Free Republic

Barack Obama's presidency stunk, and so does the building he's building to celebrate his 'legacy.' Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted pictures of its emerging look: Obama’s presidential library looks like…[FILL IN THE BLANK]. pic.twitter.com/Y7wcVP0T6m — Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 25, 2025 It's a monument to megalomania, monomania, and ego. It's been plagued by community protests, cost overrun, no-bid contracts with shoddy materials and all the other hallmarks of a one-party blue city and its government. Which pretty well describes Obama's political career -- an ugly career demands an ugly building. All the same, who the heck approved the design...

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008, majority opinion by Justice Scalia): “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendment declares that it shall not be infringed. NYSRPA v. Bruen (2022, majority opinion by Justice Thomas): The Second Amendment guaranteed to ‘all Americans’ the right to bear commonly used arms in public subject to certain reasonable, well-defined restrictions. For rational Americans, Heller and Bruen make clear that the Second Amendment is a natural, unalienable right that encompasses keeping and bearing—wherever one might be—“commonly used...

It’s frightening enough to see full-blown totalitarianism return in Germany, but worse is knowing that it’s happening across the West, including in America. Germany’s Bundestag police commissioner, Uli Grötsch, is trying his best to rid his police force of members of the conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Grötsch, himself a member of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD), is tasked with overseeing police misconduct, but instead is using his position specifically to target supporters of the AfD to disqualify them from serving in law enforcement. Speaking to the Rheinische Post, Grötsch flatly stated: “AfD membership and work as a...

Tulsi Gabbard’s doc dump revives a damning question: Did Obama’s intel chiefs knowingly push the Russia hoax to cripple Trump before he even took office? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just released a trove of apparently once-classified documents—with promises of much more to follow. The new material describes the role of the Obama administration’s intelligence and investigatory directors—purportedly along with President Obama himself—in undermining the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. In addition, their efforts extended to sabotaging the 2016-2017 presidential transition and, by extension, the first three years of the Trump presidency. The released documents add some new details to...

As the former president’s “chickens come home to roost,” it will be interesting to see how this slick politician twists the revelations. For two decades, Barack Obama has demonstrated, through words and deeds, that his deference is toward no one other than himself. This is a man who behaves as if he were ordained to deliver America from the faults of the forty-two presidents that preceded him and to straighten out any president who succeeds him. That’s why it took the former Commander-in-Chief a whole seven days of being subjected to prison memes and accusations of “treason” to manifest public...

Whether or not indictments, trials and convictions of high-profile figures like Hussein Obama, James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, and Hillary Clinton occur, the consequences will likely be profound, impacting political, legal, social, and institutional domains. The differences between the political Left and Right are so deep that no matter which way this goes, the divide is likely to deepen. If these individuals are held to account, leftists will likely call it a politically-driven vendetta. Rep. Jim Himes, for example has called the revelations “baseless” and a distraction. Unaware of or ignoring the irony, Democrat voters would accuse President Trump...

MAGA has gotten far too big to suit the globalists, and they want Trump neutralized. The Martin Luther King Jr. conspiracy has an eerie ring to it: as we’ve been told, the FBI et al. couldn’t find much on him, so they engaged in a non-stop effort to discredit, smear, and destroy his reputation. It sounds very much like what they tried and are still trying to do to Trump. The Deep State and FBI and counter-intel finally got their wish — King was assassinated. I have little regard for MLK’s moral code: he wasn’t a saint by a long-shot,...

Across Europe, things feel increasingly fragile. As governments lose control of basic order and the state becomes rapidly incapable of maintaining law and order, this isn’t so much a ‘clash of civilisations’ as the West quietly rolling over and letting itself die. Today, it was announced that Germany will be working alongside the Taliban. Yes, those same extremist Islamists that NATO forces—including Germany’s—spent years fighting in Afghanistan. The aim here is to facilitate the deportations of Afghan criminals living in Germany. Despite not officially recognising the Taliban regime, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government will allow two Taliban officials to work at...

Not only will DEI gradually destroy a critical institution of public safety, but at some point it will also destroy the lives that the institution is charged to protect. Similar to the flood itself, the tragedy of the high waters sweeping through the Central Texas Hill Country has violently ebbed and flowed from the public consciousness. At the last count, the death toll has reached 135 souls, at least a dozen of them little girls at a Christian camp. True to the spirit of the times, the disaster soon degenerated into yet another game of partisan mudslinging. Of course, leftists...

Eighty billion dollars flushed down the toilet, as air traffic controllers were stuck using equipment dating from the Carter era. Democrat frontrunner for 2028 Pete Buttigieg, is the kind of guy who could give California's Gov. Gavin Newsom or Los Angeles's mayor, Karen Bass, a run for the money. Amid news of an aircraft near collision over North Dakota, following a disastrous similar military-civilian crash in Washington, D.C. in January, we learn this about how he ran the cabinet office he headed, the U.S. Department of Transportation. So while he was 'breast-feeding' his twins and telling us about his 'husband,'...

