Free Republic

The U.S. Coast Guard said “politically charged” messages led to the removal of an environmental ​group’s vessel from a fleet of sailing ships gathered in New ‌York on Saturday to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. A ship owned by the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater environmental organization was forced out of the Sail4th 250 parade in New York Harbor, ​the Coast Guard said in a statement emailed to Reuters. The ship had ​banners that read “Save the Clean Water Act” and “Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, ⁠Climate Solutions”. Participants in the event had agreed to refrain from displaying political or ​politically charged...

Ugandan-born, socialism-loving New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has emerged as a “kingmaker” in the Democrat party, says Phillip Elliot of TIME. Two prominent House Democrats lost their primaries to insurgent rivals while a third left-wing candidate defeated the Brooklyn Borough chief,” he writes. “All together, the results demonstrated the fragility of an Establishment imprimatur, the power of the New York Mayor’s blessing, and the ascendancy of socialism. Elliott then goes on to do this silly thing that Democrats have done for a few decades now, and suggests that this “ascendancy of socialism” is not, as Donald Trump and some...

There’s actually a small window of time to completely break the Left, and this opportunity will not come again. The Left can be badly weakened — perhaps even broken. The process has a misleadingly dry name — civil asset forfeiture. This legal procedure allows law enforcement officials — typically the Attorney General or a District Attorney — to seize property based solely on suspicion of criminal activity. No criminal charge, let alone conviction, is required. The justification rests on the extraordinary legal fiction that the property itself, rather than its owner, is the defendant. However implausible that premise may seem,...

America 250 has become another front in the culture war, exposing a fundamental divide over patriotism and American exceptionalism. Earlier this week, I walked around the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Despite the heavy negative press coverage, I thought it was impressive and inspiring. The event boldly portrays American patriotism and exceptionalism across our great nation to celebrate our country’s 250th birthday. It runs from June 25 through July 10, featuring more than 150 exhibits from all 56 U.S. states and territories, along with businesses, innovators, and civic organizations. There is a towering Ferris...

July Fourth, 2026 marks America’s 250th anniversary. Americans will be out and about at parades, fireworks displays, and other patriotic observances. President Trump will be at Mt. Rushmore, where fireworks, long prohibited, are making a comeback. Barbecue grills will blaze, we’ll eat too much, and love every minute of it, thankful for being born American and thereby winning life’s lottery in a nation of equal opportunity, where even an African American can become a trillionaire. Sadly, so many who bristle at being American will hold their own anti-American events. Some will commit acts of vandalism and violence, acts of mindless...

Most people I know are simultaneously excited to meet with and greet new American citizens who are filled with patriotism for their new country, and mad as hell about the illegal immigration and cohort of immigrants (and their children) who openly hate America and are dedicated to destroying it. Many of the most patriotic people I have met are recent immigrants, who often fled authoritarian regimes and appreciate America's promise of freedom and opportunity. A disproportionate number of entrepreneurs and small business owners are immigrants, and it's true that these people inject a vitality that you sometimes don't find in...

Friday will be the thousandth day since jihadis massacred 1,200 people in Israel. Which means we’ve been wrestling for about 999 days with the appalling fact that the pogroms increased support for Hamas and the other terrorists instead of revolting and alienating world opinion. The jihadis tortured and mutilated their victims, raped and murdered them, burned and starved them, and forced them to watch as they inflicted their horrors on their mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, grandparents and babies. The fact that such evil would draw rather than repel millions of people seems, on the surface, inexplicable. Yet the...

“. . .a political party doesn’t lose 95 percent of a registration advantage because voters are kinda annoyed. Something much, much deeper is going on.” — Richard Landwirth. Meme credit: Jamie Glazov on X. Okay, convince me that gay-Islamic-race-communism is a “progressive” political program America is going to buy like corn flakes. The Lefty-left wants to think so, as it lurches from one peak of mental illness to an even greater one in the 130 days to the midterms. Look how successful they’ve been with open borders, defunding the police, men in the girl’s swim lane, no cash bail, sex-change...

Yes, they failed on birthright citizenship, but this is still a major win. The Supreme Court has delivered a stunning victory for American sovereignty that every Donald J. Trump voter should cheer. In its bold 6-3 Mullin v. Doe ruling on June 25, the Republican-appointed justices allowed Trump’s administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti and Syria. Far more importantly, they slammed the door on endless judicial sabotage of immigration law enforcement. This is not some narrow tweak. The decision broadly shields the entire TPS program from most court meddling, granting the executive branch sweeping authority over designations,...

National self-sufficiency beats globalism’s mass dependency. What makes a nation wealthy? It’s not just arable lands surrounded by other lands filled with water, timber, coal, gas, oil, metals, and minerals. It’s the farmer who knows best how to cultivate those lands in order to maximize food production. It’s the woodsman, miner, fisherman, and oilman who can extract nature’s bounty and provide the raw materials for every kind of manufacturer. Producing things requires knowledge and skill. Competition between producers creates an incentive to innovate. This motor of discovery — in which human ingenuity uses established knowledge and long-harnessed skills as inputs...

