Free Republic

A high-profile Washington, D.C. conservative pundit exploded in anger during a podcast interview he was conducting when his guest suggested that the burgeoning conservative Christian nationalist movement would inevitably push for the overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. After asserting that Dave Rubin’s gay “marriage” is something “beautiful,” Ben Domenech, a Fox News contributor and founder and former publisher of The Federalist, lashed out at his guest, National Conservatism movement leader Yoram Hazony, who had said that “gay marriage is already back on the table,” ripe for a revitalized national public debate. Domenech, showing...

Ben Domenech provides insight on former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper's answers during an interview with Bret Baier, and how the former secretary feels about Trump running again in 2024 on ‘Special Report.’ BEN DOMENECH: Absolutely. They would say good. I mean, they would look at someone like Secretary Esper as a problem. Look, this is the latest in a long series of Washington books stretching back for centuries titled effectively "if only they had listened to me." And it's interesting to see Esper going around and doing these interviews and talking about this today. I actually have a lot...

Former President Trump attacked Meghan McCain and her family in a statement Friday, mocking her for saying she left ABC’s “The View” due to a toxic work environment and going after her father, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who died in 2018. “Isn’t it funny that Meghan McCain, who has always been a bully and basically a lowlife, is now complaining that it was she who was bullied by the Slobs and Radical Left maniacs of ‘The View,’ ” Trump said. “In any event, Meghan should fight the Communists instead of explaining how they beat her, hurt her, and...

The issue of mandatory vaccination is once again an item of debate in media circles given the recent outbreaks in measles, and fueled this week by the continued inability of politicians to discuss vaccination policy without sounding like anti-science fools.... The current vaccine debate, unlike those prior ones, is actually motivated by a real problem (the return of diseases presumed previously eradicated) as opposed to conspiratorial musings....But vaccination is not about protecting the vaccinated so much as it is about protecting others from disease-carriers. Vaccines are properly understood not on the basis of narrow self-interest but as a defense of...

The question of how to counteract cancel culture goes far deeper than the question of legal or illegal speech.While some Republicans build their campaigns around cancel culture in the form of a broad bumper sticker slogan or rebuke the party for seeking leaders dissimilar to neoconservatives like Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the issue of standards—and what those standards ought to be—should be at the heart of the cancel culture discussion on the right. It’s time for conservatives to make morals a focal point and not overgeneralize by invoking free speech as an end-all, be-all. Cancel culture, which Federalist writer Tristan...

I confess that like most Americans, I had no interest in watching Joe Biden's non–State of the Union address to a mostly empty House chamber hosting a joint session of Congress. That's why I missed a golden moment during the commentary afterward on Fox News Channel, one that surely stands as what the progressives like to call a "Profile in Courage." You may have noticed that in recent weeks, FNC has been trying out various personalities from its stable of commentators as hosts of Fox News Primetime that airs in the 7 P.M. Eastern timeslot, the lead-in to Tucker Carlson's...

For more than 30 years, Rush Limbaugh sat down and talked to Americans about America. Across the country, in pickup trucks, roadside diners and quiet cubicles where his listeners were obliged to wear headphones lest they offend, his rich baritone rolled out of the air, and it spoke the truth.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a terrible mistake Tuesday night when he released word that he was in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump. This mistake goes well beyond a simple political miscalculation. It is the physical manifestation of Washington Republican hubris, wrapped in a fog of frightened groupthink.Announced the eve of the House impeachment vote in the pages of The New York Times, McConnell’s plan reportedly rested on the belief that impeaching the outgoing president “will make it easier to purge Mr. Trump from the party.” Published just after the No. 3 House Republican, Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney,...

Colin Kaepernick is right about one thing—the NFL’s new social justice messaging campaign is best described as “propaganda.” Kaepernick’s dissatisfaction with the league’s explicitly pro-Kaepernick efforts, however, should be a major lesson for other woke capitalists. Absolutely nothing short of dismantling the capitalist system will satisfy their detractors.Corporations can go to great lengths to mollify critics, but those critics will never be pleased because their worldview is ultimately rooted in radical anti-capitalism. Mark Cuban, for instance, should recognize that Kaepernick and the leaders of Black Lives Matter do not see him or Roger Goodell as allies, no matter how...

Meghan McCain's father-in-law misused his position in the Trump administration for private gain by capitalizing on his government connections to help get his son-in-law hired at the Environmental Protection Agency, investigators said in a report obtained by The Associated Press. The Interior Department's Inspector General found that Assistant Interior Secretary Douglas Domenech reached out to a senior EPA official in person and later by email in 2017 to advocate for the son-in-law, Eric Frandy, when he was seeking a job at the agency. Eric Frandy is married to Domenech's daughter, Emily. Douglas Domenech is also father to Ben Domenech, who...