What one whistleblower’s dissent reveals about the Russia hoax. When senior Obama officials demanded a new Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in December 2016—one month after Election Day—they were aware that dissenting voices existed within the intelligence community (IC), as they sought to suppress them. One such voice came from a senior ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) analyst who spearheaded the September 12, 2016, ICA on cyber threats. His refusal to bend the facts rattled the intelligence apparatus. His voice had to be silenced. At the time, the Intelligence Community’s (IC) consensus was clear: foreign adversaries did not...

Children as young as 14 will be encouraged to wear makeup and costumes and take part in stage performances. Taxpayer money is being funnelled through the health ministry in Baden-Württemberg—a state in southwest Germany—to a drag workshop for children. And all this under the guise of “child and youth protection.” The local administration’s official website for the event—one of many “protection action days” listed for the coming months—says it is targeted specifically at “queer youth” who will be enabled to “creatively explore gender identity, gender expression and social role expectations.” Through makeup, costume styling, and performance, the young people develop...

Obnoxious and entitled federal bureaucrats’ attempts to resist reform are making it hard to say good things about public service. Right now, there’s a lot of angst in certain corners about the Trump administration’s attempt to downsize the federal bureaucracy. I say “certain corners” because I don’t think this concern is widely held by American voters, but since I live in a Washington, D.C. suburb there’s a lot of anguished Facebook posts and fretful conversations between neighbors — to say nothing of a sudden increase in housing stock, following years of high mortgage rates suppressing the market. On one hand,...

I last wrote about California’s high-speed rail to nowhere in Democrat’s dying and dead mass people movers in June: Approved by California voters in 2008, it was supposed to have run from San Francisco to Los Angeles by 2030 at a cost of a mere $33 billion. Eventually, it was downscaled to a very short route in the Central Valley, and the costs are over $100 billion and still rising [it’s now around $130 billion]. All that and not a single foot of rail—for a railroad!—has been laid. A variety of bridges and other concrete and steel monoliths have been...

Guess who runs California? Officially, it's the governor and the political class, i.e. the legislature. But it's actually the public sector unions. I guess that's what happens when they organize the vote drive and get the folks out to vote. Here is the story: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is incapable of getting his employees to show up to the office more than two days a week. This is an indictment of his leadership and reveals a flaw that should be fatal to his presidential aspirations. It is also an indictment of the California Democratic Party, which has shown itself to...

The three biggest stories this week expose judicial hijinks, the willingness of the Wall Street Journal to publish defamatory anti-Trump nonsense in violation of all journalism ethics, and Tulsi Gabbard’s public declassification of material showing how President Obama worked from the moment of Trump’s 2016 election victory on to tar and hamstring him with made-up Russian influence lies. Judicial MalfeasanceAs usual, the most significant coverage of lefty judiciary hijinks is by Margot Cleveland. She uncovered a memo of a judicial conference in which the notorious D.C. judge James Boasberg confirmed to Chief Justice John Roberts the anti-Trump bias of that...

Amid disastrous green diktats and crippling cuts to farmers’ livelihoods, the out-of-touch elites in Brussels seem to have forgotten where their food comes from. This afternoon, farmers from all over the European Union met outside the European Parliament to march on the Berlaymont, the European Commission’s HQ. Organised by COPA-COGECA, the umbrella body for 22 million European farmers, the demonstration should by all rights be a wake-up call for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The unions will hand over a petition signed by 6,335 organisations, along with a symbolic pair of boots, in protest of the EU’s plans to...

“We’re aware; the challenge here is finding a federal hook. But WH has been in touch about whether we can assist in some form or fashion.”America First Legal shared documents with Fox News showing communication between the Biden White House and the DOJ over the memo that demonized protesting parents at school board meetings. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland’s memo weaponized the FBI against these parents after the National School Boards Association begged former President Joe Biden’s administration to intervene. The NSBA described the protests as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” The memo came out on October 4,...

For those intrepid watchers of American politics, it comes as no surprise that the game of politics has become dirtier and meaner over time. The "take no prisoners" and "never let a good crisis go to waste" strategies are now the two most commonplace ones being employed by average, politically-engaged Americans. We need only look at the often aggressive interaction of family members on holidays or watch angry participants in town halls for proof. Americans take a position, choose a side and then defend their positions, sometimes to the death. There is no room for facts-based discussions, honest contemplation or...

The Democrat party’s caterwauling over illegal alien roundups becomes only more shrill by the day. Last week, California politicians were very upset that federal agents had the temerity to disrupt the workings of a marijuana farm exploiting children for its labor. It’s always a bit jarring to see what card-carrying members of the Democrats’ premier virtue-signaling club will find worthy of their righteous indignation. Many rational observers couldn’t have guessed that Democrats would pull out all the stops to shill for “child slavery.” Of course, there was also a time when rational observers could never have guessed that Democrats would...