Free Republic

Sen. Ted Cruz no doubt wanted everything to be just right for his official presidential roll-out today at Liberty University in Virginia. He even went to the trouble of practicing everything from his wave to a kiss with his wife on Sunday. Enter a group of Rand Paul supporters. Several students wearing “Stand With Rand” shirts made their way into seats directly behind Cruz on stage this morning. The students' shirts were blurry yet visible in many of the shots during Cruz’s speech....

Rand Paul stopped by the SXSW Festival last weekend to show the tech savvy youth of today that he is a pretty cool dude who gets it when it comes to the issues they care about like privacy and cool apps. “I do Snapchat,” the Republican and probable candidate for president at one point said. During an interview with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith, the Senator from Kentucky did his best to woo the young tech crowd by linking concern over NSA spying programs with the libertarian narrative of an intrusive and abusive government. He referred to those in the...

Most of the likely Republican presidential candidates are supportive of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. But Americans who identify as Republican or lean that way appear to disagree. That’s according to a new survey from Pew Research, released on Monday, gauging post-Snowden attitudes on digital privacy and surveillance. Of respondents who were familiar with the NSA spying revelations, 70 percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican said they were losing confidence that the agency’s surveillance programs served the public interest. Just 55 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic said they had lost faith.... But the strong majority of...

Conservatives often find themselves at odds with the libertarian crowd. However, is that anger really warranted? As President Reagan once said, “If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” True conservatives and libertarians, let’s not pretend there aren’t fakers on both side, all agree on the fundamentals: limited government, personal responsibility, and economic freedom. Neither group wants the government interfering in our daily lives and telling us what we can and cannot do. Now there may be slight disagreements on how that plays out in the policy arena, but we should not allow...

A controversial conservative activist is being accused of trying to incite anti-police protesters by saying, "I wish I could kill some of these cops," to provoke them into making outrageous statements. A former top staffer with Project Veritas, Richard Valdes, said the incident occurred in January, when an undercover operative assigned to infiltrate the protest groups was given a script that included the startling comment. Valdes said he was fired by the group's founder, James O'Keefe, for not following through on the bizarre assignment....

Already, we have the greatest video of the 2016 presidential election cycle. Rick Santorum -- And have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is? -- was down in the home office of American Sedition for one of those mock "summits" designed to lift the wallets of terrified caucasian separatists. A lady got up in the audience, opened her mouth to speak, and huge bats flew out. Why is the Congress rolling over and letting this Communist dictator destroy my country? Y'all know what he is and I know what he is. I want him out of the...

Because I'm a Conservative, I believe in a strong separation of church and state. As Eliade wrote in The Sacred and the Profane, "the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from 'natural' realities." We do a disservice to the truly sacred when we force it into Caesar's world. What is sacred to me is between myself and my Maker--and forcing that into the public square diminishes both of Us. Because I'm a Conservative, I care about the environment. Whether prompted by the Bible or by our own sense of morality (itself a part of...

I took the time over the weekend to read the entirety of the 102-page Department of Justice report on the Ferguson PD ("FPD"). I cannot recommend highly enough that you do the same. During the course of this reading, I intentionally read it with as jaundiced of an eye towards the Department of Justice as possible. I intentionally disregarded all commentary regarding what the DOJ investigators reported that they saw, and also all of their reported interviews of the citizens of Ferguson and FPD officers. I decided to say to myself, let's assume that everything DOJ says is a lie,...

Donna Tellam was among the 33 passengers and six crew members aboard the Denver-bound flight that left Dulles about 10:15 p.m. She was relaxing in her seat in first class, playing a game on her phone, when a man came running down the aisle toward the cockpit. He was waving his arms and yelling, she said. The man, whom Tellam described as small and thin with dark hair, was clearly distressed. He kept saying that the plane "was going too slow, that it was going to fall... and all of us were going to die," Tellam said Tuesday, recounting the...