Free Republic

Though it didn’t work as well for the Democrats as it did for Hitler. Hitler was originally democratically elected — not by a majority, but rather by a plurality, as allowed by the Weimar Republic’s constitution. It was a turning point for all of world history. The Nazis, being ambitious tyrants, leapt at any possible opportunity to expand their grip on Germany. So, on February 27, 1933 — just four weeks after Hitler was sworn in as chancellor — the fire that struck the German parliament building was at least partially blamed on Bolshevik agitators. Sound familiar? Germany’s then-president, Paul...

How Progressives Were Able to Rule the Western Nations: Good Intentions, Bad ResultsBy The HermitThe story of the West in the last hundred years is not one of a secret cabal or a single mastermind. It is the story of an idea — progressive ideology — that promised to perfect society through reason, science, and planning. It appealed to the best intentions of reformers, philanthropists, teachers, and politicians. Yet, like many noble experiments, it has produced results far different from what its advocates hoped. What began as a movement to uplift and modernize has ended by weakening the civic and...

Participants of the “Revolutionary 1st of May Demonstration” light flares and wave flags of the left-wing Antifa movement during May Day events on May 1, 2018 in Berlin. John MacDougall / AFPIt remains to be seen who is responsible for the arson attacks on a van and threats to Munich’s famous Oktoberfest on October 1st. Police are currently treating a claim of responsibility posted on the left-wing extremist platform Indymedia as either a fake or plagiarism. But regardless of the investigation’s outcome, Germany faces a massive problem with ideologically motivated left-wing extremist violence—one that politicians and media have been reluctant...

Harvard University has recently hired a visiting professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality department whose alter ego is a drag queen who goes by the name of “LaWhore Vagistan.” The department announced in July it is bringing on Kareem Khubchandani to teach classes on “Queer Ethnography” and “RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire.” Khubchandani has an extensive career in drag queen performance and is committed to bringing “the nightclub to the classroom, and vice versa, teaching critical race, postcolonial, and gender theory through lipsync and lecture.” “I am an educator, scholar, and performer invested in feminist, queer, and trans everyday-aesthetics,...

Late Friday afternoon (September 26) the U.S. Justice Department filed an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The indictment is extremely brief — barely one page of text — and focuses only on a single statement made by Comey in sworn Congressional testimony given on September 30, 2020, which statement is alleged in the indictment to be false. For a few reasons, I’m not going to comment here on the strength or weakness of the indictment. First, the indictment does not allege the related facts that go to whether...

It wasn't long ago when the party anxious to avoid piling on more debt (Republicans) would capitulate to additional spending when shutdowns loomed. Democrats ran an extortion racket: acquiesce to more spending or we’ll close the government and blame Republicans. 2025 began with DOGE slashing government spending. Democrats then rushed to the courts seeking injunctions. That was then. With their government shutdown push, Democrats just ran a bus over their base. Because you-know-who resides rent-free in their heads, they’ve concluded a government shutdown sounds great. Because Republicans cut funding to the Democrats’ favorite programs, Democrats’ brain trust now grants OMB...

What have we learned from the Democrats’ tumultuous history? Power is what they prize. Acquiring it, retaining it, and controlling others through its exercise is what they live for. Some things never change. Last Saturday, Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior Democrat U.S. senator, made a ballsy -- if unintended -- declaration in a X post. Wyden proclaimed: “My message to Donald Trump is this: we don’t need you here. Stay the hell out of our city.” My, my, are we hearing echoes of John C. Calhoun’s fiery declarations in the runup to the Civil War? The senator’s words smack of States’...

If violence can be cloaked in the language of ‘justice,’ then terrorism is transformed into activism. Assata Shakur died Thursday. If you read The New York Times’ headline, you’d think Shakur was convicted for being a “revolutionary” and had to flee to Cuba. USA Today headlined their piece, “Assata Shakur, Tupac’s godmother who sought political asylum in Cuba, dead at 78.” Rolling Stone wrote she was a “Convicted Black Liberationist and Tupac’s Godmother.” Harper’s Bazaar wrote: “Assata Shakur, Legendary Revolutionary and Black Liberation Army Member, Has Died.” But you wouldn’t necessarily glean from any of those headlines the actual truth...

For a decade, conservative voices were erased by tech giants—yet the media now pretends censorship began only when comedians faced suspension. For every conservative in America who is delighted that at least some of the purveyors of hate speech and misinformation on the woke left are at last being held accountable, there is another who still adheres to the ideals of free speech. As UFC CEO Dana White recently said on 60 Minutes, “Probably the most important speech to protect is hate speech.” That diversity of opinion never surfaced among the left, however, over the nearly ten years during which...

At Quantico, Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump delivered a blunt message to America’s generals: the age of political correctness is over, and uncompromising readiness is now the standard. When Secretary Pete Hegseth strode to the podium at Quantico and declared, “Welcome to the War Department,” he did more than rename an institution. He called for a reckoning. Hegseth’s speech was direct and unsparing. “The era of politically correct, overly sensitive don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now.” He pledged to “clear out the debris, remove distractions, [and] clear the way for leaders to be leaders… You might say, we’re ending...

