Free Republic

“The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” one of the world’s top democracy researchers says in a new report. The Varieties of Democracies Institute, or V-Dem, a research group based in Sweden, cites the “suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices” as a key reason for the “derailment of democracy” in the United States. The researchers say that freedom of expression in the US “is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.” The findings are featured in the 2026 edition of V-Dem’s annual Democracy Report, which finds that the...

When anti-regime protests spread like wildfire throughout Iran in mid-October of 2022, the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was quick to lay the blame on the usual foreign suspects. “I say explicitly that these riots and this insecurity were a design by the U.S. and the occupying, fake Zionist regime and those who are paid by them,” he told a class of cadets at a police college in Tehran. He suggested that the ultimate goal of the U.S. and Israel was regime change in Iran. This elicited a response on Twitter from Iranian rapper Hichkas, who defended foreign support for...

Two weeks after announcing the launch of his "Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour," Bruce Springsteen is catching some heat as fans are left outraged over astronomical ticket prices. "If this concert is meant to be a political statement, dynamic pricing makes no sense... It feels contradictory to defend democracy while playing by pure free-market rules where money decides everything," one fan wrote on Springteen's Instagram post. "Big fan and I’m in for a reasonable price, but I can’t help thinking about those who can’t play this game." "Unfortunately no one can afford to actually go.....," another wrote. "It’s...

BOGOTA, March 8 (Reuters) - Colombians were heading to the polls on Sunday to elect a new Congress and choose three of the presidential candidates who ​will contest elections this May, a vote that will shape the next ‌president's ability to push through legislation and fulfill their agenda. Voters will choose from over 3,000 candidates to fill 102 Senate seats and 182 House seats, in an election analysts predict will ​be divided among some two dozen parties, likely forcing the next president ​to form a coalition government. ... President Gustavo Petro, whose term ends in August, has repeatedly questioned the...

The Nobel Foundation, the group responsible for administrating the various Nobel prizes, on Sunday issued a clarification around the rules for handing out the prizes after Venezuela‘s opposition leader María Corina Machado offered her peace prize to President Donald Trump, which he accepted. “The Foundation upholds Alfred Nobel’s will and its stipulations,” the foundation wrote in a statement posted to X on Sunday. “It states that the prizes shall be awarded to those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,’ and it specifies who has the right to award each respective prize.” “A prize can therefore not, even symbolically,...

Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi organisation has announced it will disband ahead of sweeping federal laws coming into effect - but not without taking a parting shot at the government.

When elections were annulled in Romania, Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner, said: "We did it in Romania, and we will do it in Germany." It’s worth remembering that quote when the same institutions now lecture others about coercion and democratic norms. ... Elon Musk .. Tyranny Breton gets his dessert

More than 200 enraged pub owners are banning Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his MPs from their businesses in protest at increased business rates which they say threaten their survival. Hundreds of businesses have signed up to the Taxed Out campaign where boozers will bar Labour MPs from entering their premises. This comes after Rachel Reeves announced that nearly 5,000 small pubs will soon pay huge business rates for the first time as the rateable values of premises are set to increase. Temporary rates relief will also be replaced with a less favourable system, meaning that a standard British...

Nigel Farage has erupted after the Labour government moved to cancel yet more elections next year. Voters in Essex, Hampshire, Sussex, Brighton, Norfolk and Suffolk were set to have their say on new mayors in 2026, as part of Labour’s commitment to more devolution. However it emerged last night that these elections are now being postponed until 2028, with ministers set to blame local council reorganisations for the delay. Nigel Farage has now condemned the move, branding it ‘despotic’. The Reform UK leader slammed: “For the second year running, this failing Labour government will now CANCEL elections in areas they...

Superbia without restraint is More’s accusation against the society of his time. The problem is fundamentally the same as that of Erasmus, but More’s horizon is much wider. He recognizes the evil not only in the pleonexia of the princes but generally among all classes of the people; the lust for power and political aggrandizement is only one manifestation among others. For More’s famous description of the state of England and of Western society at large, the reader should refer to the monographic literature, or better to the Utopia itself. Let us only recollect the lords who, after a war,...

