Free Republic

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...

The man who took Turkey from a secular nation to an Islamist one may finally have driven his people to take extreme measures against him. Last week, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamist president, arrested a political rival. That sparked several days of protest, and, today, it’s seemingly culminated with protestors invading the presidential palace. The big question is whether this ends with a brutal response or the end of Erdoğan’s reign. Obviously, I have no answer to that question, but I can provide a little, very superficial background to help make some sense of what’s happening in Turkey today. Today’s...

The Ninth Circuit has long been the left-most federal appellate court in the United States. However, the day after Thanksgiving, the Ninth Circuit issued a decision that must have made President-elect Donald Trump very happy: It concluded that the Supremacy Clause means what it says, namely, that when it comes to the border, local political bodies cannot use regulations governing private parties to override the federal government’s supremacy on immigration matters. United States v. King County revolved around Boeing Field, an airport in King County, Washington (i.e., the Seattle area). In 1941, King County conveyed the field to the U.S....

Yesterday, Donald Trump joined Fox News host Lawrence Jones at a Bronx barbershop. Trump, a Queens native who spent a lot of time on construction sites, was clearly at home among these guys in a way that Kamala and Walz never could be. (JD Vance would be at home there, too.) There was no fakery. Trump may be a billionaire, but these are his people—and because Trump is real, he understood the pain the barber’s hyper-inflated energy bills are causing him. That pain and Trump’s recognition explains why he’s campaigning in New York, a place that ought to be a...

It’s been obvious for years that China has a Potemkin economy, kept alive by slave labor, market bubbles, and government underwriting. it can’t last forever. The latest grim forecast about the economy comes from Peter St Onge, an economist with a much deeper fund of knowledge about and understanding of the Chinese economy than I could have in a thousand lifetimes.The biggest hint that the Chinese economy was in trouble was the demise of Evergrande, a massive property developer in China. The bankruptcy was huge, with the company’s assets valued at a probably inflated $245 billion and debts of $300...

I am a very big fan of the podcasters at the Daily Wire: Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan. I don’t agree with them on everything, but I enjoy their intelligent takes and humor. They and I agree that JD Vance did a wonderful job during the vice-presidential debate, but they all missed how well he did on the abortion issue.When Walz was asked about abortion, he launched easily into the shtick that it’s all about women’s healthcare while boasting about what a wonderful state Minnesota is for abortion. He had to lie, of course, about the...

One of the hallmarks of narcissism is that when things go wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. Being a narcissist means never having to say you’re sorry. Nothing more perfectly illustrates this truism than an essay from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times blaming Republicans for California’s myriad woes. While the author is correct that, when Republicans had the chance, they didn’t make smart decisions, the reality is that it’s the Democrats who have led California to the desperate place it’s in now. Steve Lopez’s essay doesn’t make the mistake of blaming Republicans for all the state’s problems. He concedes that Democrats...

For now, I’m taking at face value that Biden has withdrawn from the presidential campaign via a tweeted-out letter, with the promise of a live statement to follow. However, a surprising number of people believe that, considering how consequential Biden’s statement is, a tweeted-out letter suggests a coup rather than a voluntary resignation.

Andrea Widburg is an attorney, Managing Editor for American Thinker, and owner of the website Bookwormroom.com. On the podcast we discuss unrest in Europe, Trump/Biden debate, SCOTUS ruling, lawfare, 2024 election and much more.

One of the big lies in today’s world is that the Jews are white supremacist colonizers, while the people in Gaza and the West Bank are the region’s indigenous inhabitants. In fact, the contrary is true. Jews long predated Muslims in the region, as described in the Bible. Now, there’s more evidence that Isaiah, 2 Kings, and 2 Chronicles all accurately describe the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem 2,700 years ago.During the reign of Hezekiah of Judah in Jerusalem and Sennacherib in Assyria, the mighty Assyrian kingdom attacked Jerusalem (around 701 BC). We know it happened because of a clay prism...

Something extraordinary happened above Israel over the weekend. It wasn’t that Israel repelled a massive Iranian rocket and drone barrage, although that was sufficiently miraculous. Nor was it that amazing that Saudi Arabia helped defend Israel against Iranian incursions because it’s been rumored for decades that Saudi Arabia occasionally lends a hand in those matters. What was truly extraordinary was that Saudi Arabia openly admitted to helping Israel fight back against Iran’s attack. It shows the truth of the ancient proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many people are pointing to President Trump’s Abraham Accords as...

