Free Republic

After 250 Years, Our American Republic Is Coming ApartThe crisis we face today is existential. Too many Americans, both native-born and naturalized, have been taught to despise their country.If it sometimes seems like the American cultural mainstream is ignorant of the role of Christianity in the founding of the United States, or even hostile towards it, that’s because it is.The story told about America’s founding by the corporate media, book publishers, libraries and other institutions is one in which the Christian faith, so central to our history and founding, is almost wholly absent.I don’t mean that anecdotally. A recent report...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three fellow socialists in the New York City Democratic Congressional primaries and all three won last night. Democratic incumbent Dan Goldman lost to Brad Lander, who was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America until 2023. DSA Member Claire Valdez won nomination for a Brooklyn House seat. But the eyepopper is the victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DSA member and PhD graduate student, in East Harlem and the Bronx. She defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and will easily become the most radical House member since Vito Marcantonio of...

SUGAR GROVE, N.C. — Year after year, Ross and Rebecca Tobiassen saw their healthcare costs rise, having relied on the Affordable Care Act for federally subsidized health insurance since its start in 2014. Year after year, the couple in western North Carolina kept their coverage, believing the peace of mind was worth the cost. But in December, that changed. The Tobiassens decided to cancel their insurance when Rebecca saw the cost of their monthly premiums would jump from $130 to more than $550. ... The Tobiassens are among the Americans who canceled their ACA coverage after Congress allowed enhanced tax...

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has attempted to convince the world that it represents justice, morality, and the will of the Iranian people. But behind the propaganda lies a brutal reality that millions of Iranians know all too well. The regime’s systematic oppression of women remains one of the clearest examples of its cruelty and fear. For as little as showing a strand of hair, Iranian women are met with intimidation, imprisonment, torture, or worse. Today, the world is once again witnessing the Islamic Republic’s relentless assault on the dignity and freedom of women. Recently,...

A few years ago, to help my mind get over the grind of writing The 33 Strategies of War, I bought a pool table. After a hard day’s work, I would settle into the game of pool and make myself completely focus on the green felt, the cue stick, the stripes and solids. It ended up being the perfect choice of a diversion. Pool, it became clear to me, is all about angles. First, there are simple angles, as you must hit the cue ball to either side when you are not straight on. This is often not as easy...

Freedom in the United States has always arrived in stages, declared in one space and denied or delayed in another. Such was the reality for formerly enslaved Texans who learned of their emancipation in 1865, two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation and the same year he issued his “40 acres and a mule” promise. Indeed, Juneteenth is as old as the call for reparations. Flashforward to 2021, and the bill that established Juneteenth as a national holiday and H.R. 40, the proposal to establish a commission to study reparations, reached Congress. The former...

Juneteenth is a powerful reminder that the Democrats lost their war for slavery. Yes, the glorious news of Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation finally made its two-year trek to the great state of Texas. On June 19, 1865, U.S. Major General Gordon Granger delivered General Order No. 3 and proclaimed, in part: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” WHO IS JUNETEENTH FOR? This freedom was made possible by whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics who fought for the Union. (Of course, all these...

One of the individuals charged with plotting a terrorist attack against the UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House earlier this week, and the alleged ringleader of the operation, is an illegal alien, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Abraham Alvarez, a Mexican national, entered the United States as a child and later received deportation relief through former President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after overstaying his visa. Alvarez was arrested on Sunday by the FBI in Omaha, Nebraska. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already lodged a detainer against him.

Dear Senator Warren,When I watched your recent video on X about Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, I found myself in the unusual position of agreeing with you—at least in part. That is not a sentence I write often.You see…you are correct that something has gone profoundly wrong in an economy that can produce a trillionaire. You are correct that the gap between the financial elite and ordinary Americans has become so vast that most people can barely comprehend it. And you are correct that millions of Americans increasingly feel as though the economy is rigged in favor of...

I wrote about Jimmy Kimmel's monologue earlier but that was just the first fruits of a bumper crop of left-wing hate. Everyone on the left is now offering Elon advice on how to spend his money (money which he literally can't spend) and quite a few people are just demonizing him as evil for being rich. I anticipated all of this yesterday but I might as well document some of it for posterity here. Rep. Jayapal called the news "total bulls**t" and called for a wealth tax. Imagine if Elon Musk did something to benefit others with his trillion.— Amy...

Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, compressed here from Paragraphs 163-168, asserts that:“More than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Politics has the task of orientating economies and technologies to the common good ... to ensure equity: taxation, social protection and industrial policies must correct the imbalances created by the concentration of wealth and power” (emphasis mine). Can the Pope reasonably hope to achieve these aims by relegating Adam Smith’s invisible hand illustration to the dust bin of history? Pope...

Human beings are unique among living creatures in being able to alter their own fertility deliberately, imposing their own constantly changing choices and preferences on childbearing. We are now watching a revolutionary transformation of human birth choices play out around the world in a way that only science fiction writers could have imagined even a generation ago. Humanity is in the midst of a headlong global birth crash—a plunge underway all around the world, in rich and poor regions alike, very possibly presaging an indefinite global depopulation, with our “peak human” moment coming shockingly soon. For many decades, demographers assumed...

Later this month, the Obama Presidential Center will open on the South Side of Chicago. In a preview for the press, NPR and other media toured the building and grounds showcasing the Obama presidency. It isn't a presidential library. It's a campus, with basketball courts, gardens, ball fields, a playground for kids, a Chicago public library branch and an eight- story museum that towers over it all.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After two decades of rising support for LGBTQ+ issues, U.S. attitudes have plateaued and begun to slide back modestly. Approval of same-sex marriage, moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relations, and endorsement of gender changes are all down from peaks reached in the early 2020s. While most Americans still favor legal same-sex marriages, the 65% who do so today is down six percentage points from the peak in 2022 and 2023. Similarly, the percentage viewing gay or lesbian relations as morally acceptable, 62%, has not been lower since 2016. And the share of Americans who consider changing...

President Donald Trump’s push to restore accountability across the federal government has triggered a major exodus of attorneys from federal agencies, with more than 10,000 lawyers leaving government service since the beginning of 2025, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.The departures reveal the growing divide between the Trump administration and a legal establishment that has increasingly aligned itself with progressive politics and left-wing advocacy organizations.According to the report, roughly one in five government lawyers employed at the end of 2024 had left by March 2026. Despite federal agencies hiring approximately 3,200 lawyers during that period,...

US President Trump accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being the reason for global hatred of Israel in an angry call on Monday, Axios reported. Earlier on Monday, Iran had threatened to stop negotiating with the US due to Israel’s action in Lebanon, prompting the call in which Trump at one point yelled at Netanyahu, “What the f*** are you doing?” According to one US official, Trump felt that Netanyahu was reacting disproportionally to Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. He objected to Israel destroying buildings to take out a single Hezbollah commander, and Israel’s threats against Beirut, Axios wrote. Another source...

Over the course of their lives, Americans have an average carbon footprint of 1,300 tons of CO2. Paris Ortiz-Wines, a young woman from San Francisco, has already canceled hers out. She could hop on a flight every week for the rest of her life, eat ribeyes at every meal and sip almond milk all day long, and still be in the clear. Back in 2021, Ortiz-Wines played a key role in the campaign that stopped the closure of California’s only nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. This has already saved more than 30 million tons of CO2 emissions. Ortiz-Wines is part...

It was once a sacred place, ushering you inside with its signature red roof and comforting smell of bubbling cheese in a special era now known lovingly as "the '90s." In its prime, Pizza Hut wasn't just a restaurant chain — it was an experience. The stained glass lamps, red booths and red cups. The fully loaded salad bar. The Pac-Man machines to keep you entertained while you waited for your personal-pan pizza. "It was perfect," says one of many TikTok videos of the experience. "Felt like home," someone commented on another nostalgic video. Now, one of the largest franchisees...

The United Methodist Church’s experience with the disaffiliations of a number of its congregations has received widespread coverage in church media and in some secular media outlets. Because the polity of the UMC differs from that of many other denominations, this chapter in our denomination’s history may be confusing to those with different approaches to the ways congregations and whole denominations govern themselves. Some may find it helpful to learn of the steps that led to the disaffiliation process, what its effect has been upon the denomination and what it may hold for the future of the denomination in the...

VATICAN CITY—Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered. The pontiff’s encyclical letter—a text that is poised to define Leo’s papacy—reads like a sharp warning to Silicon Valley executives and humanity more broadly about the future of civilization as new technologies rapidly advance. The risk, he said, is that humans will be reduced “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces....