Free Republic

History suggests civilizations fall when complacency, debt, and tribalism replace unity, discipline, and reform—prompting fears the West may be nearing a familiar decline. Western civilization arose in the 8th century B.C. Greece. Some 1,500 city-states emerged from a murky, illiterate 400-year-old Dark Age. That chaos followed the utter collapse of the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece. But what reemerged were constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets—what we know now as the foundation of a unique Western civilization. The Roman Republic inherited and enhanced the Greek model. For a millennium, the Republic and subsequent Empire spread...

The question is not whether the EU collapses but whenIf I were a bookie, I would be making odds now about when the European Union will finally unravel and die. Unless there is an imminent and drastic course correction, the blessed event cannot be far off. I might need a Doomsday Clock akin to the one publicized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Their clock hovers near midnight, which signifies nuclear Armageddon, the minute hand pushed closer or farther away from the blast depending on minatory world events. My clock would measure the EU’s proximity to implosion. Its recent...

Everything everywhere in the West is going to hell on three different fronts, and the weekend's news — you know, the stories I wallowed in all Saturday and Sunday instead of waiting for Monday morning — provides three perfect (and perfectly chilling) examples.... But then I had a happy thought, courtesy of the Blogfaddah himself, Glenn Reynolds. "If," he asked on Sunday, "the Intifada has been globalized, doesn’t that mean that it’s been, well, globalized on both sides?" Glenn took it a step further."If it’s a global Intifada, then isn’t a mosque or Islamic 'charity' that, say, provided the guns...

I had a visitor from the East Coast, a few weeks ago, and I drove her around the San Fernando Valley to show her what a dismal ----hole it is. But I kept missing all the encampment sites and pirate RV villages, which move around, so we ended up driving around the Encino hills, where my plan to show a visitor how disgusting Los Angeles has become led to the visitor saying that oh my goodness, this is such a pretty neighborhood. I apologized for the absence of squalor. There’s a lot of that going around. A bunch of recent...

President Donald Trump's administration has warned that Europe faces "civilisational erasure" and questioned whether certain nations can remain reliable allies, in a new strategy document that puts a particular focus on the continent. The 33-page National Security Strategy sees the US leader outline his vision for the world and how he will wield US military and economic power to work towards it. Trump described the document as a "roadmap" to ensure America remains "the greatest and most successful nation in human history". European politicians have begun to react, with Germany's Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul saying his country did not need...

Repaired cracks cover the walls of every large New York Thruway rest stop near Rochester, according to a recent News10NBC investigation. The damage is visible at sites like Clarence, Pembroke, and Clifton Springs — all finished in 2023. The walls were built by Nexii, a Canadian company promoting eco-friendly materials. Applegreen, the Irish firm that rebuilt 27 rest stops with private funding, says the cracks aren’t a safety concern and repairs are ongoing. No toll or tax money funded the construction, officials confirmed.

Is the Chinese economy collapsing? Or is something worse waiting in the wings?The short answer is that we could be looking at something much worse than a crashing economy. China could be part of a collapse of the global monetary system.We’ll begin the analysis with the latest official economic releases from China. These releases showed some of the weakest performance by the Chinese economy since the 2020 pandemic collapse.Things Aren’t Looking GoodIndustrial production growth for October declined to 4.9% (year-over-year) from a prior level of 6.5%. This was the weakest reading since August 2024. Some sectors receiving state support such...

In A Nutshell Around 3,500 BCE in central Jordan, people built over 95 stone burial monuments (dolmens) and standing stone structures on hilltops, creating a ceremonial gathering place that remained active for roughly 200 years. These monuments appeared during a crisis period when the Chalcolithic way of life was ending: large settlements had been abandoned, trade networks collapsed, and climate data shows a severe drought around 3,400 BCE. Unlike typical residential sites, Murayghat had no hearths or permanent housing—instead, excavations found massive 27-liter pottery bowls (suggesting communal feasts), ritual grinding stones stained with red ochre, and animal horn cores. Researchers...

For 500 years, a pattern has destroyed every global superpower that followed it. Spain collapsed in the 1600s. Britain lost its empire by 1954. The Soviet Union disintegrated in 900 days. Three empires. Three complete collapses. All following the exact same seven-stage sequence. And the United States has already completed five of those seven stages. This documentary traces the collapse pattern across three superpowers and five centuries—from Spain's silver wealth that bankrupted the richest empire on Earth, to Britain's pound that lost reserve currency status within decades of two world wars, to the Soviet Union that went from superpower to...

