Free Republic

A trip through Canada suggests that the country has been impoverished by its punitive taxation. Canadians have a taxing problem. And so do their hockey teams. No Canadian team has won a Stanley Cup in the past 32 years. Yet a Florida team has been in the Stanley Cup Finals for six consecutive years. Florida: The State of Hockey! This is not purely coincidence. Professional athletes, like all others of a competitive nature, like winning. And they don’t like surrendering millions of their hard-earned dollars to the government. Canada at large — and most of its provinces — impose significant...

The Democrat (they're not democratic) party has sometimes been called “a criminal enterprise”. Baltimore native Isaiah L. Carter was once a conservative, but became a leftist over time. Last February he accused the Democrat party of “deception, corruption and political manipulation.” He wrote, This f***ing political party, the Democratic Party, have lied to us about everything. They’ve lied about being the party of the middle class. They’ve lied about being the party of peace. They’ve lied about being the party that wants to help poor people. [snip] This is a cadre of criminals and losers and spoiled children of affluent...

I had my own run-in with a Democrat politician who was acting in a way that no politician has acted before in America. Democrats suffering from severe cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) are now displaying another symptom: staging ill-conceived confrontations to get street cred with their antifa progressive base. Some recent headlines: - North Carolina state Rep. Julie von Haefen attended a “No Kings” protest and was photographed holding what appeared to be an effigy of the decapitated heads of Trump and his senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller. - U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver was charged in a three-count indictment...

To the media’s feigned horror, President Trump has called New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a “pure, true communist,” not to mention a “total nut job.” As shall be seen, Trump knows something about communists in government. Google AI’s program Gemini takes a more gentle approach than the president. “Mamdani describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist,’" Gemini assures us in its charmingly anodyne way. “He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.” While conceding that Mamdani promises “free city buses, free childcare, government-run grocery stores, and rent freezes,” Gemini’s “experts in political science “ insist these policies...

Our oldest daughter will be 29 in November. She has a wide circle of friends, most of whom are scattered across the country, so Facebook is how they stay in touch. Let’s just say her voting for Trump this last November hasn’t gone over well -- at all. And she’s having a very rough time of it. Really struggling. Partially because that’s how lefties do you, but also because she’s genuinely trying to understand them and, crucially, have herself be understood. She’s highly intelligent, extremely articulate, and very careful with her language, but she’s still getting what we old-timers would...

Prime Minister Donald Tusk does not back down. On June 1 his candidate for president Rafal Trzaskowski lost the vote to the Conservative Karol Nawrocki. Nobody doubted Nawrocki’s victory. Even the observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the election was “competitive and well-managed”. Nawrocki won, Trzaskowski lost. But Tusk is now trying to block Nawrocki taking office. He won’t back down. Tusk is pitching accusations of electoral fraud – no evidence, just accusations — at Nawrocki. The fight is getting dirty. Even during the election, Tusk was trying to sink Nawrocki, going as far as...

For most, July 1 is nothing more than just another rectangle on the calendar before a major holiday. In California, it has become a day of dread – the day gasoline prices jump because of another fuel tax hike in the state that already punishes its drivers with the highest prices in the nation. Lawmakers passed, and then Gov. Jerry Brown signed, Senate Bill 1 in 2017. Known as the Road Repair and Accountability Act, it was Sacramento’s promise that the state’s cracked, potholed, car-busting and outdated streets, highways and bridges would be fixed. All that had to be done...

Last week I invited readers to get a good laugh out of New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to avert impending energy disaster by green-lighting one nuclear power plant that optimistically might solve 5% of the problem when it is ready to operate in the 2050s. Now this week brings an even superior farce: A video clip has emerged of our settler-colonialist Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani calling for “seizing the means of production.” Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic primary has led researchers to dredge up a treasure trove of his old tweets and video clips, each one more...

As frustrating as many of the Supreme Court’s decisions have been of late, in the past week or two, they seem to have come to their senses. That they finally put a stop to the unconstitutional intervention, intrusion into the purview of the executive branch’s powers, and stopped those far-left activist judges from kneecapping the president (Trump vs. Casa). They also ruled that no state can allow the genital mutilation of minor children (US v. Skrmetti). That this issue got this far is a sad commentary on the state of our nation. And in a third victory, the Court ruled...

Since Zohran Mamdani won last week’s Democratic primary and put himself in pole position to become New York City’s next mayor, a fresh cohort of Gothamites seems to be eyeing the exit ramp toward the Sunshine State. This Floridian says: Sorry, we’re full. For more than five years now, Florida has been the top destination for fleeing northerners, émigrés seeking something more than milder weather and lower taxes. These new Floridians arrived to join a freedom movement led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, escaping the insane blue-state policies that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to a head. The newcomers — myself included...

Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Stacy Davis Gates recently said that “all children belong to” the union. Seriously. For real. According to the Daily Caller, Gates trashed President Trump for diminishing the power of teachers’ unions during a recent City Club Chicago event, going so far as to characterize Trump’s education agenda as a “re-litigation” of the Civil War. All while complaining about the failing state of Chicago schools. Gates told the crowd, “The children are always ours. Every single one of them, all over the globe.” Gates then mocked parents who might disagree by saying “CTU thinks your children...

Zohran Mamdani, the Marxist-Muslim tapped as the leading candidate to become New York City’s next mayor, does not believe in the police. Instead, he believes in social workers. The police, in turn, do not believe in being handcuffed in their duties and exposed to a high risk of death in a city that no longer allows them to do their jobs. If Mamdani wins, they’re saying, they walk. In the lead-up to the New York City Democrat mayoral primary, Mamdani was very clear about his desire to rid New York City of the troublesome plague of active policing. Instead, he...

As a Canadian friend told me after the church on Sunday, his compatriots up north need to start thinking about their country and less about hating Trump. It seems that the Canadian version of Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well up there. The latest involves President Trump stopping negotiations over a tax. Here is the story: President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States is immediately “terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada” in response to Ottawa’s decision to impose a digital services tax on American tech firms. Trump’s surprise announcement on Truth Social accused Canada of “copying...

The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has become a mirror of the dysfunction infecting the federal government. The parallels are striking. President Trump arrived on the political scene just in time to rescue America from what would have been a fatal decline. He is without doubt the premier statesman of the century so far. Also without doubt, one of the best female basketball players in sports is relative newcomer Caitlyn Clark. She is also the most maligned — both verbally and, astonishingly, physically, as in brutally assaulted on the court by competing players. These physical assaults are far beyond the...

As June comes to an end, so does the pagan festival of debauchery known as “Pride Month.” It has become an annual annoyance to find troupes of dancing gay men — usually semi-naked and engaging in various forms of erotic foreplay — overtaking public streets as the first warm days of summer return. It would be nice if the LGBTQ+ crowd — or “Alphabet people” to those without a special letter designation — could enjoy their civil rights without resorting to X-rated acts of exhibitionism in front of children and strangers. Alas, the celebration of sin seems to be “Pride...

For years, radical gender ideology appeared unstoppable. The media framed transgender identity as the next frontier of liberation. Pride Month drew enthusiastic endorsements from nearly every university, corporation, and school district. Dissenters were often marginalized, and the prevailing narrative allowed little room for debate. No longer. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the movement has begun to retreat. The Supreme Court recently upheld a Tennessee law banning medical transition procedures for minors. Many corporations have withdrawn support for this year’s Pride events. An ideology that once seemed culturally dominant has lost significant ground in public opinion. In retrospect,...

In an era when America’s enemies test our resolve and our own intelligence community may be leaking classified information, one thing remains clear — President Trump and his national security team are fighting back. Washington was rocked this week when a preliminary, unvetted Pentagon memo was leaked, suggesting U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities barely dented Tehran’s ambitions. But the so-called “intelligence” — drawn from a single day of post-strike reporting and lacking input from the CIA or NSA — has been decisively discredited. Now, as federal agents scour the corridors of power to find the whistleblower-turned-saboteur, the White House,...

What radicalized me? Oh gee I don’t know, maybe stories like this one? Per a report at Fox News, township officials in the unincorporated community of Cranbury, NJ are in the process of seizing a historic family farm that has been under the family’s ownership for 175 years—that means since 1850—because they want to use it for a welfare housing project. Benji Farraro reports that in April, Andy and Christopher Henry, the two brothers who currently own the farm, received a letter that informed them that Cranbury would be seizing all 21 acres, but government officials have now decided that...

At around 6 a.m. this morning, hundreds of people across Germany awoke to police officers at their door. Their only ‘crime’ is to have openly made critical or offensive comments on the internet, many about specific politicians. German police raiding right-wing Compact Magazine’s editor-in-chief’s home, Twitter This is not a scene from the Third Reich or the German Democratic Republic, but from the Federal Republic in the 21st Century. Officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) intend to make approximately 170 house visits today, to investigate ‘hateful’ or insulting comments made online. Suspects have had their tablets, laptops, and...

To most rational observers, the public antics of the Democrats appear counterproductive if they ever wish to emerge from the political wilderness. On all the most important issues, they champion wildly unpopular positions and employ asinine tactics that alienate most voters. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than when it comes to illegal immigration. In recent weeks, we have been subjected to absurd PR stunts by people like Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), who crashed a press conference being held by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and attempted to force his way past Secret Service while screaming at her....