Free Republic

When I found Darshan Smaaladen earlier this month, she had joined several hundred of her neighbors at a “No Kings” demonstration in Orange County, California. Not that she was there to protest. “Rallies are great,” Smaaladen told me, “but they don’t get people out to vote.”A year ago, Smaaladen had helped lead a successful campaign to recall two ultraconservative members of Orange County’s school board. Now the 52-year-old mother of three was using the “No Kings” protest as a campaigning ground for Proposition 50, the ballot measure orchestrated by Governor Gavin Newsom that would redraw California’s district map to add...

Climate deniers use scientific aesthetics to reinforce and legitimize their message. At the same time, their main opponents, the climate activists, are portrayed as emotional and irrational. This has been demonstrated by researchers from the Universities of Gothenburg and Amsterdam, who have studied how climate deniers communicate online. "Disinformation is not just about incorrect facts, but about how these facts look and feel. In today's digital media landscape, messages are spread through images, memes and visual narratives that influence us in an instant, before we even have time to think. By understanding the aesthetic logic behind climate denial, we can...

Climate change is reducing the chances of runners breaking marathon records, new research claims. The study, external by US-based non-profit organisation Climate Central said rising temperatures "have made record-breaking runs in some races nearly impossible". It also predicted that optimal running conditions - which it defines as 4C for men and 10C for women - will be less likely in 86% of 221 global marathons by 2045. Former women's world record holder Catherine Ndereba said: "Climate change has altered the marathon. "Dehydration is a real risk, and simple miscalculations can end a race before it begins. Every step now carries...

All along we've been told this was about aggressive expansionism and applied a strategy of deterrence. That was wrong.With the imposition of new U.S. sanctions on Russian oil producers and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s dismissal of visiting Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev as a “propagandist,” the Trump administration’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine seem to be hanging by a thread. Their success or failure will depend on a simple premise: one must understand a problem in order to resolve it. Unfortunately, the West has been misdiagnosing the problem it faces in Ukraine for more than a decade, with increasingly...

The film dispels the comforting illusion that technology can shield us from a nuclear attack.Director Kathryn Bigelow’s new thriller, “A House of Dynamite,” is not simply a gripping film — it is a wake-up call. The movie dramatizes, in real time, the terrifying 30-minute window between the launch of a nuclear missile bound for the U.S. and its impact. In doing so, the film exposes a brutal truth that too many decision-makers and policy experts in Washington refuse to admit: Long-range missile defense will not protect us. Our only real path to escape nuclear catastrophe lies in reducing global arsenals.From...

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville caused outrage and renewed partisan tensions this week after remarks in which he described a “fantasy” scenario of public humiliation for supporters of President Donald Trump and institutions that align with him. The comments came during an appearance on the podcast Politics War Room with co-host Al Hunt, and quickly drew attention for their provocative imagery and historical reference points. Carville accused Trump of being a “tin-pot tyrant” with “no use for democracy” and warned that companies, universities and law firms who “bend the knee” to his agenda will face more than political consequences —...

Before you add John Bolton’s indictment to the growing pile of specious prosecutions of Donald Trump’s enemies, stop and read the Justice Department’s allegations that the former national security adviser systematically shared classified information with people who weren’t authorized to read it, all in the service of writing a tell-all book. The 18-count criminal indictment, filed yesterday, was compiled by experienced prosecutors, not political lackeys. It is detailed and precise, and relies on Bolton’s own words to implicate him. You should question whether these charges would be brought if Trump weren’t president. Officials in Joe Biden’s administration passed on the...

Lemon is facing warranted backlash after telling Black and Brown Americans to legally arm themselves in case ICE agents come to their doors. During a live broadcast, Lemon said he was “tired of the niceties” and suggested the Second Amendment exists for situations like this. “Black and Brown people need to get a gun legally. Go get your permit, go get your license, and learn how to use it,” Lemon said. “Because if ICE shows up at your door, you should be able to protect yourself and your family.”

Democrat Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) lashed out after President Donald Trump announced that he would use unspent research and development (R&D) funds to pay U.S. troops amid the ongoing Democrat-caused government shutdown. During a CNN interview with John Berman, Rep. Dean is fuming that President Trump is keeping our brave troops paid during the Democrat-led shutdown. John Berman: “How do you feel about these paychecks going out during the shutdown? I don’t think anyone’s opposed to people being paid, but people look at this and say this could actually extend the shutdown because it takes out some of the pressure...

NBC News veteran Andrea Mitchell was scorched online after she appeared to credit the Biden administration for the Gaza peace deal brokered by President Donald Trump. The 78-year-old host thanked former Secretary of State Antony Blinken for his work “creating the basis for the agreement once the two sides were finally prepared to compromise – we hope!” — a message that many read as giving the Biden team credit for Trump’s breakthrough. “Thank you for spending two years working toward this moment,” Mitchell wrote Monday on X in a reply to a post by Blinken. Trump announced the cease-fire last...

