Free Republic

The old politics is gone – and it’s not coming back. ‘Historic local elections’ are three words you don’t often see next to each other. But last night was surely the exception. While many of the counts are only really getting started, the picture is already crystal clear: the two-party cartel that has squatted over British politics for 100 years is crumbling – and Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK is the party rising from the rubble. There’s the Runcorn by-election, a Labour safe seat snatched by Reform by six votes – the first time a Faragist party has won a...

The coalition campaign in this election has been shocking - incompetent, flatfooted, timid, incoherent and today we saw Liberals (in Australia the major conservative party is called the Liberal Party) ...... If the coalition draws the wrong lesson ..... it risks being destroyed ....... and already I do hear fake autopsies being written like this today by the Prime Minister: "The Liberal Party has become more and more right wing under Peter Dutton ,,,,," In fact Dutton isn't of the hard right or certainly hasn't shown it ....... he isn't even offering bigger tax cuts than Labor (the governing party)...

It's always nice returning to North Idaho from the California Bay Area. It only takes a few minutes to spot some great bumper and window stickers in Idaho! The two below were at the Fred Meyer (aka, Kroger) store. I was shopping for Baby Back Ribs and some good rub and sauce. Baby Back Ribs are on sale for $5.49 / pound! Got two 3.5 pound racks.

The United Kingdom has been in managed decline since 2008. The dismal performance of the British economy -- characterized by slow growth, low productivity, and stagnant wages -- has been the subject of much analysis in recent years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has highlighted that the UK's recovery from the 2008 financial crisis has been the slowest on record, even weaker than the recovery following the Great Depression in the 1930s and the early 1920s slump. The authors have spent part of their careers in Singapore and have written extensively on the city-state’s economic growth since its independence....

Are we seeing the end of global leftism? Probably not. For one thing, politics is sort of a fuzzy spectrum; there will always be a left and a right, although things are a little more complicated than that. But there is a reason the Overton Window is a thing, and it can't go all the way to one side or another, and there will always be people and systems to the left and to the right of that window. But modern leftist politics, defined by socialism and its fuzzy-headed cousin "progressivism" (which may be taken to mean "progress on the...

The more often Americans attend virtually any Christian denomination, as well as Jewish services, the more likely they are to adopt conservative political views, according to a recent statistical analysis. “The more Democrats go to church, the more they look like Republicans,” states the study. “Being politically liberal and being highly religious are just not compatible,” wrote Ryan Burge, an associate professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University and research director for Faith Counts. “Among white people who never attend: 45% are liberal. Among weekly+ attenders: 11% are liberal. That same pattern is there for every single racial group.”...

It’s a curious peculiar hallmark of our political moment as conservatives that adhering to principles—steadfastly examining issues through the lens of conservatism and first principles—is now treated as heresy by self proclaimed conservatives, while ideological flexibility and indifference are paraded as virtues. This peculiar attack invariably comes from the populists, those sartorial magicians who don the garments of conservatism when it suits them, only to cast them off the moment they conflict with the “current thing.” These are the ideological chameleons, the political reincarnations of those high school kids who reinvented themselves annually to fit in with whatever clique was...

Pope Francis has appointed a new bishop to a Texas-based diocese who will replace a theologically conservative critic of the pontiff who was removed from office last year. The Catholic Diocese of Tyler announced last Friday that Francis appointed the Most Rev. Gregory Kelly, auxiliary bishop of Dallas, to lead the regional body. Kelly will fill the vacancy left after Francis removed Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, the former head of the diocese who had criticized the pontiff for some of his policies on LGBT issues and overall doctrine. “I am grateful to the Holy Father for this surprising pre-Christmas gift,...

When I first started reading the works of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk in the fall of 1989, that most joyously fateful of seasons, I had no idea I would wind up three decades later having spent much of my adult life reading him, writing about him, and holding a position named in his honor. At the age of fifty, I happily and proudly stand in his shadow. Of all of the things I have learned about him, though, nothing has impressed me more than the man’s charity, his saint-like dedication to all around him: the poor; the lonely; the disabled;...

People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg? More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned. The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion...

A number of readers have noted the absence of my byline on the American Thinker homepage, and it’s time to address my departure. A number of readers have noted the absence of my byline on the American Thinker homepage, and those that investigated the “About Us” page saw that I am now credited as “Founder and Editor Emeritus.” Some have written AT asking what this is all about. I didn’t want to distract from the campaign that concluded Tuesday, which I regarded as a battle to save the Republic, so I did not explain my departure to readers. SNIP But...

