Free Republic

Liberals recycle the same Red Scare myths, swapping Nixon for Trump and ignoring hard evidence that undercuts their tidy fairy-tale of heroes and villains. Fifty years ago, I had the misfortune to spend an entire semester as a college student with a fellow scholar who could only be described as an aggressive bore. Even though the seminar’s subject was literature, my pedantic classmate treated every topic that came up as a historical parallel to the McCarthy Era, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. (Nowadays, the trifecta has been updated to Charlottesville. January 6 and all things Russian.) I was reminded of...

I met Charlie at the start of his career and came away impressed. He mattered. And now he is dead, as the leftist fever swamps celebrate. As you all know, Charlie Kirk was killed today, leaving behind a wife, two young children, and a movement. I had the pleasure of meeting Charlie nine years ago, at the start of his amazing rise as a voice of young conservatism, and I came away deeply impressed, a perception that never left me. But to understand both Charlie and his death, you need to understand the madness of the left. (And no, we...

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a horrific reminder that the left is based on nothing other than terror, violence, and aggression. This has been true since Karl howled to Friedrich that the bourgeois would someday pay for his plague of skin boils. The history of the Left is a history of violence. Scarcely a single leftist government has gained power without violence or the threat of violence. No leftist government has ever remained in power without violence. Violence is built into the very foundations of leftist ideology. Marx himself fantasized in print over the apocalyptic events that would accompany...

You will own nothing and become Muslims. One of the nightmares that periodically jolt me awake is the image of an American jumping from the inferno-ravaged upper stories of New York’s World Trade Center into the dust-plumed streets below. He is tormented and maybe praying and then gone. More than anything else, that horror from 9/11 haunts me. In the first few years after the Islamic terror attack, news programs would replay some of those desperate moments caught on video, when workers trapped between floors of fire were forced to make a final decision about how they would die. Many...

Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump. In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione. The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response. This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.

Charlie Kirk comments on reactions from the left, including sympathy for the murderer from CNN's Van Jones, to the racial angle of the murder of a Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina. "In reality we’re asking a very simple question, Mr. Jones, will you apologize for all the criminal justice reform you pushed forward that allowed these 14-time criminal offenders to walk the streets? You are the architect and designer of constantly feeling bad for the criminal—criminals who then kill more people like Irina Zarutska," Kirk said. "And by the way, I didn’t bring up race. The attacker said, quote, 'I...

FBi investigating shooting at conservative lobbying group. A gunman opened fire on a security guard at the Washington D.C., headquarters of a conservative Christian organization only to be tackled and subdued by the guard whom he had just shot in the arm, authorities said. The suspect, identified by law enforcement sources as Floyd Corkins of Herndon, Va., is alleged to have entered the offices of The Family Research Council and yelled at the guard about the organization's policies. The shooter soon fired a handgun at the guard at around 10:50 a.m. ET. Corkins, who himself was not shot, was...

Last week, the police department in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, unveiled a new “optional” patch for officers featuring the words “Dearborn Heights Police” in Arabic alongside English. Although the department quickly reversed course amid swift backlash, it was yet more evidence of the growing balkanization of the American public. According to the city’s now-deleted Facebook post, the patch, which would have been the first of its kind in the United States, was designed to “reflect and honor the diversity of our community — especially the many residents of Arabic descent who call Dearborn Heights home.” Mayor Bill Bazzi, an immigrant from...

There’s a reason why the J6 Committee deleted the records of their activity, an angle missed by most. When you understand what they hid and why they did it, you then understand why current Speaker of The House Mike Johnson will not go near the subject. The J6 Committee used interfaces with the NSA database and pre-existing portals with aligned DHS Social Media databases (including Twitter, see prior “Twitter Files”), as research and evidence gathering mechanisms for their investigations. The J6 targets were identified through a collaboration between the legislative research group and the FBI. [That’s unlawful by the way...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become the rare figure who draws as much raw hostility from Democrats as Donald Trump ever has. That fact alone is remarkable. Democrats once celebrated Kennedy as the scion of a legendary political dynasty. They now treat him as a menace to society. His break from the blue ranks last year, and the populist movement he has built, mirrors Trump’s earlier rebellion against establishment Republicans. That similarity explains why both men are uniquely loathed by Democrat insiders. The fury stems not just from Kennedy’s decision to leave the Democrat party, but from how he left....

