Free Republic

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” he was suing New Jersey’s acting Attorney General Alina Habba and a Department of Homeland Security special agent on allegations of false arrest at an ICE detention facility in Newark because it was “egregious” and “authoritarian. Baraka said, “You know, putting out information even before I was, you know, processed that I was a criminal. I did something wrong. I disobeyed the law. I’m not above the law. and ultimately, I didn’t break any law, right, I was cuffed or fingerprinted, took pictures of twice, once there and once in...

A Michigan judge struck down several abortion-related laws last week, including a 24-hour waiting period, mandatory informed consent requirements, and a law prohibiting non-physicians from committing abortions. Judge Sima Patel ruled that all three laws are now unconstitutional given the state’s adoption of an amendment that declared abortion to be a constitutional “right.” Following the amendment’s passage, Northland Family Planning Centers and a group called Medical Students for Choice filed a lawsuit calling for the overturning of the laws. In 2024, Patel placed a preliminary injunction on each of the laws. At that time, she said a 24-hour waiting period...

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said on Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that President Donald Trump was using “secret police” to cause people to “disappear” like authoritarian regimes do. While discussing a Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, being detained by ICE agents, guest host Alicia Menendez said, “Let’s talk about that video that we all just watched, the tactics ICE agents use on Ozturk and then for the next 24 hours, her location being unknown even to her own lawyers.” Van Hollen said, “You’re absolutely right. look, this is a terrifying video. It was obviously terrifying for her, Miss Ozturk....

US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) launched an unhinged rant Sunday against President-elect Donald Trump — claiming the nation was on the “eve of an authoritarian administration.” The lefty lawmaker representing parts of Queens and the Bronx let loose during a series of Instagram videos in which she slammed TikTok for crediting Trump for the social media platform’s return after it was briefly offline in the United States this weekend. “We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration,” the congresswoman said a day before Trump’s inauguration. “This is what 21st-century fascism is starting to look like.”

For years, reforming the Constitution has been a misguided conservative issue. Downplaying the danger of a runaway convention, impatient conservatives have campaigned to ask the states to call a Constitutional Convention (Con-Con) to consider reforms and amendments that might address their many legitimate concerns. Now, leftists are appearing on the reform horizon, calling for major constitutional changes. One impatient leftist is Prof. Erwin Chemirinsky, dean of the Law School at the University of California, Berkeley. His new book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, goes beyond reform and calls for scrapping the Constitution altogether. He...

The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election. In 2018, when we wrote How Democracies Die, we knew that Donald Trump was an authoritarian figure, and we held the Republican Party responsible for abdicating its role as democratic gatekeeper. But we did not consider the GOP to be an antidemocratic...

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt advised pushing a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term. "How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote....

We've been spending a good bit of time covering the incredibly violent and dangerous rhetoric the Left has been spreading for years now since there has now been a second attempt on Trump's life. You'd have thought the first attempt on his life when he was actually shot in the head might influence them to maybe tone down the dangerous rhetoric but ... no. Suppose if all you really care about is staying in power and not violence in your country it doesn't matter who is getting hurt, especially if it's not your candidate in danger, right? This clip though...

A Washington Post ‘reporter’ on Monday asked Karine Jean-Pierre what Biden is going to do to stop Trump’s live X interview with Elon Musk on Monday night. President Trump is back on X after taking some time away from the social media platform. Trump tweeted a campaign ad ahead of his highly anticipated live interview with Elon Musk on Monday evening at 8 pm ET. Washington Post reporter Cleve Wootson wants the government to intervene to shut Trump down with just a few months to go until Election Day. “One more, Elon Musk is slated to interview Trump tonight on...

Harris liked to brag about using “a huge stick” as a prosecutor in San Francisco, where she regularly threatened poor parents with jail time in her efforts to craft social policy — which wasn’t her job. It’s true that Harris threw a lot of people in jail to bolster her political fortunes. Some of them likely innocent. And judging from her disposition, she would throw a lot of more people into jail, if she could. When pro-life journalist David Daleiden published videos of Planned Parenthood executives nonchalantly discussing the selling of body parts, Harris had his home raided, seized evidence...

