Free Republic

A warning should have been heeded at the time of Trump’s assassination attempt in Butler: the era of outdoor political events is coming to an end. Like most, I did not fully grasp it at the time. I thought that the assassination attempt on Trump was a fluke. I thought of it as an attempt by some oddball, who by luck, was able to exploit a failing in Trump’s Secret Service detail. I still dismissed as marginal the impact of Democrats portraying their political adversaries as demonic for so many decades. Up until last week, I gave it no weight....

As the transgender debacle spirals into greater chaos in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the time is ripe to openly discuss its absurdity before more children are inculcated into this dangerous delusion. Simple logic debunks the preposterous idea that a person can transmute his biological sex, that doctors and parents “assign” a sex in mysterious ignorance of what the infant truly is, or that men should be allowed to play dress-up in women’s sports. The Mayo Clinic discredits itself by legitimizing gender dysphoria as “a feeling of distress that can happen when a person’s gender identity differs from the...

Maybe you spent time last week perusing X postings related to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Aside from the many accolades, conservative influencers did fine jobs identifying left-wingers who not only celebrated Kirk’s assassination, but offered attaboys to Tyler Robinson, the triggerman. Some even called for more violence. If you didn’t have time earlier, scroll through the Libs of TikTok’s and the Vigilant Fox’s threads, for starters. You’ll get an eyeful. “Somebody had to do it” wasn’t an uncommon refrain. Who, this side of hell, delights in an act of murder? What was striking was that many of the posts featured females....

Whenever Germans head to the polls, one question dominates all debate: How strong will the populist AfD become this time? Last Sunday’s district and mayoral elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW)—Germany’s most populous state—provided a stark answer. While Germany’s state broadcaster spoke of a “sigh of relief” when the ruling CDU emerged victorious with 33.3% of votes, keeping the AfD in third place at 14.5%, this narrative of triumph masks a far more troubling reality for Germany’s political elite. Minister President Henrik Wüst, despite his CDU’s electoral win, admitted he could no longer “sleep peacefully” given the AfD’s result. His anxiety...

According to a recent Gallup poll, in 2010, socialism had a net approval rating of +7 among Democrats, which is bad enough. Fifteen years later, the margin has jumped to +37 — an increase in net approval of more than 500%. As I wrote yesterday when discussing the bizarre Hochul/Mamdani relationship--she endorsed him, but not the reverse--I pointed to the fact that no Democrat with national ambitions can afford to offend the communists, even if it endangers their general election prospects nationwide. And Hochul wants to be president. Before you drop the inevitable "Democrats just think socialism means more social...

During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Senator Ted Cruz, raised an issue with FBI Director Kash Patel that others, including President Trump, have raised as well. “I want to more broadly encourage you to follow the money,” said Cruz. “The violence we are seeing is not purely organic. There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence.” As to whether the George Floyd riots of 2020 were orchestrated, Senator Cruz need look no further than an extraordinary article published by Time magazine in February 2021. The author, Molly Ball, laid out in exquisite detail what...

Quite apart from the Fed’s rather dovish interest rate cuts — they’re signaling two more quarter point drops after today’s move — one of the things that struck me about today’s announcement is how much the central bank apparently opposes President Trump’s pro-growth economic policies. Mr. Trump’s supply-side tax cuts and deregulation moves are going to boost economic growth while keeping prices low. Already, second-quarter gross domestic product growth has come in at 3.3 percent and the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow is projecting another 3.3 percent in the third quarter. There’s a business and factory capital spending boom going on. And...

Incredibly, if you choose to believe a new YouGov poll, a plurality of Americans believe the alleged assassin of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is a Republican. Several outlets and notable figures have made the preposterous claim that the suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was a conservative Christian, when the truth is that he was a radical transgender man living with another transgender man whose own relatives admit he “hates conservatives and Christians.” Federal authorities confirm that Robinson has been “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.” Yet, according to the poll, 24% of adults believe Robinson to be a Republican, while...

For years Democrats have been accusing conservatives of being cruel, heartless individuals. Our crime? Believing in God, the Church, the family, the country, the Constitution, and the rule of law. Their attempts to claim the moral high ground has led them to institute "restorative justice," where people credibly accused of criminal acts are released without bail. They've instituted policies allowing millions of unvetted, unvaccinated individuals from third-world countries to be welcomed into the country and hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children to go missing in four years. We've watched while Catholic churches were vandalized and burned because we oppose...

Over the last few days, many children in Texas told their parents what they heard or saw in the classrooms about Charlie Kirk's assassination. Unfortunately, some teachers decided to engage in political activism. They expressed opinions, usually negative, of Charlie Kirk. It was too much for many parents who went over to see the principal. It was also too much for Governor Greg Abbott, as we see in this story: The Texas Education Agency is investigating teachers and staff who have "posted and/or shared reprehensible and inappropriate content on social media" about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.As expected, the American...

