Free Republic

In the summer of 2021, as the fight over Harvard’s admission practices moved toward the Supreme Court, a peculiar new term began surfacing in op-eds, DEI training decks, and cable news panels: “white adjacent.” The phrase sounded almost clinical, like a term of art borrowed from sociology. In practice, it did something far more consequential: it gave the progressive racial justice apparatus a way to explain away an inconvenient fact. Asian Americans, by nearly every measure of educational and economic development, were outperforming the racial group that critical race theory holds up as the chief beneficiary of American structural power—in...

America is surging ahead while Canada stagnates, and that growing asymmetry—not trade alone—is driving the acrimony between two longtime allies. At first glance, the current American-Canadian trade “war” is absurd. We are neighbors with a long history of close friendship, speak the same language (for the most part), and spring from the same British civilization. Nearly one million Canadians reside in the United States. Given the two countries’ natural affinities, Canadians are nearly indistinguishable from Americans. Both sides have reasonable grievances over trade policy. Americans don’t like Canada’s perennial trade surpluses of more than $50 billion in a supposedly free-trade...

Although it is a day most Americans fail to remember to celebrate for its historical importance, this September 17th will mark the 239th anniversary of the signing of our Constitution. Unappreciated, particularly at a time liberals consistently trumpet an anti-American tune, is the fact ours is “the oldest single, codified framework for a national government still in operation.” Meanwhile, California—the Democrats of which are probably the least appreciative of the freedoms the Constitution guarantees us—has passed a bill that will add two more holidays to be recognized there. The bill passed the state house and awaits passage by the state...

There was a time when buying a light bulb did not require government permission. Customer demand dictated market choices. You walked into a store, examined the alternatives, considered price and quality, and bought the one you wanted. The manufacturer wanted to sell it. The merchant wanted to stock it. You wanted to buy it. Three voluntary parties agreed; nobody else’s rights were violated, and that was the end of the matter. But that arrangement is incompatible with the agenda of California’s overlords. Today, while shopping online, Californians routinely encounter a disturbing message: “This item cannot be shipped to your location.”...

It was once so toxic to be called a “socialist” that newly minted President Obama called The New York Times to protest that he wasn’t one. Now? House Democrats just voted overwhelmingly against a resolution condemning it. The following quote is widely attributed to Norman Thomas, who was the “the Socialist Party of America’s candidate for president in six consecutive elections between 1928 and 1948.” And while there is some doubt (according to lefty academics) as to whether or not he said these exact words in this exact order, there is no doubt that the sentiment was his: The American...

The Minnesota Maniacs take on the Texas Crime-Killers over a jailed ICE agent, and just look at who's running Minnesota. The cage match between Minnesota's really-far-left Attorney General Keith Ellison and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott just got a bit more intense after Ellison accused Abbott of turning the Lone Star State into a "sanctuary state for violent criminals” after an ICE agent charged in the non-fatal shooting of a man in Minneapolis was released from a Texas jail. According to Politico, which ran this piece on Aug. 26: A federal judge Wednesday evening denied Minnesota’s bid to force Texas Gov....

A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jonathan Turley devoted one of his columns to this seeming anomaly — that the Left somehow gains from its own failures. The headline of his column was “The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.” The theme of the piece is that the failure of a policy of the Left is never admitted to be a failure, but rather is only seen as a reason that the taxpayers haven’t yet devoted sufficient resources to the issue, and therefore the answer is to double down and...

Rising interest rates, record insolvencies, and permanent recession -- the looming economic crisis in the EU is taking shape. Brussels is responding by preparing the ground for capital controls. The regulators' latest target: European citizens' foreign bank accounts. Starting January 11, 2027, trouble looms for EU citizens with foreign accounts. From that date, banks from third countries -- Switzerland, the UK, the US, or Singapore -- will be prohibited from offering so-called core banking services to European citizens. In essence, this covers three core functions: classic deposit-taking (checking, savings, or fixed-term accounts), lending, and the guarantee business. Banks wishing to...

Within Western societies, there persist subcultures that treat institutions as resources to be harvested while simultaneously scorning the normative order those institutions sustain. The ideal of a democratic polity rests upon a fragile consensus: that citizens will, by and large, restrain immediate appetite in favor of reciprocal forbearance, that private property will be treated as more than a provisional convenience, and that elected officials will refuse to dignify predation as justice. While rule of law and a free press are necessary conditions for such restraint, they are not sufficient. Civil society’s everyday virtues -- queueing, mutual non-interference, the tacit assumption...

What is communism? asks Krzysztof Szczawinski on X. No, it’s not the “bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union.” No, it’s not “a discredited economic theory”. [Instead, it’s] a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper -- a civilizational war against truth itself[.] Then he goes on to give us two words that the Poles invented to describe life under communism: Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] -- a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood[.] And Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] -- a deep, performative hypocrisy[.] I’m sure he’s right....

