Free Republic

Now that former President Trump is the Republican nominee for President in 2024, it’s time for Republicans, including those who doubt him or even can’t stand him, to get behind him. The times demand it. We are in a war, fighting an enemy of revolutionaries that kick and spit on America. I call our enemy the “woke regime” or the “group quota regime.” This war is a contest between those who love America and those who hate it. But we do not have a commander-in-chief. You can’t win a war without one... Trump is the most towering figure of our...

We see this almost everyday now in the news. An illegal alien is arrested in a sanctuary city for a violent crime, ICE issues a detainer request for the local jurisdiction in which the criminal is being held, that jurisdictions then ignores the ICE detainer and releases the criminal from custody. What is the solution to this? In my opinion jurisdictions should be held liable for the actions committed by illegal immigrants after they are released from custody. The victims and families should have the right to sue these jurisdictions.

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board – the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored "Ministry of Truth." In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he...

Tom Klingenstein frequently, and correctly, points out that the first step in winning a war is to acknowledge that you are in one. Similarly, one might say that the first step in resisting encroaching tyranny is to understand what it looks like. If the American experiment in self-government is unprecedented (as the founders, as well as Lincoln, believed) then its transformation into something unjust and oppressive would also be unprecedented. To notice the signs of America’s descent into illiberalism—assuming such a thing can be contemplated—it would not be sufficient merely to examine the historical record of how totalitarianism emerged in...

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known as Devils and perhaps less accurately as The Possessed) provides a welcome opportunity to reengage this timely and timeless literary dissection of moral and political nihilism. In it, Dostoevsky gathered all his imaginative and prophetic powers to confront the spirit of radical negation that defines the modern revolutionary project. This powerful novel is at once an unerringly accurate diagnosis of the sickness of soul that drives the totalitarian temptation as well as an inexhaustible literary monument to the ideological scourge that is coextensive with late modernity. It is at...

We need a wartime President, someone to rally around. A war without a commander-in-chief is no war at all. There is a Lincoln or Churchill among us, there always is. But he must stand up. This is not the time for polling or focus groups. It’s the time for someone to lead. Someone with the courage to stand alone, someone of honorable ambition, who will call the woke charge that we are racist; what it is, rubbish. Someone who believes that America’s traditional culture is exceptional and is committed to keeping it that way. Someone who will recall the great...

Republican Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently sat down for an interview with me in what is Ramaswamy’s most politically combative interview to date. Ramaswamy makes the case in the interview that America is in a state of war, not with foreign countries, but with ourselves. The country, he notes, seems for many—left and right—to have two regimes or two societies that have radically different, perhaps unbridgeable understandings of what constitutes a just society. As Ramaswamy puts it: “We are absolutely in a [Cold Civil War] with the fate of the country at stake. And you had better know it…Either you...

Since early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border. The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the “border is secure.” He is now written off as a veritable “Baghdad Bob” propagandist. But how and why did the Biden administration destroy immigration law as we knew it? The Trump administration’s initial efforts to close the border had been continually obstructed in the Congress, sabotaged by the administrative state, and stymied in the courts....

In the latter part of 2023 Americans have come to a much better understanding of the medical failures behind the COVID pandemic responses. Whether these measures were political failures remains to be seen. To consider that question, we would have to know whether any of the responsible officials had ulterior agendas behind, or in addition to, protecting public health. More than a few analysts have speculated that the most constitutionally dubious pandemic measures were pretexts to solidify and embolden an emerging authoritarianism on the part of global elites. Such concerns are not evidence of paranoia. This May, the Rockefeller Foundation...

Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land. Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable —a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to precivilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, a DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women’s sports and their locker room privacy? We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to...

While nobody denies that racist people exist all over the world, including in the U.S., racism in America today is, to a very significant degree, a manufactured problem, crafted by woke Leftists in order to overthrow the American way of life. The Left claims there exists an intolerable, all-pervasive system of white oppression and if you disagree, they will destroy you and may even inflict violence. The woke tell us that racism has gotten worse, but this is drivel. As I explain in my speech “Racism in America Today,” the less actual racism there is, the more of it the...