Where I work in Austin, I deal with a LOT of Hispanic customers, primarily Mexicans. They have been telling me for some time that there is almost no construction work available. Today, two in a very short space of time said they have no work. Furthermore lemons, avocados, poblano peppers or other produce into the U.S. due to tariffs and are unloading tons of it on the side of rural highways for the locals to pick up for free. We are about to see major economic problems as the Trump Administration attempts to fix YEARS of problems caused by Godless...

The alarms aren’t just blinking anymore. They’re blaring. America’s debt-fueled consumer economy is starting to crack. Families who used to keep the stores and car dealers busy are now falling behind on payments. This isn’t some slow leak. It looks and feels like the early days of 2008, only deeper and faster. Car loans are a disaster. Credit cards are choking people. Home loans are sliding into trouble. Even those Buy Now Pay Later apps, sold as a way to “manage money,” are pulling people into digital debt traps. The question isn’t if the hit is coming. It’s how long...

The classic Downfall bunker meme gets a 2025 twist. Silver has smashed through $50, the short-side generals are panicking, and their trusted market-rigging AI — COMEX-GPT — starts glitching and twitching. Watch the mayhem unfold as the paper shorts crumble and the physical market takes control.

The bloc might not survive without reform and an end to the Ukraine conflict, the Hungarian PM believes The EU is on the verge of collapse and will not survive beyond the next decade without a “fundamental structural overhaul” and disentanglement from the Ukraine conflict, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has warned. Speaking on Sunday at the annual Civic Picnic in Kotcse, Orban said the EU has failed to meet its founding ambition of becoming a global power and cannot handle current challenges due to the absence of a common fiscal policy. He described the bloc as entering a phase...

The collapse of an under-construction railway bridge over a major river in China has killed at least 12 workers and left four others missing, state media reports said. Aerial photos from the official Xinhua News Agency show a large section missing from the bridge’s curved aquamarine arch. A bent section of the bridge deck hangs downward into the Yellow River below. Sixteen workers were on the bridge in northwest China’s Qinghai province when a steel cable snapped about 3 a.m. Friday during a tensioning operation, Xinhua said. Boats, a helicopter and robots were being used in the search for the...

The promise of a green manufacturing boom, fueled by generous subsidies and ambitious climate policies, is unraveling across the United States and beyond. So-called “ghost factories”—abandoned or stalled clean-energy projects—are becoming a stark symbol of the challenges facing the green energy sector. From Arizona to Massachusetts, once-celebrated plans for battery plants, wind turbine factories, and solar component facilities are being scrapped or delayed, raising serious questions about the sustainability of Net Zero ambitions, the risk of deindustrialization, and the potential for fiscal collapse in green markets.

Consumer sentiment soared in early June, rising for the first time in six months and posting its strongest monthly gain since January 2024, according to preliminary data released Friday by the University of Michigan. The university’s closely watched index of consumer sentiment jumped to 60.5 in the first half of June, up from 52.2 the prior month—a 16 percent gain that beat every estimate in a Wall Street Journal survey of economists. The expectations sub-index surged more than 21 percent, the biggest one-month gain since late 2023. The sharp rebound in optimism follows weeks of steady economic data, including soft...

A scenario European leaders would do well to consider, as Kyiv enters the Washington-sponsored peace process with profound frustration: with the White House determined to put an end to the war in Ukraine, the Europeans are telling Zelensky that no peace is necessary. The war can continue indefinitely, they say; and, if the Americans want out, Europe can still step in to fill the void. But Zelensky is foolish to believe that the Europeans will save him from the forces of reality. Europe, the last bulwark of the once-insurmountable pro-war consensus, is a continent of hawks without beaks. Ukraine cannot...

From secure borders to functioning cities, America is shedding the hard-won pillars of civilization—by choice, not chance—in a sweeping, top-down descent into disorder. Secure borders and stationary populations were considered the mark of emerging civilization by classical historians. In contrast to nomadism and constant strife over disputed territory, peoples who had clearly defined and protected borders ascended to statehood, maintained a distinct culture, and achieved greater prosperity and security. In contrast, what we suffered from 2021 to 2025 was unprecedented. It was an intentional administration effort to de-civilize the nation by destroying its borders—as if to return to the premodern...

An article published last year ended with the following ominous sentences: “If the USA is unlikely to become once again an overwhelmingly Christian nation (and this seems to be the case), where will we turn for a new morality? Is it possible that we are now entering a century or so of moral anarchy?”

people are familiar with the common construct of “the third world.” they are also familiar with the idea of “the first world.” what’s interesting to me is the idea of how one becomes the other and the presumption of the causality and the pathways by which that occurs. it’s worth some exploration. worryingly, this is a topic on which i think most people’s intuitions and utopian hopes are hopelessly wrong to the point of being outright dangerous. in an attempt to clarify and circumvent such, i’d like to add a new construct to the list, that of “the second world”...