“If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States"Rising outrage by families of 9/11 victims and FBI agents involved in the original World Trade Center bombing investigation, along with attacks from political rivals and questions from the one or two media outlets not in the tank for his campaign, forced Zohran Mamdani to answer why he had campaigned at the Al-Taqwa Mosque, which had been under NYPD surveillance, and tweeted a photo of himself with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted coconspirator in the World Trade Center bombing.And Mamdani’s response was accusing critics of ‘Islamophobia’.“The same imam...

Longtime Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) acknowledged that her party forced the government into a shutdown on Wednesday in order to secure “health care for everybody” — including illegal immigrants. Waters, 87, was questioned outside the US Capitol Tuesday about Democrats’ opposition to a stopgap funding bill in both chambers of Congress that would have kept the government’s lights on until Nov. 21. “Are Democrats demanding health care for illegal aliens?” asked LindellTV reporter Alison Steinburg. “Democrats are demanding health care for everybody,” Waters responded, hours before her Senate colleagues blocked the spending measure. “We want to save lives,” she added....

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — Moldova’s electoral commission on Friday barred two pro-Russian parties from participating in this weekend’s tense parliamentary election, which is beleaguered by widespread claims of Russian interference. The outcome of Sunday’s high-stakes vote could determine whether Moldova, a Soviet republic until 1991 and a candidate for European Union membership since 2022, can continue on a path toward the EU or will be brought back under Russia’s orbit. The parties barred Friday, the Heart of Moldova and Moldova Mare, face allegations of illegal financing and voter bribery. The Heart of Moldova was one of four parties in the...

Louis XIV declared, "I am the state." The motto of today's Democratic Party should be "Democracy is us." Supporting anything we oppose is a threat to democracy. On the other hand, opposing anything we support is anti-democratic. According to democracy's self-appointed champions, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation of criminal aliens, President Trump's campaign against urban crime, congressional districts that reflect reality, ballot ID laws, cutting the bureaucracy, opposition to racial quotas and protecting women's sports and privacy all are existential threats to democracy.

Germany has long called itself a country that upholds democracy in a “defensive form”—a concept propagated by an establishment that claims the right to decide who and what voters should be allowed to vote for. This principle is now being wielded most aggressively in the fight against the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). This week, a court of appeals confirmed the exclusion of the AfD candidate from the upcoming mayoral election in Ludwigshafen, a western German industrial city of 122,000 residents. When citizens go to the polls on September 21, they will no longer have the option of voting for...

"When they go low, we're going to bury them below the Capitol. That's what we're going to do, because this is about protecting democracy," Swalwell tells me on California's redistricting efforts.

Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada marked the fourth anniversary of their return to power by warning Afghans of "divine punishment" if they are ungrateful for the group's rule. Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada warned Friday that God would severely punish Afghans who are ungrateful for Islamic rule, marking the fourth anniversary of the group's return to power with threats against those who oppose their governance. Akhundzada, who is seldom seen in public, said in a statement that Afghans had endured hardships and made sacrifices for almost 50 years so that their interpretation of the Islamic law, known as Sharia, could be established....

Democrats decry “destroying democracy” while dismantling long-standing institutions, weaponizing agencies, and undermining the very systems they claim to defend. "Destroying democracy”—the latest theme of the left—can be defined in many different ways. How about attempting to destroy constitutional, ancient, and hallowed institutions simply to suit short-term political gains? So, who in 2020, and now once again, has boasted about packing the 156-year-old, nine-justice Supreme Court? Who talks frequently about destroying the 187-year-old Senate filibuster—though only when they hold a Senate majority? Who wants to bring in an insolvent left-wing Puerto Rico and redefine the 235-year-old District of Columbia—by altering the...

The Left claims they’re “saving democracy” from Donald Trump—but their actions tell a different story. Democrats have pushed some of the most brazen political scandals in modern history—from the Russia collusion hoax, to burying the Hunter Biden laptop, to hiding President Biden’s cognitive decline—all in the name of stopping Trump. Victor Davis Hanson exposes how the Left has undermined democracy in the very process of claiming to defend it on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

In the immortal words of J.D. Vance, do they even hear themselves? The biggest names in Democrat gerrymandering are out taking to the Sunday talk show circuit, to complain about Texas's maneuvers to redistrict their state in what would likely bring in more Republican seats in Congress, in what they say is a bid to correct underrepresentation. "Threat to democracy," intoned Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzger, without irony. Questioned about his own state's famous gerrymandering, he insisted that his state is nothing like Texas, which its own way was true enough, because nothing is as badly gerrymandered as Illinois. New York's...