“They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi; they call you a Nazi so they can kill you.”— Podcaster Blaire White. Sadly, the Party of Love has struck again. A prominent conservative voice was publicly silenced in Utah last Wednesday — not by persuasion or reasoned argument — but by an assassin’s bullet. “[D]eeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology,” Kirk’s murderer pulled the trigger convinced he was striking a blow against fascism. But he committed murder and destroyed his own life in the process for a damnable lie. Because settling arguments with bullets instead of reason is, without question, fascism in...

We like to believe that we live in an enlightened age. Unlike the ignorant prejudice of medieval times, unlike the history of slavery around the world and in our own country, unlike the genocide of the Holocaust and the horrors of WWII, ours is a peaceful and progressive age on the pathway to utopia. There has not been a global conflict in 80 years, nor, some believe, is there likely to be one ever again. Supported by such a view of history, we can anticipate a future of global prosperity in which hunger and want are things of the past...

One of the key conditions that King’s College professor David Betz says leads to civil war: an elite radically disconnected from the masses. Civil war is coming,” David Betz told a Budapest audience on Thursday night. And later: “Sorry, but I don’t think there is a peaceful solution at this time.” Betz should know. The professor is head of the war studies department at King’s College London and is an academic expert in civil war. For years he has been writing that all the conditions for civil war to break out have been met in most Western countries; all that...

A Franco-Syrian journalist’s investigation links far-left leaders to Islamist networks. A book that has not yet gone on sale is already causing tremors in French politics. It is Les Complices du mal by Franco-Syrian journalist Omar Youssef Souleimane, and will be published in early October. The volume, the result of extensive field research, reveals the links between leaders of La France Insoumise (LFI), the far-left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Islamist organizations close to the Muslim Brotherhood and their growing influence in French political and social life. The controversy erupted when LFI’s lawyers sent a legal notice to the publisher...

"You currently have one side willing to talk and extend a microphone to anyone, and one side that shoots to kill when they do." —Aimee Terese on X. When Brian De Palma’s movie, Dressed to Kill, came out in 1980, this was a different country. Like Hitchcock’s Psycho before it (1960), both films depicted men seeking to become women who are murderously deranged by their wishful fantasies. Now, our country has become murderously deranged by the same fantasy writ large. These derangements are acted out now by a segment of the population that calls itself “the trans community.” This is...

In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the internet is flooded with shock, grief, and horror at what has happened. It was also horrified at the thousands of leftists’ delight and celebration, congratulating the assassin. Far too many of those who have been thanking the shooter, for reasons that are impossible to discern, seem to think they are the mainstream, that a majority of Americans agree with their ghoulish praise of this murderer. How is it possible that these thousands, maybe millions of Americans, many of them teachers, professors, nurses, doctors, and of course, indoctrinated students, think that...

We all know that when you corner an animal, it will fight tooth and nail for its survival. This means that even supposedly meek creatures will defend themselves with a surprising level of frenzy and violence. The choice for any cornered creature facing death is to go out with an all-out snarl. This is where the Democrat party movement finds itself. Snubbed at the polls, cut off from sub rosa USAID sustenance, humiliated time and again by the ever adroit Donald Trump, and hemorrhaging its plantation BIPOCs, the party has resorted to obscenities, outright antisemitism, and the defense of criminals...

All last year, we were treated to a steady stream of stories about the “huge” and “baffling” gap between the public’s negative views about the economy and its “actual performance.” Our favorite “economist” Paul Krugman was apoplectic. “Why are so many Americans still telling pollsters that the economy is in bad shape” when “it’s hard to overstate just how good recent economic numbers have been.” Last week, the government issued two reports that explain why. And the reason is simple. The experts were wrong. The public was right. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after a string of glaring...

President Trump’s latest broadside landed with the familiar thunder of one of his off-the-cuff declarations. In a rather interesting interview with NBC News, he called for billionaire George Soros to be “put in jail.” To his critics, it sounded like yet another wild Trump line, a flourish designed to inflame. It carried the same cadence as the time he promised “fire and fury” for Kim Jong Un, or when he declared NATO allies were “delinquent” freeloaders, or when he warned that the European Union was a “foe” in trade. Each line was ridiculed, painted as reckless exaggeration. And yet, time...

The flags of 11 sovereign indigenous tribal nations were permanently raised recently at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, during a ceremony at the new Tribal Flag Plaza. Gov. Tim Walz said of the ceremony, "Minnesota is moving in a direction that everyone is welcome.” I’m not sure about that, but, based on recent tragedies in Minneapolis, it appears murderous nut-jobs are welcome. I have respect and admiration for Native Americans and their history, but I am more than a little leery about continuing to emphasize our differences instead of the things that make us American. And the 11...