Free Republic

I often write about the folly of attempting, through a myriad of government mandates and subsidies, to compel the replacement of our electricity system with one powered by the wind and sun. You may think it would be impossible to come up with any public policy that is worse than that one of a forced energy system transformation. And yet, the Manhattan Contrarian designee for “worst possible public policy” has gone to something else. That something else is the building of what they call “affordable housing” on some of the world’s most expensive real estate here in Manhattan. The term...

Zohran Mamdani is about to take office as New York City’s new mayor. One of his signature initiatives is the idea of ‘community policing’. This usually gets translated in the press as “he wants to send social workers out to answer 911 calls.” That alone is crazy enough, but as usual, the press does not begin to understand or communicate effectively what is really happening. A bill has already been introduced before the New York City Council to create what will be called the “Department of Community Safety.” Brooklyn Lincoln Restler, a member of the Working Families Party, is the...

". . . power that goes unpunished only learns one lesson: it can do whatever it wants." —Roger Stone. John Brennan, former US Communist Party member, former CIA Director, and Convert to Islam. Has it occurred to you that the video footage of the hallway outside Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell that shows nobody coming or going around the hour that he “killed himself” could be fake? All authorities from the FBI to The New York Times pretend that the date-and-time stamped video is authentic, and that it proves nobody went into his cell to kill him. Nobody has questioned this....

Clinton won in 1992 by selling a recession that was already over; the lesson for 2026 is simple—ignore real economic gains, and a fake downturn can still decide an election. As the 1992 campaign approached, incumbent president George H.W. Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection. The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular U.S. victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses. For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90 and 70 percent. By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the...

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”Attributed to Voltaire, this quote holds great significance, even in our modern times. In the twentieth century, we saw absurd ideologies like communism and Nazism take root in modern states and drive civilized people to commit unfathomable atrocities. The popular notion of race-poisoning propelled the Nazi regime on a militant crusade to purge the European continent of inferior peoples, as the regime defined the term. In the second half of the twentieth century, the equally absurd notion of ubiquitous ecological poisoning took hold in the West, spawning a new...

President Donald Trump early in his second term renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. This was the original name given to our federal military in 1789 and it had been in effect until it was eliminated by legislation in 1947 and actively became the Department of Defense in 1949. In William Shakespeare’s great play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet utters the immortal line, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This name change by Trump is not to change the department’s smell, but to signify a change in tone, focus, and...

I have not had much time to write for American Thinker lately because we had to put a governor back in her box after her special session shenanigans. When the regular Oregon legislature session rejected the most significant tax increase in Oregon’s history, the Oregon governor, Tina Kotek, took it upon herself to call for a special session to pass the Transportation Tax package, a $4.3 billion naked wealth grab from the taxpayers of Oregon. Kotek dragged in a cancer patient in a wheelchair and an extremely ill legislator who had not gone to the capitol for months to secure...

As radical Islamist threats continue to plague Australia, politicians are pivoting to policing speech and tightening gun laws on law-abiding citizens—now openly admitting curbs on free expression are needed to shield their multicultural agenda.Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has unveiled a sweeping plan to combat what she calls rising anti-Semitism, but the measures conveniently sidestep the core issue of unchecked radical Islamism behind recent attacks, focusing instead on doxxing anonymous social media users and reviewing gun laws. In a joint news conference, Allan announced legislation that would force social media platforms to reveal identities behind anonymous accounts accused of spreading ‘hate’....

Imagine facing arrest simply for posting sharp or critical comments online. Picture police at your door for expressing opposition to mass immigration. Envision a country where you could be imprisoned for years without a jury ever deciding your guilt. This isn't dystopian fiction - it's the reality unfolding in Britain today, my former home and once part of the free world. Earlier this year, parents Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine from Hertfordshire were arrested in front of their children over disparaging remarks made in a private parents' messaging group. They were among the estimated 10,000 people arrested in Britain this...

But who wants to die for Big Brother’s woke State? Oliver JJ Lane, a writer and editor for Breitbart London, writes frequently about the growing censorship regime in the U.K., the public’s distrust of both institutional government and Establishment politicians of all labels, the official cover-up of Muslim “grooming” gangs that target and rape British children, and the increasing backlash of native Britons against a ruling class that prioritizes “multiculturalism” and “diversity” over everything else. A running theme of his articles is that the U.K. is headed for civil war. Last summer, Lane wrote a piece with this provocative headline:...

The White House/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain. Not only did the Obama and Biden Administrations go to great lengths to protect Hillary Clinton, they went to unconstitutional lengths to get Trump. The Obama-Biden Administration prevented agents investigating Hillary Clinton from reviewing some eight thumb drives of intel based on purported concerns over executive and congressional privilege, newly released documents reveal. This reality renders last month’s revelation that the Biden Administration approved Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoenaing of congressional Republicans’ toll records even more appalling — and the Democrats’ weaponization of the criminal justice system even more obvious and outrageous. Last week, Sen....