On Independence Day, Federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden that blocks the White House and numerous federal agencies from communicating with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The Government filed a Notice of Appeal, and requested a stay on enforcement of the injunction until its appeal is decided. Doughty denied the stay, though he nominally clarified the injunction’s scope. The Government then filed for an emergency stay with the Fifth Circuit...

Drag performances took place on board the USS Ronald Reagan under the command of a Navy captain whose promotion to rear admiral is currently being blocked by Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville. Capt. Michael Donnelly served as commanding officer of the aircraft carrier the USS Ronald Reagan from April 2016 to September 2018. During that time period, Yeoman 2rd Class Joshua Kelley was performing as a drag queen at Morale, Welfare, and Recreation department-sanctioned events on the carrier under the drag name “Harpy Daniels.” As commander of the USS Ronald Reagan, Donnelly would have been aware of, and responsible for,...

American higher education is undergoing several revolutions at the same time. The DEI revolution, ongoing for decades, has reached a tipping point. The professorial class and campus administrations are close to cementing it as the official ideology of American universities. However, a rearguard action, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, finds its state legislature aiming to eliminate the DEI offices that symbolize and spearhead this radicalization, pointing toward an education that emphasizes professional competence and reasonable patriotism. Soon, shrinking enrollments and a demographic cliff will strain many colleges and universities to the breaking point. Enrollments, 20.5 million in 2011,...

Democratic ballot harvesting operations have reached such heights of sophistication that they can parachute into decisive battlegrounds and scare up enough votes among ignorant and unmotivated citizens to overcome the natural enthusiasm of informed and self-motivated voters...We need to demand leadership from the leaders we do have. Remember, successful political action is about organizing, not merely about grassroots willpower. For decades, the Left has used the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do little more than redistribute taxpayer largesse to unions and other special interest groups that do their organizing for them. On the Right, far too many of our...

Most Americans have moved on from the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM)-driven ransacking of some 200 American cities, which resulted in as much as $2 billion in property damage and at least 25 deaths. But that time must be remembered for more than rioting and destruction. The BLM pressure campaigns, harassment, and moral blackmail also amounted to possibly the most lucrative shakedown of corporate America in its history. Today the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life published the most comprehensive database to date tracking corporate contributions and pledges to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes...

People do not uproot themselves and leave the rhythms of home “for light and transient causes.” People are not coming to Florida just for the weather. They are fleeing the woke regime of blue America—an abusive, lawless, totalitarian regime which is waging war against American principles and the American way of life...For the American regime, a just society is one in which free men and women pursue happiness according to their abilities and according to nature. Such a society is one where merit rules. For the woke regime, on the other hand, a just society is one where the regime...

While it did not by itself start a “national conversation” amidst the flurry of last-minute electioneering, a series of political advertisements appeared in late October that may be the most consequential ads of the 2022 election cycle. The most prominent ad, playing on some Georgia radio and TV stations during a hotly contested Senate race, puts forth a simple question: “When did racism against white people become OK?” It then details the various ways in which elected Democrats, from Joe Biden on down, have supported racist anti-white policies on issues from healthcare to employment. The phrases “Stop left-wing racism” and...

hough Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) events at local libraries are presented as innocuous, family-friendly gatherings that help elevate historically oppressed sexual minorities, their real purpose is deliberately subversive. “The drag queen might appear as a comic figure,” Chris Rufo writes in a recent expose in City Journal, “but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life." According to queer theory advocate Gayle Rubin, traditional concepts of sex and gender were mythologies constructed by powerful, heteronormative forces that sought to persecute those with non-conforming sexual orientations,...

Foreign ownership of American farmland has raised bipartisan concern from all levels of government, from governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida to senators such as Iowa’s Chuck Grassley and Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow. Foreign ownership of American farmland went from 1 percent in 2000 to 2.9 percent in 2020, a 290 percent increase over the past twenty years. With the rise in foreign ownership in American cropland come new security risks. Recently, Chinese companies have been buying agricultural land close to American military bases, raising concerns about their intentions.