Free Republic

I have lived in Budapest for most of the last five years and traveled extensively throughout Western Europe in that time. Over and over again in my travels, I face Europeans demanding that I justify the policies of that ‘monster,’ Viktor Orbán. To be fair, they are under no obligation to support Orbán and his Fidesz party, but it would be nice if these critics had any idea what they were talking about. They usually don’t—especially when it comes to migration. Long ago, I concluded that these Europeans, including British bien-pensants, have to scapegoat Orbán to escape blame for the...

“I’m the Prime Minister of Spain. This Is Why the West Needs Migrants,” Pedro Sanchez headlined his New York Times op-ed. “The West needs people. Currently, few of its countries have a rising population growth rate. Unless they embrace migration, they will experience a sharp demographic decline.” Spain’s demographic decline is helped along by the nearly 1,000 euthanasia cases a year. Those who die are replaced with the growing flood of Muslim championed by Sanchez. The West needs people, but only certain kinds of people, and it euthanizes the wrong kind. Spain’s population is set to shrink by one more...

Once upon a time in California, I went to the Orange County fairgrounds to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger give the signal for a wrecking ball to drop onto a vehicle. The audience went wild, and Schwarzenegger went on to become governor and deliver on his promise to roll back a car tax increase, thereby blowing a $4-billion hole in the state budget. SNIP “There’s no historical precedent in modern California history for a governor’s race with such a large field or such an amorphous field of candidates,” said longtime political observer Dan Schnur. “Unless you’re paying very close attention, it feels...

Trump’s second term has Democrats plotting a full-scale reckoning—targeting him, his allies, and the roots of Trumpism itself. “There will be no post-presidential peace for Donald Trump,” boomed The New Republic last week. In a lengthy piece on why the president should not expect to enjoy a restful retirement, Matt Ford laid out Donald Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors—mostly high crimes—and accused him of having “excited domestic insurrections against us,” in the grave words of the Founding Fathers. The shuttering of the Kennedy Center may be the least of Trump’s second-term sins. In the first year since returning to power,...

Xcel learned the hard lesson that if you feed the crocodiles, do not be surprised when they bite you. Alex Epstein was not exaggerating when he wrote recently that we are all indebted to the politicians who have cut solar and wind subsidies and saved our grid by incentivizing reliable generation, which was having its operating revenue looted by subsidized, unreliable solar and wind. Of course, more work to preserve reliable generation is required at the state level, but at least sanity has returned to federal energy policy. However, the political sphere is only one arena in which the struggle...

s anyone aware of current events surely knows, another young woman was murdered by an illegal immigrant with, yet again, a long criminal record but on the streets because sanctuary cities don’t believe in jailing the violent thugs Biden allowed to invade our country. This time it was in Chicago, the victim, an eighteen year-old freshman college student, Sheridan Gorman. Walking with friends in a part of the city the reprehensible Gov. J.B. Pritzker has vowed is completely safe, the killer, dressed in black and masked, fired as the girls fled, killing Sheridan. She was shot in the neck. This...

The new documents show that Smith’s efforts to acquire Patel’s phone records during his time as a private citizen were far more extensive than previously reported. pecial Counsel Jack Smith’s targeting of Kash Patel and numerous congressional Republicans as part of his lawfare against Donald Trump was worse than originally thought, new records show. Released Tuesday by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the new documents demonstrate that Smith and his team’s efforts to acquire Patel’s phone records during his time as a private citizen were far more extensive than previously reported. The bid to...

What’s in a name? These days...not much. The European Union does not include Ukraine; nevertheless and notwithstanding the objections of E.U. members Hungary and Slovakia, the European supra-state insists on paying the salaries of Ukraine’s government bureaucracy while that nation’s martial-law-holdover-president, Volodymyr Zelensky, fights to maintain control over a breakaway region that has rejected Ukrainian rule since the 2014 coup d'état of Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization does not include Ukraine; nevertheless and notwithstanding the objections of NATO members Hungary and Slovakia, the American-led military alliance insists on sending money and weapons to the Kyiv regime...

ocky Mountain high, Colorado,” sang John Denver, AKA Henry Duetschendorf Jr. in 1972. Those were heady days for Colorado. Ski resorts, the Rockies, natural beauty aplenty and the promise of new beginnings enticed many, including me, to move to Colorado. My stay on the west slope was brief, and over the years, Colorado has descended from a more-or-less business-friendly and affordable state to a Democrat People’s Republic, increasingly crowded and hostile to civil liberties and prosperity. I occasionally travel to Colorado Springs for service on my recumbent trike and bike at the best recumbent shop in this part of the...

So many people inside the United States believe the left’s narrative about the United States today, the question becomes very real: can the nation survive the presence within it of a large and growing population of people who hate it and wish to see it destroyed? For the left, the truth doesn’t matter as much as the narrative. And if the narrative is incendiary enough, and they can convince enough people to believe it, it could indeed be destructive, and even bring the whole nation down, with incalculable effects for the world at large. The narrative that the left is...