Below is my column in The Hill on how Democrats in some blue states are moving from censoring speech to compelling speech in renewed attacks on free speech. They are facing resistance in the courts despite determined efforts to force others to mouth approved viewpoints. Here is the column: More than five years ago, I wrote in these pages of a growing trend on the left toward compelled speech — the forcing of citizens to repeat approved views and values. It is an all-too-familiar pattern. Once a faction assumes power, it will often first seek to censor opposing views and...

How London was taken over by Muslims and transformed into a powerhouse of Islamism. In the annals of civilizational decline, few spectacles rival that of a once-mighty empire wilting under the weight of its own timidity. Britain, the cradle of parliamentary democracy, Magna Carta, and the Enlightenment’s unyielding torch, now teeters on the brink of self-inflicted oblivion. The antithesis of multicultural harmony, the year 2025 brings another pitiful surrender to the forces of Islamic extremism, a phenomenon chillingly encapsulated by Melanie Phillips in her prescient 2006 tome Londonistan. Phillips, a Cassandra of our age, warned of London’s metamorphosis into a...

Nancy Pelosi was recently asked by USA Today’s Susan Page if the Democrats would impeach President Trump a third time if they capture a majority in the House next year. Her answer was predictably coy: “The person most responsible for impeaching President Trump when I was speaker was President Trump.” When Page pressed Pelosi on whether she believed impeachment should be on her party’s agenda, she said, “No, there has to be cause. There has to be reason.” This is very similar to the way she tiptoed around the “I” word during the run-up to the 2018 midterms, knowing full...

Leftists excuse perpetrators and vilify victims. What started as a joke is no longer a laughing matter: Leftism is a mental illness whose sufferers include an inordinate number of narcissists and psychopaths. Anybody who has endured a leftist mob knows this to be true. In the name of “racial justice,” “climate justice,” “trans justice,” “justice for ‘Palestine,’” or whatever other cause du jour the woke-sters have adopted as the next life-or-death “social justice” fad, leftists block drivers on busy highways, scream in the faces of wary pedestrians, set fire to businesses and cars, and terrorize civilians. They threaten and harass...

As leaders equivocate and extremists unite left and right, open season on Jews spreads across the West—unchecked, unnamed, and certain to grow deadlier. Jews celebrating Hanukkah were just slaughtered by Muslim gunmen on an Australian beach, in an imitation of the October 7 massacres. At Brown University, two students were killed and nine wounded by an allegedly Muslim shooter. An inert Europe is canceling Christmas celebrations out of fear of threats of violence from Muslim minorities. In the West, when an Islamist shoots a Jew, politicians often offer two bizarre remedies: gun control or a task force to tackle Islamophobia....

America’s “deaths of despair” - fatalities from drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide - have climbed for more than two decades, reaching levels unseen in modern times. The long-run trend is stark. After mid-century stability, the curve bends sharply upward after 2000, driven first by drugs and later joined by alcohol and suicide. The data, drawn from the Senate Joint Economic Committee’s “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair” report shown below, are clear. The deeper question is why. COVID made a bad situation worse. Lockdowns and restrictions stripped away social contact, church gatherings, family support, and purpose. Economic uncertainty due...

Here we go again. It's Groundhog Day for gun control which we see after every tragedy. The ghouls of the gun grabber lobby have come out of the woodwork. Their repetitive calls for even more restrictions on our common-sense human right to own weapons are illegitimate and unconstitutional. It's the same playbook passed down from the brown Bolsheviks of the Third Reich that is being used by violent leftists today. As we said in the headline, the brutal truth about gun control is that it's never meant to work, and that there are several secondary issues that descend from this,...

The goal was allegedley ‘to lower public-facing crime rates’, regardless of if there was actually less crime. Leadership at the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) under former chief Pamela A. Smith (who announced on Dec. 8 she would step down at year’s end) reportedly “deliberately” suppressed or distorted crime statistics in the nation’s capital “to lower public-facing crime rates,” according to a 22-page interim report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Committee opened the inquiry on Aug. 25, 2025, after reports suggested that crime statistics were being manipulated downward. Oversight majority staff conducted eight transcribed interviews...

During a press conference on Wednesday, a Providence-area radio host, Chas Calenda, directly confronted Brown University officials and law enforcement with information he has received about the school intentionally disabling surveillance systems due to DEI concerns. The response from university officials and the Providence Mayor indicate Mr. Chas Calenda’s informed accusation and question is directly on target. WATCH: In addition to information we previously shared {GO DEEP} reflecting requests from various “civil rights” and “humanitarian” groups who demanded Brown University disable their surveillance system, additional information about the issue comes via the Rhode Island ACLU making the same demand in...