Free Republic

When intrepid young journalist Nick Shirley made his way to Minneapolis’s now notorious “Quality Learing Center,” he found not just a local scam, but also a too perfect metaphor for today’s Democratic Party. Operating behind the false front of a legitimate political party, Democrats have fashioned nothing more than a money laundering operation that exploits the anxieties of its base to empower and enrich its friends and allies. Although the seeds were planted long ago, those seeds have borne their dark fruit thanks to at least three helpful federal interventions and a major shift in newsroom zeitgeist. Exploiting migrants,...

Democrats can rebrand candidates, but they cannot hide a long record of condescension toward the very working-class voters they now need to win back. After failing to win Congress and the presidency in 2024, the Democrats conducted an internal postmortem of what went wrong. While they predictably did not divulge the full results, everyone knew what they had found. Their obsessions with the low side of 30/70 issues had especially alienated Democrats from white middle- and working-class voters. Yet middle-class whites still comprise about 40–50 percent of the population and are perhaps overrepresented in voter turnout. Democrats realize that their...

Explaining the decline of the Roman Empire in The Story of Civilization, Will Durant wrote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.” The same could become true of the European Union (EU) in the 21st century. Postmodern illusions of a benign and righteous multiculturalism are allowing Islamist ideology—which has no reservations about its supremacist ambitions—to spread its roots with unprecedented virulence. Consider how a guilt-shame complex fostered by leftist academia in institutions, the media, and the public is eroding the Judeo-Christian ethos. Christmas is no longer Christmas but some silly secular celebration like...

The inmates are taking over the asylum, and the psychiatrists think it’s just wonderful. This, followed by this, may be one of the sharpest takedowns of the lunatic left-wing fringe mindset you’ll ever encounter. Melanie Phillips doesn’t dance around the issue — she goes straight for the jugular vein of the self-delusion that defines the modern left. Phillips teaches a masterclass in Left-Wing Victimology. It all begins with a neat little circle of vanity. Blue-haired leftists in Minneapolis, or Brooklyn, or San Francisco, or London, or Brussels tell themselves, “I’m liberal because I’m a good person; I’m a good person...

We reported some time ago on New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to create a “Department of Community Safety.” This is the initiative that gets characterized misleadingly as simply a plan to replace cops with social workers. It is much more than that. It is much more frightening than that. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the leftist vision of abolishing the police and substituting for them a cadre of individuals who will be empowered to forge the new society Mamdani and his Marxist supporters envision. The first step in this effort has been the creation of something called...

Those who wield power over life and liberty should share, at least proportionally, in the price of being wrong. Dr. Thomas Sowell, the renowned economist and social theorist, once observed: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” His insight highlights a fundamental disparity in governance. Politicians, bureaucrats, and judges routinely issue rulings and enact policies that carry enormous ripple effects on society -- yet they are insulated from the human and financial costs incurred when...

There’s nothing really new in the uproar surrounding the loss of a USAF F-15E Strike Eagle over Iran this past weekend. Media hysteria over the downing of a single U.S. aircraft has become a commonplace schtick in coverage of American wars over the past three decades. During WW II, the U.S. lost over 23,000 planes in combat. I kid you not, playmates: 23,000+ – and that’s only combat losses. Overall losses, including accidents, amounted to 65,164. The media talking heads would have had to be carried out in straitjackets if they’d been active at the time. Losses dropped sharply following...

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger (D.) and other local authorities are under fire over a recent string of very high profile and preventable crimes committed by illegal aliens in the sanctuary state. One of Spanberger’s first actions as governor was to sign an executive order barring state and local authorities from cooperating with federal authorities for federal immigration enforcement. Since then, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has pleaded with Spanberger and Fairfax County officials to stop releasing dangerous criminals back into the community without notifying ICE. In the past few weeks, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged...

The problems with defense of Europe are complex. Europe not wanting to defend itself is only one of them. Europe has been taking a lot of flak in the last two months in the midst of the Iran War, raising the question of whether its members are capable of or interested in militarily defending themselves. An example is a serious conflict that arose recently when President Trump asked the Europeans to help the U.S. open the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait has been mostly closed to traffic by the Iranians, and Trump insists that the waterway should be an open...

On Easter, the holiest day of the year, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Savior, and Treasure. Just saying those words out loud — Lord…Savior…Treasure — it is easy to recognize why modern socialist governments find Christianity so threatening. For if He is the King of kings, then all of our would-be masters in this world are pale imposters. If He alone is the Way and the Truth and the Life, then the marble halls of Big Government are just false paths leading to false idols that promise false salvation. If He is the only Treasure, then...

