Free Republic

What does one do with useful grifters who’ve lost their utility? The Democrats Frankenize them. It’s like ostracizing without the pomp and ceremony. If you’re unfamiliar with the process, you can watch it play out on the Clintons over the next few months. Frankenizing became a thing during the good ol’ days of “me too.” It was an era of national insanity, in which every Hollywood starlet wannabe with two X chromosomes insisted she was a victim of toxic masculinity after taking her clothes off to land a part. The Dems demanded that we believe every woman’s tale of harassment,...

The self-destruction of Britain: New Labour’s quiet revolution, deep state resistance to democracy, and transethnic buildup to civil war. The British historian David Starkey has long maintained that Tony Blair’s assumption of power in 1997 marked an all-encompassing upheaval of British society. Nothing, he argues, is the same as before. The old Britain has been uprooted; its legal system and top management have been comprehensively remade. Where once a relatively homogeneous nation allowed its citizens to “govern themselves,” in Starkey’s memorable phrase, today they stand profoundly alienated from their government, police, and courts. SNIP Eight governments in a row have...

Bad Bunny’s Superbowl House Party. . . So Long, Been Good to Know Ya! It’s all backstage now. This fraught moment, the power centers locked in the coldest cold of the year, the Spanish language lessons of Bad Bunny behind us, all the real action in the battle to save the country is out of sight, moiling and churning in the deep background. Everybody’s on edge waiting for shoes to drop, praying they don’t drop on their heads. You should have seen Senator Mark Warner (D-VA; Vice-chair of the Senate Intel Committee) on Face the Nation Sunday, frothing at the...

Could Democrats and the media tell us their plan to get rid of the 10 million illegal immigrants President Biden let in? Because I’m getting the sense that they don’t have one. In fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t want anyone deported, ever, for any reason. Notwithstanding the obligatory throat-clearing, of course, I support a secure border, their behavior proves they don’t. The Biden administration did everything in its power to get more than 10 million “Undocumented Persons” to come here—setting up an app so illegal immigrants could actually schedule their illegal crossings, then rewarding them at the border...

“But let’s not miss the fact that we have coordinated, well-funded, and I think insurgencies or terrorist organizations, however you want to call it, literally trying to prevent legal laws from being enforced in the United States.”U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott testifying before Congress on February 10, 2026. The man speaks truth.The mainstream media continues to push the narrative that all we are seeing are “peaceful protests”. Most conservative commentators remain content to ridicule participants in the ongoing anti – ICE actions around the country and dismiss them with derogatory comments and sarcasm. No one, it...

This week’s major developments include a number of secondary explosions: government bureaucrats who censored free speech on internet platforms using NGOs as covers will be facing court action; the fallout from the boomeranging Epstein disclosures keep damaging the Democrats and their foreign allies; the media’s promotion of the moronic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only served to highlight that she is ill-informed and too lazy to prepare for interviews; and DOGE and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent are making it very hard to keep hiding Democrat corruption. Censors Face the MusicThe CCDH (Center for Countering Digital Hate) is an NGO headed by...

SPECIAL SERIES: Religious Liberty Around The World. In deteriorating health and 78 years old, Jimmy Lai is not likely to survive the 20-year prison sentence that Hong Kong’s kangaroo court handed him on Jan. 9. The Chinese Communist Party has ensured that the voice of this prominent media mogul and ardent defender of democracy will never be publicly heard from again, on anything. It accomplished this by distorting the territory’s formerly celebrated judicial system and rule of law. Over a thousand democracy defenders have been imprisoned since Hong Kong’s draconian national security law was imposed in 2020 and, as a...

Super Bowl halftime has devolved into a stale Roman bacchanal—gaudy, raunchy, and empty—leaving millions bored, alienated, and wondering who the spectacle is even for anymore. In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows: mediocre music veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets. As seen again this year, the usual array of supporting dancers twerk and simulate intercourse, in sync with the main singer, mindlessly grabbing his/her genitals—apparently to highlight the explicit sexual allusions of mostly nonsensical lyrics. For some strange reason, this Roman orgiastic ritual is supposedly...

I often make fun of the liberal mindset that prescribes that all the personal problems of people in our society can and must be solved by government taxing and spending and the creation of more and more “programs” of one sort and another. As I write on my “About” page: The central tenet of [the Manhattan] orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending. The obvious corollary is that since all problems can be solved by taxing and spending, therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and...

Annually and increasingly, tens of thousands of people are leaving blue states because of politics. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall the 1961 Berlin crisis. I recall it subsequently, when schools taught real history. That crisis happened during the Cold War’s peak years. In brief, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev wanted the U.S. out of West Berlin. There were multiple reasons, but, chiefly, access to West Berlin allowed East Germans to escape communist rule. According to the National Archives, by 1961, as many as four million Germans had escaped East Germany using West Berlin. With tensions rising, and the hemorrhaging increasing,...

