Free Republic

One of the chief arguments against Donald Trump is the very fact that so many of us on the Right spend so much time arguing with each other about him. “The Right” has always been a broad ideological coalition, and any president is going to lean toward one part of that coalition at the expense of others, leaving some people disgruntled. But in my experience, that usually led right-leaning writers to debate their differences on the issues, rather than just arguing about the man. Yet that’s what we’re doing with Trump. He has a remarkable talent for needlessly pitting former...

Yet somehow I wasn’t surprised to see Donald Trump supporters, those swaggering tough guys, turn one of their favorite Internet forums into a safe space where they no longer need to encounter criticism or opposition. Earlier today, Free Republic proprietor Jim Robinson announced that the discussion board would no longer tolerate opposition to Trump’s candidacy.

On the right, we’ve grown to pride ourselves on our greater openness to debate and ideas, on having no need to toe a Politically Correct line or crawl into a “safe space” like pampered college kids who just can’t handle hearing from anyone who disagrees with them. For myself, I am so personally dedicated to this ideal that I even perform the great personal sacrifice of reading the comments field beneath my articles. Yet somehow I wasn’t surprised to see Donald Trump supporters, those swaggering tough guys, turn one of their favorite Internet forums into a safe space where they...

If you try to shut down public debate, is this a way of ensuring that you win—or an admission that you have already lost? The question seems relevant today, because the most remarkable characteristic of our current national debate is that one side wants desperately to stamp it out whenever it occurs. Recently, for example, a gay New York businessman had the temerity to sponsor a “fireside chat” with Republican presidential candidate and arch-conservative Ted Cruz. He was, of course, required to repent the error, calling it “a terrible mistake” to actually talk to a politician who disagrees with him...

The big, existential question for Republicans right now is: who are Donald Trump’s supporters? It matters because this will determine the future, and the future prospects, of the party. I heartily agree with Ben Domenech, whose article on this just made it harder for me to fulfill my obligations to his publication, by pre-empting most of what I was planning to write about Trump for The Federalist. Ben argues that Trumpism would turn the Republicans from a “classically liberal right” to a European-style nationalist party that is “xenophobic, anti-capitalist, vaguely militarist, pro-state, and consistently anti-Semitic. If you criticize Donald Trump,...

Conservative writer and CNN talking head S.E. Cupp recently put out a video describing how she has been welcomed among conservatives even though she is an atheist. This led Hot Air's Allahpundit to chime in with his own experiences, citing myself and National Review's Charles Cooke as other examples of atheists on the Right. And we're not the only ones. There's Heather Mac Donald and Walter Olson, and a whole website devoted to the issue. Among marquee names, there are a few famous agnostics/atheists like Charles Krauthammer and George Will. When you start looking, we're everywhere. I pretty much agree...

Barack Obama’s presidency is failing. Despite what he and his cheerleaders in the press think, he is still losing the argument over ObamaCare. The program has posted a few non-catastrophic enrollment numbers lately, but a lot of the public has already made up their minds. They never liked the program much to begin with, and now that they know what’s in it, they like it even less. The economic recovery, such as it is, continues to be slow, painful, and jobless. The president’s foreign policy is spinning out of control in all directions. So the left is doing what they...

It might seem strange to say it, but I am a global warming skeptic because of Carl Sagan. This might seem strange because Sagan was an early promoter of the theory that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are going to fry the globe. But it’s not so strange when you consider the larger message that made Sagan famous. As with many people my age, Sagan’s 1980 series “Cosmos,” which aired on public television when I was eleven years old, was my introduction to science, and it changed my life. “Cosmos&88221; shared the latest developments in the sciences of evolution, astronomy,...

This geographical accident connects the heart of Western Civilization--the need for man-made power to drive our industrial civilization--to the heart of Islamic Civilization: the holy city of Mecca and the traditionalist Arab-Muslim societies of Arabia. Like fratricidal Siamese twins, two opposing civilizations have been joined at the heart.