Free Republic

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a larger-than-life figure. Which is why it’s hard to believe that Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, marks 10 years since his passing. Often viewed as a chief pioneer of the modern originalist movement, Scalia was instrumental in laying the groundwork necessary for restoring proper jurisprudence to an institution that had swayed from its intended purpose. With his crafty wit and skilled penmanship, the Reagan appointee authored some of the most thought-provoking and memorable legal opinions in the court’s recent history. Encapsulating the best moments from Scalia’s nearly 30-year Supreme Court career into one article is...

As if it were a medieval explorer circumnavigating the unknown world half a millennium ago, the newest brand of political conservatism is beginning to reach all parts of the globe’s democratically elected national governments. Each version of this political trend, like a fingerprint, is unique, but its general principles are being established as voters everywhere reject leftist governments that have touted social welfare, redistributionist ideologies, and various neo-Marxist policies which have failed. Almost every week brings news of another conservative victory in a national election. This past week, it was the surprise landslide victory for Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s...

George Orwell was on to it almost 80 years ago—the problem of below-replacement level birth rates. In a short book written for the Britain in Pictures series in 1947, written just as Britain was emerging from wartime rigors into an uncharted postwar future, Orwell noted that despite an upward blip in birth rates during the war, “the general curve is downward. The position is not quite so dangerous as it is sometimes said to be, but can only be put right if the curve not only rises sharply but does so within ten or at most twenty years.”David Veksler/Unsplash.com“Otherwise,” he...

These days, Republicans are pursuing a seamless garment of big government, from police-state immigration tactics to their interventionist economic policies. With both parties now hostile to limited government, Americans can only expect civic life to get worse rather than better.

Ben Shapiro’s war on Tucker Carlson risks turning conservatism inward—smearing populist concerns as extremism instead of confronting the economic failures driving millions to revolt.Just as a “country without borders is not a country,” so it is that “the conservative movement also requires borders.” This was the general message delivered by conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro in a December 17 speech at the Heritage Foundation and again the next day in a speech at Turning Point USA’s Amerifest conference.Shapiro’s other main point was more specific: Conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson is no conservative and must forthwith be expelled from the conservative...

Ben Shapiro joins Heritage President Dr. Kevin Roberts live for remarks and in-depth discussion of his New York Times bestseller, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics). Together, they examine the cultural, political, and moral challenges shaping the nation and outline the competing visions for America’s future, offering a clear look at the crossroads ahead and what it will take for the “Lions” to prevail.

Conservative political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos recently expressed regret for "mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party" a decade ago, and claimed hidden homosexuality is rampant in conservative political circles. Yiannopoulos, who reached the peak of his fame around the 2016 presidential campaign as a provocative, outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, also claimed that therapy and his Christian faith have helped him move away from the homosexual addiction that once consumed his life. "I have to be honest with you, I bear some responsibility for this because it was me, 10 years ago — mainstreaming homosexuality in...

The legendary Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, who died four hundred years ago, described the warrior mindset: “To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead.” The kensei samurai didn’t want his students to be reckless with their lives. He wanted them to fight without fear or hesitation. Sometimes we look at all the problems in our world and become overwhelmed. Our constitutional Republic is under attack from enemies both inside and beyond our borders. A vast, unaccountable bureaucracy raging from D.C. has stamped out the Constitution’s design for limited government, and today’s corrupt politicians have abandoned...

The internal conflict over the future of the MAGA movement is described as a generational divide: On one side are the boomers, the Republican Party’s old guard that attached itself to Donald Trump’s winning agenda, and on the other side are the Zoomers, the rising generation of conservatives angry that, in their view, the president has betrayed his own movement. The split is anything but organic. Rather, it’s the intended result of a campaign waged by a revisionist faction determined to seize control of MAGA, and the Republican Party, by erasing Trump. The fight has been simmering on social media...

Conservative women give us a fighting chance. After New York City voters chose the terrorist-sympathizing communist Zohran Mamdani to lead them toward a future of more crime, higher taxes, and worse public service, post-election autopsies (or perhaps pre-autopsies of New York’s inevitable suicide) noted how overwhelmingly young women went for Zohran the Barbarian. According to exit polling, 84% of women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine voted for the magical Marxist Muslim. Only white men voted against the guy who cracks jokes with Islamic fundamentalists who celebrated the 9/11 terror attacks. Democrat pundits point to this statistic as evidence...

You know, I'm so tired of being against everything. Saying what we're not. It's time that we start saying what we are. And it's hard, because we're changing. It's different to be a conservative, today, than it was, you know, years ago. And part of that is just coming from hard knocks. School of hard knocks. We've learned a lot of lessons on things we thought we were for. No, no, no. But conservatives. To be a conservative, it shouldn't be about policies. It's really about principles. And that's why we've lost our way. Because we've lost our principles. And...

Chances are, you’re already aware that birthrates are falling throughout the developed world, sagging well below the “replacement rate” and sparking worries about the implications of a future dearth of workers and consumers. However, the emphasis on economic implications has allowed a powerful political undercurrent to go almost entirely unnoticed: Birthrates are varying significantly by political orientation, a trend that has the potential to shape electorates and policies for generations to come — to the benefit of conservatives.Replacement birthrates vary over time and place depending on shifts in related variables such as child mortality. In developed countries, sustaining populations without...

Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wisconsin)…became House speaker at the age of 45 on Oct. 29, 2015, 10 years ago Wednesday. … The legislative turnover has been remarkable: Roughly 60 percent of the current House Republican Conference never served with Ryan, who retired in January 2019. Those few House Republicans who served under Ryan and remain in Congress have mostly sworn off their allegiances to that previous era. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) was a freshman lawmaker in spring 2016 when she warmly introduced Ryan as a “happy warrior” …By 2020, Stefanik had reinvented herself as a Trump loyalist who would...

Dear friends, to see this EXPONENTIALLY growing high-tech demonic world we live in today, we MUST have a regenerate biblical world perspective which ONLY comes through a saving relationship to Jesus Christ (Dan. 12:10; John 3:3-7; 17:17; Col. 3:1-4; 1 John 2:15-17). The REALITY of this day is that the Conservative movement in America - much like those who fought valiantly at the Alamo - will shortly be overrun and butchered at the hand of an EXPONENTIALLY growing godless and lawless world; It will be after the Rapture of the Church that all moral and spiritual restraint will be removed...

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei scored a surprise victory in Sunday’s midterm elections, bolstering his embattled reform drive. His La Libertad Avanza party won 40.84% of votes for Congress, far outpacing the opposition and marking a rebound for the US-backed right-winger after months of economic turmoil and political resistance. Argentine President Javier Milei hailed his party's runaway victory in Sunday's midterm elections as a "turning point" for the country and vowed to charge ahead with his agenda of shrinking the state and deregulating the economy. Milei's small La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party rebounded from a series of setbacks to win...

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is in talks with several quantum-computing companies to take equity stakes in exchange for federal funding, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Companies including IonQ (IONQ.N), Rigetti Computing (RGTI.O), and D-Wave Quantum (QBTS.N), are discussing the government becoming a shareholder as part of the agreements, the report said, adding that the discussions include minimum funding awards from Washington of $10 million each. Other companies such as Quantum Computing (QUBT.O), and Atom Computing are considering similar arrangements, the Journal added. Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Earlier this...

Conservatives are nowhere to be seen in a Harvard University course focused on black women in politics, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by The College Fix.Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard University's medical school; Courtesy of American Life League'History 167: Race, Gender, and the Law Through the Archive' praises First Lady Michelle Obama, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and Vice President Kamala Harris for having “left their mark on 21st-century politics and grassroots organizing.”The course says it will examine black women in the 20th century who “shap[ed] politics, grassroots organizing, the...

There is a collective sense of enough—no more faux tolerance in the name of imaginary leftist ills. It has been two weeks since Charlie Kirk was killed. Many, many words have been written and spoken about him and in reaction to his death. There have been many events, memorials, and eulogies, but also criminal acts. I’ve been reading and thinking, coming to a synthetic conclusion rather than reacting quickly. There is absolutely no excuse for killing Charlie Kirk. No one should be killed for their words. They might be shunned, or even arrested, but never killed. No matter how vile...

Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested that the government, in response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, may start to target “hate speech.” In a podcast interview the AG stated that hate speech isn’t free speech and that her office may prosecute those who cross the line. Her comments outraged many on the right, who correctly see “hate speech” as a dubious concept engineered to suppress conservative views. It’s also an unconstitutional concept, as our laws recognize hate speech as free speech protected by the First Amendment. This was affirmed by Charlie Kirk himself. “Hate speech does not exist legally in...

A large part of me feels filthy comparing the two because Charlie Kirk doesn’t deserve for anyone to lump him into the same category as George Floyd. Even if we accept the central thesis of the Black Lives Matter movement — that George Floyd was murdered in a senseless act of police violence — the circumstances between the two were extraordinarily different, and no one should lose sight of why: George Floyd was convicted of eight separate crimes between 1997 and 2005 alone. (It’s unclear how many times he was arrested.) In 2007, he was sentenced to four years in...