Free Republic

Following our bombing of Iran, we are hearing the usual caterwauling from the Left about international law. Of course, no one invokes international law when Iran kills our servicemen, or when Hamas massacres Israelis, or when Iran launches missiles against the United Arab Emirates, and so on. There is a certain asymmetry in the invocation of international law.I took a course in international law when I was in law school. It was taught by a distinguished scholar in that field. As I recall, the first section of the course was devoted to the question, is there such a thing as...

Who is moving to California or New York? Or Chicago. No one, pretty much. The only rival to Florida is Texas. Austin is an enormous tech hub, while both Dallas and Houston are economic powerhouses. Dallas has become a financial center and now has its own stock exchange. Florida and Texas are poised to be the great rivals of the 21st century, as New York and California were in the 20th. What do Florida and Texas have in common? No income tax, to begin with. That is obviously a huge factor. But it is more than that: both are competently...

Okay, John Hinderaker went and did it last week! He has abused his stewardship of TWiP and went full Die Hard Christmas Movie Denialist! As the Dude says in The Big Lebowski, this aggression will not stand, man! To restore proper balance in the universe, I am staging a coup d’tat, and am taking over this week’s TWiP. To mix movie references further, John has done a Denethor-level job as Steward of TWiP; time for the Return of the (TWiP) King! Actually, like the Gaza and (prospective) Ukraine ceasefires, we’re going to share power, and alternate TWiP each week. And...

In the wake of news stories about the massive frauds that have been perpetrated in Minnesota–stories that we have been writing about here, for years–President Trump is moving to revoke temporary protected alien status for Somalis in Minnesota: [President Trump's X post] Unfortunately, this action (assuming Trump follows through) will have no practical impact, since there are only a few hundred Somalis on TPS in Minnesota, and fewer than 1,000 across the country. The Somali situation in Minnesota reflects different problems in our immigration laws–specifically, the broad “refugee” entitlement and chain immigration of alleged relatives. The Star Tribune weighed in...

Joe Biden: More Corrupt Than You Thought I know, that is a very high bar to get over. But consider: why did Joe Biden pardon more people, by a wide margin, than any other president? Documents have come to light that suggest Biden pardoned thousands, some of whom were violent criminals and most of whom had no apparent grounds for clemency, because he was being criticized for pardoning his degenerate partner in crime, his son Hunter. So he “flooded the zone” with thousands of names that no reporter had the time–or more important, the inclination–to track down.

Some years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates was the hottest thing on the Left, viewed as an intellectual of world-historical importance. Scott performed the excruciating task of reading Coates’s Between the World and Me. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction, but Scott called it the worst book he had ever read.Coates made a lot of money from his racist grifting, and then disappeared from sight. He hasn’t been heard from for a while. Apparently he was writing comic books.But now Coates is back, with a new political cause: kill the Jews!His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just...

A society can reach a point where it is literally too stupid to survive. Are we getting close to that fatal juncture? Here is one of many thousands of data points: a judge in Indiana has ordered that state to pay for sex-change surgery on a convicted murderer.Not just any murderer, but Jonathan Richardson, who is serving a 55-year sentence for strangling his own stepdaughter. He now goes by Autumn Cordellionè. The accent is a nice touch.The inmate has sought sex reassignment surgery, including an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty, arguing it is the “only remedy” to treat “persistent gender dysphoria”.The state...

Robin DiAngelo is a grifter who has made millions off a hateful book titled White Fragility. She is one of the left-wing “anti-racists” who were interviewed by Matt Walsh in the Daily Wire film Am I Racist?, which opened yesterday and which I reviewed at the link.Walsh’s interview of DiAngelo is one of the film’s highlights. She has no idea who Walsh is, and he introduces himself as “Matt.” You can’t be too careful these days, she says. The high point of the interview is when they talk about reparations, which DiAngelo favors. It happens that a member of the...

I think [Vance] is a bad decision for a number of reasons. At 39, Vance is too young...with less than two years in the Senate as his only political office, he has nowhere near the experience that a VP should bring to a ticket. Vance, who is unknown to the general public, won’t bring Trump a single new vote. In fact, there is no reason to think that he is any kind of political powerhouse: in his only race, he ran far behind the other statewide Republican candidates in Ohio. ...Vance’s political views are...half-baked. He is still evolving...he denounced Trump...

Europeans Aren’t As Crazy As We AreOr, to be more specific, their left isn’t as crazy as our left. One instance among many is the United Kingdom’s relatively sane reaction to the “trans” hysteria that gripped the world’s leftists a few years ago. In America, “trans” ideology remains rampant, but in Europe it has been reined in. Thus, for instance, Britain has shut down its notorious Tavistock “child gender identity clinic.”In the last days of the Conservatives’ majority, they enacted an emergency ban on prescription of puberty blockers for children, the heart of the “trans” regime. In the wake of...