Feckless blue states are spending like there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come, and they’ll be demanding red state money to pay their debts. I begin by presenting three trends. One might even call them inevitabilities, and one might argue they’re not trends at all, but present realities that are intertwined and will tend to collapse in on each other, inevitably leading to the third inevitability. The first trend is a Congress of feckless fools: I’ll get to Lippencott’s final question momentarily, but our Congress does seem unable to accomplish anything of consequence, such as the SAVE Act, which...

SNIP Just as globalists in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and across Old (and increasingly Islamic) Europe turned the “Reign of COVID Terror” into an opportunity to bilk taxpayers, enrich elites, and grow the totalitarian national security State, the same globalist scum quickly turned the Ukraine conflict into another “emergency” requiring more taxes, censorship, and public sacrifice. All of a sudden, anything criticizing the official public policies of Western governments was labeled “Russian disinformation.” If you disagreed with whatever the West’s vaunted “experts” said, you were dismissed as “Putin’s puppet.” Pro tip for information warfare enthusiasts: When...

NATO endures on American backing while many allies demand U.S. action abroad but withhold it when asked, exposing a widening gap between rhetoric and responsibility. NATO members are not legally required to join any member’s military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership. But they often do just that. Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security. They followed the precedent set by America’s 1999 intervention in...

Last Saturday, March 28, 2026, is a day that will live… in something-or-other. I was driving down Seattle’s Aurora Avenue to take a car in for service and saw a young lady near a bus stop waving an 86 47 protest sign. It looked something like this: Thank goodness the young woman was a lefty. Otherwise, experts would have agreed to condemn her as a would-be assassin. Later on, during my daily walk, I passed a silver-haired liberal woman proudly carrying a No Kings sign home under her arm. There’s another woman, at the top of the hill, who tacks...

In response to the intensifying European energy crisis, the green lobby in Brussels and Berlin is accelerating the pace of transformation. Pressure generates counterpressure. In response to the intensifying European energy crisis, the green lobby in Brussels and Berlin is accelerating the pace of transformation. Politics lacks the imagination for a real energy crisis scenario. Civil society submits, nearly paralyzed, to its fate. Anyone who expected that empty gas storage in Germany and the escalating energy crisis in Iran would silence the green lobby in the country must think again. The political representation and its media apparatus -- the extended...

Democrats don't hate all Christians, of course. Christians are great if they are genderqueer or love illegal immigrants, but if they conform to rather normal Christian theology and believe that such a thing as sin exists, or that good and evil are real things, they are quite scary. Postmodern, anti-Western Christianity=good. Cisgender, heterosexual, and especially white Christians=bad. You would think that their objections would be ideological, but that isn't primarily the case. The hatred of Christianity you see in many liberals is actually a hatred of the West itself. The West was called "Christendom" for centuries, and for a reason....

Military victories are decided on the battlefield—but in modern America, they are too often lost in the politics that follow. The rare quick and total victory over an enemy at little cost often ensures unquestioned political support in modern consensual societies. In most cases, however, especially in the Western world, ongoing military success or failure is adjudicated through the lens of politics—in a way sometimes at odds with the reality of the battlefield. Politicians answer to the people. The best do not drift with the prevailing winds. On the other hand, all must face elections, secure legislative support, and ultimately...

No Kings? Ha! That “movement” is a sham, funded by many groups, to the tune of at least $3 billion. The groups? Pro-communist. Meaning that the No Kings movement is driven by those who apparently want a dictatorship á la those of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong-un. And a per capita GNP of about $98. But no kings! We have to understand something: any Republican president is a “king” in the eyes of deranged, power-hungry leftists: Nixon, Reagan, ‘W’, Trump, whoever. And any Democrat, no matter how tyrannical, is a wildly successful benevolent leader, no matter...

When I write about threats to Western civilization, I struggle to find the sweet spot between describing the myriad problems we face and my firm belief that we are capable of winning this fight. I do not think all is lost. I do, however, think that it is important for as many people as possible to recognize what our enemies are doing. When we are being attacked from all sides — culturally, politically, economically, socially, parentally, morally, religiously, psychologically — it is sometimes difficult to recognize that these attacks are all connected. Those who wish to destroy Western civilization use...

Over the past few months, there has been a rash of social media videos from nurses making absolutely atrocious comments about people with whom they disagree politically. Here’s an example, posted this past weekend. Actually, these have been common since Pres. Trump began his second term, but they’ve really ramped up since the beginning of combat in the Gulf. This one wants all MAGA supporters to jump off bridges so that she can take pleasure in watching. Others, cutting a lot closer to the bone, have stated that they’d refuse care to MAGA supporters or, in one case, take steps...