Free Republic

This week, the Senate is supposedly voting on the biggest immigration overhaul in decades. That is a polite way of saying that US workers are on the chopping block. The Senate’s “border deal” is a terrible bargain hashed out behind closed doors, one that sells out the American working class in favor of illegal immigrants, the biggest corporations, and Wall Street. To appreciate the harms that would befall workers from this bill, we’d do well to look to one of the heroes of the modern left: Cesar Chavez. A co-founder of the United Farm Workers, Chavez is remembered today as...

<p>Is what’s happening all a bad dream? The wage of utter incompetence? A bad joke? Nefariousness?</p><p>Did New York offer an answer by not incarcerating arrested foreign thugs, illegally residing in the U.S., who had swarmed New York City police and kicked the heads of officers while on the ground?</p>

To a certain type of conservative intellectual, Ron DeSantis looked like the perfect candidate to usher the GOP into a post-Trump era. He had served in the military, held Ivy League degrees, and carried no obvious baggage. He was the popular governor of Florida, a large state with interesting demographics. He’d presciently opposed Covid restrictions early on and put himself on a populist warpath against Disney and other “woke” corporations. He was like Trump — but better, more disciplined, and ideologically purer. So what caused DeSantis’s presidential bid to unravel, forcing him to drop out of the Republican presidential race...

As we wrote here earlier, it was inevitable that Claudine Gay would eventually step down. A while back, we listed reason #1 of ten why she would resign: "Harvard can claim to be America’s preeminent university, or have a plagiarist as its president—but not both.” To paraphrase Churchill, Harvard had an initial choice between a scandal and dishonor; it chose dishonor and now it will have scandal. The latest six allegations of plagiarism (now totaling some two dozen), if they were to be further excused, ignored, or contextualized, would have continued to have made a mockery of Harvard’s own codes...

Why is political support for Donald Trump so high, even as he faces 91 felony charges in four separate cases? Though polling suggests that a criminal conviction could cost him the election, observers have been surprised that the indictments themselves haven’t done more to dent his support. Put differently, why isn’t the lawfare against Trump working yet? Part of the answer might lie in this fact: 77 million Americans have criminal records, meaning they have at least been arrested. Many of these people may find themselves identifying with the 45th president because of their own experiences of being accused, arrested,...

They were all good bois and girls. Rest in peace, puppers.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday announced a new public health order that, she said, will ban people from carrying firearms, either open or concealed, in Albuquerque and throughout Bernalillo County for the next 30 days, regardless of whether they have a permit. Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, issued an executive order Thursday evening declaring gun violence a public health emergency. During a news conference Friday, she said she expects legal challenges to the public health order and expressed uncertainty about whether the order would prevail in court. The order states "no person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed...

Summer’s nearly over, and cold-and-flu season is on the way. Soon everyone will be sniffling and sneezing, hacking and coughing. You know what that means: Covid hysteria is poised for a comeback. You can feel it in the hot, wet, politicized air. News reports say case counts are on the rise. A new coronavirus variant is circulating, and researchers are worried. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking a surge in Covid-related hospital visits. A few college campuses and business offices are demanding masks. President Biden told reporters Friday he’s asking Congress “for funding for a new vaccine...

After years of denigrating ivermectin as dangerous and as “horse medicine,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been forced to retreat on its all-out attack on the medicine after three doctors sued the agency in federal court for impeding their right as medical providers to prescribe the medicine to their patients. The FDA made a key admission in court during an Tuesday proceeding in which lawyers for the doctors asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals whether doctors have a right to prescribe ivermectin since the FDA approved the drug for use in humans way back in 1986. So,...

One of Donald Trump’s more uncanny attributes is the ability to expose truths that most of our elites are too timid to acknowledge. It was common during his administration to hear mainstream journalists, staffers for congressional Democrats, or left-leaning political consultants whisper, once the third round of drinks was brought around, that on Russian “collusion” or solar-panel farms or the Kennedy assassination, Trump kind of has a point. So it is with the classified documents. You know, the ones he took from the White House—boxes and boxes of them—in flagrant violation of the requirements of the National Archives and Records...

