Free Republic

During Trump’s first term, the Democrats had two major arrows in their quiver: The Russia Hoax and lawfare. When they weren’t falsely accusing him of being a Russian asset, they were using the courts to prevent him from acting. By doing so, they managed to hamstring almost all of his domestic actions. This time around, while the Russia Hoax is gone, we’re seeing lawfare on steroids, so much so that we can reasonably say that we’re living in a “kritarchy” (i.e., rule by judges). This is not what our Constitution intended. In just the last 24 hours, judges have held...

I wish I could remember who, but someone I recently corresponded with through American Thinker told me about a book called Bureaucratic Bombs by J.B. Morris, which detailed a collection of “true stories from America’s self-serving city”—so I immediately bought it and read it. The beginning of the book includes a number of quotes from media personalities, politicians, and federal workers, one of which was particularly striking, from Jay Leno: “Obama said if you are having trouble with the Obamacare website you can apply by mail. Only the federal government would develop a website that is slower than the mail.”...

A disturbing surge of swatting attacks has struck media personalities, conservative influencers, and me too. The FBI is investigating. FBI Director Kash Patel has said, “This isn’t about politics—weaponizing law enforcement against ANY American is not only morally reprehensible but also endangers lives, including those of our officers. That will not be tolerated.” “Swatting” is the crime of making calls to report fake emergencies in order to provoke armed police responses. The calls often claim a shooting, hostage situation, or bomb threat—to dispatch heavily armed police, typically SWAT teams, to a victim’s address. As federal and local authorities scramble to...

A State Department list of 898 approved government grants and contracts authorized by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) includes over $2.5 billion of authorized funding to organizations that have previously supported the charitable infrastructure of designated terrorist organizations. In March, the State Department provided a document to Congress listing some 5,341 awards terminated as part of the administration’s decimation of USAID, alongside 898 surviving grants. Surviving beneficiaries that have supported terrorist charitable infrastructure are set to receive, the Middle East Forum has found, a total of $2.5 billion across 103 awards [see Appendix], for projects that the USAID...

Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber. Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he’s “not considering any concessions” and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead. This isn’t Eisgruber’s first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd...

Music has always been political, so I wasn’t at all surprised by the, shall we say, expressiveness at this weekend’s Coachella festival. Nor was I surprised that the political sloganeering was aimed at denouncing the Jewish state—if you’re a band nobody’s ever heard of, and you don’t have the talent to change that with your music alone, you’ll be tempted to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon and hope it can pull you farther than you were able to go on your own. The band itself is obviously not important, but I couldn’t help but think of how strange it is...

And the corrupt press continues its sabotage campaign. It’s been three months since Vice President Vance cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary. The Deep State worked hard to scuttle Hegseth’s nomination in December and January with a steady drip of news stories calling his character into question, but President Trump and his trusted veep stood by their man and applied enough pressure on wayward Republican senators to secure his confirmation. Suddenly, corporate propagandists posing as reporters are back with fresh stories meant to undermine Secretary Hegseth and get him fired from the Pentagon’s top post....

There are more than enough activist judges willing to undertake the job of stopping every move Trump makes to fulfill his campaign promises to the voters. “Color revolutions are a political term used to describe turbulent political events: mass street protests and riots in order to achieve a revolutionary change of government. Some revolutionary upheavals are successful and some remain only attempts,” Eurasia Review writes. The Democrats sought and failed to take President Trump out via their many absurd legal challenges (aka lawfare). The two assassination attempts on his life failed. Now that he has been re-elected, they are using...

Even the most "normal" among them have no choice but to fall in line. The rage and hysteria are escalating. They’re openly calling for Trump’s assassination. They’re marching, they’re protesting, they’re screaming into the void for what, they don’t know. Something has been taken from them, something they desperately want back. It’s been ten long years of fighting, but nothing has worked. There is no way out for them. They’re trapped. If you talk to one of them, they will tell you they believe things that aren’t true. Trump is taking away Social Security and Medicaid. They’ve eliminated the National...

Suppose two presidents exercise the powers of the executive branch. One does so under an explicit statutory grant during a time of declared emergency. The other acts pursuant to administrative discretion in the face of record-breaking border incursions. Now suppose that federal judges enjoin both policies. What happens next? If the president is a Democrat, the Supreme Court stays the injunction. It instructs the lower courts to stay their hand, warning that questions of immigration policy lie chiefly with the political branches. It urges patience, careful deliberation, and above all, continuity of government operations while the matter is litigated. If...