As the 250th anniversary of our declaring independence from British tyranny nears, what’s affirmed is that America is preordained to be the battleground between liberty and tyranny -- whatever the stripe. ast Tuesday, there was a Broadway premiere of sorts. In New York City, elections revealed the Democrat Party’s future. Avowed socialists won with the backing of Zohran Mamdani and dollars from leftist NGOs. There’s no spinning it. Democrat grandees aren’t even trying. Bill Maher claims he’s open to voting for J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio in 2028 if the party is captured by socialists. Whacky James Carville loudly called...

The EU says protecting Europe's identity is against its values. Eva Vlaardingerbroek - Eva Vlaardingerbroek on X. Campaigners behind the ‘Save Europe Act’ say the European Commission is preparing to reject their European Citizens’ Initiative after receiving a letter warning that its proposals appear to violate the European Union’s fundamental rights and values. In a video published on Tuesday, June 30th, the initiators of the act—Dutch conservative commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek and Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner—said they had received a letter from the European Commission, warning them that the Save Europe Act appears to be “manifestly contrary” to the Charter...

In an interview with FOX News host Laura Ingraham, Vice President J.D. Vance said communism is the result of the Democratic Party being run by universities and professors. LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS: You've been following what's going on with the Democrat party and the rise of socialism. The president calls it communism and says this is this is really the biggest threat to the country now, an internal threat, and you've seen what happens when the base of the party, a party, turns on its establishment beginning with the Tea Party in 2009, ultimately resulting in President Trump's election twice....

Just a few years ago, wearing a sombrero on Halloween could get you banished from polite society for the social crime of “cultural appropriation.” Nutrition experts argued that preventing obesity was a form of racialized “fatphobia,” even as scientific names of songbirds were purged in a moral campaign presumably aimed at white supremacy. Meanwhile, a slew of studies and papers and articles argued that punctuality, excellence, and other forms of professionalism are “the systemic, institutionalized centering of whiteness.” Today, as universities are dismantling their DEI bureaucracies, corporations are scaling back antiracism training, and academic trigger warnings and diversity pledges have...

In the late nineties, my boss sent me to an HR training conference. As I entered the elevator up to the conference room, a middle-aged black man and I acknowledged each other with a nod and a smile. We rode up alone and in silence. One of the first hourlong presentations was on race relations, and the man I’d shared the elevator with was the speaker. To my openmouthed astonishment, he began by talking about me. He said he’d ridden the elevator that morning with a white man, and that I hadn’t spoken to him because he was black and...

A remarkable feature of governments in Europe is the extent to which they operate explicitly against the interest of their citizens and voters. They give an outward appearance of being democracies, and they hold regular elections, but somehow the people in power are a self-perpetuating political clique that, from all evidence, seems to hold the ordinary working people and voters in complete contempt. Prime examples of operating against the interests of the people include: opening the borders to millions of impoverished migrants who hate the host countries; and imposing a fantasy “energy transition” that drives up the cost of energy...

Night of the Long Knives, redux. It was this week back in 1934 that we experienced something called Night of the Long Knives: In Germany, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler orders a bloody purge of his own political party, assassinating hundreds of Nazis whom he believed had the potential to become political enemies in the future.Hitler didn’t do primaries, but his purges were basically the same thing. Let’s get rid of those who may become potential enemies or will get in the way of our ambition. They are no longer convenient, so let’s push them over. We hear that Hakeem Jeffries...

n his many articles for Tablet and other outlets, Jacob Siegel, a journalist and war veteran, has focused on how rulers and elites use digital tools to calibrate information and control people. His new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, traces the evolution—from 9/11 to the advent of AI—of a mammoth alliance between government and Big Tech that subverts our constitutional republic and enslaves Americans. According to Siegel, the foundation of the information state is a “whole-of-society” approach to governance that aligns “the most powerful institutions behind the dictates of the state.” Tech platforms, NGOs,...

Everyday life has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take. Two dangerous trends are coalescing in Germany: the deterioration of private life and the tyrannization of politics. The latter comes to light in the persecution of any political opinion marginally different from that of the government. Private life deteriorates under pressure from a stagnant economy with its withering welfare state. Unending tax hikes are coupled with the erosion and increasing unreliability of social benefits. There is another aspect of the regress of private life...

Film critics hate it, but it is resonating with the general public. Director Uwe Boll just released a movie that is ticking off all the right people. Called Citizen Vigilante, it is an unapologetic rejection of globalism, mass migration, Islamic conquest, and “woke” leftism. The movie bashes politicians, judges, NGOs, and law enforcement agencies that have bent over backwards to excuse inexcusable crimes committed by non-Western immigrants. It unequivocally demands a return to law and order. It urges viewers to seek justice. It threatens the continuing survival of any Western government that continues to allow outsiders to prey on its...