Free Republic

No, we don’t want Canada as a 51st state; yes, we want to trade with you; and yes, your Prime Minister is on a crazed personal vendetta that could destroy you. Have you tried listening to Canadian podcasts? Once in a while, I do, and we can conclude that Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well north of the border. It’s comical, but it sadly represents what they are thinking up there. The problem is that the Canadian political class is barking up the wrong trees. I agree that President Trump took the “51st state” joke too far, but the...

Former-banker-turned-tiny-French-President Emmanuel Macron blasted what he called “American free speech” while speaking to reporters last week. Defending the European Union’s robust censorship policies, le petit fromage insisted that Europe’s speech-policing Digital Services Act should censor information that governments consider false “much more extensively, much faster, and much more forcefully.” Macron then did his Orwellian best to condemn free speech as oppression and praise censorship as liberation: “So-called American ‘free speech’—at least as it exists today and has been promoted by some people—is the opposite of free speech.” The terribly disliked French leader continued, “My freedom cannot mean that I am...

When political opponents become existential threats, violence can begin to look like virtue. America traditionally has had a rather simple method for dealing with politicians we don’t like. We vote against them. We argue, campaign, write letters, give speeches, hold rallies, donate money, put obnoxious signs in our yards, and ultimately go to the ballot box. What we don’t do is shoot them. Or at least that used to be the understanding. Some disturbing new polling suggests that boundary is eroding. The Overton Window on political disagreement is shifting. University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, director of the Chicago...

Conservatives have yet to build the institutions, infrastructure, and legal capacity needed to counter lawfare before it destroys more lives. Lawfare grows more dangerous with every operation. This week’s disclosures about Jack Smith’s operation show how far that machinery reached. We already knew about Smith’s sweeping indictments of President Trump on flimsy charges and many of the operation’s other abuses, including the secret seizure of phone records from Republican lawmakers, the review of text messages involving 44 members of Congress, and subpoenas seeking records on at least 430 Republican individuals and entities. This week, we also found out that...

To judge from many of the comments on this site, a substantial number of readers have difficulty understanding the sophisticated modes of thinking of the New York progressive. Looking at New York’s official progressive orthodoxy in action, these readers often see illogic and inconsistencies that seem to make no sense at all. And yet, despite the apparent internal contradictions, the New York progressives themselves generally achieve near or even complete unanimity as to many of the important policies that they seek to implement. How does this work? We need to take a deeper look. So I thought for today it...

So here we are, with diesel at $6 a gallon. Listening to the political conversation, you could easily come away thinking this all started when Iran went to war. In fact, it didn’t. Iran supplied the shock, but we had already built the vulnerability, which is a key distinction. Yes, the war in the Middle East has disrupted oil flows and tightened global supplies. The Energy Information Administration says that tight global distillate supplies and elevated crude prices are pushing diesel prices higher. U.S. distillate inventories have fallen below their five-year range, while the loss of significant refining and petroleum-product...

How the British people gave up their own country, their future, and the narrative of their past. The Thames and the Tower of London (Samuel Scott, 1771). With intellectual clarity and courage, Soviet-born British podcaster Konstantin Kisin has challenged the common claim that Britain has always experienced high-volume immigration and is inherently a “nation of immigrants.” He notes that the post-1066 Norman conquest added only 5,000–10,000 individuals from mainland Europe to the ruling class—a number that pales, both numerically and proportionally, next to modern net migration figures running in the hundreds of thousands annually. The unprecedented transformation of Britain’s demographic...

The midterms are about more than Trump, Iran, and the price of gas. They reflect an ideological shift among Democrats that could permanently change America’s trajectory. So, you’re thinking about sitting out the midterms. Or you might just vote Democrat to protest. The Iran war has dragged on too long, you say. Months rather than weeks hardly make it Vietnam, though. Casualties are minor. Consider: Iran with nuclear weapons would be an uber-terror state. It would pose a 24/7 threat to U.S. security. Victor Davis Hanson is right: Breaking Iran is a gift, yet hard to appreciate now. Higher gas,...

Muslim communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani officially receivd his federal security clearance this week. It’s unthinkable that such a stone-cold national security threat would be given access to classified intel when he has deep doumented terrorist ties and has deeper allegiances with our enemies than America herself. This is sheer suicidal insanity. It’s official… America has lost her ever-loving mind. It’s unfathomable, but Muslim communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has officially been granted a federal security clearance, giving the Jihadist a green light to spread his venom even further. Mamdani is an apocalyptic Twelver, has met...