Many Americans believe the Biden administration brought four of the worst years we have encountered in the past half century, if not longer, for the nation and the American spirit. The purpose of presenting here the most damaging actions of those four years is to recall how we allowed ourselves to go off the rails for that time, and the effects wrought, so as to not repeat them or anything similar in our future. These five failings are presented in the order of significance regarding harm to America: financial, psychological, and social effects. 1. COVID Mandates. Many books will be...

Thomas L. Friedman, famous New York Times editorialist, does not much like Trump’s plan for Gaza. A skilled wordsmith, he dismisses it, writing, “How short a distance it is between out-of-the-box thinking and out-of-your-mind thinking.” However, the former is correct. This plan is creative, unique, and incisive, and kills several “boids” (as we say in Brooklyn) with one rock. For one thing, it will safeguard Israel. Under an American Riviera on the Mediterranean, there will be no more rockets launched in an eastward direction; no more leaping out of tunnels (a new tourist attraction!) to unleash suicide bombers. For another,...

The Pennsylvania governor survived an anti-Semitic attack. Now he faces a choice: fold to his party’s radicals—or lead. Earlier this month, on the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, 38-year-old Cody Balmer firebombed the residence of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. A search warrant indicates that the attempted murder was driven by Balmer’s fury over what the Democratic state chief executive—America’s most identifiably Jewish governor—“wants to do to the Palestinian people.” Balmer is not merely an anti-Semite and would-be domestic terrorist. He was out on bail after assaulting his estranged wife and stomping on his ten-year-old son’s broken leg....

Democrats are still reeling from the debacle that was their 2024 election cycle, and still have not found a means to effectively fight back against President Donald Trump’s ambitious agenda. So, naturally, they have decided to dip into the past and find a hero, or more specifically, a martyr. Auditions are already happening. As we speak, the holy trinity of the supposedly oppressed that graces the altar of the progressive media ecosystem are alleged murderers Luigi Mangione and Karmelo Anthony as well as alleged MS-13 gang member and human trafficker in the country illegally, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. DEMOCRATS PRIORITIZING ILLEGAL...

I am chagrinned that it has taken me this long to understand the emptiness of Democrat dogma. I started realizing this some years ago when I began building curriculum for the college logic class I was going to teach; I was searching for debates that were won by left-leaning apologists, thinking I should present examples from both sides of the social/economic/religious worldviews. But I began to suspect that such examples weren’t to be found. I found people -- mostly men -- who could slide around from one logical fallacy to another with slippery skill, but none did any convincing. Then...

The last dignitary Pope Francis met in his mortal life was JD Vance, the U.S. vice president, Catholic convert, and critic of the pontiff’s liberal views on mass migration. There is something powerfully symbolic about that. The scene of the two men, separated by 48 years and scarcely more than a meter, stands for the passing of one kind of Catholicism, and the rise of another. When he became pope in 2013, progressive Catholics expressed hope for a “Francis effect” that would liberalize Catholic doctrine and practice, and draw back to the Church millions disaffected by what they regarded as...

PBS NEWSHOUR: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart join William Brangham to discuss the week in politics, including President Trump's continued faceoff with the courts, if Republicans will begin pushing back against the president and Harvard rejecting Trump's demands. David Brooks, New York Times: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. "The core argument is that Trump is really about amassing power," Brooks said of his column. "And anything that might potentially restrain his power, he will destroy. And that includes the court systems and anything part...

Professional sports are all about mom, apple pie and the flag, right? Baseball is our “national pastime,” football is our national religion, basketball is…well…marketing for athletic shoes? And hockey is an advertisement for restorative dentistry? Anyway, these leagues are supposed to be red, white and blue. Apart, that is, from some knee taking and refusing to stand for the National Anthem, buying into the whole “America is systemically racist” thing, supporting trans this and that, and OK, the Budweiser debacle, which is at least sort of associated with them. Sigh. Sports used to be so simple. Players were expected to...

The Democrats have staked their political fortunes on the issues that Americans dislike the most. The phrase “the hill you choose to die on” is an expression meaning a belief, opinion, or position that one is fiercely committed to defending, even when it is impractical or contrary to one’s long-term goals. It suggests a willingness to fight or resist to the point of losing, rather than pivoting, conceding, or compromising. In the political world, most players lack conviction or principles. They are swayed by the political winds, the latest opinion polls, or the size of the most recent campaign contributions...

I live near this event (The April 19th Reenactment of the encounter between Colonials and the British at the Old North Bridge) but had only gone to it once before many years ago, and it was rainy with no visibility of the event due to crowd size. I determined it wasn't worth going to again until this anniversary. I thought this would be something I should go to. In 1976, the 200 Year Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I had no opportunity to see any of it because I was an E2 Airman Apprentice doing Scullery Duty in the...