Free Republic

The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.Ehrenreich understood that marriage was...

When I first encountered the data on falling fertility rates, I was confident that I could explain them. The problem, surely, was that other people had failed to embrace my preferred political program. As both a conservative and a mother, I assumed that if we all embraced a culture that was more pro-family—and particularly pro-motherhood—then birth rates would shoot up. It all aligned perfectly with my ideological commitments. How neat. I’ve since realized that this is how most people respond to this issue because the data on fertility rates tend to function as a Rorschach test. Conservatives blame the collapse...

Conventional wisdom in the entertainment industry has held that religion is a risky subject—polarizing, niche, and best avoided in mainstream storytelling. New research however, suggests the opposite...even among viewers with no religious affiliation... A national survey conducted by HarrisX in partnership with the Faith & Media Initiative, released in late January 2026, examined how American audiences respond to religious themes embedded in mainstream films and television... 77 percent of entertainment consumers agreed that the presence of faith in television and movies is broadly appealing. This sentiment was remarkably consistent across generational lines...Political affiliation made little difference... A telling example came...

Like many, I consider symphonies to be the highest expression of the western canon of classical music. Partisans of opera, chamber music, and solo piano music may disagree, of course. I've put together a list of the symphonies which I believe to be the most important and/or interesting from the Classical and Romantic periods, as well as a few early Moderns. I was tempted to include piano and violin concertos as "honorary" three movement symphonies with extended solos, but decided against it. I've also excluded symphonic poems, e.g. those of Franz Liszt (even those he called symphonies), Richard Strauss, Claude...

A Chicago man who told investigators he works as a security guard for prostitutes chained a customer to a metal pole in a basement apartment for a week, forced him to liquidate his stock portfolio and withdraw more than $32,000 in cash from two banks, then beat him so severely he suffered broken ribs and a punctured lung, according to prosecutors. While the victim was confined in the apartment, one of the assailant’s sex workers, who was also allegedly beaten with a two-by-four while locked in the basement, assured the victim he would get used to the attacks, prosecutors said....

The primary purpose of government is to protect the liberty and property of the citizens. We have seen, for some time and in almost every major American city, how municipal governments from Boston to Los Angeles have utterly failed in this primary role. In Los Angeles in particular, the despicable phenomenon of "flash mobs," organized (presumably) online, strikes with the speed of summer lightning and loot convenience stores, threatening the owners and employees, and stealing everything but the shelving and light fixtures - leaving chaos in their wake.On X, a prominent Californian, Justine Bateman, took to her X account to...

It is the godly God-fearing mother that is crucially needed in our land today, and her absence has been greatly felt. Lawlessness, lewdness, violence, rebellious children, and narcissism are EXPONENTIAL today, and their effects have EXPONENTIALLY ravaged culture, society, people, and land! Godly mothers are absolutely crucial to any society in this fallen world, and Satan knows it (Prov. 31:10-31). Almighty God cannot praise the godly enough, and her role is absolutely key for preserving her children, family, society, and nation from the ravaging effects of this fallen world’s lawless state (Rom. 1:18-32). The godly mother is one who is...

Painters think in brushstrokes. Directors think in scenes. Women under 30 think in Instagram stories. Young women’s travel, clothing, hobbies, and even their romantic relationships are subconsciously selected based on what would look best photographed, filtered, and ironically captioned. Digital life and real life are not in competition; they’ve melded. Social media isn’t a hobby or a distraction for young women; it is their medium of self-creation and, in some instances, self-destruction—and it has ruined girlhood, Freya India writes in her debut book GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything. India, herself a 20-something, surveys the online activity of...

If a country cannot defend itself from external attacks and will not defend its own internal culture, then that country won’t long last. This isn’t a controversial point, is it? Nations survive when they are capable of securing their borders from invaders who wish to conquer them. Nations endure when they are capable of preserving their own historic cultures. When they can do neither, foreigners take over and either kill, enslave, or convert the locals. That’s human history in a nutshell. Do you remember when people were handing over their DNA to genealogy-mapping businesses that trace family lineages, and most...

When I look at the faces of those eight young Iranian women about to be hanged for the “crime” of wanting freedom I think of their grandmothers. Their very own grandmothers -- who enjoyed wide-ranging individual freedom and wore bikinis, miniskirts, and smoked cigarettes -- are sadly the root cause of their grandchildren’s demise. Decades ago, they welcomed the revolution with open arms. At its core, they are the reason it succeeded. And now, 47 years later their grandchildren are being slaughtered for wanting the same freedoms their grandmothers had, yet foolishly gave away. They are the reason women are...

