Free Republic

I was asked this week how I can be a Christian and support Donald Trump throwing out thousands of illegal aliens. But one of the toughest things about being a Christian is trying to be a citizen. No — scratch that. I mean trying to be a good citizen. Saint Paul was a citizen, too, but I don’t think he cared a bit about the Roman Empire. He gave the impression that if the Gauls invaded tomorrow, he would just shrug his shoulders and try to baptize them, too. And although he was the polar opposite of Thomas Paine in...

Sunday is a “clearing the spindle” day, and one of the things on my spindle has been Nate Silver’s prediction last week that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC, is currently the most likely person to be the Democrat party’s 2028 presidential candidate. Frankly, I think he’s right. She’s telegenic, has name recognition, and manages to make the same politics that killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century seem user-friendly. She’s also Bernie Sanders’ anointed heir, and he missed the nomination in 2016 and 2020 only because the Democrat party panicked. Last week, Nate Silver, while acknowledging that it’s...

Classical theory may not care where the steel mills, chip foundries, shipyards, research labs, aircraft plants, oil fields, and supply chains are, but the real world of power politics does. I spent most of my time during 20 years in Washington, D.C. working in a bipartisan manner on trade policy with the aim of keeping here, then bringing back, strategic industries. There was then a coalition of national security Republicans (on my side of the aisle) and labor union Democrats. Democrats did not want to lose the middle-class blue-collar jobs when factories closed. Republicans did not want to lose the...

This is an interesting situation. As Kamala rises in the polls, the stock market declines. Are the two linked? Probably not, but who knows? As of today, the Kamala bounce seems to be real. A Morning Consult poll from early this month has Harris up by 4 over Trump. This is a massive poll of 11,000+ registered voters, supposedly giving it more credibility. But what would be more convincing would be a more targeted poll of likely voters. One key takeaway from this poll is that Kamala’s popularity may have peaked at 50% and is now moving down. In what...

It seems Joe Biden didn’t like what recent polls were telling him. So he and his staff started claiming they’re fake. Unfortunately for Biden sycophants, the most recent Rasmussen Poll had Trump up by a gob-smacking +12 in a five-way race. Since it is tough to put a positive spin on something like that, and since there is no such thing as a silent Biden voter, this poll had to be wrong, too. One of the most interesting things about this particular poll is that it is included in the Real Clear Politics polling average but not in the FiveThirtyEight...

Self-serving Representative Matt Gaetz had absolutely no plan beyond “oust House Speaker McCarthy.” Some America First Patriots who support Gaetz claim that his actions “exposes” RINOs in Congress. That makes as much sense as Titanic passengers being happy the ship hit an iceberg because that “exposed” that the luxury liner lacked sufficient lifeboats. Finally, after three weeks of chaos, Republicans have a Speaker of the House! We wish fourth-term Conservative Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana complete success. He is currently the vice chairman of the House GOP conference. An attorney by trainng, he’s a former conservative talk radio host and...

South Africa, alas, is not our friend. Despite decades of financial and moral support from the United States, South Africa is drifting into alignment with our rivals for global supremacy. Daniel Greenfield reports for Front Page Magazine:In November 2022, Climate Envoy John Kerry announced a giveaway of $1 billion in foreign aid to South Africa. The failed racist state which regularly suffers blackouts from its socialist power system was being offered billions to subsidize electric cars and green energy.Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed that “President Ramaphosa and the South African Government have created a bold plan identifying a clear strategy...

This war need never have happened if Kissinger’s, and many others’, proposal for a neutral, non-NATO Ukraine had been accepted by the US in 2021, as Russia reasonably requested, and if Ukraine, at America’s direction, had ceased its eight year, US-sponsored war on the Donbas Russian speakers and Russian ethnics, and had enforced the Minsk II accords.But the US Military Industrial Complex wanted a war and got one. The object: To bleed and weaken Russia with a Vietnam-like quagmire.Russia appears to be surviving US sanctions quite comfortably, as new customers pop up in Asia for its natural gas and other...

Nothing against Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio's 3rd District, but it was difficult not to raise an eyebrow at his tweet on Tuesday suggesting that the "Left is furious that there's Free Speech on Twitter." There certainly does seem to be something going on at Twitter to allow more conservative voices to be heard, and given the openly malicious censorship on the platform that conservatives have endured these past years, that does bring more balance to the dialogue taking place there. Conservatives are celebrating this as a victory, while vexed liberals lament their loss of command in the progressive echo...

Are there any decent Democrats out there anymore? Are they sick and tired of what the fascist far left has been doing to this country? Have they become thoroughly disgusted by the lies, deception, cheating, and gaslighting promulgated by their side in a headlong pursuit of power? The election two years ago highlighted the fatal flaw in our constitutional republic — a flaw that only has been made worse this time around. Our system isn't designed to withstand it if one side loses its moral underpinnings in favor of a lust for power and is willing to do anything to...