Immediately ahead of tomorrow’s EU summit, French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for the introduction of Eurobonds. Collective debt financing would be the final salvo in the march of Brussels’ central planners.As the 27 EU heads of government convene today with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the stakes are high from a fiscal perspective. A decisive item on the agenda at Belgium’s Alden Biesen Castle is the so-called Draghi Plan. The question hovering above it all is as simple as it is explosive: How can the obvious productivity and growth weakness of the Eurozone economy be overcome? For...

Foreign-born Rep. Shri Thanedar openly threatened to prosecute his political enemies this week — a reminder of what Democrats plan to do if they get power back. During a committee hearing Tuesday, Thanedar — struggling to speak English — threatened to prosecute Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott when President Donald Trump is out of office. “You better hope you get pardoned because you will be held accountable for the absolute disregard of the law your agencies have shown over the past year,” Thanedar threatened. “Your agencies have lost the trust of the American people, with millions taking to...

How stupid and offensive was the the Super Bowl halftime show? Here’s a game that has evolved over the decades to become an unofficial American holiday and long shared a patriotic spirit similar to that felt during Fourth of July celebrations. It has created and sustained tremendous brand value for the National Football League. But rather than protect that investment, Roger Goodell and the NFL lit it on fire for laughs. Or to make a political statement… I guess. Because it’s pretty difficult to ignore the intended message of “entertainers” singing in a foreign language, waving foreign flags, and simulating...

EU Europe is increasingly abandoning a civilized approach to dissenting opinions. The raid on the Paris offices of Elon Musk’s company X appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Today, those who resist are being attacked on multiple levels, while those who submit are largely spared. It is time to increase pressure on Brussels. Elon Musk’s communications platform X has become caught between systemic fronts. On one side stands the American understanding of free speech, which has experienced a political revival under Donald Trump’s new presidency. On the other, an increasingly repressive EU control regime is eroding the...

As the United States advances toward the 2030 Census, a structural political realignment is quietly but relentlessly taking shape. It is not being driven by campaign slogans or cable news theatrics, but by population movement, economic performance, and policy outcomes that are increasingly difficult to ignore. Together, these forces are placing Democrats on the brink of a profound loss of electoral power in the 2030s, one that could permanently reshape the national political map. Fresh population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau have been analyzed by redistricting experts. The facts indicate a clear and persistent migration away from Democrat strongholds,...

Oh, the horror! The sheer, unmitigated brutality! Vice President JD Vance's motorcade descended upon the Winter Olympics in Milan like a fleet of rogue armored personnel carriers, "wreaking havoc" in ways that would make even the most dramatic speed skating wipe-out look tame. At least, that's the breathless hysterical narrative spun by the Daily Beast in its latest masterpiece of journalistic gymnastics, headlined "Vance's Clunky Motorcade Wreaks Havoc at Winter Olympics." Penned by the intrepid "Breaking News Reporter" Vic Verbalaitis, this exposé reveals the true villain of the 2026 Games: not doping scandals or judging controversies, but a convoy of...

Americans were forced to sit through one of their biggest cultural events of the year in a language that is not theirs, surrounded by symbols of other, foreign places. The Super Bowl is supposed to be one of the cultural cornerstones in American life that still belongs to Americans. There are only a handful of days each year when most of the country pauses and gathers around the same screen to participate in something recognizably ours. It’s a shared experience — rooted in common language and culture and tradition. Which is why the Super Bowl half time show this year...

For the Democrats, it’s been a short, slippery slope from demanding Trump’s impeachment to likening him, ICE, and all Republicans to Nazis. Trump “is impeached forever,” declared Nancy Pelosi, voicing an accidental truth after Democrats impeached Trump for his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. What Ms. Pelosi meant to say was that it did not matter whether Trump was or was not convicted, or even if the charges against him had merit. She had left her mark. The stain of impeachment would last forever. That’s what Speaker Nancy Pelosi meant. She laughed and smiled as she asserted that it...

The violence and size of the anti-ICE riots in Minnesota took federal officials by surprise. But maybe they shouldn’t be shocked. As it turns out, and as is often the case when it comes to far-left demonstrations, outside money, organizations and foreign influence are firing the revolt. As Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche this week told “The Ingraham Angle,” investigators discovered a “massive fraud going on all through Minneapolis, all through Minnesota, and suddenly it turned. It turned almost on a dime, and it became suddenly all about ICE, all about getting ICE out and how horrible ICE was...

Another sterling week for the Trump administration, another interval of agony for his opponents. The attention of those less politically minded is focused on the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy -- always fodder for the would-be Colombos and Miss Marples -- and the Olympics. Yet this week saw some victories for the administration along with some serious unfinished business. The ousted dictator Nicolás Maduro seems isolated, depressed, and devoid of funds sufficient to hire teams of lawyers to defend him. Any claims he might have for immunity seem destined to fail. The evidence establishes he was born in Colombia;...