The third attempt on Trump’s life confirms it: polite society is becoming violently intolerant.We now have an extraordinary situation where the university campus, once the great refiner of minds, seems to be indoctrinating the young with a fancy for violence. It seems that if you teach people that their self-esteem is the most sacred thing on Earth, and anyone who dents it deserves instant cancellation, then you will give rise to an army of the intolerant. That’s what we are witnessing, in the UK too: a style of politics that feels haughty, dogmatic and tinged with violence. From the...

President Trump has now survived three assassination attempts. The perps weren’t exactly members of Moms for Liberty. The liberal media like to portray violence as coming exclusively from the right. President Biden claimed that White supremacy was the greatest threat to America. What do Luigi Mangione (charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson), the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, the man convicted of the 2012 attack on the Family Research Council, and the shooter at a practice session for the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game have in common? All are or were hard-core leftists. Most of the political violence...

A group of Congolese refugees was seen protesting in Washington, DC, on Monday, calling on the US to increase its involvement in addressing violence in central Africa, despite data showing thousands from the region have already been resettled in the US in recent years. According to reporting from the Daily Caller News Foundation, Congolese Tutsi demonstrators marched near the White House to protest against the governments of Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Activists accused both governments of carrying out anti-Tutsi violence and called on US officials to take stronger action. One protester held a sign that read...

The Madison is a neo-Western television series created by Taylor Sheridan for Paramount+. The series follows the Clyburn family, originally from New York City, who relocate to the Madison River valley of southwest Montana for emotional recovery following a major life-changing tragedy that both shocks and permanently changes the family.

Nearly 10% of US births in 2023 came from illegal immigrant mothers, according to newly published research. Pew Research Center revealed that 320,000 of the 3.6 million babies born in the US that year were anchor babies who would not qualify for birthright citizenship if President Trump’s executive order is upheld by the Supreme Court. “Under the current erroneous birthright citizenship interpretation, these children automatically become citizens and unlock food stamps, welfare, specialized schooling for English education, and eventually college aid,” Brandy Perez Carbaugh of the Heritage Foundation told The Post. Nearly 10% of US births in 2023 came from...

It's been ages since I started a thread. These two pages seemed worthy of a read and discussion for those who might be interested. They are from family archives, an assignment in Sociology for the winter term 1944-1945 at Dartmouth College. Just discovered. They address many of the topics that are being discussed today.

The same civilization that produced the scientific method, actuarial science, and data-driven medicine now treats the act of noticing statistical trends as a moral failing — provided those trends involve race. Welcome to the cognitive dissonance Olympics, where your lying eyes are always the problem, and the scoreboard is considered hate speech. Pattern recognition is not a political act. It is how your brain keeps you alive. Doctors diagnose disease with it. Generals anticipate attacks through it. Every competent investor in the history of capital markets has made money using it. Information theory research estimates that human senses gather roughly...

A 110-foot Ferris wheel, state pavilions and patriotic festivities are coming to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., as part of a 16-day "Great American State Fair" marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. "As our nation prepares to celebrate 250 years of freedom and opportunity, the National Mall will once again serve as the stage for telling our nation’s story. Thanks to President Donald J. Trump’s leadership," said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a release. "The Great American State Fair will bring all 50 states and six territories together in one place, showcasing the people, landscapes, and traditions that...

In 2025, arguably the biggest movie of the year didn’t come from Hollywood or even hit U.S. movie theaters. It came from South Korea. KPop Demon Hunters became Netflix’s most popular film of all time and won Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song... In 2020, Parasite became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. A year later, Squid Game became one of the most-watched television shows during the COVID-19 pandemic... Korean music has topped charts with bands like Blackpink and BTS. Even Korean beauty products, or K-beauty, have begun to...

The radical culture war on public art. The Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, has called for the removal of a mural of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee whose brutal murder was caught on video, because, according to Mayor Smiley, because of its “misguided, isolating intent”. Providence has a BLM street mural covering three blocks and a “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” mural, but Mayor Smiley urged supporting artists “whose work brings us closer together rather than divide us” and remembering Irina’s murder divides us. Unlike BLM and “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” which bring us together. In...