Free Republic

We have lost our culture to the Cultural Marxists and, increasingly, our liberty to the Rogue Ruling Class™. It is easy to despair. But, in the late 1970s, it was also hard to believe we could defeat Soviet Communism. Then three courageous people—Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan—changed the world. Reflecting on that, Robert Reilly describes what we must do today to win our war: Language, then, and the restoration of its relationship with reality were critical to the Communist collapse. This was no small feat since, for many in the West, words had lost their meaning....

Waffle house hero James Shaw Jr. refused to take the bait when CNN’s Van Jones tried to get him to slam President Trump. The 29-year-old who took down the shooter who opened fire and killed four people at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee last month, remained humble and classy despite the attempt by Jones. Asked if he had heard from the president since the shooting, which left Shaw with minor injuries as he wrestled the gun away from alleged shooter, Travis Reinking, the hero said not yet. “I haven’t heard anything, but that’s not to say he didn’t try...

PHILADELPHIA — A Southwest Airlines jet apparently blew an engine at about 30,000 feet and got hit by shrapnel that smashed a window and damaged the fuselage Tuesday, killing a passenger and injuring seven others, authorities said. The plane, a twin-engine Boeing 737 bound from New York to Dallas with 149 people aboard, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia just before noon as passengers breathing through oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling said their prayers and braced for impact. "I just remember holding my husband's hand, and we just prayed and prayed and prayed," said passenger Amanda Bourman, of...

Michael Cohen is a fraud of a lawyer who works exclusively for President Trump, federal prosecutors charged Friday. “Cohen has told at least one witness that he has only [one] client — President Trump,” the lawyers wrote in court documents, challenging Cohen’s claims that records seized in raids on his home and office Monday should be protected by attorney-client privilege. And he’s barely doing any “legal work” for Trump, either, they claim. “[Reviews of the records] indicate that Cohen is in fact performing little to no legal work, and that zero ­e-mails were exchanged with President Trump,” according to the...

Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, broke his silence a week after the Florida school shooting with an unrepentant defence of gun rights and an aggressive attack on political elites who “hate individual freedom”. LaPierre used his address to the conservative conference CPAC to hit out at anti-gun campaigners, who, led by young survivors of the shooting, have attempted to make political headway in the last week. “They fantasise about more laws stopping what other laws have failed to stop,” the National Rifle Association executive vice-president said. “So many existing laws were ignored.” He added: “They don’t care if...

On Monday Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway (D) cited the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and demanded that the NRA cancel its upcoming convention. The convention is scheduled to take place in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. Mayor Pro Tem Caraway spoke Monday about the scheduled NRA convention. Fox 4 reported that he framed his demand that the NRA pull out by pointing to JFK’s assassination, then pivoting to the July 7, 2016, fatal ambush of five Dallas police officers, the Florida school shooting, and November 2017 murder of a 27-year-old mother of six in the...

Axel Galvez had a deal: $7,500 for five untraceable semiautomatic rifles. And he had a buyer: a felon who planned to ship them overseas. Now, he just needed weapons that would be invisible to regulators. To avoid background checks, Mr. Galvez bought rifle parts, then assembled the five guns at the Los Angeles machine shop where he worked. He offered to build his buyer 100 more for $130,000. An underground gun-making industry that enables criminals to elude background checks and bypass gun regulations is creating a growing trade of “ghost guns,” weapons that can’t be traced by police, authorities say....

Attendees at the Valero Alamo Bowl booed the Stanford University Band during its halftime performance after the bandsmen mocked the border wall, Whataburger, and all things Texan. The performance came during the California university’s bowl game versus Texas Christian University (TCU). TCU responded by defeating the Stanford Cardinals. The Stanford marching band, known for satirical halftime performances, poked fun at Texan’s state pride, the border wall proposed by President Donald Trump, horned frogs (the TCU mascot), and Whataburger (the iconic Texas hamburger chain), KSAT reported. Audience members booed the band loudly when they mocked the border wall, and even louder...

