Free Republic

For the past 22 years I have watched, written about, broadcast, and cross-referenced the groups, messages, and protests by the left in Portland, Oregon. For a long time, before the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was one of the few in Portland talking about the derivations of these groups on my blog and the radio. Before the category-killing Antifa movement subsumed the anarchists and BLM activists, these groups always came from one place: the ANSWER Coalition. This anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-capitalist, anti-anything-opposed-to-America organization gave cover to the wildest and most extreme groups in Portland. Earth First!, Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation...

So far, Amy Klobuchar has not been associated directly with the Feeding Our Future, daycare, autism, and other Somali-led frauds that have taken down Tim Walz. But then again, the scandal has not obviously damaged Attorney General Keith Ellison, or any of the many other Minnesota Democrats who have had ties as close or closer to the fraud as Tim Walz. Our Pravda Media has, until recently, been so incurious about the fraud that has eaten half of Minnesota's Medicaid budget that only Walz has been tarred by the scandal. But 2026 is an election year, and the smart money...

January 6th was terrifying for many Americans. After all, they saw it on television. But what did they really see? Did they know what actually unfolded that day? Did they even ask? Trump is the Jan. 6 President, proclaims the New York Times’ Editorial Board. And the text: What I learned, living through these events as a former Democrat, is that the New York Times Editorial Board is lying through its teeth. Or maybe they aren’t lying. Maybe they really do believe it. They exist inside the Doomsday Cult of the Left, after all, along with all of those high-minded...

When policies consistently produce death, chaos, division, and decline -- yet are defended with religious fervor -- it is reasonable to ask whether something far darker than mere politics is at work. Conversations with many on the political Left have become nearly impossible when anything of substance arises. Unless the topic is kept superficial -- sports, entertainment, or the weather -- any serious discussion quickly devolves into an automatic pivot: blame Trump. It doesn’t matter if the news is objectively good for America; they will either ignore it, find fault, or reframe it as harmful. Conversely, catastrophic outcomes stemming from...

That the radical Left worldwide would celebrate the inauguration of communist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City was entirely predictable. What is striking, however, is the ostentatious triumphalism displayed at a time when the Trump administration is systematically exposing illegal extraction mechanisms and financial flows step by step. It is a moment of celebration for the radical Left in the United States. After the defeat in the 2024 presidential election, the inauguration of Zohran Kwame Mamdani -- the first Muslim mayor of New York City -- marked the resurgence of socialist forces within the Democratic Party. Naturally,...

Minnesota Democrats more focused on photo ops than accountability for billions vanishing in massive statewide fraud schemes. Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan serves as the unwitting mascot for civic leaders. Her priority? She is more focused on photo ops than accountability for billions vanishing in massive statewide fraud schemes. She is known for her fashion stunts, which have become her personal optic of choice. This time, she recently wore a black hijab -- the safest Muslim color -- as a gesture she framed as “solidarity” with the Somali community being accused of the massive fraud. Solidarity can be charming,...

Since he dropped the news around the year-end holidays and his inauguration, you may have missed how Zohran Mamdani saved many of his most radical appointments for last. On Friday, the new mayor named Ali Najmi to chair his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which picks judges for family and civil courts and interim appointees for criminal courts; Najmi is big on making the bench more “diverse.” Mamdani outright ordered the committee to find more diversity picks and to get public defenders and other anti-prosecution types more involved in judicial selections: Expect the city’s courts to become even more eager...

Smith believes the government can prosecute any of us for rejecting official ‘truths.’ Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who attempted to put President Trump in prison for acknowledging that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, testified before the House Judiciary Committee the week before Christmas. Here are the video and transcript of his deposition. Smith’s testimony is disturbing because his argument in favor of prosecuting the president boils down to this: (1) Every sensible person knows that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. (2) For President Trump to pretend otherwise reveals that he is knowingly telling a “lie.” (3)...

With the calendar now officially flipped over to 2026, we can expect to hear more serious rumblings about which Democrats have their sights set on a White House run in 2028. At the top of that list is California Governor Gavin Newsom. But Newsom’s schizophrenic relationship with left-wing gender ideology may have already alienated both hardcore progressive partisans and everyday Americans. In March 2025, Newsom outraged liberals when he appeared on a podcast hosted by Charlie Kirk, the late Turning Point USA founder. When pressed by Kirk, Newsom admitted that it was “deeply unfair” to allow biological men who claim...

Education has become one of the main ideological battlegrounds across the Western world and particularly within the European Union. Although the EU treaties recognise education as a national competence, in recent years Brussels has developed an increasingly sophisticated architecture of programmes, funding streams and partnerships with NGOs aimed at exerting direct influence over what happens in classrooms—especially in areas related to identity, gender and sexuality. It is in this context that the report Indoctrinating Children: How Brussels Embeds Gender Identity in the Classroom, published by MCC Brussels and authored by sociologist Ashley Frawley, must be understood. The study documents how...

As grand jury investigations begin, the alleged wrongdoers may find that a criminal court finds them guilty as charged. American Thinker readers are familiar with the criminal conspiracy or coup to unseat a duly elected president. John Solomon of Just the News just let the cat out of the bag with his breaking interview about ...a “slam dunk” conspiracy case to prosecute former federal agents and prosecutors for election meddling for relentlessly pursuing Donald Trump for political purposes... Solomon has validated my investigative reporting since 2019. I contend that the acts of the Democratic Party, Deep State, New World Order/WEF...

Josh Gerstein of Politico is facing an avalanche of critical responses on Twitter/X over a post he published on Monday night in which he implied that Somali daycare centers might start justifiably shooting people for knocking on their doors and asking questions, under ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws. He was responding to the explosive claims made by independent citizen journalist Nick Shirley and the revelations in his recent viral video exposing hundreds of millions in alleged fraud carried out by Somali-owned daycare centers in Minnesota. Here is Gerstein’s tweet (it’s a screenshot in case he deletes it): Liberal journalists support ‘Stand...

Campus free expression is in crisis. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), its 2026 College Free Speech Rankings found that student acceptance of disruptive protest tactics has reached record highs. More students than ever believe it is acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to campus events, or use violence to silence speech. For the first time, a majority of students oppose allowing any of the six controversial speakers - three liberal, three conservative - that FIRE asked about. The average school earned an F for its speech climate; only 11 of 257 institutions scored...

Blue Zone political culture is empty. There’s nothing in it. They don’t make anything, they don’t do anything, they aren’t trying to do anything. Let’s bracket a great piece of journalism with more details and some context. By now, I assume most readers here have seen the magnificent work of the independent journalist Nick Shirley in Minnesota, showing widespread Somali fraud in government-funded programs by simply walking up to the front doors of daycare centers and healthcare organizations and inquiring about their services. Daycare centers with millions of dollars in government funding and no children inside, and neighbors who say...

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...