Under Joe Biden, or whoever was running the country between 2021 and 2024, over 470,000 unaccompanied migrant children waltzed into the country. Many of these kids promptly vanished into a bureaucratic black hole. Since then, in a move both heroic and horrifyingly necessary, the Trump administration has located over 22,000 of these kids, arrested 400 traffickers, and uncovered the grim reality that 27 children met tragic ends through murder, overdose, or suicide. Yes, Epstein’s operation was a master class in depravity, but Biden’s border policies might just take the cake, and it’s a moldy, taxpayer-funded one at that. While Epstein...

The cold-blooded murder of a Ukrainian refugee on a Charlotte public transit system has finally gotten the mainstream media aroused, but not because a heinous crime was committed. It's because "Republicans pounced." Here's CNN's take: Gruesome video shows a man stabbing a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte light rail train — a case that has turned into a flashpoint as the Trump administration vows to crack down on crime in large, predominantly Democratic cities. It's as though they're trying say that a 'gruesome video' is unrelated to a gruesome act, and that the video is the problem,...

Editor’s note: We expected the leftist thought police at Google would declare that this editorial was “unreliable” and “harmful“— because it blasphemes the climate religion — and strip its AdSense ads from the page. And we were right! (See below.) Al Gore famously warned that sea level rise caused by man’s use of fossil fuels was going to kill us. Barack Obama implied that he had magic powers that would control surging sea levels. A fresh study shows just how dishonest this pair and the many others who did their best to misinform the public have been. Gore’s 2006 propaganda...

During the recent gathering of Democrat Party bosses in Minneapolis, there was no shortage of deranged rhetoric, usually about the dark doings of the “dictator” Trump. But the most delusional diatribe was delivered by DNC Chair Ken Martin, who unintentionally captured why Democrats have been unable to recover from their drubbing last November – and why their prospects aren’t much better moving forward. Martin opened the first session of the three-day meeting with a predictably dull speech full of progressive platitudes and mangled metaphors that ended with this bizarre call to arms: “The Democratic Party has to stop trying to...

In Britain, mocking transgender ideology online, waving the British flag, or reading the Bible on a street corner is now enough to land you in prison – even as the British judicial system lets child rapists out of prison early and ignores a growing wave of violent migrant crime. A recent viral story of an Irish comedian who was arrested earlier this month provides the latest shocking evidence of just how dystopian Britain has become – and how it may not even be safe for Americans to travel there anymore. Graham Linehan was arriving at London’s Heathrow airport on September...

Rising amenability to socialism is causing Democrats to freak out. While the national socialist media is busy ignoring the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska, there are two other closely related stories of note that show the current state of affairs. The first is that Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) suggested that socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and other Democrat socialists should “create their own party.” The beginnings of an ideological civil war within the ranks of the party. The flip side is that polling from Gallup and Rasmussen shows significant support for this collectivist ideology — meaning that...

You know and I know that there are certain things you are not allowed to say in these United States. Especially about World War II and the Holocaust. Because the Narrative. Right now, I’d say we are trending towards a Narrative that you are not allowed to doubt the genocide in Gaza. Why? Because genocide. Back in March 2024, Willis Eschenbach, a noted “climate denier,” came up with an analysis of “genocide.” The word was invented by Rafael Lemkin in 1944, he says, when “Lemkin was employed by the US War Department to write a book on Nazi atrocities called...

The answer is…never, because evidence doesn’t matter and there is none. I know the following is exceptionally long but I believe it shows the lengths that green pushers have gone to, programming AI to dutifully push their agenda instead of just answering questions with facts. It is dangerous to our economic survival as a great country that for decades a cabal has, without evidence, indoctrinated the public, especially children, that humans, CO2, and our use of natural resources have caused dire temperature increases and disastrous climate change. The cabal includes a compliant and non-curious media, educators, scientists who go along,...

George Floyd was a criminal and a sometime thug. By the time he died of a drug overdose in 2020, he had spent at least the last 23 years committing crimes. Over that 23-year period, he was arrested at least nine times for everything from drug possession and distribution to theft to aggravated assault. He was stopped for a wide variety of other activities that required him to do community service or did not result in an arrest. Nine arrests over 23 years might not sound like a lot, but for more than eight of those years, he was in...

Last week the newly-confirmed head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Susan Monarez, was abruptly fired by President Trump, barely a month after receiving her Senate confirmation in July. Although Monarez was new to CDC as of the second Trump term, her career in high-level government positions runs back to through the Biden, Trump I, and Obama administrations. Upon announcement of Monarez’s firing, the press was immediately filled with reports of “turmoil” at the agency. At least four high-ranking officials resigned in protest (even as Monarez tried to hang on). In addition, large numbers of staffers came forward (anonymously)...