Free Republic

The birth, life, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ are the best news and most essential truths we sinners could ever read. For the moment, push the presents, tinsel, strands of lights, and Santa-adorned decorations out of your mind. Pause and reflect on the significance of this day. It has nothing to do with “Black Friday” sales. It has nothing to do with red-nosed reindeer, talking snowmen, or North Pole elves. It is not about crackling fires, baked treats, or warm cocoa. This is the day we reflect upon the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It is so...

I have not had much time to write for American Thinker lately because we had to put a governor back in her box after her special session shenanigans. When the regular Oregon legislature session rejected the most significant tax increase in Oregon’s history, the Oregon governor, Tina Kotek, took it upon herself to call for a special session to pass the Transportation Tax package, a $4.3 billion naked wealth grab from the taxpayers of Oregon. Kotek dragged in a cancer patient in a wheelchair and an extremely ill legislator who had not gone to the capitol for months to secure...

Politico is framing the celebration of Christmas as a “far-right” front in Europe, arguing that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her party have made it a “spectacle.” Conservative social media users blasted the left-wing outlet’s Wednesday article, “How the far right stole Christmas,” authored by Rome correspondent Hannah Roberts. […] In the Christmas Eve piece, Roberts wrote that the holiday “is becoming a new front line in Europe’s culture wars,” with so-called “far-right” parties and politicians “claiming the festive season as their own.” The evidence?: Meloni’s defense of public Nativity scenes and other long-standing Christmas traditions in her majority-Catholic...

As radical Islamist threats continue to plague Australia, politicians are pivoting to policing speech and tightening gun laws on law-abiding citizens—now openly admitting curbs on free expression are needed to shield their multicultural agenda.Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has unveiled a sweeping plan to combat what she calls rising anti-Semitism, but the measures conveniently sidestep the core issue of unchecked radical Islamism behind recent attacks, focusing instead on doxxing anonymous social media users and reviewing gun laws. In a joint news conference, Allan announced legislation that would force social media platforms to reveal identities behind anonymous accounts accused of spreading ‘hate’....

American cities did not stumble accidentally into mass surveillance. They chose it. Over the past decade, thousands of municipalities quietly installed automated license plate reader systems that record, store, and analyze the daily movements of ordinary people. They did so deliberately, with minimal public debate, and with striking indifference to the constitutional implications. This architecture was celebrated as modern, data driven, and compassionate. It was defended as the price of safety. Privacy objections were waved aside as abstract or paranoid. The public was assured that responsible officials would use the tools wisely. That confidence collapsed the moment enforcement priorities changed....

A federal judge granted on Tuesday a preliminary injunction order that would prevent the enforcement of parts of West Virginia’s H.B. 2354, which takes aim at artificial food dyes. U.S. District Judge Irene Berger of the Southern District of West Virginia entered the preliminary injunction order Tuesday, according to WV Metro News. According to the order, the International Association of Color Manufacturers (IACM) sought to prevent the enforcement of West Virginia’s H.B. 2354, as it amended Section 16-7-2(b)(7) to include seven color additives that are “poisonous and injurious” as ingredients or substances. The seven color additives named are butylated hydroxyanisole,...

Imagine facing arrest simply for posting sharp or critical comments online. Picture police at your door for expressing opposition to mass immigration. Envision a country where you could be imprisoned for years without a jury ever deciding your guilt. This isn't dystopian fiction - it's the reality unfolding in Britain today, my former home and once part of the free world. Earlier this year, parents Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine from Hertfordshire were arrested in front of their children over disparaging remarks made in a private parents' messaging group. They were among the estimated 10,000 people arrested in Britain this...

Andrew had his gun license stripped by Met police. The hunter becomes the hunted. For his long association with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is facing a long list of repercussions that seem to have no end. Now, the avid hunter has surrendered his firearms license to the Met Police – the same police force who dropped the investigation into his alleged crimes. The Telegraph reported: “The former Duke of York, 65, agreed to give up his firearms and shotgun certificates last month after he was visited by the Metropolitan Police at Royal Lodge in...

The time for “polite inquiries” is officially over. For five years, the bureaucratic fortress of Fulton County, Georgia has stonewalled every attempt to look under the hood of the 2020 election. They hid behind state seals, played legal shell games with ballot locations, and treated public record requests like personal insults. But as of December 2025, the game has changed. The Department of Justice (DOJ), now acting as a legal strike force under the Trump administration, has launched a federal offensive that is sending shockwaves through the Georgia political establishment. Led by assistant attorney general Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ has...

But who wants to die for Big Brother’s woke State? Oliver JJ Lane, a writer and editor for Breitbart London, writes frequently about the growing censorship regime in the U.K., the public’s distrust of both institutional government and Establishment politicians of all labels, the official cover-up of Muslim “grooming” gangs that target and rape British children, and the increasing backlash of native Britons against a ruling class that prioritizes “multiculturalism” and “diversity” over everything else. A running theme of his articles is that the U.K. is headed for civil war. Last summer, Lane wrote a piece with this provocative headline:...