You know the mantra: Human caused climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, causes an increase in the frequency and severity of major storms, like hurricanes. When major hurricanes come along, as they regularly do, the promoters of this mantra immediately claim an ability to “attribute” the storm and/or its intensity to the ongoing human-caused warming. For example, last October we had Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 storm that struck Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. As soon as Melissa had passed, an organization calling itself World Weather Attribution promptly came out with an...

There are more charges than ever, but once again, it’s really for daring to stand against the Left. Well, this isn’t going to go anywhere, at least unless the Democrats win a big victory in November, but Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) is (mercifully) on his way out of Congress, and apparently this is his bid for immortality. Just like the New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who miraculously transformed an arguable misdemeanor into 34 felonies in order to give the left a weapon against Donald Trump, Cohen has now shown an impressive talent for making mountains out of molehills,...

Commie Canada and the dis-United Kingdom should be renamed the “Dumb and Dumber” of the British Commonwealth. King Charles III’s North American prime minister, Mark Carney, ran to The New York Times last week to talk about his military combat preparations against the United States in the event that President Trump crosses Lake America and liberates Canada from its delusional leaders. What a showboating dunce. The U.S. singlehandedly sustains Canada’s economy and national security, yet the tiny central banker huffed and puffed in a hilariously Napoleonic display of fake strength. In the same interview with the failing Times, Con-man Carney...

New York City has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country among large cities, and maybe even the most expensive by some measures. By contrast to most other parts of the country, the majority of housing units here are rented rather than owner-occupied. Latest data from Zillow.com gives a city-wide average rent (across all apartment sizes and types) of $3650. In Manhattan, according to this New York Post piece from August 12 (citing data from the Corcoran brokerage firm) the average rent has hit $6,655 per month. According to the politicians in power, the reason for these...

Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon raised more than $270,000 in tax-exempt funds in 2024 through a charity she said would support Cafe Resistance, her black power-themed bookstore and coffee shop. But Nixon ultimately placed the store under her for-profit LLC, failed to file the IRS disclosure that would detail how the charity spent its money, and reported to the state of Florida that $214,000 went toward unexplained “other” expenses, the Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr and Thomas Catenacci report. The missing Form 990 was due in November 2025 and would have provided a thorough accounting of the charity’s spending and...

The concept of “counter-revolution” has always carried an ambiguous charge. It denotes, at its core, organized resistance to the acceleration of utopian ideology inasmuch as this menace begins to devour the concrete order of ordinary life. Unlike nostalgia for a golden age, counter-revolution is the recognition that certain political experiments, once they pass a threshold of abstract purity, become engines of tyranny. The French 1790s offer the paradigmatic case. The Federalist revolts of 1793 and the far more ferocious War in the Vendée reveal two distinct modes of resistance to Jacobin radicalism. One was republican and decentralizing; the other was...

One of President Donald Trump’s major focuses has been rooting out fraud across taxpayer-funded public services. Through their White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, Co-chairs Vice President JD Vance and Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson have touted unprecedented efforts to expose and crack down on massive instances of fraud since February 2026. Yet, despite the national implications and scope of Trump, Vance and Ferguson’s campaign against fraud, Google News implemented a months-long blackout of coverage of their key actions and accomplishments in its morning feed. Put into practice, the blackout means that millions of active Google News users...

The justice’s dissent over the SAVE voter-verification system continues her increasingly public dispute with the Court’s majority. The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may use the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database for voter-verification purposes. Pursuant to an executive order issued by President Trump last March, about half of the nation’s 50 states have been accessing the database to assure that their voter rolls contain only American citizens living within their jurisdictions. In June, however, Biden-appointed District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that it was unconstitutional for the DHS to share the database...

t seems that the Democrats have already settled on a candidate for the ’28 presidential contest. It’s always a good idea to get ahead of the game, to make your arrangements early so as to guarantee a smooth, simple process and to ensure that all the pressure is on the opposition. At least that’s what you might think until you realize that the candidate is… Kamala Harris. This is one of those things that causes you to stare off into space and consider whether you’ve slipped through a transdimensional portal and ended up in an alternate timeline where humans evolved...

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has stopped pretending his socialist vision is just a local experiment.On CNN International’s Amanpour, the Democratic Socialist was asked whether America is ready to elect people on the hard left — and whether the 2026 midterms will be a referendum not only on President Trump, but on the Democratic Socialists of America. “I think this will absolutely translate on a national level,” Mamdani said. Amanpour noted that other Democrats still believe national races reward moderates, and that local energy is one thing, but winning the country is another. Mamdani answered by recasting New York’s...

In 1974, Simon Leys published ‘Chinese Shadows’ under a pseudonym to protect himself from pro-Maoist intellectuals. The book describes habits of mind that are now alive and well in America. Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated. With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado. Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of...