In a decade and a half of punditry, I’ve had to eat my share of crow for incorrectly predicting voter behavior. I was notably wrong about Brexit and wrong about the 2016 U.S. presidential election, calling them for Remain and Hillary, respectively. The opinion writer’s weakness for wishcasting is partly to blame. But voter preferences can also change quite rapidly. What polls suggest today can be completely upended tomorrow, let alone in several weeks or months. Having said all that—deep breath—I think Donald Trump is poised to sweep next year’s GOP primary. Or as The New York Times put it...

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court restricted the use of race as a factor in college admissions, holding that such “affirmative action” violates the equal-protection clause of the Constitution. Conservatives are celebrating the restoration of the all-American ideal of “meritocracy.” The right has long upheld merit and “equality of opportunity” as the true American ideals, as opposed to newfangled progressive efforts to achieve “equality of outcomes,” not least through affirmative action. The conservatives are wrong on the history. The original US ideal was, in fact, much closer to equality of outcomes than proponents of opportunity, merit, and social mobility would...

..... Episodes like this may be one reason the red wave didn’t materialize, why Republicans failed to usher in a new dawn of prosperity for the multiracial working class that Republican leaders from Senator Ted Cruz to the House policy honcho Jim Banks say they want to champion. When it came down to it, the Republican Party offered ordinary American workers little that might have bolstered their power or leveled the economic playing field. That failure helped dash conservative hopes for a clean Republican sweep. Mutual recriminations will ping-pong around right-wing circles in the coming days and weeks. Most will...

The company expects that most people won’t have to pay anything out of pocket for the vaccine after commercial sales begin, Ms. Lukin said. Many health insurance plans cover the full cost of an annual flu shot, for instance, and people in the U.S. have gotten Covid-19 vaccines at no cost to date during the pandemic. Ms. Lukin said the commercial list price would take into account the value provided by the vaccine, along with manufacturing costs, including the added expense of single-dose vials. The price of vaccines for adults varies widely, with some costing more than $200 while others...

Katie Lane’s father, Patrick, died of covid-19 in the summer of 2021. Hundreds of thousands of Americans did, of course, but Lane believes that her father was among the estimated 234,000 people whose deaths could have been prevented had he been vaccinated against the coronavirus. Asked during an interview on CNN why she thought her father chose not to get a dose of the vaccine, Lane suggested that there were a number of factors, media consumption included. “He watched some Tucker Carlson videos on YouTube, and some of those videos involved some misinformation about vaccines,” Lane said, “and I believe...

Hi Damon: My best friend is an antivaxxer (not only covid, all the vaccines). His wife is, too. They have a 9-month-old baby and they haven’t vaccinated him. I babysit for them every other weekend. Should I take the baby to get his shots without telling them? — Anonymous Anonymous: My feelings on vaccinations are well-documented. But just in case you’re unfamiliar, a quick refresh:

Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he will step down from his National Institutes of Health leadership posts in December, and the fact that this is a major news story suggests the problem with his tenure. He became the main symbol of the rule by experts who imposed lockdowns on America and brooked no scientific debate on Covid. Dr. Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, and his personal research contributions are impressive. He first became known to the public during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and his agency was an...

When God wants to drill a man, And thrill a man, And skill a man, When God wants to mould a man To play the noblest part; When He yearns with all His heart To create so great and bold a man That all the world shall be amazed, Watch His methods, watch His ways! How He ruthlessly perfects Whom He royally elects! How He hammers him and hurts him, And with mighty blows converts him Into trial shapes of clay which Only God understands; While his tortured heart is crying And he lifts beseeching hands! How He bends but...

Arguing that it did, the Casey Court went much further still, making the claim that “liberty” included abortion and much else besides. It became one of the most infamous passages in the entire history of SCOTUS jurisprudence: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Thus, Casey was about so much more than abortion. It offered an understanding of liberty that made the individual the arbiter of everything, including the meaning of the universe. It was the most radical principle of...

As soon as the draft opinion in Dobbs leaked, left-liberal commentators rushed to offer a parade of horribles: The traditionalist logic of the Glucksberg test would imperil a whole set of rights previously recognized under substantive due process, such as the rights to enter into a same-sex marriage, to engage in same-sex relations, even to use contraception. When the full set of opinions were released, the dissenters in Dobbs—Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonya Sotomayor, who wrote jointly—adopted exactly this line. On the opposite side, the court’s rightmost justice, Clarence Thomas, wrote in a concurrence that “in future cases,...