Free Republic

Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), now the president of the University of Florida, slammed pro-Hamas demonstrators this week who have created chaos on college campuses across the U.S. and the weak leadership at the universities that has allowed the behavior to happen. Sasse’s remarks come after the school released a statement early in the week revealing that numerous arrests were made on campus because the school would not tolerate disorderly conduct that was in violation of the school’s policies. “Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust,” he wrote in an op-ed at The Wall...

Increasing numbers of worried Americans have been wondering over the last few years whether progressive Democrats have succeeded in creating a police state in America. From the Russia Hoax to the revelations of the Twitter Files release, to the coordinated attempts to quash scandalous and true Biden family stories, to the blatant display of dual justice, they’ve seen that the cabal of one political party, with its power bases in the government and the sycophant media, has succeeded in limiting or destroying political opponents while eliminating individual rights. Just how bad is it? Has that cabal suspended our American Constitution...

Perhaps the noblest thing that thinking people can do is let America’s university system implode. Watching these pro-Hamas riots taking place on some of America’s most pampered and privileged college campuses feels a lot like ripping off a dirty bandage only to discover that the foul-smelling flesh is teeming with gangrene. I know that most of the country’s esteemed academic institutions traded intellectual vitality for vapid political correctness many years ago, but still, students waging violent jihad in support of Israel’s destruction are a gut-wrenching sight. These are the same youthful, useless idiots who are always banging on about banning...

Why and how did this angry, odious, insufferable fantasist become the intellectual lodestar for the global left? This week, with the global celebration of May Day and with the ongoing protests on the nation’s college campuses, it is worth remembering that the man who largely inspired both was a hateful, intellectually shallow misanthrope, remembered by history and admired by jesters and dupes largely because of his odiousness. The First of May is celebrated by socialists around the world, not specifically because of Karl Marx but to honor the anarchists hanged for the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. Nevertheless, this...

I’m old. So old that I still believe that classic Western liberalism is the best system for assuring prosperity and peace, and authoritarianism, particularly of a theocratic nature, is a disastrous governance style. Watching the encampments and riots on college campuses, I see that too many young people have missed this lesson and instead support violent, barbaric, theocratic authoritarianism. I think these participants are not representative of a majority of students or voters and that the weak responses of some universities bode ill for their futures. Moreover, I think the Administration’s failure to act on the side of Western civilization...

Explanation: Despite their resemblance to R2D2, these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1.8 meter Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert region of Chile. The ATs are designed to be used for interferometry, a technique for achieving extremely high resolution observations, in concert with the observatory's 8 meter Very Large Telescope units. A total of four ATs are operational, each fitted with a transporter that moves the telescope along a track allowing different arrays with the large unit telescopes. To work as an interferometer, the light from each telescope is...

The closer you look at Bragg's case, the stupider it becomes. None of the liberals calling for Trump's head know what he's accused of, they just know he did it. They don't remember how the previous accusations ended or even what they were, despite having taken the strongest of positions; and here they are, again, taking the strongest position on the one issue they want you to know they care about: Donald Trump is Guilty. So that's the Manhattan jury pool. Almost all of them read the New York Times so it's no wonder. But to be fair, no one...

A majority of Americans believe that mail-in ballot fraud tainted the 2020 election, but most state and federal officials continue to pretend the results were aboveboard. A majority of Americans wish to put an end to mass illegal immigration, but the Department of Homeland (in)Security continues to do nothing to protect our borders from foreign invasion. A majority of Americans are worried about rising inflation, but the federal government continues to print and spend money and issue costly regulations. A majority of Americans oppose widespread government surveillance programs that intrude upon their privacy, but elected officials continue to give the...

“Resentful childless harpies unconsciously longing for domination. Why else worship at the altar of Hamas? Why else would it be so overwhelmingly female?” — Dr. Jordan Peterson. Wasn’t it cute how the youngsters who “occupied” Columbia U’s Hamilton Hall — and were busy smashing things up inside — demanded restaurant-grade meals sent in to avert “starvation and dehydration” amongst their dauntless ranks? You could imagine a colossal mommy breast with three hundred nipples descending from the sky over upper Manhattan to nourish them back to action. “Feed me. . . !” It turns out, actually, that at least half the...

