Free Republic

This morning, EPA released the official Federal Register version of its Rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding as to motor vehicles. The Federal Register cite is 91 F.R. 7686. This official version of the Rescission, in printed, single-spaced and triple column format, is only 111 pages, versus the 436 pages the previous preliminary version; however, the text appears to be substantially unchanged. It only took literal minutes for the first lawsuit challenging the Rescission to get filed. Here, via the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists, is a copy of a Petition that they say was filed today...

Somehow, they didn't foresee this happening when the billionaires fled the fleecing. Most of New York City's public employee unions endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor -- UFT teachers union, AFSCME, SEIU Local 1199 -- a lot of the big important ones. So it must have come as a surprise them that Mamdani's first target to finance his huge $120 billion budget is likely to come not from billionaires, as he claimed would happen, but from a raid on their pension funds, which by the way, cannot flee. Oh, what irony. Instead of going after the millionaires when the billionaires fled,...

ith all eyes on the U.S. military buildup around Iran right now, the Russia-Ukraine War has been temporarily upstaged. It will not play second fiddle for long. The recent trilateral talks in Geneva involving the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United States have been unable to resolve a principal issue of disagreement: Ukraine’s martial-law-president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s refusal to cede any land and Russia’s insistence that the Donbas region — specifically the four eastern territories that have already held a referendum in support of becoming part of the Russian Federation — be acknowledged as sovereign Russian territory. As the war heads...

Apparently, Americans must give up their dogs to avoid appearing “Islamophobic.” Outrage against Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) is the left’s outrage du jour. The rage mob swung into action after Fine wrote: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Yeah, that was it. He didn’t say “Kill them all” or even “Deport them all.” He didn’t recommend any action at all. He was actually responding to an X post from far-left, pro-Hamas activist Nerdeen Kiswani. In response to a news item about two grocery stores removing people with dogs, Kiswani...

n February 12, The New Republic’s Editor, Michael Tomasky, published a 10,000-word piece of his own entitled “What the Democrats Need to Do Now,” with the subheading explaining that this was the plan “to win back working-class voters” by showing that the Democrats “are on their side,” and “picking fights on their behalf.” My mind was blown reading it. The cognitive dissonance was dizzying. He really does think Dems are pure as the driven snow with nothing but good intentions, and gosh darn it, they’re just not fighting hard enough, nor have they fought hard enough in the past. We...

When all the ‘release valves’ for a civil society have been welded shut, society stops being ‘civil.’ It seems as if every month a new story comes out of Britain warning about the likelihood of future civil war. Retired colonel Richard Kemp recently gave a television interview during which he warned that the “Islamification” of the United Kingdom would lead to “inevitable conflict.” Several British academics specializing in the preconditions for civil conflict, including professors David Betz and Michael Rainsborough, have argued the same point. Kemp’s point of view carries the added weight of someone who has witnessed insurgent fighting...

In 2023, newly disclosed documents related to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein revealed meetings and financial interactions between Epstein and the eminent linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky. The disclosures did not accuse Chomsky of criminal conduct. But they confirmed that, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor, Chomsky met with him multiple times and discussed financial matters. Chomsky’s response was characteristically blunt: his meetings with Epstein, he said, were “none of your business.” The tone may have been legally defensible. Culturally and symbolically, it was something else. Because Chomsky is not merely a professor emeritus at MIT....

What does one do with useful grifters who’ve lost their utility? The Democrats Frankenize them. It’s like ostracizing without the pomp and ceremony. If you’re unfamiliar with the process, you can watch it play out on the Clintons over the next few months. Frankenizing became a thing during the good ol’ days of “me too.” It was an era of national insanity, in which every Hollywood starlet wannabe with two X chromosomes insisted she was a victim of toxic masculinity after taking her clothes off to land a part. The Dems demanded that we believe every woman’s tale of harassment,...

The self-destruction of Britain: New Labour’s quiet revolution, deep state resistance to democracy, and transethnic buildup to civil war. The British historian David Starkey has long maintained that Tony Blair’s assumption of power in 1997 marked an all-encompassing upheaval of British society. Nothing, he argues, is the same as before. The old Britain has been uprooted; its legal system and top management have been comprehensively remade. Where once a relatively homogeneous nation allowed its citizens to “govern themselves,” in Starkey’s memorable phrase, today they stand profoundly alienated from their government, police, and courts. SNIP Eight governments in a row have...

Bad Bunny’s Superbowl House Party. . . So Long, Been Good to Know Ya! It’s all backstage now. This fraught moment, the power centers locked in the coldest cold of the year, the Spanish language lessons of Bad Bunny behind us, all the real action in the battle to save the country is out of sight, moiling and churning in the deep background. Everybody’s on edge waiting for shoes to drop, praying they don’t drop on their heads. You should have seen Senator Mark Warner (D-VA; Vice-chair of the Senate Intel Committee) on Face the Nation Sunday, frothing at the...

Could Democrats and the media tell us their plan to get rid of the 10 million illegal immigrants President Biden let in? Because I’m getting the sense that they don’t have one. In fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t want anyone deported, ever, for any reason. Notwithstanding the obligatory throat-clearing, of course, I support a secure border, their behavior proves they don’t. The Biden administration did everything in its power to get more than 10 million “Undocumented Persons” to come here—setting up an app so illegal immigrants could actually schedule their illegal crossings, then rewarding them at the border...

“But let’s not miss the fact that we have coordinated, well-funded, and I think insurgencies or terrorist organizations, however you want to call it, literally trying to prevent legal laws from being enforced in the United States.”U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott testifying before Congress on February 10, 2026. The man speaks truth.The mainstream media continues to push the narrative that all we are seeing are “peaceful protests”. Most conservative commentators remain content to ridicule participants in the ongoing anti – ICE actions around the country and dismiss them with derogatory comments and sarcasm. No one, it...

This week’s major developments include a number of secondary explosions: government bureaucrats who censored free speech on internet platforms using NGOs as covers will be facing court action; the fallout from the boomeranging Epstein disclosures keep damaging the Democrats and their foreign allies; the media’s promotion of the moronic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only served to highlight that she is ill-informed and too lazy to prepare for interviews; and DOGE and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent are making it very hard to keep hiding Democrat corruption. Censors Face the MusicThe CCDH (Center for Countering Digital Hate) is an NGO headed by...

SPECIAL SERIES: Religious Liberty Around The World. In deteriorating health and 78 years old, Jimmy Lai is not likely to survive the 20-year prison sentence that Hong Kong’s kangaroo court handed him on Jan. 9. The Chinese Communist Party has ensured that the voice of this prominent media mogul and ardent defender of democracy will never be publicly heard from again, on anything. It accomplished this by distorting the territory’s formerly celebrated judicial system and rule of law. Over a thousand democracy defenders have been imprisoned since Hong Kong’s draconian national security law was imposed in 2020 and, as a...

Super Bowl halftime has devolved into a stale Roman bacchanal—gaudy, raunchy, and empty—leaving millions bored, alienated, and wondering who the spectacle is even for anymore. In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows: mediocre music veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets. As seen again this year, the usual array of supporting dancers twerk and simulate intercourse, in sync with the main singer, mindlessly grabbing his/her genitals—apparently to highlight the explicit sexual allusions of mostly nonsensical lyrics. For some strange reason, this Roman orgiastic ritual is supposedly...

I often make fun of the liberal mindset that prescribes that all the personal problems of people in our society can and must be solved by government taxing and spending and the creation of more and more “programs” of one sort and another. As I write on my “About” page: The central tenet of [the Manhattan] orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending. The obvious corollary is that since all problems can be solved by taxing and spending, therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and...

Annually and increasingly, tens of thousands of people are leaving blue states because of politics. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall the 1961 Berlin crisis. I recall it subsequently, when schools taught real history. That crisis happened during the Cold War’s peak years. In brief, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev wanted the U.S. out of West Berlin. There were multiple reasons, but, chiefly, access to West Berlin allowed East Germans to escape communist rule. According to the National Archives, by 1961, as many as four million Germans had escaped East Germany using West Berlin. With tensions rising, and the hemorrhaging increasing,...

Immediately ahead of tomorrow’s EU summit, French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for the introduction of Eurobonds. Collective debt financing would be the final salvo in the march of Brussels’ central planners.As the 27 EU heads of government convene today with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the stakes are high from a fiscal perspective. A decisive item on the agenda at Belgium’s Alden Biesen Castle is the so-called Draghi Plan. The question hovering above it all is as simple as it is explosive: How can the obvious productivity and growth weakness of the Eurozone economy be overcome? For...

Foreign-born Rep. Shri Thanedar openly threatened to prosecute his political enemies this week — a reminder of what Democrats plan to do if they get power back. During a committee hearing Tuesday, Thanedar — struggling to speak English — threatened to prosecute Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott when President Donald Trump is out of office. “You better hope you get pardoned because you will be held accountable for the absolute disregard of the law your agencies have shown over the past year,” Thanedar threatened. “Your agencies have lost the trust of the American people, with millions taking to...

How stupid and offensive was the the Super Bowl halftime show? Here’s a game that has evolved over the decades to become an unofficial American holiday and long shared a patriotic spirit similar to that felt during Fourth of July celebrations. It has created and sustained tremendous brand value for the National Football League. But rather than protect that investment, Roger Goodell and the NFL lit it on fire for laughs. Or to make a political statement… I guess. Because it’s pretty difficult to ignore the intended message of “entertainers” singing in a foreign language, waving foreign flags, and simulating...