There was plenty of calculated strategy behind Western governments’ COVID madness. The COVID police state revealed Western governments’ zeal for totalitarianism. Forced masking, forced experimental injections, forced school and business closures, forced isolation, and forced compliance provided Western citizens an opportunity to see the tyrannical inclinations hiding just beneath the surface of their supposedly beneficent “democracies.” None of it was pretty. Mass propaganda disguised as medical expertise (remember when Joe Biden and his CDC army of Goebbels clones demanded that we wear three or more masks outside?) and mass censorship of social media conversations (because, we were frequently told, disinformation...

Four years ago, government officials told us, "Stay home!" We have "15 days to slow the spread." Days turned into months and then years, while officials chipped away at our freedoms. I have long been wary of politicians, but even I was surprised at how authoritarian many were eager to be. Some demanded police to go after people surfing. They took down the rims of basketball hoops. Children's playgrounds were taped up like crime scenes. They told people in rural Utah and Wyoming to stay in their homes. In the name of safety, politicians did many things that diminished our...

Residents of the Evergreen State will soon be able to report their neighbors for expressing “bias.” The governor of Washington is poised to sign a bill that ends free speech in certain counties – and the rest of the state probably sometime thereafter. Recently passed by the Washington state legislature, this measure creates a “bias incident hotline” to the State Attorney General’s Office. You read that right: American citizens in the northwestern state will soon be able to turn in their friends, neighbors, family members, or even strangers for not only physical “hate crimes” but also expressions of “bias.” Substitute...

A YouTube video presents the story of the El Salvadoran dictatorship that has eradicated the criminal gangs, which, for decades, tormented families in that small nation. A lawless nation has, for now, been tamed by a lawless government. Will it happen here? Must it? In El Salvador, the problem of gangster crime had become unbearable for most of the population. The murder rate was extremely high and growing. The killers were unspeakably brutal. Tortures were often gruesome beyond description. Rapes were all too common, even in public places. Extortion was breaking the back of private enterprise. Children were sometimes killed...

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that former President Donald Trump had a dangerous “authoritarian approach.” Romney said, “I do think you can look at his record as president and particularly in the last months of his presidency and say, ‘This is a dangerous approach. It’s an authoritarian approach.’ That gives me far more concern than him playing to the crowd as he did.” He continued, “I think if you can look at the last few months of his presidency, you’d suggest that that’s the kind of thing you might see. That he would not...

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has told Der Spiegel that Ukraine is moving towards authoritarianism, seemingly making a veiled criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky."At some point we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man," the former heavyweight boxing champion said in a Dec. 1 interview.Despite being the mayor of Ukraine's capital, Klitschko said he hasn't talked to Zelensky since the full-scale invasion began.

America and the Fourth Political TheoryThere is no progression from the founding of the United States. Every step away from the founding principles of individual rights and freedom is not a progression, it is a degradation. The mistake that so many people have made is to believe that there has to be some form of updating the founding principles in order to move forward, but all of it goes backward. In one sense there is the recognition that the nation has modernized, but what it has done is drift backwards, towards the fiefdoms of Britain, the Lords and Commoners. America,...

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley called for an end to anonymity on social media during a television appearance on Nov. 14. “Every person on social media should be verified by their name,” the 2024 presidential hopeful said while fielding questions from voters on Fox News’s “The Faulkner Focus,” hosted by Harris Faulkner. “First of all, it’s a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden, people have to stand by what they say. And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots. And then you’re going to get some civility, when...

Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said over the weekend. "There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position," Lukashenko said. "They're there head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying." -snip- "We need to sit down at the negotiating table and come...

The Heritage Foundation is suing the Department of Homeland Security for withholding information about a grant of more than $350,000 it gave to a university program that linked the conservative group, Fox News and the Republican Party to militant neo-Nazis, according to a copy of the filing exclusively obtained by The Post. Heritage filed the civil suit on Tuesday in Washington, DC, federal court, alleging that DHS failed to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about $352,109 provided to the University of Dayton for research on “domestic violence extremism and hate movements.” “DHS repeatedly failed to respond...