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was in the hot seat Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee over his company’s practices on content moderation. Both Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Michael Burgess (R-TX) asked about the excessive amount of time it took the company to take down a tweet threatening Meghan McCain despite many people reporting it.An image of McCain crying by her father’s casket was doctored to show a gun trained at her with the caption: “America, this one’s for you.”Many Twitter users, including Meghan McCain’s husband Ben Domenech, complained as the image was left up for five...

John McCain's son-in-law, conservative pundit Ben Domenech, tweeted Saturday night that the senator, who is battling a deadly form of brain cancer, asked him to take care of his daughter, Meghan. McCain, a six-term Arizona Republican, was released from the hospital last week. He had been in stable condition at the Mayo Clinic, according to his family and Senate office, following surgery for an intestinal infection related to diverticulitis.

Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, calls Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson “useful idiots” regarding their defense of Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. From The Federalist: Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson have both written pieces in response to this week’s meeting with Facebook – Beck as someone who attended, Erick as someone who didn’t. Both suggest the same thing about the conservative relationship with Facebook: that criticizing the corporate entity for its obvious bias in its news curation is an act of hypocrisy and nothing more than a Jesse Jackson-style shakedown. These are the complaints of useful idiots. They...

As the Republican presidential race has narrowed to a contest between two candidates the Republican elites despise, each one with a razor-thin path to the nomination, the conversation among party figures in Washington has rapidly shifted from the desperate to the absurd. They talk of an “open convention” in Cleveland, where party leaders could parachute in a third, more favored candidate and render the entire GOP primary process null and void. House Speaker Paul Ryan, one focus of such talk, ruled himself out at a press conference on Tuesday. “I do not want, nor will I accept, the Republican nomination,”...

Ted Cruz appears to be the best positioned Republican candidate running for president in 2016, Federalist publisher Ben Domenech said on MSNBC on Saturday.“[Cruz] appeals to the base in a very strong way,” he said. “He has the second most small-dollar donations and he also appeals to the party elites.”Cruz’s cross appeal among both grassroots conservatives and the GOP establishment is reflected in his campaign donations, he said.Watch the video.“He has the second most money overall and he’s very intentional about the way he’s approached this campaign,” Domenech, said.Cruz raised $12.2 million in the last quarter, second only to Ben...

Donald Trump could transform the Republican Party into a coalition focused on white identity politics. We've seen this in Europe, and it's bad. Now that we have had time to observe the Donald Trump phenomenon, there is enough evidence to make a clear assessment of what it represents. The rise of Trump is an epic expression of frustration with the American political system, and it is a natural outgrowth of frustrations with America’s changing demographics; the hollowing out of white working class values and culture, as Charles Murray has documented extensively; and what life is like when governed by...

Was he serious? Some of his fellow panelists chuckled, but it wasn't obvious that conservative commentator Ben Domenech was kidding when on today's Up With Steve Kornacki he said that "the only person I think who could beat Hillary Clinton is Michelle Obama." Domenech's comment came during a segment on the subject of who might jump into the race should Hillary decide not to run. The mere fact that there was such a segment suggests that the controversy over Hillary's email might not be the much ado "about nothing" that some claim. View the video here.

Since the moment when police officers turned their backs in protest on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, we’ve seen the type of escalating activity in the city which would be more recognizable as the preview to a messy Latin American coup d’etat. The latest is a form of purposeful sabotage on the part of the NYPD, which is now actively shirking its duty to enforce the law. According to the New York Post, traffic tickets and summonses have plummeted by 94 percent, and overall arrests are down 66 percent for the week compared to the same period...

Both the process and the content of the current immigration bill violate America’s core principles and legacy of immigration, according to Heritage President Jim DeMint. “This whole process is not really American, to take a few people and go behind closed doors and then come out and suddenly have it on the floor of the Senate for debate,” said DeMint on “The Mike Huckabee Show” earlier this week. (Listen here) “Instead of incomprehensible, comprehensive bills that are thousands of pages, we need to take a step-by-step approach so people know what we’re doing, and with immigration, the obvious priority is...

Red America, my new blog at washingtonpost.com, has been under attack since its launch. It is a conservative blog on a mainstream media site, so many of the attacks were expected. If one bothers to read it, I believe it stands as a welcome addition to the opinion debate. The hate mail that I have received since the launch of this blog has been overwhelmingly profane and violent. My family has been threatened; my friends have been deluged; my phone has been prank called. The most recent email that showed up while writing this post talked about how the author...