Today's military leaders fail to see what will have the worst impact on military recruiting for years to come. During my last few years in the military before I retired in 2020, it was common to hear that "the military-civilian divide is a problem that is getting worse." Whenever I heard this, it was always in the context that this divide was America's problem. "The American public doesn't understand the military," or "their kids aren't fit to properly support the military." There never seemed to be any reflection from the military. But the military has a serious problem with recruiting...

For Elon Musk, no good deed goes unpunished.Get a load of the ingratitude from leaders of the nation he helped with his Starlink internet connection back when they badly needed that help: Fu** off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk Eeew. What kind of a reply is that? All the Ukrainian diplomat had to do was say 'bad idea' or 'won't work,' or 'too late for that now,' or he didn't like it. He didn't have to go all foul-mouthed and ad hominem, using toilet-mouthed language, especially against someone who materially came to his nation's aid at a...

Founded in 2006, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is a London-based nonprofit with a stated purpose of "safeguarding human rights and reversing the rising tide of polarisation [sic], extremism, and disinformation worldwide." The group previously worked with the Obama administration, combating "violent extremism," and their website lists critical topics most vulnerable to fake news and hate speech, which include:Electoral, climate, and public health disinformationConspiracy networksFar-right extremismLGBTQIslamophobiaA recent blog posted to the ISD website discussed a "hate-riddled public health disinformation campaign" where social media users identified monkeypox as almost exclusively (if not entirely) spread by homosexual male relations and questioned how...

Six years ago, Biden said he wanted to beat Trump up, not metaphorically but physically. With the Deep State at his back, is that what he’s trying to do now? On October 21, 2016, when asked about then-candidate Donald Trump, then-Vice President Joe Biden said, “The press always ask me, don’t I wish I were debating him. No, I wish we were in high school; I could take him behind the gym.” Apparently, he prefers violence over debate. Those were the uniting words of the current occupant of the White House. With all the power of the federal government, the...

Jack Dorsey just condemned the Chinese Communist Party. Will leftists start redefining the Chinese communists? It's one of the anti-liberty left's neat little tricks to rewrite their constant failure. Socialist regimes never fail; they just suddenly become "right-wing" and "reactionary"! Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, recently tweeted out a three-word message to end the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), apparently due to its authoritarian and oppressive policies. Anti-liberty leftists can no longer turn a blind eye to its surveillance state and the deliberate mass murder of millions. Unfortunately for the liberticidal left, this presents a big problem, because for years,...

Russia is “a gas station masquerading as a country,” the noted warmonger John McCain once said. This astoundingly disrespectful statement by a major US political figure says much about the condescending and diplomatically destructive attitudes of US elites towards Russia since 1991.But Russia’s size, vast stores of critical resources, military might (especially nukes), and tenacious cultural conservatism mean that it will be a significant force in the world for some time. The West could have benefited greatly from a peaceful integration of this enormous country into Europe, but it chose another route. More honestly, the United States chose another route.After...

I recently wrote a column about why I believed Trump should not run in 2024. I was wrong. I allowed my distaste for Trump’s personality to override his virtues, which are considerable. Some people want Trump without his vices. I was among them -- until yesterday, when I watched and listened to Tom Klingenstein’s speech titled “Trump’s virtues.” It was masterful and shamed me that I did not make the distinction between Trump's character and his virtues, the former being deeply flawed, the latter being almost perfect. I need to man up in my defense of the former President's virtues....

To win any fight, we must first know our enemy. There are those who argue we are in a struggle with Marxism, though in reality, we battle the organizational and operational tenets of the Marxist tree, not the ideology itself. We know that this is not a Marxist movement because it ignores Marxism's core clientele: the workers. In fact, these people despise the Marxist's traditional constituents. Instead, they toil for a small minority of the "marginalized" in society whom middle Americans find to be fringe and anathema to their core values. Even then, their movement doesn't seek a revolution of...

For undying enmity toward Mother Russia, Ukrainians have good cause. It can be traced to a single Ukrainian word -- “Holodomor” (derived from “holod, meaning hunger, and “mor,” meaning extermination). The word refers to a single event, the famine of 1932-3. This “famine,” however,” did not come from an act of nature, but from government policies -- the government at that time being not exactly Russia, but rather the Union of Soviet Socialists Republic, which was close to the same thing. In keeping their socialist, “equitable,” agenda, the Soviets, under Joseph Stalin, took over private farms and formed collectives. The...

As the Cold War wound down in the early 1990s and the threat from the Soviet Union receded, the reason why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created disappeared. But bureaucracies die hard, and bureaucratic and political inertia are often hard to overcome. An alliance established to contain the Soviet Union needed a new purpose, and like other going concerns and political organisms, NATO would either expand or die. So it expanded. And it began to expand at the same time that the United States was urging Russia to join the West in a "partnership for peace," and to...