A point I often make is that Donald Trump’s travails were not because of Democrats. Instead, they were because of Republicans. Had the Republicans supported him, the past seven years would have been very different. And if you doubt that Republicans are a problem, just check out how the Republicans in North Dakota’s legislature vote. When Democrat voters cast their ballots for a Democrat candidate, they know what they’re getting: Someone who will reliably vote in lockstep with Democrat party leadership, whether that leadership comes from the White House or Congress, and whose votes will invariably hew left. That’s not...

If he’s right, he’s put himself in the Deep State crosshairs and, if he’s wrong, he looks foolish. Either way, speaking up was a risk. I always find Tucker Carlson’s monologues interesting, and that’s true whether I agree with him or not. I also find that he’s very brave, speaking truths that others in the media either oppose or are scared to utter. Thursday night saw Tucker take one of his bravest stands yet, advancing a spin on Watergate that, if true, puts him in the Deep State’s crosshairs and, if he’s wrong, makes him look utterly foolish. Tucker’s monologue...

Because Independence Day always makes for a slow news weekend, that leaves room for looking at and thinking about other news stories that wouldn't normally make the grade at American Thinker. The one that caught my eye was the Daily Mail's huge photo essay showing the wedding of Charlotte Freud, one of Rupert Murdoch's granddaughters, to Luke Storey, a rapper. It was held in the exquisitely picturesque English Cotswold district, but the photos are a testament to the death of beauty in the modern era. If you like things that are quintessentially English, the Cotswold district is the place for...

It turns out that Elon Musk had a good reason to put the Twitter deal on hold: It’s possible that Twitter management may have misrepresented the number of actual accounts it has versus fake/spam accounts. And in another blow to the now-beleaguered social media company, Project Veritas put out another undercover video on Tuesday, this one of an ad executive mocking Musk for supporting free speech and having Asperger’s, along with freely admitting that Twitter doesn’t make any money. Between the one and the other, it’s entirely possible that Twitter will soon collapse from its own weight. It was a...

Even before the Ukraine war began, people were speculating that something was physically wrong with Putin. He looked puffy, not as if he’d gained weight, but as if he were reacting to medicines. Speculation escalated with recent videos showing him clutching a table and with a badly shaking hand. Now, The Sun, a British tabloid, is claiming that Putin is going under the knife for a cancer operation, as well as suffering from Parkinson’s. As early as January 3, Britain’s Telegraph paper was suggesting that Putin is seriously ill. The five pieces of evidence it reported were his puffy face;...

Biden’s executive orders ending the Keystone Pipeline, along with exploration and drilling on almost all federal land, when combined with the Democrats’ and RINOs’ uncontrolled spending (made possible by printing money), has created unprecedented inflation in America. To try to stave off the worst of it before the mid-terms, Biden recently announced he was releasing 1 million barrels of oil per day from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. However, it turns out that he’s sending at least some of that oil to Europe! When you have a government that destroys America’s energy independence, you’re going to have rising fuel prices. (As...

War is one of the most consequential actions our government can take. The question is whether, looking back at America’s conflicts in the past hundred-plus years, we can discern lessons that should guide us going forward. David T. Pyne, a former U.S. Army combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with an M.A. in National Security has used his Substack account to write a concise essay analyzing which wars America should have avoided entirely and which were justified wars, whether conducted wisely or not. Trump understood much of this intuitively; Biden does not. The post, entitled “How Modern Wars Have Harmed...

One of the things that’s bewildered me for almost 20 years is why poll workers are so often Democrats. I assumed it was because Republicans were too passive and disinterested to get involved at the ground level. This matters because, as both Stalin and Biden said, what ultimately matters is who counts the votes—and the next closest thing to counting the votes is being a poll worker. I just learned that I owe Republicans an apology. It turns out that, in 1982, the RNC entered into a consent decree that prohibited it from aggressively enlisting poll workers, and that consent...

Like a broken-down vaudeville performer of old, Joe Biden has just a few acts in his repertoire and he’s sticking to them. One of those acts that he drags act as often as possible is climate change. So it was that, after the terrible damage when a tornado devastated Mayfield, Kentucky, Biden immediately said that the tornado is proof of global warming. (Other Democrats piled on with the same message.) However, the reality is that extreme weather events are getting less frequent. More than 40 tornadoes touched down in a six-state region on Friday night, with the greatest damage centered...