Free Republic

The Costs and Casualties of Government’s Information Total War“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”This phrase, misattributed to Voltaire, has largely come to dominate—and confuse—our understanding of the importance of free speech in a free society. That misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the very lukewarm response elicited by the exposure of “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” unearthed through discovery in Missouri v. Biden now before the Supreme Court. The trouble with this framing of free speech is that it focuses...

Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama from 2006-2011, appeared on “Face the Nation” Sunday and told moderator Margaret Brennan that he thinks the biggest threat to the nation isn’t white supremacy, it’s not China or Russia or climate change—it’s the political polarization of our country. It’s not the first time we’ve been so divided, he says, but there’s something new about our latest rifts :MARGARET BRENNAN: What do you think the biggest threat to United States is right now?FORMER SEC. GATES: I think it is the polarization in the country. And, you know,...

Gary Webb, reporter who exposed CIA, dies THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Gary Webb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who wrote a controversial series of stories linking the CIA to crack cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles, has died at age 49. Webb was found Friday morning at his home in Sacramento County, dead of an apparent suicide. Moving-company workers called authorities after discovering a note posted on his front door that read, "Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance." Webb died of a gunshot wound to the head, according to the Sacramento County coroner's office....

Billionaire Bill Gates is warning that America is heading for “civil war” and fears that “political polarization” could “bring it all to an end.” Gates made the prediction during a recent keynote conversation at this year’s Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy. The Microsoft co-founder revealed that he plans to end Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 25 years. “The goal for the foundation is to run for another 25 years,” Gates said in the keynote conversation with Forbes’ Chief Content Officer Randall Lane. He revealed that he plans to spend billions of dollars over the next few years on...

For many years—most of my politically cognizant life, in fact—I felt secure in my politics. Truth and justice, I believed, leaned leftward. If you were some version of a decent human being, you cared about those less fortunate than you, which meant that you supported a whole host of measures designed to even the playing field a little. Sometimes, these measures had unintended consequences (see under: Stalin, Josef), but that wasn’t reason enough to despair of the long march to equality. Besides, there was hardly an alternative: On the other end of the political transom lurked despicable creeps, right-wing orcs...

At the end of the day, senators care more about protecting themselves and their colleagues from unpredictable, inconvenient floor votes than they do about passing legislation.Official Washington’s conventional wisdom about the Senate filibuster is a fairy tale. It is utterly unmoored from the choices being made by individual senators, party caucuses, and the body as a whole. Every person who has ever told you that the mean, nasty, outdated legislative filibuster is the source of Senate gridlock and the obstacle to common-sense legislating in Congress has either swallowed, or is peddling, a lie. In an op-ed in the Washington Post...

Tulsi talks with Rubin

In times of social crises in America, big tech billionaires are often amongst the first to speak up—though how they do so varies. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, unlike many of his peers, didn’t directly speak about the riot that erupted in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday afternoon. But the second-richest man in the world did make it clear that he was watching the news and indeed had a strong opinion about the surreal events that transpired at the U.S. Capitol. Late Wednesday night, after police had cleared protestors from the Capital ground to allow Congress to resume vote counting...

I don’t think it’s unusual to say that author George Orwell’s dystopian story of 1984 is the most intriguing, thought-provoking, frightening, and influential political work of fiction to ever hit bookshelves, media, and film. I think the reason as to why this is so, is because as human history continues to advance, we see numerous elements depicted within this story, play out in our society and in our everyday reality. 1984’s Influence in Politics: Some of the terminologies used within both the book and the film are words that have seeped into our political discourse, so much so, that they...

On July 2, 1776, the world changed forever. The Second Continental Congress voted to formally sever ties with the British Empire. America was officially born. On that day, John Adams wrote the following to his wife, Abigail: “The second day of July, 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with...

Leaked funding documents reveal an effort by George Soros and his foundations to manipulate election laws and process rules ahead of the federal election far more expansively than has been previously reported. The billionaire and convicted felon moved hundreds of millions of dollars into often-secret efforts to change election laws, fuel litigation to attack election integrity measures, push public narratives about voter fraud, and to integrate the political ground game of the left with efforts to scare racial minority groups about voting rights threats. These Soros-funded efforts moved through dozens of 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) charities and involved the active compliance with civil rights groups, government...