Revenge is an act designed to inflict harm on someone because they’ve inflicted harm on us. We could yearn for anything after we’ve been mistreated, like a scoop of ice cream, a nap, or a relaxing massage. But what most of us really want is the other person’s pain—and for them to know that their pain is because of the pain they’ve caused us. The desire for revenge is the root motivation for almost all forms of human violence. From childhood bullying to intimate partner violence, urban violence, police brutality, mass shootings, violent extremism, genocide, and even war, perpetrators of...

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) claimed that “nobody” knows what the left-wing terrorist organization Antifa is and that it does not exist, despite promoting an Antifa “handbook” in a 2018 social media post. Ellison was reacting to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s remarks at a recent White House roundtable on political violence during a Saturday appearance on MSNBC when he said, “There really is no Antifa as an institutional organization… Nobody even knows what it is.” He went on to claim that “the first person I ever heard use the word Antifa was...

Posing as a TV reporter clad with body armor, Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday mocked the Trump administrative narrative that National Guard troops are needed to quell chaos in “war-torn Chicago” in a bit for ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “This is JB Pritzker, reporting from war-torn Chicago. As you can see, there’s utter mayhem and chaos on the ground. It’s quite disturbing,” he says on a downtown Chicago bridge. “The Milwaukee Brewers have come in to attack our Chicago Cubs. “We’ve seen people being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them, and our deep dish pizza, well, has...

Hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers may not automatically receive back pay once the government reopens, the White House indicated in a draft memo, prompting broad fears that the Trump administration might try to circumvent federal law to maximize the pain of the shutdown. The memo, which was shared by a White House official, could presage a radical break from a policy adopted during President Trump’s first term. It appeared to contradict some of the administration’s own guidance, which by Tuesday still indicated that furloughed employees would receive retroactive pay shortly after Congress strikes a funding deal. Following the...

Next year, the United States will observe the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. To begin a year of celebration, Donald Trump appeared at the Iowa State Fairground in early July. “We’ve saved our country,” he proclaimed to the crowd of supporters. Trump then announced a “giant patriotic festival” on the National Mall for next summer, and suggested an Ultimate Fighting Championship event could take place on White House grounds. UFC is one of the corporate sponsors of ­America250, the nonprofit organization that will be overseeing the country’s semiquincentennial celebration. Other sponsors represent different parts of Trump’s corporate coalition:...

Trump is clearly listening to the NEOCONS, and he may believe their BS that Russia’s economy is collapsing, so Russia can be defeated in three days, as Kinzinger was claiming. Mark Rubio is a Neocon. I believe Trump hired him as a compromise to the Neocons. But he is taking us into World War III in slow motion. Trump is listening to the wrong people, and he had better look unbiased at why Putin is being put into a precarious position. He has insulted the dignity of Russia and reduced it to a meaningless 4th-world country. If Putin is replaced...

It seems to really bother Julia Reinstein of New York magazine's The Cut section that there could be even the slightest hint of thought diversity among the late night talk show hosts on television. Her ire on this matter was directed towards Jimmy Fallon, not so much because he demonstrated any sympathy for the Trump administration but because he seemed to exhibit insufficient hostility towards the President.You can see Reinstein's irked attitude over Fallon's lack of perceived antipathy towards Trump right in the first paragraph of her story on Monday, "Jimmy Fallon Doesn’t Want to Be ‘That Political’."

Seattle Democratic Mayor Bruce Harrell said during a mayoral debate Thursday night he has “no desire” to put repeat criminal offenders in jail, and he doesn’t know how to answer the question on whether the city is “too lax” on repeat offenders. “So, let me make something very clear. I was the one that sponsored the ‘Ban the Box’ legislation when everyone opposed it because the criminal system has had a disparate impact on Black and Brown communities, let me lead with that,” Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a mayoral debate Thursday night when asked a follow-up question about...

The Mamdani momentum is taking the country by storm. After his big New York City primary win shocked the Democratic establishment, socialists like Zohran Mamdani are not just gaining popularity, but are actually being recognized as serious candidates in elections across the nation. One of those key elections is the Minneapolis mayoral race, where Democratic Socialist State Senator Omar Fateh is now just 5 points behind incumbent Democratic mayor Jacob Frey, who is seeking reelection for a third term. Fateh joins Mehdi to discuss the mayoral race, the racist and Islamophobic attacks he’s received, and how he plans to stand...

This ruling is part of a series of cases in which the Court is scaling back Congress's efforts to control the presidency in the wake of Watergate. An entire structural edifice of government was created to constrain the executive. And the Roberts Court is now dismantling those structures. I was not alive at the time, but I imagine that Watergate felt something like the resistance to the Trump Presidency. I agree with that Trump is completing Nixon’s aborted second term “by attempting to gain control of the executive branch and tame the Administrative State.” But unlike Nixon, Trump is supported...