Free Republic

Gov leaves soldiers untrained to send money to the Muslim terrorists likely to kill them. It’s all about priorities. Those used to be guns or butter. Now it’s guns or Gaza. The Army has been told to stop “non-essential” training exercises to save money, according to a defence source. A defence source said the plans mean not doing what he called “nice to have training” – like large live fire exercises and rehearsing platoon attacks in UK training areas like Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire and Sennybridge in Wales. It is understood planned exercises that were due to take place that...

Philosophy and Christianity base themselves on goals. Communism has another basis entirely. Greek philosophy was defined by goals of life as communicated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and, following them, by the Stoics such as Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and others. With the acceptance and spread of Christianity, we see many erudite lights of wisdom, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and others. These and others advanced the idea that the Word of God and men’s faith in that Word and in Christ are the source of a living, true knowledge of God. Many of the Catholic and...

Socialism is gaining ground, particularly among younger adults. It is sometimes modified with the word “democratic,” as in the name Democratic Socialists of America, but the modification is lipstick on a pig. Socialism and communism spring from the same desire to elevate government over family. That makes it important for students to understand where the militant ideology has led in practice. A new public school curriculum in Florida offers a model for doing that. Public school students in Florida will take a course this year that was approved in November 2025 by the state Board of Education: History of Communism...

Senate Democratic nominee James Talarico appears ready to bring a touch of Trotsky to Texas. In a video from a climate forum, Talarico is shown declaring capitalism an "oppressive system" linked with White supremacy and saying that it must be "dismantled" to achieve a better world. It is reminiscent of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who denounced the "fundamental evil of the capitalist system" and called on citizens to free themselves from its oppression. The Democratic Socialists of America and radical sites have long called "to dismantle the capitalist state." As a state representative, Talarico addressed the 2020 climate conference by...

Democracy invites despotism. When understood as majority rule, democracy means that fifty-one of every hundred citizens can have their way with the other forty-nine. “But I want to keep my possessions, weapons, and children.” Too bad, the majority have decided to redistribute your property to those lazy bums over there, disarm you before you can do anything about it, and indoctrinate your children in public schools, so that they learn to resent you and love the State.Democracy is dangerous without guardrails. Unless a society has a strong sense of moral virtue that fosters personal discipline, duty, and honor, base selfishness...

Government—and those who feed off it—slowly but inevitably become our masters. In June 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, America was born. In 1789, its entire payroll reportedly fit on a single ledger page, consisting mainly of customs officers, marshals, postmasters, and clerks. By 1800, the federal civilian workforce had grown to 125 people. By 1901, it had reached 231,000, including the Post Office. Today, the federal civilian workforce numbers approximately 2.7 million. Add another 1.7 to 2 million contractual employees, and the number is around 4.5 million—and this doesn’t count anyone in uniform....

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...