Free Republic

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s ban on military service by individuals who identify as transgender or have gender dysphoria, staying a lower-court order that blocked War Secretary Pete Hegseth from enforcing the policy. The 2–1 decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sharply rebuked U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, concluding that her ruling in March overrode military judgment and applied a standard of review the courts are not entitled to use when second-guessing force-readiness decisions.

Trump is right to warn against mass immigration and the Islamification of EuropeLast week the Trump administration expressed its fear that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” Its concern was articulated in a 33-page National Security Strategy that outlined Donald Trump’s world view and how America will respond economically and militarily.The sentence that caused the most reaction on the other side of the pond was the assertion that, if current trends continue, Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” Those trends are mass immigration and what conservative French commentators call the “Islamification” of Europe. If Europe doesn’t address these trends,...

Legal conservatives find themselves in an unusual position: originalism has reached unprecedented acceptance within the judiciary and the bar. A majority of Supreme Court justices—including at least one appointed by a Democratic president—identify as originalists, or at least strive toward originalism. Guided by the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments, the High Court has overruled Roe v. Wade, ended the use of race in higher education, and recognized the individual right to own firearms. But some find these successes disorienting. Originalism’s victories have triggered an important debate among conservatives. Some wonder if originalism is...

My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine...

Today the NY Times has published the story of a trans woman named Jennifer Capasso. Capasso, who lives in New York, was diagnosed with multiple tumors which had spread throughout to various organs. Capasso was still getting medical treatment, including surgeries to remove the tumors, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. In March 2022, Capasso set her phone to record what the doctors were saying during the operation.“I wanted to know what’s going on,” she recounted. She turned on the audio recorder on her phone before the anesthesia hit. “Knowledge is power.”The surgeon removed part of her lung....

“I’m thankful for my health” is a common refrain heard around the Thanksgiving table. But for Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, the feeling is a bit more complicated. David J. Garrow reviews the senator’s frank memoir, Unfettered. “An October 25 debate against Oz was a disaster. ‘My nerves beat me down. I had wilted. I’d choked,’ and in its wake ‘I had mentally collapsed.’ Now ‘I never thought I would win’ the race to become a senator, which felt all well and good since ‘I didn’t deserve to be one.’ But win Fetterman did, by a margin of more than 250,000 votes,...

The U.S. Supreme Court could soon extend its administrative stay in the Texas redistricting case that has generated nationwide controversy and headlines for months. If so, a legal analyst told CBS News Texas that it will become a clear signal that the Justices will keep the 2025 congressional maps in place for next year's all-important midterm elections.

Recently, during a social gathering, someone who reads my column regularly asked me if I had lost any friends because of my politically conservative leanings. Rather than respond with the usual sanitized comment about the unlikely chance of losing “true” friends simply because of my opinions, I told him that my friends and I never talk politics or religion. In fact, my friends and I have an understanding about controversial subjects. If we’re at a dinner or another social function and someone expresses a political opinion that one of us disagrees with, we might briefly attempt to refute what was...

When it comes to talking to Gen Z men the right is beginning to sound a bit like the left: You can’t get ahead. The whole world is stacked against you. You’re the real victim here. Podcaster Ben Shapiro recently said as much at a recent event, when he called out conservatives for inculcating young men with a “nihilistic” worldview rather than giving them the “tough talk” they need. “I think that the right is actually weirdly feminizing young men by giving them a victimology to buy into,” Shapiro said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “This notion that you, as...

The Radicalization of Gen ZA rootless generation looks for home in dark places.A friend who works with high school students recently said to me, “I overheard a group of boys talking about ‘international Jewry.’” He was in disbelief to hear these seemingly mild-mannered kids express views that, not 20 years ago, would have been considered taboo.What is going on with Gen Z?I’ve written elsewhere that Gen Z is experiencing a kind of church resurgence. That remains true. But at the same time, Gen Z is one of the most polarized generations in American history.In 2024, Gen Z—led in part by...

In early October, Canada's Liberal government kicked off it's long-delayed compensated confiscation efforts with a test run in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The goal of the "buyback" effort is to take thousands of lawfully purchased semi-automatic firearms from their rightful owners. While the Liberal government has called the scheme "voluntary," anyone caught possessing one of the banned firearms after the government's amnesty period expires risks criminal charges. Because of Canada's restrictive gun laws, the government had a list of about 200 "assault weapons" in the Cape Breton area, as well as the names of their owners. One official expressed confidence...