Divorcing a good man is not an act of bravery but an act of self-destruction that harms many others in the process.There’s a big milestone coming up for a lot of families this year: first divorced Christmas. It might be a challenging day of splitting kids between disparate family events. Or, perhaps, Mom and Dad will behave like adults and both show up to the same gathering in an effort to create some normalcy for their children, who, heretofore, might have had an intact family and simple celebrations.For as long as there has been marriage, there have been some people...

Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, watching the Christmas specials was a huge part of Christmas. Before the day of DVR, and when VCR tapes were just emerging, catching the live Christmas specials was an exciting event and my eyes were glued to the TV. I caught every nuance of every program over the years, and of course had questions. Like, in Frosty the Snowman, why does Karen wear gloves and mittens yet her legs are fully exposed to the cold? And if you watch carefully, when the children run out of the school house, a little boy jumps...

Saks Global Enterprises, the parent company of luxury department store chain Saks Fifth Avenue, is considering a potential Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing as a last-resort option to address mounting liquidity constraints and near-term debt obligations, according to a Bloomberg report. The publication reported that Saks is evaluating bankruptcy as part of a broader effort to manage its balance sheet rather than as an imminent filing. The company faces a debt payment of more than $100 million due by the end of December, limiting its financial flexibility. According to the report, which cited people with knowledge of the matter, Saks has...

Video game developer and ‘Call of Duty’ creator Vince Zampella, 55, was killed in a horrific car crash in Southern California on Sunday. Video posted to social media shows Zampella speeding out of a tunnel in his Ferrari in the San Gabriel Mountains before crashing into a concrete barrier. The Ferrari burst into flames as onlookers screamed in horror. Several witnesses ran across the windy mountain road and dragged the ejected passenger away from the fiery wreckage. Zampella died at the crash site. The unidentified passenger died later at the hospital. NBC Los Angeles reported: Video game developer Vince Zampella,...

The White House/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain. Not only did the Obama and Biden Administrations go to great lengths to protect Hillary Clinton, they went to unconstitutional lengths to get Trump. The Obama-Biden Administration prevented agents investigating Hillary Clinton from reviewing some eight thumb drives of intel based on purported concerns over executive and congressional privilege, newly released documents reveal. This reality renders last month’s revelation that the Biden Administration approved Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoenaing of congressional Republicans’ toll records even more appalling — and the Democrats’ weaponization of the criminal justice system even more obvious and outrageous. Last week, Sen....

Pete Hegseth’s Saturday begins with personal training. The Secretary of War, @SecWar on your socials, is very fond of working out with the troops – something most defense secretaries have done without someone dutifully filming the experience for Instagram. Then he heads off to the Reagan National Defense Forum, the annual gathering of war hawks, policy nerds and defense contractors in Simi Valley, California. Hegseth, the veteran of the Global War on Terror, is there to fulfill his mission of denouncing the neocons. “Out with idealistic utopianism, in with hard-nosed realism,” he declares, insisting the United States will no longer...

John Stossel interviews James Lindsay, famous for fighting wokeness on the left. Lindsay is vigorously investigating wokeness on the right, mostly but not limited to those following the ideas of Nick Fuentes. ---- A new section of the right is foolishly bashing liberty … and even embracing Marxist ideas. That's why some call them the "woke right."

Below is my column in The Hill on how Democrats in some blue states are moving from censoring speech to compelling speech in renewed attacks on free speech. They are facing resistance in the courts despite determined efforts to force others to mouth approved viewpoints. Here is the column: More than five years ago, I wrote in these pages of a growing trend on the left toward compelled speech — the forcing of citizens to repeat approved views and values. It is an all-too-familiar pattern. Once a faction assumes power, it will often first seek to censor opposing views and...

Birthright citizenship — the idea that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen, with full right to receive all benefits and vote when they come of age — has been a fixture of the administration of the laws in this country for my entire lifetime. But does the text of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution make the birthright citizenship rule apply to all cases, even the most extreme? Under the 14th Amendment, properly interpreted, do children born of illegal aliens subject to a deportation order really qualify for birthright citizenship? How about children born of an...

How London was taken over by Muslims and transformed into a powerhouse of Islamism. In the annals of civilizational decline, few spectacles rival that of a once-mighty empire wilting under the weight of its own timidity. Britain, the cradle of parliamentary democracy, Magna Carta, and the Enlightenment’s unyielding torch, now teeters on the brink of self-inflicted oblivion. The antithesis of multicultural harmony, the year 2025 brings another pitiful surrender to the forces of Islamic extremism, a phenomenon chillingly encapsulated by Melanie Phillips in her prescient 2006 tome Londonistan. Phillips, a Cassandra of our age, warned of London’s metamorphosis into a...