Free Republic

On Monday on CNN’s “News Central,” former German Chancellor Angela Merkel told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that President-elect Donald Trump was fascinated by dictators’ power. Amanpour asked, “I remember very distinctly when Donald Trump was first elected. You did one– You were the only one to actually welcome his election conditionally. In other words, based on the respect and the adherence to mutual values, democracy, freedom, diversity, rule of law, human rights, etc. And I just wonder whether you thought he did act in that way, and especially because you said he was clearly fascinated by the Russian president. ‘In the...

A beautiful Brazilian soap star has the lead role in her own daytime drama, which casts George Soros, the billionaire financier of lefty causes, as a heavy who not only broke her heart, but also reneged on a promise to give her an Upper East Side apartment worth $1.9 million. The drama will be staged in Manhattan Supreme Court, where 28-year-old Adriana Ferreyr yesterday filed a blockbuster $50 million suit charging, among other things, that the frisky octogenarian slapped her around while they were in bed discussing his real-estate betrayal. The sultry actress and the mogul, who's worth some $14.5...

Unlike most of the world's people, many Americans view the possession of firearms as the norm rather than the exception. The European and Japanese feudal aristocracies loathed firearms, because they eliminated the role of the nobility in combat. Firearms democratized warfare, penetrated armor, and allowed fighting from a distance, thereby greatly reducing the importance of the nobility's old skills with swords in close combat. In Japan and much of Europe, the aristocracy promoted laws restricting or prohibiting the possession of firearms, especially handguns, by common people. In continental Europe and England, hunting was tightly controlled by the aristocracy. Common people...

There is an entire bookshelf (10 feet, 6 inches long) in Roy G. Jinks's home office that contains every firearms patent issued in the United States from June 29, 1832, to May 17, 1921. They were compiled and bound first by Daniel Baird Wesson, who died in 1906, and then his sons. D. B. Wesson, as he was known, together with his business partner Horace Smith founded Smith & Wesson, a company that holds a special place in American industrial history. Roy G. Jinks in his home office, which mirrors the office of Smith & Wesson co-founder D. B. Wesson,...

Reasons To Be Cheerful Theodore Dalrymple on the joy of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary — in gooseberries, for example, even in human beingsIn my line of work, it is rather hard to think of reasons to be cheerful. On the contrary, it requires quite a lot of concentrated intellectual effort: one has the sensation of scraping the bottom of one’s skull for thoughts that just aren’t there. Of course, since lamentation about the state of the world is one of life’s unfailing pleasures, the world is a greater source of satisfaction than ever. Another consolation is that most...