The canonized legacy of Cesar Chavez is collapsing under revelations that recast a sainted activist as a deeply flawed—and possibly predatory—man the Left can no longer easily defend. Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, eventually became the symbolic leader of the entire Mexican American community of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, he was eventually enshrined in the pantheon of modern leftist activists and civil rights leaders alongside Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Betty Friedan. His Chavez Foundation today emphasizes Chavez’s saintlike status as “a genuinely religious and spiritual figure.” His Tehachapi redoubt remains a national monument....

Democrats and their media propaganda arm have kept one narrative vibrantly alive for at least six years: 2020 was the most honest, fraud-free election in American history. As evidence they say: “because we say so,” and present Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes and his 81.2 million popular votes, the most ever in a presidential election, far more than those of Barack Obama--The Lightbringer—in either of his elections. Normal Americans have always been skeptical of those assertions, as Biden, who ran a campaign from his basement and was clearly already in the throes of dementia, shouldn’t have been able to win...

The Paramount+ 'Star Trek' show will end after its already filmed second season.So much for Paramount+‘s Gen Z Star Trek show.The streamer has decided to end Star Trek: Starfleet Academy after season two. Starfleet Academy had recently finished airing its debut season. Paramount+ had (rather optimistically, as it turned out) already ordered a second season, which recently wrapped production. Starfleet Academy has been a polarizing entry in the Trek canon. Many critics have celebrated the show for focusing on a younger generation and its coming-of-age themes. On social media, the show has been a frequent target of mockery from those...

The civilian board that oversees America's spy agencies will probe whether political bias kept intelligence analysts from sharing with Congress and President Donald Trump evidence that China meddled in elections dating to 2020, its chairman says after an explosive report by Just the News. "We ran a decade-long investigation in the Congress into China, and so this new bombshell that you just dropped is very concerning to me, and it should be to the Congress," President's Intelligence Advisory Board Chairman Devin Nunes told the Just the News, No Noise television show. "This information was likely around in 2019, probably in...

As New York approaches the Green Energy Cliff, developments are starting to come more quickly. When last I addressed the subject on March 6, there had just been “leaked” a three-page memo from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to the Governor’s office, revealing that implementation of what New York calls its “cap and invest” program — actually, an artificial scarcity program intentionally designed to drive prices up and impoverish the people — would cost every New York household thousands of dollars in increased energy costs. (I put the word “leaked” in quotes because most knowledgeable...

Overconfidence despite clear incompetence was evident in both Obama and Mamdani. There is a cognitive bias called the Dunning–Kruger effect, which -- in my opinion -- would be better called the Obama-Mamdani effect today. Dunning-Kruger describes a delusional mindset where “People with low knowledge or skill in an area tend to overestimate how competent they are.” In biblical terms, this kind of hubris is defined by Paul in Romans 12:3 as one “...think[ing] more highly of oneself than one ought.” That Scripture verse captures the essence of two popular, similar politicians who, despite having little knowledge or skill, have convinced...

Seventeen years ago, then-President Barack Hussein Obama’s Department of Justice launched a witch hunt against four Connecticut police officers who’d been rooting out illegal alien fraud. The four East Haven Police Department officers — Jason Zullo, John Miller, David Cari, and Dennis Spaulding — “were branded as criminals, their lives and families torn apart,” according to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF). But they weren’t criminals — they were “committed, decorated professionals engaged in the unglamorous work of enforcing the law in a community plagued by fraudulent vehicle registrations, gang activity, and illegal enterprises.” Years later, Spaulding is now...

For 15 years the FBI was engaged in a landmark investigation into the largest Islamic-based charity in the United States, called The Holy Land Foundation. The organization was operating as a front for Muslim terror groups, funneling cash from western countries to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, until they were finally put on trial in 2008. Convicted leaders were known as the “Holy Land Five,” and included Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain. Among the documents seized from these individuals during the investigation was a strategic paper drafted by senior Muslim Brotherhood operative...

One of the many obnoxious characteristics of present-day liberal elitists that makes them so detestable is their deep superiority complex, their Sophomania, their delusional belief that they are intellectually---as well as morally---superior to everyone else, particularly conservatives whom they see as Neanderthals. They truly believe they have a monopoly on intelligence and morality. Camille Paglia put it well: “Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of ‘compassion’ (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers.” This smug Sopjomania of theirs, combined with their self-righteous stance, is something...

One often hears Democrat politicians decrying the lack of common civility abroad in the land these days. In so doing, they generally blame Normal Americans—largely but not exclusively Republicans—for that failing. But how often do we see the Normal American owners or managers of restaurants or other public accommodations, kick Democrat politicians or functionaries out of their establishments because their presence “makes them feel unsafe” or might be “perceived as a lack of support for the community that makes up the majority of our team.” I can’t recall any instance of that happening, ever. That’s not surprising. Normal Americans aren’t...