The Republican president, considered a lightweight and an ignoramus by many in Washington, suffered a setback in the offyear elections, losing several seats and effective control in the House, while maintaining and perhaps strengthening his party in the Senate. His leverage on domestic issues is reduced, but he retains the initiative on foreign policy and judgeships. That's a fair description of this week's offyear elections -- and of those in 1982, the last time voters paired a Republican president with a Democratic House and a Republican Senate. It also resembles results in 1962, when a Democratic president's party gained...

Physicists from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary have determined that the sunstones claimed to be used by Vikings to navigate on foggy and cloudy days could provide accurate results. Vikings living between 900 and 1200AD did not have magnetic compasses, and their ability to navigate was attributed in part to the use of calcite, cordierite or tourmaline crystals which functioned as linear polarizers to help them determine geographic north. The crystals can split sunlight into two beams, and when the crystal is turned, splitting the two beams at the same brightness, a navigator could see the polarized rings around the...

Political polarization may be blotting out Americans' understanding of their own history, a new poll suggests. More Americans identified former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama as the best president in U.S. history rather than Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.When asked who was the best president in U.S. history, 16 percent of Americans selected Reagan and another 16 percent selected Obama, according to a recent YouGov survey. Lincoln took third place with 15 percent, and Washington followed with 10 percent.The grand totals miss the larger story, however. Among Republicans, 36 percent chose Reagan, while only two percent of Democrats...

A new Rasmussen poll reports that a majority of voters think so, and it certainly feels that way. Since Donald Trump’s election in November, the pace and intensity of deeply divisive rhetoric has accelerated. Antifa and the Alt-Right are literally fighting in the streets. Combative talking heads on cable news, vicious social media exchanges, riots at universities, a bitter special election in Georgia, and even the shooting of a congressman have both sides rethinking the entire political process and talking about abandoning the “rule of law.” It is an uneasy time, a time for hard questions. Can politics really provide...

Both victory and defeat have been radicalizing experiences for the Democratic party during this century. Democrats moved left after losing to George W. Bush; they moved farther left after winning with Barack Obama; and now they seem to be moving farther left still under President Donald Trump. The cumulative effect of all this movement has been to put the party well to the left of where it was during Bill Clinton’s administration. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign felt it necessary to disavow many of her husband’s old stances, and some of her own. President Clinton signed a tough-on-crime bill; Hillary Clinton...

Forty-nine years ago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate for president. The year 1968 was a tumultuous one that saw the assassinations of rival candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson's unpopular lame-duck Democratic administration imploded due to massive protests against the Vietnam War. Yet Humphrey almost defeated Republican nominee Richard Nixon, losing the election by just over 500,000 votes (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent). Infighting Democrats could have defeated the unpopular Nixon if not for a few unforeseen developments. Their convention in Chicago turned into a creepy carnival of...

In 1862, a man named Lt. Charles H. Colley of Gray, ME was killed during the Battle of Cedar Mountain. When his grieving family opened up the casket that was supposed to contain their son, they were stunned to discover that a fully uniformed Confederate soldier had been shipped to them instead. Having no way to identify the soldier, and also lacking the means to ship him back to Virginia, Lt. Colley's family decided to bury him in Gray Village Cemetery alongside the Union soldiers who had been killed in the war. They figured that this unknown Confederate's family would...

Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Breitbart, has quit the company following an incident where one of its reporters accused GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign manager of violently grabbing her. "When you reach a point where you can't give 100% to people you represent, it's not tenable to continue representing them,” Bardella said in a statement to The Hill. Bardella, a former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), also implied that Breitbart’s handling of the incident at the Trump event was his main reason for leaving. “My own personal observation is that there is a cycle of behavior that is...

Video ay link. President Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday morning that his inability to reduce polarization between the political parties in Washington "gnaws" on him as he settles into his final year in office. "The one thing that gnaws on me-- is the degree of-- continued polarization," he said during an interview broadcast on "CBS Sunday Morning." "It's gotten worse-- over the last several years," Obama continued. "And I think that in those early months my expectation was is that-- we could pull-- the parties together a little more effectively." Obama campaigned in 2008 on a platform of...