Free Republic

President Trump's nominee to become ambassador to Germany has a history of controversial statements on race, geopolitics and use of force against civilians, according to an analysis by CNN's KFile. According to the report, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor has made multiple public statements warning against the supposed Islamization of Europe, calling for deadly force against Latin Americans on the U.S.-Mexico border and defending Russia's illegal military involvement in Ukraine.

Remington Outdoor Co. filed for bankruptcy for the second time in two years with plans to sell the 200-year-old maker of firearms. The company said reduced gun sales prevented it from making money even after restructuring its finances in its first bankruptcy. Remington had $437.5 million in sales last year, about half the business it did in 2016, according to court papers filed in Decatur, Alabama. The company owes various lenders more than $250 million, including a $12.5 million debt to Remington’s home town of Huntsville, Alabama, which put up a loan to help upgrade a manufacturing plant there. The...

An Ohio man seen kneeling on the neck of a 2-year-old boy on social media has been arrested, authorities said Thursday. Isaiah Jackson, 20, was booked into jail on a probation violation after the Clark County Sheriff’s Office launched an investigation Tuesday into the photo, which depicts a man with his knee on the back of a white child neck’s along with a caption, “Blm now mf.”

Days after dozens of artists, writers and academics, including JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, signed an open letter decrying the weakening of public debate amid a rise in what they call “illiberalism”, another group has denounced it. The counter opinion comes amid raging debate over 'cancel culture' where prominent people face a backlash for sharing controversial opinions."The signatories, many of them white, wealthy and endowed with massive platforms, argue that they are afraid of being silenced, that so-called cancel culture is out of control, and that they fear for their jobs and free exchange of ideas, even as...

Pope Francis has said he's "pained" by Turkey's decision to convert Istanbul's Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. Speaking at a service in the Vatican, the Roman Catholic leader added that his "thoughts go to Istanbul". Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian cathedral nearly 1,500 years ago and turned into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453. The Unesco World Heritage Site became a museum in 1934 under Turkish Republic founding father Ataturk. But earlier this week a Turkish court annulled the site's museum status, saying its use as anything other than a mosque was "not possible legally".

It's been entertaining to watch liberals backtrack and twist themselves into pretzels over the alleged claims in John Bolton's new book. On the one hand, they don't want to come across as too sympathetic to Bolton, on the other, they want to emphasize that they hate Trump and his supporters much more and so are perfectly content to enlist Bolton's support in their greater cause. Therefore, the standard liberal line seems to be that what Bolton is saying is great, but he's terrible for saying it now rather than during the impeachment hearings.I haven't seen Bolton's book and have no...

Five tourists arrested for damaging Peru's iconic Machu Picchu site will be deported to Bolivia later on Wednesday, police said.A sixth was released from custody and ordered to remain in Machu Picchu pending trial after paying bail of $910. The six tourists -- four men and two women -- were arrested for damaging Peru's "cultural heritage" after being found in a restricted area of the Temple of the Sun on Sunday. They were also suspected of defecating inside the 600-year-old temple, an important edifice in the Inca sanctuary.

Since 1969, "Virginia Is for Lovers" has been the tourism and travel slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Advertising Age called it "one of the most iconic ad campaigns in the past 50 years." But the Virginia of 2020 seems to be another country than the friendly commonwealth to which this writer moved four decades ago.

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published...

I always liked the idea of Texas—a massive, arrogant, sun-scorched, red-blooded homeland for impenitent cattle rustlers who provided a cultural counterpoint to the sniffly, snobby classes of the Eastern seaboard. Back when America was all about expansion rather than retreat, Texas was far more American than anything you could scrape up from either coastline.

Steve King says assuming all cultures are equal is 'devaluing' the Founding Fathers © Greg Nash Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said at a constituent town hall Tuesday night that treating all cultures as equal is “devaluing” the country’s Founding Fathers. "If we presume that every culture is equal and has an equal amount to contribute to our civilization, then we're devaluing the contributions of the people that laid the foundation for America and that's our Founding Fathers," King said Tuesday, according to the Des Moines Register. The controversial Republican lawmaker added that his remarks Tuesday were “not about race, it's...

An Australian teenager who broke an egg on a controversial far-right senator's head says he has given almost A$100,000 (£55,000; $69,000) to survivors of the Christchurch mosque attacks. Will Connolly egged Fraser Anning in March - prompting people to flood him with donations to pay his legal costs. Mr Anning had caused fury a day earlier when he said, on the day of the shootings, Muslim migration was to blame for them.

Former President Barack Obama expressed support Thursday for Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden, but stopped short of an explicit endorsement for his longtime running mate. Obama, who has remained active in politics since departing office more than two years ago, has offered Biden more than he has to the rest of the Democratic field, as the 19 other candidates are all vying for attention, support, and anything to boost their campaigns.

Congressional Democrats and the NRA are at odds over a provision of Democrats' Violence Against Women Act that would keep people with certain criminal convictions from getting guns.In what has been referred to as the “boyfriend loophole,” those convicted of abusing or stalking a partner would be blocked from owning a gun.

There is a loud debate going on in Washington right now, one that we participate in, about border security -- whether to build a wall, how much funding ICE should get and whether our detention centers are big enough to hold everyone they need to hold. People argue about these questions every day. And so it seems like the parties are divided on the matter. But on a deeper level, there really is no debate, there is instead consensus. Virtually everyone in the political system knows, as an article of faith, that mass immigration is good for our economy. Immigrants...

Last Friday, in Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the more civilized places on earth, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, an Australian, turned on his cellphone camera and set out to livestream his massacre of as many innocent Muslim worshippers as he could kill. Using a semi-automatic rifle, he murdered more than 40 men, women and children at one mosque, drove three miles to another, and there killed seven more. Dozens are still wounded, suffering and dying.

Do you ever get the feeling that news stories come and go faster than they used to? Ask anyone in the news business. It's real. The O.J. Simpson story lasted about a year. Now, it feels like there is an O.J. a week. Maybe it's the effect of staring at screens all day, jumping from snippet to snippet. Our brains have been rewired to think only in the present tense. Or maybe there is a lot more news than there used to be. Some world historic crisis hits every four days, knocking the last world historic crisis from our collective...

President Trump late Monday tweeted that the U.S. would stop getting tangled in "endless wars" and that the military's role in these conflicts will "eventually come to a glorious end." Trump's tweet comes on the heels of recent news reports that indicate that the U.S. is not as close to withdrawing troops from Syria as the president indicated last month. "Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are...

A professor who fooled prestigious journals into running absurd hoax papers, as a test of their bias, says he may now lose his job because of his actions. Peter Boghossian was one of three people who collaborated last year to test the standards of various university disciplines, submitting papers loaded with left-wing buzzwords to journals in fields like feminism, race studies, queer studies, and cultural studies. Many prestigious journals fell for their absurd hoax papers. A leading feminist journal published a section of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf that had simply been re-written with fashionable buzzwords. Another journal published a paper...

Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism. America’s “ruling class,” Carlson says, are the “mercenaries” behind the failures of the middle class — including sinking marriage rates — and “the ugliest parts of our financial system.” He went on: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” He concluded with a demand for “a fair country. A decent country. A...