The Biden re-election campaign should be dead in the water. Inflation is surging again, wokeness is deeply unpopular with most Americans, bills are beginning to come due for the Left’s “green” initiatives, and, most of all, Biden himself is so far gone in dementia as to be dysfunctional. How can he possibly win in November? By running on abortion. We saw it in many areas of the country in 2022. What should have been a red wave petered out, as the Democrats grabbed the lifeline that Dobbs gave them and often rode it to victory. Can it happen again in...

Because leftists cannot win in the war of ideas, they will inevitably choose violence over reasoned debate. In 2004, when I got curious about what blogs were, I started investigating blogs on both the left and the right. I quickly realized that leftists dealt with obscenity, invective, and America hatred, and that I preferred the polite, reasoned debate on the right. One of my favorite sites was Power Line, started by a cadre of four Minneapolis-based attorneys. I still check in with Power Line on a regular basis, which is how I learned that leftists firebombed the offices of the...

It is true that I have been in Washington, mostly to attend the Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn trial. I will write up my thoughts on the trial (or at least, those portions I have seen) when I have time. But something else has been distracting me: leftists firebombed my office last Saturday night. At around 2 am, they broke into the building that houses Center of the American Experiment and two other conservative organizations with which we often collaborate, along with many other businesses. The arsonists set two fires: one was in the first floor corridor between American Experiment’s...

The Biden administration is demanding that Israel take even more extraordinary measures to avoid harming “innocent civilians” as it tries to eradicate Hamas. Around the world, politicians and others express dismay at the alleged number of innocent civilians who have been killed by Israeli bombardments, even while admitting that Hamas’s casualty numbers include its own terrorists, people killed by terrorists’ awol missiles, and so on.But my complaint is more fundamental. Watching videos of Israeli captives being paraded through Gaza, and seeing “civilians” spitting on them, hitting them, joyously celebrating their capture, I have asked: where are these innocent civilians we...

The Jews are just a warm-up. Many people have made this observation, but this is a nice data point: earlier this year, Minnesota’s legislature enacted a statute that requires “Ethnic Studies” to be incorporated into every single class from kindergarten through 12th grade. Including math and biology.And Minnesota is not alone. The “Ethnic Studies” dodge started in California, but it is expanding across the country. And “Ethnic Studies” is just one arrow in the Left’s quiver. The teachers’ unions have converted our public schools into anti-American propaganda centers, and this was well underway long before “Ethnic Studies” came along.So, the...

It is hard to believe, but Germany is on its way to becoming a post-industrial country. What its economy will look like at that point is anyone’s guess, but it won’t be pretty. ... But it is all right. Who needs to make products, anyway? More broadly, the 61-year-old academic said Germany was “too reliant on car manufacturing.” Around 800,000 people work for car makers in Germany, many in highly-paid jobs. The country is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and Porsche, and produces around 25pc of all passenger cars manufactured in Europe. However, the industry has been slow to...

Over the last week, we have been barraged with stories about a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was unable to obtain an abortion in that state and had to cross the line into Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. If you Google “10 year old abortion Ohio,” you get 33,100,000 results. The story is everywhere, internationally. But did it happen? It turns out that the story originated with an abortionist who is also a media figure, seemingly working full-time to promote abortion. And if a 9 or 10 year old was raped, it was a heinous crime. Where is the...

It seems that my friend may have been emailing Ron DeSantis: DeSantis Proposes $8 Million in Budget to Relocate Illegal Immigrants to Delaware, Martha’s Vineyard. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set $8 million in his 2022–23 budget to transport illegal immigrants out of The Sunshine State. He proposed the spending in the Freedom First Budget to protect against harms resulting from illegal immigration. The spending may include the transportation of unauthorized aliens located within Florida to other states or the District of Columbia. “In yesterday’s budget, I put in $8 million for us to be able to transport people illegally [in...

administration has produced a clownish energy policy. It is simultaneously suppressing petroleum production in the U.S. and begging Saudi Arabia and Russia to produce more. This is idiotic, but Jennifer Granholm apparently thinks it’s funny. You might think the administration’s energy policies couldn’t possibly get worse. But now the New York Times reports: “Biden Administration Plans Wind Farms Along Nearly the Entire U.S. Coastline.” The Biden administration announced on Wednesday a plan to develop large-scale wind farms along nearly the entire coastline of the United States, the first long-term strategy from the government to produce electricity from offshore turbines. Speaking...

Wind and solar energy are both essentially obsolete technologies. There is a reason why only the very rich or the very adventurous sail across oceans: the wind is unreliable, and at best produces relatively little energy. Nevertheless, liberals have concocted fantasies whereby all of our electricity, or perhaps our entire economy, will be powered by those fickle sources. There are a number of reasons why this will never happen, but a paper published last week by Center of the American Experiment argues that land use constraints are the most basic reason why wind and solar are inexorably destined to fail....