Ten years ago this month, I announced that Wyoming Catholic College—where I was then serving as president—had made the deliberate decision to forgo participation in federal student loan and grant programs. Our reason was simple: We believed that accepting federal dollars might compromise our mission to “immerse students in the Great Books (the Western canon), the Good Book (the Bible), and God’s First Book (nature).” In other words, we chose to reject federal funds for the sake of defending classical education. What a difference a decade makes. Today, classical education is no longer something to simply be defended—it is ascendant,...

Eric Swalwell sometimes flies under the radar among members of Congress who operate daily with a double-digit IQ. Often, it's members of the so-called Squad who earn that accolade. They get the spotlight, and rightly so. But the congressman proves his mettle time and time again, spitting out ideas indicating he's clearly two beers short of a six-pack. Swalwell, the Democrat Representative who has served California's 14th congressional district, recently announced he was jumping into the Golden State's gubernatorial race. He announced his laughable campaign with the less humorous Jimmy Kimmel because, of course. Things got infinitely funnier when, speaking...

Two momentous things come together as the New Year approaches. The first is the 250th anniversary of the greatest document in political history, the Declaration of Independence. The second is the national firestorm that rages over its meaning. Trump The first of the contrary winds fueling our national firestorm is Donald Trump, who has closed out his first whirlwind year. Crime is down in several cities where he sent the National Guard. The economy is doing pretty well, and predictions are that it will continue, decline, or quicken (I think it will fluctuate). The stock market is high, and the...

Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief at CBS News, is already making waves.The founder and editor of The Free Press and former New York Times columnist has adopted a rallying cry in meetings with colleagues, according to the Wall Street Journal.: "I wanna blow this up." Weiss's plan "is working to overhaul the organization’s evening news program, counter what she sees as a left-leaning bias in legacy media and make the newsroom operate more efficiently," reports the Journal. Paramount Global and its new boss, Dave Ellison, recently acquired CBS in a deal that was harshly criticized by other legacy media outlets....

The University of Notre Dame has ixnayed and expunged the school’s historic Catholic mission from its staff values and instead chosen to adopt a “refreshed” set of generic concepts like “community.”According to the Daily Caller:The University of Notre Dame has dropped the school’s historic Catholic mission from its staff values and adopted a “refreshed” set of generic concepts like “community” instead, though it will still identify as a “Catholic research university.”The Catholic school’s list of staff values previously included requiring that one “Understands, accepts, and supports the Catholic mission of the university and fosters values consistent with that mission.” Now,...

The left sees that she might be useful in their war to bring down TrumpIt is always interesting to see who the American left claims are the leaders of the American right. There was a time during President Trump’s first term when Steve Bannon fit the role – and relished playing it. Back then most days brought another media profile of the dark genius of the MAGA movement. The Guardian, New York Times and others were obsessed. Vanity Fair would send reporters to follow Bannon as he conquered America and, er, Europe. Documentary crews were perennially in tow. Indeed one...

In the school of Tuckerism, I was a prospective PhD. I never missed Tucker’s Fox News monologues. Every night, I imbibed his lively lectures, treating his conservative social critique as a nightly devotional. His cuts into liberalism were scalpel-sharp. I once commented to my wife, after another of Tucker’s surgical vivisections of some liberal propagandist, “I’d hate to be one of his liberal guests.” Though sometimes, looking back, the red flags were there—baseless conspiracy theories punctuated with an emphatic “This is just true, period!”—he still put on a nightly clinic on how to deconstruct the left. But now the scalpel-like...

The Weaponisation of ScienceYesterday, I took part in a panel discussion in Washington, D.C., on the weaponisation of science — specifically, how conflicts of interest, industry influence, and scientific deception have reshaped modern medicine.It was an important conversation about how the scientific process has been hollowed out by financial incentives, regulatory capture, and institutional cowardice.For me, this is not an abstract debate. I’ve spent much of my career investigating how science becomes distorted — not by a few rogue actors, but through an entire system built on commercial dependence.Once you start pulling the threads of how evidence is produced, who...

Treatment Action Group (TAG) is profoundly disappointed and outraged at the lack of health care protections for people living with and affected by HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and hepatitis C (HCV) in the bill to end the U.S. government shutdown. With only a promise of a future vote to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits, millions of people now face unaffordable health insurance costs. As we approach World AIDS Day on December 1, we demand that legislators defend access and affordability of health care, especially for those with preexisting conditions. Several of the fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills, which...