Free Republic

It wasn’t twenty years ago today, as the Beatles once sang – only four, to be exact (though at times, it feels like two decades). And while Donald Trump isn’t Sgt. Pepper, he has succeeded in making American march to a different beat. It was four years ago on this date that Trump did the improbable – he descended down a Trump Tower escalator and leapt into a busy Republican primary field. Some of us who follow these things for a living refused to take him seriously at the time. That includes yours truly. I thought Trump was trying to...

Attention banks! Do not give a mortgage to Simon Galperin! A guy named Simon Galperin just wrote this article, which is titled, “I’m a 29-Year-Old With $235k in Student Debt. I’ll Never Pay It Back.”Galperin’s statement that he will never pay back his student debt is not because of a medical issue that has rendered him unable to work.Instead, his statement is proof that he is irresponsible, lazy, spoiled, and entitled.He also says he believes that innocent taxpayers should be forced to pay off his student debt, so that he can then get a mortgage to buy a house.If Galperin ever...

The Hong Kong demonstrations reveal that President Trump was right in many ways to identify China early on as a threat to the United States. He saw them as an economic threat and dishonest trading partner. To a lesser degree, he saw them as a military threat. He was right, although ultimately, their military — including space and cyber warfare — are probably the largest threat. To be clear, China is a bigger, long-term threat economically and militarily than anyone else, including Russia which has aging nukes but otherwise is a virtual third-world economy and a vastly weakened military. Modern...

Mexican Federal police have discovered an enormous marijuana plantation just south of San Diego, 6 miles over the Mexican border in the state and El Centro, and set it on fire. Border Patrol officials out of San Diego, California, estimated the 70,000 pounds had a street value of $277 million and they believe they were produced to flood the U.S. market, Customs and Border Protection said in a statement issued late Friday.

President Donald Trump’s supporters began lining up in Florida on Monday morning ahead of his scheduled campaign launch on Tuesday. Local media reported eight Trump supporters began to camp out at 2:30 a.m. Monday as the first in line at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida.On Twitter, Trump said the rally would be “record-setting” after the campaign received over 100,000 ticket requests. The arena sits 20,000. “Our Country is doing great, far beyond what the haters & losers thought possible – and it will only get better!” Trump wrote. The campaign plans to kick off the event at 10:00 a.m....

CNN has found a replacement for the slimy and now-indicted porn star lawyer Michael Avenati, who represented stripper Stormy Daniels, suing and accusing Trump of criminal and impeachable activities such as misusing funds in a nondisclosure agreement he failed to honor, as well as defaming her. Avenati’s replacement as a “source with knowledge” of Tump’s alleged crimes against humanity it would appear is one Andrew McCabe, disgraced former FBI Director, fired for lying to investigators, with multiple criminal referrals aimed at him. Avenatti appeared on CNN to the high praise of the network poobah’s so many times that one could...

In a bid to out-promise his rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, former Vice-President Joe Biden has pledged to cure cancer if he is elected. As it so often happens when Biden gloms onto an idea it turns out not to be an original thought. It was in 1971 that the much reviled President Richard Nixon declared “war on cancer.” He even persuaded Congress to pass the National Cancer Act (P.L. 92–218). The government’s war on cancer is now nearing its 50th year. A recent development was the Obama Administration’s “Cancer Moonshot” initiative that Biden himself announced in early...

<p>Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.</p>

I just found out that recycling hurts the environment even more than I had thought Ever since I read this 1996 New York Times article called “Recycling Is Garbage,” I’ve known that government recycling of plastic, paper, and glass wastes more resources than it saves, and that the environment would actually be better off if we put these things into landfills instead of recycling them.Over the next 1,000 years, all of the garbage in the entire United States could fit into one landfill that was 100 yards deep, on a piece of square land which was just 35 miles on each...

VIDEO Here are some presidential candidates solemnly pledging they would NOT run for president. Among them are Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Beto O'Rourke. Of course, we believe them...NOT!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the soul of the Democrat Party. She represents 50 years of indoctrination in colleges, which endangers the party because she has been fed a steady diet of ignorance. An ABC News interview today underscored her simplistic view of the world. AOC and her ilk want reparations. Now! AOC and her ilk want open borders. Now! AOC and her ilk want their student loans erased. Now! AOC and her ilk want gun confiscation. Now! AOC and her ilk want the end of coal, oil and gas. Now! AOC and her ilk want whatever they want, and they want...