"The Speech" is what Ronald Reagan called it. Today we call it, "A Time for Choosing," and it was a pivotal turning point in Ronald Reagan's life. Ronald Reagan began a long side-career of public speaking as his acting career closed out. He traveled across the country meeting Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Chambers of Commerce and any other civic-minded local groups. This continued and intensified during his service as the General Electric spokesperson while hosting their sponsored television series. "The Speech" was delivered in various forms and to different audiences as each word was honed, measured and memorized. During the...

For his speaking portion of the evening, Sailer read an essay which appeared in Noticing titled, “What If I’m Right?”. A common theme of his work is the chasm between elite narratives and the lived experiences of ordinary Americans...

In the past two years, two competing groups of conservatives—National Conservatives or NatCons and Freedom Conservatives or FreeCons—have issued competing manifestos. These manifestos reflect a divergent understanding of the progressive challenge to the American way of life.This divergence can best be understood in the context of the history of modern American conservatism, which can be broken into three waves: the first wave, symbolized by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan, lasted from the mid-1950s to the end of the Cold War; the second wave, symbolized by Paul Ryan and the two Bush presidencies, ran from the 1990s to roughly...

There’s an odd and unsettling strain of fatalism sweeping through the ranks of erstwhile conservative thinkers these days, as though they've been put into a form of collective hypnosis and conditioned into believing that the only way to stave off disaster is for all of us to throw ourselves headlong into another Trump campaign—ironically, more than Trump himself is willing to throw himself into it. It’s the kind of logic that says, “If the Titanic is sinking, you should try to put out the fire in the engine room by drilling more holes in the hull.” We are told in...

All pro-life people need to support and vote for Trump in the 2024 election. They need to take the huge, giant “W” (aka the win) on abortion that the Supreme Court gave America with the Dobbs decision and carry their fight against abortion to the state level. They also must understand that the moral fight over abortion is inextricably intertwined with the greatest cancer of 20th-century American government, namely, judicial activism. If we lose this one, we’ve lost the nation.This is how close we are:They want to overthrow The Constitution pic.twitter.com/d1g35Vavwy — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2024A vocal minority...

It is often forgotten, but Hoover was a political philosopher. He first outlined his political philosophy in 1922 in "American Individualism." In 1934, in response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hoover wrote "The Challenge to Liberty."Both "American Individualism" and "The Challenge to Liberty" were a defense of what Hoover called the “American System,” or constitutionalism. In "American Individualism," Hoover hailed the principle of equality of opportunity or the “fair chance of Abraham Lincoln,” which reflected his own life story. Hoover argued that it was the American system of liberty that allowed an individual to advance. Orphaned at an...

The key difference between NatCons and FreeCons has to do with the character of the current political struggle against progressives on the Left. FreeCons believe we are mainly involved in policy arguments. FreeCon signatory Yuval Levin, for instance, writes that our divisions are a family argument between two forms of liberalism: progressive liberalism and conservative liberalism—we are not, he assures us, in a “political fight to the death.” National conservatives, on the other hand, generally believe we are involved in what the late Angelo Codevilla called a “Cold Civil War”—or as third waver Victor Davis Hanson has put it, we...

“The Land the Law Forgot,” is what liberal legal scholar Jonathan Turley called New York in June. Oh, it’s not that it doesn’t have laws; it’s got so many, in fact, that studies found it to be our country’s least free state. It’s that N.Y.’s supposed law enforcers are ideological enforcers, using and going beyond the Empire State’s surfeit of strictures to build an empire of left-wing conformity. Letitia James’ Vendetta And now Letitia James, the notorious N.Y. attorney general who tag-teamed with a judge to try to pummel former President Donald Trump, has claimed another scalp: nonprofit anti-(destructive)immigration entity...

Welcome to Restoration. The great story of Western civilization, our core creeds, and the Judeo-Christian moral framework on which our societies were built are all under siege. At least three ideologies are pedaled as alternatives: 1. Communism: This resurgent communism is cultural. It is firmly embedded in our core institutions. It is international in outlook, and breath-taking in its subversive ambition. And it again has traction among the young. 2. Technocracy: The Technocratic Managerial Regime, as analyzed by N.S. Lyons, is ascendent in most every nation it seeks to dominate. 3. Islamism: A radical and aggressively metastasizing version of Islam...