Free Republic

The judicial mob tyranny under which we’re now living didn’t begin with Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter, but it certainly got a lot of traction there. Earlier this week, I attended the theatrical debut of Dinesh D’Souza’s compelling new documentary Police State. As much as I liked the movie, there was one subject left unexplored: the ironic fact that, today, among those most vulnerable to the “police state” are local police. Searching for a more inclusive metaphor than “police state” to describe our current state of peril, I reached into the past and came up with “Jacobin Justice.” In...

Kudos to Father Raymond de Souza, who noticed something that the rest of us had missed. In a Catholic Herald column, Father de Souza explains how the release of the Vigano testimony affects the US bishops’ plans: The American bishops have already asked Pope Francis to appoint an apostolic visitor to investigate the entire McCarrick matter. It is likely that the visitor, when appointed, would have interviewed Viganò in any case. His “testimony” will now be part of the material that the visitor must examine. Viganò has not provided documentation to support his charges, but has indicated where that documentation...

Trump should invest $$$ in free tickets to the movie Hillary's America. It makes a lasting impression. Perhaps someone can pass this on to the Trump campaign

Dinesh D’Souza knows the value of a good controversy. After all, he has made a career of lobbing ideological hand grenades. In 2010, for instance, he published a book and an article in Forbes arguing that Barack Obama had embraced his father’s anticolonial fervor and was intentionally squandering America’s influence to put it on equal footing with the developing world. Critics were aghast. The Columbia Journalism Review called the Forbes piece “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and a “singularly disgusting work,” while the conservative Weekly Standard assailed D’Souza’s “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” Former...

Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska is not your typical governor. And she is now a very atypical vice-presidential candidate. Yet her selection foreshadows an American election that will run along the well-worn grooves of the culture wars; 2008 will not be that different from 2004 and 2000. Last summer, I found myself, improbably, at the governor's mansion in Juneau, Ala. -- a reception for our visiting group had been organized to meet the new governor, sworn in less than a year earlier. There was a considerable buzz about this Alaskan pol -- about how very different she was. The impression...

The eruption of rage in some quarters of the Islamic world against Pope Benedict XVI requires that several tough things be said. Painful though it may be, speaking frankly is necessary if there is to be honest and open dialogue. It is not only the obscenity of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist terrorist band suppressed in several Muslim states, demanding an apology from anyone, let alone the Holy Father. It is not only the grandstanding Pakistani politicians passing resolutions condemning a papal speech few read, and even fewer understood. It is that we have seen this before. When Pope John...