On the night before DeWayne Craddock murdered eleven people, Kate Nixon debated whether to take her pistol to work the following day. According to The Virginia-Pilot, Nixon feared Craddock. She was his supervisor at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center, and told her husband the disgruntled employee “gave off ‘real bad vibes’ and she’d had to write him up several times for issues with performance and attitude.”

(Video at link) The “poor huddled masses” coming across the southern border may not be so poor after all. Swiss journalist Urs Gehriger recently visited African migrants who breached the border and hung out on the streets of San Antonio, Texas, waiting to go elsewhere in the country, and he met hostility from people who didn’t want to share details about their experiences, conflicted each other, and had rolls of $100 bills. In a recording played on Fox News, Gehriger asks a migrant from Congo how she got to America. She refused to say. “We are here now in the...

What, no Google Doodle today? If ever a person deserved a Silicon Valley shout-out it’s Ruth Graves Wakefield, who was born on this day in 1903. Ruth was the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie which she originally made somewhat by accident when she ran out of bakers chocolate for a batch of cookies she was making and decided to put some chopped up semi-sweet chocolate in the batter instead. So you might say she also invented the chocolate chip. The rest, as they say, is history. It’s surprising that Google would bypass the opportunity to honor such an accomplished woman...

Campus protests started in the 1960s, but protests on today’s college campuses have a different vibe. While protests in the past pitted students against university leadership, protests in the present are supported and accommodated by presidents and administrators. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, college officials waste resources on political activism and social justice projects housed within the Campus Y, Chapel Hill’s “hub for social justice.” Although a substantial portion of its revenues come from gifts and the University Foundation, the Campus Y benefits from its status as an official part of the university as...

Shooting at a bunch of cans or melons with a .22 pistol to pass the time has always been a favorite past time next to having BBQ in the backyard. With the huge availability and at low cost, having fun on the cheap is nice. There is a a practical side to the .22 handguns. The .22 caliber can be used to help teach new shooters the fundamentals of shooting. The caliber is easy to manage – with the minimal recoil and muzzle rise. The intermediate shooter can take this to another level of tactical shooting. For newbies the .22...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) Great drinking game for this week’s Democrat debates. – Every time one of the candidates promises a new giveaway program that would cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion, take a shot of tequila. You’ll be dead within an hour. A friend tells me that death would not be the worst consequence of playing this game. The worst consequence is that you have to watch the Democrat debates in order to play it. Solid point. Now, onto today’s topic, which is why in the hell did President Trump do an interview with that...

A massive crowd on the streets of Hong Kong Sunday as the protest continues against the extradition law. Organizers say some two million people took to the streets.... 30 killed and 40 wounded in a suicide bombing attack in northeastern Nigeria..... At least 12 killed, more than a dozen wounded in a jihadist rocket attack on a government held area in northwestern Syria... Turkey says it attacked the Syrian army in northwestern Syria in response to an attack by Syrian government forces on a Turkish observation post... Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the Russian S-400 air defense system is...

SEOUL, June 17 (Yonhap) -- U.S. President Donald Trump has said his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un remains "very good" and "strong," although it could change depending on Kim's approach to the stalled denuclearization talks. "At some point, that may change. And I will have to change, too. But right now, we have a very good, relationship. We have a really very strong relationship," he told an interview with ABC News on Sunday (U.S. time). The remark came amid renewed hopes for a restart of dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang since the breakdown of their no-deal summit in...

“Every great cause,” wrote the philosopher Eric Hoffer, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Having led the anti-slavery movement to its culmination some 160 years ago, and since setting the stage for explosive national growth and prosperity in the latter 19th century, the guiding principle of today’s GOP is . . . ? We shouldn’t be disappointed, ever, by the Racket Republicans. As a group, what do Republicans in Congress stand for other than reelection? Hardly a week goes by in which patriots aren’t saddened. Name the issue. Democrats pack up like dogs....