Antifa block at the 1Europafüralle demonstration in Berlin. (image from: Leonhard Lenz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons) We in the United States, especially those of us on the right, know that the left is threatening our freedom and inherited moral standards. We also understand that these assaults have been facilitated by what Donald Trump broadly describes as the fake news, which are the powerful, misnamed “news sources” that shape our political culture. These vehicles of state propaganda have worked to white out or distort whatever does not fit their ideologically driven narratives. Although such distortions or concealments from our indigenous media...

A couple years ago the journalist Matt Taibbi came up with a telling new term for the way the media works in our time: bombholing. Bombholing is the practice of publishing wild and unsubstantiated stories in the press, then sending those same stories down the memory hole when they turn out to be false. Then the media hits viewers with a new “bombshell,” which makes people forget the old “bombshell.” Viewers are led “from mania to mania.” Taibbi once laid it out in more detail: News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale...

Explanation: A mere 280 light-years from Earth, tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers (less than 1/25th the orbital distance of Mercury) from a small, cool sun. Still, on a dayside always facing its parent star, temperatures approach a torrid 2,500 degrees F as measured at infrared wavelengths by the MIRI instrument on board the James Webb Space Telescope. In this illustration of the hot exoplanet's orbit, Webb measurements also show nightside temperatures remain above 1,000 degrees F. That suggests that strong equatorial winds circulate the...

There is a famous story about Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman walking down the street with a friend. The friend stopped and said, “Hey, there is a $20 bill on the sidewalk.” The economist turned to him and replied, “There can’t be. If there were a $20 bill on the sidewalk, somebody would have picked it up.” Friedman often taught that if something were in people’s best interest, they would discover and put it to use without having to be told or forced to do so. A Forbes economic writer named Tilak Doshi, a long-time energy economics analyst, wrote a...

With tent cities springing up across American campuses, filled with antisemitic activists who are openly supporting U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, you could be forgiven for suspecting that this activism was not wholly organic. And you would be right. Fingerprints Of Further Funding Take the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, where “students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips, and $10 rotisserie chickens,” according to the New York Post. That is not the sort of event a campus student association organizes on...

Progressive pundits have a habit of sticking to the same words and phrases when discussing major issues of the day. No matter who is talking on MSNBC, CNN or a podcast, they speak in unison. That happens thanks to coordination by a small group of subversives. Politico last week documented the machinations of leftist commentators and former government officials who have been holding weekly Zoom sessions to hammer out messaging since 2022, when it became clear that former President Donald Trump intended to run again in 2024. Participants explore the most effective talking points to ensure that voters won’t send...

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiative in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkable stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming...

Joe Biden's civil rights chief at the Department of Justice, Kristen Clarke, has always been a problem. She's been hauled into Congress for her draconian, flimsy and politicized prosecutions of pro-life activists, effectively acting as Joe Biden's knifewoman to punish his political pro-life enemies as if on a political mission closely connected to Joe Biden's bid to stick it to his political opponents. I wrote about her record of it here. Now we learn she's quite the knifewoman in a more literal sense, and a leading congressmember says she lied about it under oath. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke admitted...

The 19th-century Prussian general Karl Von Clausewitz famously said: “War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.” Or as we more often hear it, “War is but politics by different means.” Some predict that America is on the verge of a hot war. But while it’s true that our country is more divided than ever, it may not be as divided as the pro-Hamas, anti-American protesters hope. War is what generally happens when two (or more) sides get to a point where they can no longer peacefully coexist with the current circumstances. America seems...

Explanation: Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to our own Milky Way. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100, also known as NGC 4321 is 56 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. In this telescopic image, the face-on grand design spiral shares a nearly 1 degree wide field-of-view with slightly less conspicuous edge-on spiral NGC 4312 (at upper right). The 21 hour long equivalent exposure from a dark sky...

Stanford University, its campus lined with redwoods and eucalyptus trees, has long been known as a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. But in recent years, another ideological force has taken root: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” a euphemism for left-wing racialism. DEI, in fact, has conquered Stanford. I have obtained exclusive analysis from inside Stanford outlining the incredible size and scope of the university’s DEI bureaucracy. According to this analysis, Stanford employs at least 177 full-time DEI bureaucrats, spread throughout the university’s various divisions and departments. Stanford’s DEI mandate is the same as those of other universities: advance the principles of...