I’ve been on a bit of an anti-woman kick in my writing (see here and here)—not because I actually hate women (I am one), but because I’ve been dealing with a lot of awful women in recent weeks. One such exchange comes to mind, and there’s a point in it I’d like to make. Every summer, I buy a pool membership pass at a local country club because it allows me some suntanning time, and my 8-year-old logs lots of swimming hours. But let me be clear: This is not some fancy-schmancy club—snobby people are not my people. The club...

In this overview, Mike examines Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s effort to follow the money behind tax-exempt organizations, political campaigns, extremist activity, and what he describes as the financial architecture of the deep state.From Arabella Advisors and the Sixteen Thirty Fund to the Tides Foundation, Open Society Foundations, CAIR, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mike explains how donations can move through interconnected charities and political organizations without revealing the original donors. These networks, he argues, allow billionaire-backed operations to influence elections, protests, political movements, and American culture while retaining their tax-exempt status.

The mayor’s new judicial panel reveals the radical direction in which New York’s criminal and family courts may be headed. Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced 18 new appointees to a “revitalized” judicial panel. Known formally as the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, the panel has a say in who becomes a judge in the city, evaluating and recommending candidates for mayoral appointment to the criminal and family courts, as well as interim appointments to civil courts. Established by Ed Koch in 1978 by executive order—before then, judges were appointed by the mayors themselves, who would...

While we were spared another one of those ironically dubbed, ”summers of love,” the lawfare war continues, and with some interesting developments. Summer’s almost over. Have you noticed how peaceful it has been compared to the last few years? This calm is particularly remarkable since ICE activity is at an all-time high and the mid-term elections are right around the corner. Dismantling USAID certainly put a crimp in these orchestrated demonstrations. But there was more behind the cutback, notes Jeff Childers at Flopping Aces. He credits Secretary Scott Bessent’s close examination of nonprofit organizations being used as conduits to move...

The communists who want to run our country and our lives have no regard for our well-being. Just look at a little history, plus the present day. When I was studying to become a nurse in the late 1960s, I learned that the most important value in patient care, for both nurses and doctors, is safety. Not curing, which is hoped for but often impossible, and not even empathy, although a high priority. That is because the patient who falls out of bed or is given the wrong dose of medicine or whose grievance is ignored or — yikes! this...

Socialism’s sectarian logic, pseudoscientific hubris, and the inescapable path from guillotine to Gulag C. The sectarian, antidemocratic, and antirational character of egalitarianism has been exposed with grim consistency across two centuries of revolutionary experiment. From the Jacobin committees of public safety to the Politburos of Moscow, Beijing, and their satellite regimes in Africa and Asia, the pattern recurs: utopian doctrine, once armed with state power, converts political disagreement into existential crime and answers it with systematic slaughter. A political monster from birth, socialism—along with its Siamese twin, communism, the progeny of egalitarianism and collectivism—does not merely fail to deliver abundance;...

A new Justice Department report reveals that FBI personnel opened investigations into two Catholic priests, conducted surveillance tied to the Richmond Catholic Memo, and continued revising the memo after headquarters ordered it deleted. The report reveals how an investigation into a violent extremist led to the surveillance of clergy affiliated with traditional Catholicism, though the FBI ultimately concluded the priests posed no national security threat. The report also sheds new light on internal disputes on the reliability of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity,” Attorney General...

The Census Bureau’s own Post-Enumeration Survey, the internal audit that checks the official count against a sample of households, found that Tennessee was undercounted by 4.78%, Florida by 3.48%, and Texas by 1.92%. On the other side of the ledger, Delaware was overcounted by 5.45%, Rhode Island by 5.05%, and New York by 3.44%, with Hawaii and Minnesota padded as well. These figures are the Bureau’s own, and they are not rounding artifacts. A 3.48% miss in a state of 22 million people is roughly 750,000 residents who were never recorded. The Bureau published these figures, described them as...

And by “suicidal” I mean that. Had Harris won, the country would be in complete and total freefall. Economic. National security. You name it. As you’ve come to expect, I’ve got all the receipts. Let’s revisit the “Biden” (i.e., Obama and his apparatchiks) Hall of Shame. 1. Halting the border wall and reviving catch-and-release. On Day One, wall construction was stopped, parts of it sold off pennies on the dollar, and billions in Congressionally-appropriated funds rerouted. Simultaenously, the Border Patrol was ordered to let people walk right into the country instead of detaining them. Every smuggler and criminal in the...

The most formidable challenges facing establishment Democrats in November’s midterms are the success of far-left, socialist, or progressive candidates in primary elections and mainstream Democrats’ surrender to that wing of the party. Alongside advocating for an agenda that is radical in its drive to reshape America – and is broadly unpopular – the DSA’s influence has left Democrats on the wrong side of an issue that the party has been hobbled by in the past: transgender policies. Simply put, the DSA’s strong opposition to legislation banning biological males from competing in women’s sports has come to define where the national...