Free Republic

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles officials agreed Thursday to drop all criminal charges against one of the city’s most visible Black Lives Matter organizers as part of a negotiated arrangement, after hundreds of activists filed petitions, filled courtrooms and led rallies in recent weeks accusing prosecutors and police of using the charges to silence a critical voice.

In the shallow world of modernity, we throw around a word like “democracy” as a stand-in for “things that I like.” Many in popular culture and elite institutions promote democracy as a cure for all that ails us—an unquestioned and unqualified blessing. Still others turn on a dime and hope for its demise as soon as it produces outcomes they don’t like. While democracy often plays a good and necessary role in a self-governing society, we have lost the healthy skepticism of its worst excesses that the Founding Fathers understood when they established the governing institutions of the United States....

The Democratic operative arrested and charged with battery against the female campaign manager for Nevada gubernatorial nominee Adam Laxalt was employed at the George Soros-funded American Bridge for months, despite a reputation on Capitol Hill for what sources described as “hostile” tactics. Wilfred M. Stark III, who goes by Mike, was arrested Tuesday evening in Las Vegas, after Laxalt campaign manager Kristin Davison accused him of grabbing and yanking her arm and refusing to let go. Las Vegas City Marshals arrested Stark, who was later released. Stark, who was a reporter for American Bridge 21st Century, was fired Wednesday night...

On Oct. 6, 2018, Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the narrowest of margins, with 50 votes in favor and 48 votes against. He is the first justice in U.S. history to be confirmed by senators representing less than half of the country (44 percent), with a majority of the population (52 percent) opposed to his nomination. Kavanaugh is the second Supreme Court justice picked by President Donald Trump. Trump, in turn, is the second president in five elections to enter the White House after losing the popular vote. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular...

The National Park Service is exploring whether to require protest organizers to pay for the cost of providing law enforcement and other support services for demonstrations held in the nation’s capital. The proposed rule also could shrink a significant portion of the sidewalk outside the White House that is accessible to pedestrians, leaving a five-foot wide sliver. The public has until the close of Monday to comment on the proposal. More than 7,600 comments have been submitted so far, the vast majority in opposition, including many who consider it an effort by the Trump administration to deter some of the...

Beto O’Rourke’s response to a question during a Houston town hall meeting this past summer lasted only four minutes. But for some Democrats it said everything. It was authentic. In an exchange that quickly went viral, the Democrat congressman and Senate hopeful was asked whether he found NFL players who knelt during the national anthem to be disrespectful. A passionate O’Rourke told the room of Texans, not necessarily a sympathetic crowd, that he could “think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights.” Clips of his answer were viewed millions of times...

NEW YORK (WIVB) - Republican gubernatorial candidate Marc Molinaro says his campaign headquarters was vandalized on Thursday night. "Stop this now @NYGovCuomo. We demand civility," he wrote on Twitter. It's not clear who did this, but Molinaro referred to them as "radical leftists who smashed windows, spray painted our door, glued our locks, and left a threatening note behind." The building is located on E. 83rd St. in Manhattan -- the home of The Metropolitan Republican Club.

The way I see it, the Democrat political party is made up of Socialists, sexual perverts, druggies, criminals, Muslims and clueless people who would circumvent our laws and try to destroy our Christian nation – some just to have their fifteen minutes of supposed fame by burning and defecating on the American flag – in public. Democrats are so determined to destroy the current administration that they will say or do anything to do so. Things have gotten so out of hand that Democrats will even disrupt Senator Cruz’s meal at a restaurant or issue death threats against political opponents...

Washington’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state’s death penalty Thursday, ruling that it had been used in an arbitrary and racially discriminatory manner. Washington has had a moratorium on executions since 2014, but the ruling makes it the 20th state to do away with capital punishment by legislative act or court decree. The court converted the sentences of the eight people on Washington’s death row to life in prison. “The death penalty is unequally applied — sometimes by where the crime took place, or the county of residence, or the available budgetary resources at any given point in time,...

FULL TITLE: 'You don't give power to an angry left-wing mob... that's what they have become': Gloating Trump lays into Democrats for failing to derail Kavanaugh nomination President Donald Trump has praised the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and blasted the 'angry left wing mob' that opposed him. Trump's remarks came on Saturday night at a rally in Topeka, Kansas, just hours after Kavanaugh was confirmed by a 50-48 Senate vote and sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice. He attacked Democrats over their fierce opposition to Kavanaugh and urged citizens to vote Republican in November, saying: 'You...

