Free Republic

California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates. In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime. We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal...

President Donald Trump, probably more than any politician in recent memory, understands that the United States must be energy dominant with constant access to abundant, affordable, and reliable energy for myriad reasons. President Trump also understands that the only surefire way to ensure that the United States has uninterrupted ample energy on hand is by going all in on the only energy sources that can supply dependable power no matter the weather conditions or time of day. Under present circumstances, based on a recent Heartland Institute energy scorecard, “natural gas makes the most sense according to the affordable, reliable, and...

Fifteen years ago, a dark movie called We Need to Talk about Kevin told the story of a mother struggling to understand why her sociopathic teenaged son had gone on a murder spree at home and at school. In the same vein, we need to talk about Democrats. We should have had a national conversation about Democrat violence back in 2017, when an Illinois Democrat and Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to assassinate an entire baseball team of Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate. While the would-be assassin failed to murder anyone before being neutralized, he did manage to...

After spending months harping on the nation’s affordability “crisis,” Democrats have recently let slip that their real goal, if they get a majority in Congress, will be to impeach as many Trump administration officials as time allows over the next two years. They will market it as “holding the administration accountable,” but the goal is far more sinister – to purposefully cripple the administration, regardless of the danger it poses to the nation. In the past few days, articles in the Atlantic and MS NOW – two eminently reliable mouthpieces of the Democratic Party – said the party is considering...

The 50th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong has just passed. (He died on September 9, 1976.). I did not see large amounts of commentary about Mao on the occasion of the anniversary, but everything that I did see was either neutral or positive, with the majority being praise. And as I looked around for any commentary I could find from around the date of the anniversary, most of what I found is again praise. How could that be? This man was a monster. Certainly, the death toll for which Mao was responsible was a large multiple of anything...

What happens when Western liberals stop distinguishing between religious tolerance and political surrender? There was a time when “Never Forget” truly meant something in mainstream circles. Twenty-five years after September 11, in some corners of America and Western Europe, it has become worth asking exactly what we were supposed to remember. The obvious answer was the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered by Islamist terrorists in a brazen attack on the American way of life. But there has been another critical lesson buried in the rubble: Western civilization will not survive if it becomes so afraid of offending people that...

Oddly enough, Islamists and Marxists have much in common. They both look at anyone who isn't a member of their outsized cults as an “infidel.” And they both feel the urge to convert, enslave, or kill the non-believers. Oh, there is no doubt that, absent a rapid, thorough, and fundamental recovery of Western values, culture, sanity, and confidence, Islamist Muslims and Marxists will one day have a “reckoning” as they carve up the carcass of the erstwhile West. But for now, they share the desire to decapitate Western nations, their relatively free markets, and any remaining rights and freedoms their...

War fever is ramping up again across Europe. This has happened several times in the four and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine, usually coinciding with important national elections — particularly those in Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Poland, and Germany — when certain domestic political parties have been demonized as “pro-Putin” and “security threats” to the rest of Europe. The war drums also get loud whenever increased military budgets are being debated within the governments of the Scandinavian and Baltic states, Finland, Germany, and Poland, as well as the European Commission. The ebb and flow of political battle cries against...

In the wake of the Lindsay Clancy Verdict and the Sydney Sweeney Pile-On and the Sophie Cunningham Point-ology it is time for a comprehensive and mandatory discussion of the issue of Women in the Public Square. WARNING to my liberal lady friends: You may not feel “safe” if you read this article. You will certainly experience it as “unwelcome.” Experts agree that the issue was raised by German sociologist Georg Simmel over a century ago. I first wrote about it 18 years ago. Simmel argued that it was not centuries of oppression that powered the feminist movement, but the new...

America has become a giant money pot that half the world is looting for all sorts of exciting things. Like a coup in Haiti. Why not? We could use a break from all the stories of Somalis financing their political careers in Somalia using health care fraud. Let’s try something more exciting. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida today announced the successful transport of 18 defendants from Haiti to Miami to face newly unsealed federal charges related to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse on July 7, 2021. The special operation involved members of the Federal...

As the Trump administration steps up immigration enforcement actions, some Democrat-run localities are now simply giving cash payments to illegal aliens and their families – all funded by American taxpayers. This shocking new development has become just the latest example of liberal politicians putting illegal aliens who have no right to be in the country ahead of American citizens. In the most recent example, during a special September 2 meeting, the Arlington County Board in Arlington, Virginia, voted 4-0 to set aside $50,000 in taxpayer funds for families in which the primary wage earner has been detained by Immigration and...