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had a plane to catch. The House of Representatives had already called last votes on Thursday afternoon, and the Republican Congresswoman from Miami was hustling to get home when an attendant in the Speaker’s Lobby stopped her. Jamie Dupree had asked for an interview. For him, Ros-Lehtinen could wait. “Jamie Dupree!” she called into the crowded hall. “Jamie Dupree!” Dupree, a 54-year-old radio reporter for the Cox Media Group, materialized out of the crowd of reporters and politicians and the two found a quiet corner of the bustling room underneath a glass chandelier. Dupree extended his microphone and...

A profile in The Times of Tony Hovater, a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer in Ohio, elicited a huge amount of feedback this weekend, most of it sharply critical. Here’s how the piece came about, why we wrote it and why we think it was important to do so. The genesis of the story was the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, the terrifying Ku Klux Klan-like images of young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and the subsequent violence that included the killing of a woman, Heather D....

The right time to eat Thanksgiving dinner is 4pm. This gives the host enough time to prepare all the things they left until the last minute like the tossed salad no one wants and the cranberry sauce no one eats. It gives them enough time to decide at the last minute to make a green bean casserole because they’ve had a panic that there’s not going to be enough food.

YORK, Pa.—Are you OK? Where are you? Barbara Estep kept texting her daughter, Nylaya Way, who was not responding. Donald Trump had stunned the nation by winning the presidency the night before, and now frightening things were happening at Nylaya’s vocational high school, York County School of Technology. Racial tensions had been building in the school’s corridors, cafeteria, and parking lot throughout the historically divisive campaign. Then, hours after Trump claimed victory in the election, they boiled over as a group of white students held aloft Trump campaign signs and chanted in a hallway, “White power!’’ A brief video clip...

Not what you've been told. Politicians exploit public ignorance. Few areas of public ignorance provide as many opportunities for political demagoguery as taxation. Today some politicians argue that the rich must pay their fair share and label the proposed changes in tax law as tax cuts for the rich. Let’s look at who pays what, with an eye toward attempting to answer this question: Are the rich paying their fair share? According to the latest IRS data, the payment of income taxes is as follows. The top 1 percent of income earners, those having an adjusted annual gross income of...

I was talking to two friends in their twenties recently, about our travel experiences in foreign parts, and we circled around like an airplane looking for a landing place before we all agreed that foreign parts are all very well, but they’re not… comfortable. Now, sometimes it’s worth it to endure some discomfort in the name of travel — of seeing new places and broadening your horizons.  I put up with an awful lot of it when I was a kid, traveling by train across Europe.  It was worth it because I had stuff to see and places to go....

In Dallas, a black nationalist activist shot and killed 5 police officers at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally. Instead of condemning BLM, Barack Obama defended a racist hate group whose role model is Assata Shakur, a wanted black nationalist cop killer, at the funerals of the murdered officers. The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism. The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi are lionized as brilliant thinkers instead of hateful racists, Amazon has ordered a black nationalist secessionist fantasy from Aaron McGruder and Showtime...

AP Material - excerpted - worthwhile to click IMO PHOENIX — Southern Baptists on Wednesday formally condemned the political movement known as the "alt-right," in a national meeting that was thrown into turmoil after leaders initially refused to take up the issue. The denomination's annual convention in Phoenix voted to "decry every form of racism, including alt-right white supremacy as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ" and "denounce and repudiate white supremacy and every form of racial and ethnic hatred as a scheme of the devil."

Richard W. Collins III, fatally stabbed last weekend on the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, was as innocent as the 22 victims slain in the Manchester suicide bombing on Monday. Collins, an African American, newly commissioned U.S. Army officer from Maryland, was, like the victims of the Manchester, England, massacre, not bothering anybody. Slated to graduate from Bowie State University this week, Collins was simply out with friends enjoying himself. So, too, were those killed and wounded in Manchester. Authorities are investigating Collins’s death, allegedly at the hands of a knife-wielding University of Maryland student, Sean Urbanski, as a...

AP content so link only.

<p>Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.</p>

In 2011, I was hired, straight out of college, to work at the White House and eventually the National Security Council. My job there was to promote and protect the best of what my country stands for. I am a hijab-wearing Muslim woman––I was the only hijabi in the West Wing––and the Obama administration always made me feel welcome and included. Like most of my fellow American Muslims, I spent much of 2016 watching with consternation as Donald Trump vilified our community. Despite this––or because of it––I thought I should try to stay on the NSC staff during the Trump...