honest progressive...

Take a bow, MOTI, you are all innate insurgents.At least according to Daniel Greenfield, the Sultan of Knish. I think one of you must have posted a link to this post as it was in my satchel of “must reads.” Butt if, like me, you never find time to get around to reading all those gems stuffed into your perpetual stack of stuff, here’s one you don’t want to miss: Five Ways to Fight the Left and Make Your Life Better. He lists 5 things that the MOTI (Famiglia MOTUS) have been doing for years now. Organic Opposition doesn't require...

Are we still a serious country? I couldn’t help but notice something last week about the stories that were emphasized in the news – and about the way they were treated. Let’s start with Donald Trump. He may not be your top choice for president. He may not be mine. But the reaction to what he said about illegal immigrants bringing crime into the United States has been one of the most absurd spectacles we’ve seen in some time. His fellow Republican candidates have either rushed to denounce his statement, or have been put on the defensive in explaining why...

“I hate America. I hate all Americans!” Ariana Grande is but yet another twisted link in a growing chain of bitter ignorance and defiant decadence that is strangling our youth’s ability to discern our most basic blessings. If I may ask, Princess, what is so unbearably unfair about living in a nation that tolerates and graciously rewards ungrateful, spiteful, and spoiled Disney debutantes like yourself? Is your festering rage caused by the fact your seven-figure checks aren’t made on recyclable hemp paper or that you might actually have to sign them? Could it possibly emanate from the disturbing discovery your...

Today’s “progressive” ideas are nothing but retreads of the notorious 19th and 20th century command-and-control tyrannies that killed about 120 million of their own citizens. Variously known as socialism, Communism, and Marxism, their chief practitioners were Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. That’s why hearing modern militant liberals called “progressives” induces brain bleed in this particular brain. As long as we allow reality-denying liberals to call themselves “progressives” we are telling the world their tired, failed ideas are the smartest, most forward-thinking of mindsets. And we’re handing them a critical public relations victory. If they are progressives, by default...

Old fashioned religion with its eye on the ethics of responsibilities as well as rights helps keep our society strong by teaching family values-the value of family I recently listened to a programme on the CBC about the killing of twins in some Nigerian tribes. This has been going on for some time. I found references from the early 1990s “In Abuja, it is believed that the birth of a set of twins is a sacrilege which brings misfortune both to the family and the village, they see twins as children formed by the devil and therefore are evil. They...

A Brit gives an entertaining talk on how to properly insult a 'progressive'.

LONDON – The British government is urging school leaders to use their “common law powers” to search student lunches and potentially confiscate any items they deem “unhealthy or inappropriate.” Education minister Lord Nash tells Express, “Schools have common law powers to search pupils, with their consent, for items. “There is nothing to prevent schools from having a policy of inspecting lunch boxes for food items that are prohibited under their school food policies. “A member of staff may confiscate, keep or destroy such items found as a result of the search if it is reasonable to do so in the...

First the flag, now monuments honoring the Confederacy may be coming down. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is pushing for the name of a park in the city to be changed. The park is named after Robert E. Lee and it is the latest push to erase history related to the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina last week. A member of the Baltimore chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans said the hatred of the flag is an attempt to hide history. Elliot Cummings told WBAL, "We are becoming like the Taliban....

Our inalienable—God given—rights as set down in the Constitution are under attack. It’s the agenda of the American left to implement an unholy, “live for today” secularism which will destroy the virtues and truth contained in our founding documents. The strength of our republic was derived from a higher authority. Our government was designed to prevent any group amassing so much power that the society at large would be harmed. It is our culture that should drive politics, not the other way around. Today’s politicians demean that culture and subject the American people to tyranny. The Obama Regime in particular...

If it seems to you that the Left has, collectively, lost its damned mind as the curtain rises on the last act of the Obama administration, you are not imagining things. Barack Obama has been extraordinarily successful in his desire to — what was that phrase? — fundamentally transform the country, but the metamorphosis is nonetheless a good deal less than his congregation wanted and expected. We may have gone from being up to our knees in welfare-statism to being up to our hips in it, and from having a bushel of banana-republic corruption and incompetence to having a bushel...

Dana Haswell Corbin had no idea she was bucking conventional political wisdom when she wore her pale blue “Bernie for President” T-shirt months before a primary vote in any state, let alone her native Pennsylvania. Conventional wisdom dictates she is supposed to like Hillary Clinton's “unique and historic candidacy” as a woman on the cusp of walking away with the Democrats' nomination. But Corbin says she likes Bernie Sanders, Vermont's “democratic socialist” U.S. senator, because of what she describes as his frank talk and his authentic voice on progressive issues. Corbin's sentiment is by no means a trend away from...

If you are a person who still believes even some of what you hear and see from the mainstream media and its lackeys on the "alternative" Left, then you deserve everything you get from them. If you are not, then you are probably as disgusted as I am with the outright lying that goes on in the name of "news reporting" from the cultural Marxists and other elements of the radical Left. Two recent stories in particular highlight the blatant dishonesty of the Left in its efforts at pushing its agenda. The first of these is the recent "tweaking" of...

Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths. Northwestern “feminist” professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students. Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously, reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species) he was so “scared” and “terrified” of his “liberal” students that he self-censors his comments in class and...

Speaking on Fox News Channel’s The Five, pundit Greg Gutfeld said that “gay marriage, in my opinion, is a conservative idea.” He noted that the left “generally hates traditions” and is all about “breaking with traditions,” and that gay marriage offers conservatives an opportunity to “embrace a tradition” that strengthens families and communities. I should acknowledge that Gutfeld spoke without notes, unscripted, live and off-the-cuff. I often talk with inexactness when I’m speaking live. Live speaking is a perfect venue to make mistakes. It’s easier to type your thoughts and have the benefit of reflection, revision, and a word processor....

I appreciate it when leftists get off script, dispatch with the propagandist talking points and say what’s really on their minds. “Progressives” hate natural marriage. And they hate the natural family. But they do so love big government. In an article for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation titled, “Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?” Joe Gelonesi, host of “The Philosopher’s Zone” radio program, calls the natural mom-dad biological family a “weathered institution ever more in need of a rationale for existing.” While he admits that it may be premature to “abolish the family and put children into care of...

[] this is part two of a three part trifecta on the utter catastrophe that has befallen what was once America's jewel in her industrial crown, namely her inner-cities. In part one, we looked at the locust-like plague that drugs, especially crack cocaine, has inflicted on America's cities. Today, we'll look at the political perfect storm of Democratic policies that have not only allowed this to happen, but in fact, fostered it. And in part three, we will struggle to find some solutions to this multi-generational mess. I think the short form is that America's cities were once home to...

Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and even William Jennings Bryan. Ely, a mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the “Wisconsin school” of progressivism, believed that “God works through the state in carrying out His purposes more...