As you might have expected from a Democratic senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy has come through for the American people. He has a plan to solve every last problem the country has by abrogating free speech and taking control of social media. At least that’s what he says in his book, Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. Just look at that title. Half the buzzwords ever spoken, right there. “Crisis” – everything is a crisis to the Murphys of the world. “Common good” – as far as I’ve ever been able...

After the lockdowns, what did the government teach me about government power? COVID changed the way I hear the word “temporary.” Before 2020, 'temporary' was temporary. Something happened, you dealt with it, and eventually you went back to living your life. Then came COVID. Most of us remember the rest. The empty streets. The closed businesses. The masks. The six-foot circles on the floor. Schools closed, churches restricted, nursing homes became nearly impossible to visit, and governments suddenly had an extraordinary amount to say about what ordinary Americans could and could not do. I don’t need to make a list...

A Montgomery County, Maryland, proposal to impose new requirements on publicly funded community media has sparked resistance from within the left. Brutus was a member of the Roman Senate’s “deep state.” Every faction spawns fanatics who, to their peril, see only the facts that justify their zealotry. For today, here and now, we are being reminded again that the Dem’s deep state is real, embraced by real people concentrated in real places. One of those places is Montgomery County, Maryland, MoCo, a suburb of Washington, DC. This post will connect the actions of little MoCo to the large deep state...

Good thing, Gov. Hochul is focused on stopping ICE from arresting them. New York’s Gov. Hochul just signed legislation protecting illegal alien criminals. Meanwhile some people keep mysteriously carrying out machete attacks. Here’s one that just happened in Long Island. A man accused of fatally attacking another man with a machete in Uniondale was arraigned Friday in Hempstead. Prosecutors allege that 35-year-old Jorge Alexander Huezo Villatoro struck 40-year-old Tadeo Alvarado-Chavez on the head and body with a machete and continued the attack after the victim collapsed to the ground. Prosecutors said the victim was left in a pool of blood....

pparently, women must now be accompanied by a male guardian to enter at least one retail outlet in Ontario, Canada. If Canadian women want to enter that shop, they must act like they are living under Sharia Law. If you must act like you’re living under Sharia law, you are effectively living under Sharia law.One would think this would send women’s libbers into paroxysms of anger, but this is not the case, because, you know, “Islamophobia.” Gotta be tolerant! Unless you are a Muslim. Also in The Great White North, anything that you say, post, blog, or infer, can —...

Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive. Consider these recent news headlines: (1) “NYC Turns Back to Gas Buses After Finding Out the Hard Way That the Electric Versions Have Big Problems,” (2) “As a Former Head of MI6 it’s Clear That Britain’s Climate Policy is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed to Our Enemies,” and (3) “Spain: 74% of sex-crime suspects are foreigners in Basque Country.” They come from three different Western nations and involve three dissimilar subjects — public transportation, national security, and violent crime — yet each news story exposes the real-world consequences...

Seattle has long been a hotbed of crime under Democrat rule, but things have gotten so bad recently that business leaders are publicly demanding change. Seattle has long been a hotbed of crime, open-air drug use, and other antisocial behaviors thanks to the city’s left-wing governance. But things have gotten shockingly worse in recent months following the election of socialist Mayor Katie Wilson last year – so bad, in fact, that major businesses are now publicly pressuring the government to do something about the city’s descent into lawlessness and chaos. On September 10, more than 30 major Seattle companies, including...

The fabled "diploma divide" reveals a darker truth about a pervasive belief in a "right to rule" among Democrat elites. The commentariat has made much lately of the fabled “diploma divide” in our politics and the propensity of “highly educated” voters to cast their ballots for Democrats. Their fascination with this statistic reveals a belief that the modern conservative movement – “America First,” “MAGA,” whatever you want to call it – is little more than a peasants’ revolt against the so-called elites who now dominate most of our institutions. Democrats have never been particularly good at masking their disdain for...

What should become of New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle when their socialist experiments blow up? Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s calling out a property owner in New York City, Attorney General James of New York attacking President Trump in a decision that was overturned in 2025, Elon Musk’s Delaware pay package ruling subsequently overruled by shareholders — all have something in common: Attack capital, and do not be shocked by the flight of capital from your communities or states. New York City, Seattle, and Los Angeles are just a few of the cities experimenting with the Democratic Socialists of America agenda,...