The UN is a sanctuary for third rate-staffers and pseudo-intellectuals from around the world on the lam from reality. In his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Donald Trump claimed that “the UN has such tremendous potential” but was not using it. What did this mean? The UN officially is a member’s organization, a meeting place for diplomacy. Did Trump want to go beyond this and see a UN as a powerful organization operating on its own? The UN has grown into a massive bureaucracy, with over 130,000 people. Secretary-General António Guterres speaks for the UN...

In their perverse pursuit of power, leftist politicians are daily signing the death warrant for the next political assassination. It’s now a matter of when, not if. You can’t relentlessly call your political enemies “Nazis”, “fascists,” and “tyrants” without giving license to homicidal leftists to do what they do best: Attack their perceived existential threats. Just ask the family and friends of Christian evangelizer and conservative icon Charlie Kirk. Or President Donald Trump, who is intimately familiar with what the unhinged left is capable of. American politics is a tinder box right now, and leftists like California Gov. Gavin Newsom...

When the newly-formed Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, April 1861, they ignited the Civil War. They, at least, had a clearcut goal: to maintain an economy (and society) based on slavery. It was patently evil, but it was firmly established and it was their engine for daily life, and they didn’t want it to end. When Charlie Kirk was murdered in 2025, Civil War 2.0 kicked off. The enemy this time are not Confederates with a coherent command structure and a goal. They are an army of nihilists like the gang in The Big Lebowski, who, for one...

Ironically, by labeling Trump’s actions as “revenge”, Mr. Comey unintentionally indicts himself. Last week a Grand Jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional hearing. Comey, unsurprisingly, claimed innocence and insisted the charges against him were nothing more than Donald Trump taking “revenge.” Many other Democrats have said the same: Trump is out for revenge! It’s an old refrain. Democrats have been accusing Donald Trump of seeking revenge since he was re-elected. For example, November 6th, 2024, the day after the election, Susan Glasser wrote “Donald Trump’s Revenge” in the New...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s flirtation with a presidential run is the latest warning sign of just how far the Democratic Party’s leadership has careened off the rails. After crushing defeats in the latest election, moderate Democrats have failed to take matters into their own hands, continuing to kneel to the strength of the far-left wing of their party who champion socialism, divisive class warfare, and pipe dreams that seem to have come straight out of fairytales. While there haven’t yet been any formal statements from the democratic socialist congresswoman, reports based on individuals familiar with her operations have confirmed that her...

Many thanks to the irreplaceable Julie Kelly for reading Kamala Harris’s new memoir, 107 Days, and posting relevant sections. The section most relevant to Kelly and the folks at Revolver News, who helped break this story, deals with the legendary pipe bombs found on January 6, 2021, near the RNC headquarters in Washington and just outside the DNC HQ. The bottom line: Harris still can’t get her story straight about her activities on January 6, and her lies have been costly for J6ers. In the way of background, for nearly a year after January 6 prosecutors were telling J6 judges...

The GOP is ascendant, but conservatives must guard against leftist drift, anti-Semitism, and socialism to preserve America’s family, faith, and freedom. The Republican Party is finally winning, and the Conservative movement is enjoying real power and cultural resurgence. The Democratic Party is on life support, and a couple of special elections in deep-red states cannot change its larger decline. They are polling very weak numbers, and the leadership looks like feckless puppets more interested in performance art or political theater than in actual governance. They have no solutions, only complaints. The monomaniacal Democratic strategy of “Orange Man Bad” has harmed...

or years, we were told by government officials and outside “experts” that the terrorists in our midst were mostly right-wing fanatics – a list that under the Biden administration came to include parents who spoke up at local school board meetings and Catholics who like the Latin mass. But even the left is now admitting what everyone else already knows. Namely, that despite their constant bleating about tolerance and peace, it’s leftists who pose the greatest threat to Americans. This week, the Trump-hating Atlantic magazine published an article titled “Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise,” written by scholars at the...

Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger · We need digital IDs to halt migration, increase efficiency, & safeguard data, they say. But border control does not require digital IDs and centralizing data is a hacker's dream. The real reason they want digital ID is for billions in fees and the control of our behavior. Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger Everybody needs a digital ID, say heads of state and high-tech leaders. They give many reasons: it will stop illegal migration; it will increase efficiency; it will protect privacy; and it will prevent online fraud and data ransoming. But we don’t need digital IDs for any...

It may be impossible to reconcile a nation so divided about basic truths. How does America survive when its citizens belong to two divided camps that believe fundamentally incompatible things? Over the last century, there has been a trend to establish “truth and reconciliation commissions” in countries emerging from periods of political terrorism, totalitarianism, or civil war. The idea is to acknowledge the crimes and atrocities that past governments officially sanctioned and to recognize the harms inflicted upon their victims. As is often the case when governments “disappear” citizens or throw them in gulags for their politically incorrect thoughts, it...