"You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob. Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law - not the rule of the mob. VOTE REPUBLICAN!"

New York Democratic leaders say they want more people to vote — except they won’t allow anyone but registered Democrats to vote in party primaries. The New York State Democratic Party plans on blocking a proposed resolution at its May 23-24 convention that would allow independent or “unaffiliated” voters to vote in this year’s Democratic primary for governor. New York’s restrictive voting laws became a national embarrassment in 2016 as many younger voters realized they couldn’t vote for Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary against Hillary Clinton because they missed the deadline to enroll as Democrats.

PITTSBURGH — The Pittsburgh Art Commission voted Wednesday to recommend the Stephen Foster statue in Oakland be removed. The recommendation is that the statue is removed from the public and placed in a place in private and "properly contextualized." The Pittsburgh Art Commission will recommend removal of the statue within six months. Foster, a Pittsburgh native who died in 1864, is famous for classic songs including “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races.” Many of his songs were used in minstrel shows in which actors performed in blackface. The statue depicts Foster sitting above shoeless, banjo-playing “Uncle Ned,” a slave character from...

Fifty years ago this weekend, a deadly urban riot began in Detroit. It started around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of a blind pig -- an illegal after-hours bar -- in the midst of an all-black neighborhood that had been all-white 15 or 20 years before. The statistics are horrifying. Rioting went on for six nights, with some 2,500 stores looted and burnt, some 400 families displaced and property damage was estimated around $300 million in 2017 dollars. Forty-three people, many of them innocent bystanders, were killed. More than 1,000 people were wounded. The reality was even more...

War reporter Lara Logan was stripped and beaten with makeshift poles used to fly flags during the celebration of the downfall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, according to new details of her sex attack in Cairo's Tahrir Square almost two weeks ago. CBS News' 39-year-old chief foreign correspondent also was kicked, punched, slapped, pinched and her hair pulled out while a crowd of about 200 chanted "Jew, Jew, Jew" and accused her of being an Israeli spy, according to The Times of London. Logan is not Jewish. Doctors say welts on Logan's body, originally thought to be bites, are consistent...

With the inauguration of Donald Trump just days away, droves of his supporters are preparing to meet in Washington D.C. to welcome the new President. But there are also darker forces assembling; a gathering of at least 75 anarchist, socialist and communist groups preparing for an event called #DisruptJ20 that has officially called for violent Black Bloc protesters to gather at 10:00 am on Friday, January 20th in Washington D.C. at the Logan Circle and the Francis Scott Key Memorial. The group’s call-to-arms is blunt: Wear all black | January 20th, 10 AM | Logan Circle, DC We are calling...

The Electoral College remains in place over two centuries after the framers of the Constitution empowered it to select presidents. Though occasionally maligned, this system of electing a chief executive has been incredibly successful for the American people. Many modern voters might be surprised to learn that when they step into a ballot box to select their candidate for president, they actually are casting a vote for fellow Americans called electors. These electors, appointed by the states, are pledged to support the presidential candidate the voters have supported. The Electoral College holds its vote the Monday after the second Wednesday...

I’ve reached a breaking point with those who continue to defend Donald Trump’s endless brutishness. If you went back in time a year, and asked Trump supporters if they would ever vote for a man who made fun of POWs, mocked the physically handicapped, compared another candidate to a child molester, and shifted positions as frequently as a fat guy in a church pew, they would have likely said “No.” How did we get here? How did we get to a place where Trump’s rhetoric and behavior is not only accepted, but emulated? Donald Trump is a master manipulator. He...

The riot planned and executed by the Left at the canceled Donald Trump campaign rally in Chicago on Friday was just the latest in a long series of mob disturbances manufactured by radicals to advance their political agendas. Even so, it is a particularly poisonous assault on the American body politic that imperils the nation's most important free institution – the ballot.

Rumors about Trump's visit started flying around the UIC campus Friday evening. Students were not happy. On Monday night, there was a meeting. The lecture hall, meant to hold 100 students, overflowed with representatives of student groups from the Black Student Union to Fearless and Undocumented. They decided they would march outside the rally to protest. "He's marginalized and dehumanized a lot of different groups, and they all come together," said Juan Rojas, one of the student organizers. A Facebook page was started to promote the protest. By the night of the Trump rally, more than 11,600 people had RSVP'd...