Free Republic

Following the fourth Democratic debate in Westerville, Ohio, BlazeTV's Eric Bolling questioned candidates Beto O'Rourke and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) about their support for a gun confiscation policy, and asked billionaire presidential candidate Tom Steyer why he thinks the economy isn't thriving under President Donald Trump. "Congressman, can you please clarify how you will get the ARs and AKs back," Bolling asked O'Rourke. "I expect our fellow Americans to follow the law. If you own and AR-15, if you own an AK-47, and it is no longer legal to own that, I expect you to turn it in," O'Rourke said....

The clown show known as the Democratic Presidential debates has given us a sneak preview of our future government. There are a few things all the candidates agree on, open borders with mass immigration, an insanely increased welfare state, massive tax increases on the middle class, and an omnipotent government. All are fighting for the support of the socialist extreme of their party. This endorsement of socialism and extreme progressivism will either be devastating for the Democratic Party or our Republic. Never has generous welfare and open borders succeeded. In years past, I would point to the European countries as...

A statue of Christopher Columbus in San Francisco was vandalized the day before the federal holiday commemorating his arrival in the Americas in 1492. On Sunday, city workers cleaned up the statue at the foot of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill that had been covered in red paint. Graffiti on the base read “Destroy all monuments of genocide” and “Kill all colonizers.”

...Progressivism: the religion of progress, a form of millenarianism that makes a god of the individual and a sacred and divine right of even his most capricious desires. Progressivism is a form of deified materialism that sees men as undifferentiated and interchangeable beings without sex or origin, beings that, like so many Legos, have been entirely constructed and may thus be deconstructed at will. Progressivism is a form of secularized messianism, as were Jacobinism, communism, fascism, Nazism, neoliberalism and the ideology of human rights. Progressivism is a revolution. Indeed, you may recall that our dear President titled his campaign book,...

The intellectual class across the West—encompassing its universities, media, and arts—is striving to dismantle the values that paced its ascendancy. Europe, the source of Western civilization, now faces a campaign, in academia and elite media, to replace its cultural and religious traditions with what one author describes as a “multicultural and post-racial republic” supportive of separate identities. “The European ‘we’ does not exist,” writes French philosopher Pierre Manent, assessing the damage. “European culture is in hiding, disappearing, without a soul.” The increasingly “woke” values of the educated upper classes reflect, as Alvin Toffler predicted almost half a century ago, the...

Everywhere you turn progressives are pushing the idea of diversity. It’s in our school curriculum, in every TV show and movie, and now even in corporate commercials. But within the era of Newspeak, what is now called diversity is actual progressive dogmatic orthodoxy. The only permitted diversity is in the narrow, acceptable progressive doctrine. It is acceptable to hold any opinion on the number of human genders if that number is greater than twelve. The current politically acceptable number is one hundred twelve. To say there are only two genders will get you send to re-education camp, or diversity training,...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s withdrawal from the presidential race last week is a lost opportunity. A successful de Blasio effort in the Democratic primaries—his was anything but—could have sparked a necessary national debate over signs of rising disorder in American cities. We haven’t returned to the bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s. The troubles of that era had many causes: disappearing jobs, changes in social welfare policy, changes in cultural attitudes, deinstitutionalization of the mental health system, drug wars, crack cocaine, a surging crime rate—all intersecting to drain the vitality of neighborhoods and stamp countless urban...

A hybrid derived from the Greek words meaning “well” and “born,” the term eugenics was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a British cousin to Charles Darwin, to name a new “science” through which human beings might take charge of their own evolution. The Eugenics Crusade tells the story of the unlikely –– and largely unknown –– movement that turned the fledgling scientific theory of heredity into a powerful instrument of social control. Perhaps more surprising still, American eugenics was neither the work of fanatics, nor the product of fringe science. The goal of the movement was simple and,...

President Trump is waging a nonstop, all-encompassing war against progressive culture, in magnitude analogous to what 19th-century Germans once called a "Kulturkampf." As a result, not even former President George W. Bush has incurred the degree of hatred from the left that is now directed at Trump. For most of his time in office, Trump, his family, his friends and his businesses have been investigated, probed, dissected and constantly attacked. In 2016 and early 2017, President Barack Obama's appointees in the FBI, CIA and Department of Justice tried to subvert the Trump campaign, interfere with his transition and, ultimately, abort...

Democrats are having a wonkish but important debate right now as they pick their next standard-bearer: Should they try to persuade voters who supported President Barack Obama for two terms and then left them in 2016? Or should they mobilize the tens of millions of Americans who stayed home in 2016 and would seem to have a natural home in the Democratic Party in 2020, including people of color and single women? The debate tends to track along ideological lines. Progressives pushing socialized medical insurance are ready to forgo any attempt to win back Trump voters. Doing so allows them...

Recently, the state of Vermont announced that pension and health benefits for state employees and teachers are underfunded to the tune of $4.5 billion (in a tiny state of just 627,180 residents).  Then, in protest against Trump administration rule changes, it diverted some $750,000 from state coffers (each year, indefinitely) to fund abortion services through Planned Parenthood rather than continue to accept federal subsidies which had been proffered since 1970. Many Vermonters, like most Americans, are struggling to pay their property taxes.  I live on land passed down to me from my great-great-great-great-grandfather, in a house I built by...

Prominent Democratic donor and LGBTQ political activist Ed Buck was arrested Tuesday and charged with operating a drug house, with prosecutors calling him a violent sexual predator who preys on men struggling with addiction and homelessness. Buck was charged with one count each of battery causing serious injury, administering methamphetamine and maintaining a drug house, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Buck is accused of injecting a 37-year-old man, who overdosed but survived, with methamphetamine on Sept. 11. That latest incident comes after two men were found dead in his Laurel Avenue apartment in Hollywood. In both...

At the very moment when the issue of race might at long last have been put to rest, it is now becoming the most important issue of all. The decades since the 1960s saw the growth of “black studies” in American universities. The courses started out in part as a way of de-stigmatizing the group and educating people about a crucial aspect of their history. But, just as a popular strand of feminism turned from celebrating women to vilifying men, a portion of black studies started attacking people who were not black. A discipline intended to de-stigmatize began to re-stigmatize....

“Listen. I gotta break it to you . . . I’m post-Christian. . . . I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t believe any of it.” These are the words former Christian minister Bart Campolo recalls speaking to his famous evangelist father, Tony Campolo, after leaving the faith of his youth. He explained that his journey to secular humanism was a 30-year process of passing through every stage of heresy. In other words, his theology “progressed” from conservative to liberal to entirely secular. He predicted that in 10 years, 30 percent to 40 percent of so-called progressive Christians will...

Transience is the very essence of the entertainment business, unpredictability its warp and weft. Early this month, the market research and data analytics firm YouGov published the results of a startling poll. According to interviews with 1,254 adult Americans, 30 percent of millennials have no best friends, 27 percent have no close friends and 22 percent have no friends at all. Not surprisingly, the report named them “the loneliest generation.” But loneliness is all around and perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in Hollywood. Here’s what surprised me: that the statistics weren’t worse, for older people as well as millennials. Look...

Over the past several years, many on the Right, whether dissident or mainstream, have begun to wake up as to the true nature of the Left. While it has taken longer than it really should have, an increasing number of normiecons are starting to figure out some things, such as that people on the Left aren’t interested in “fair play” or “following the rules.” It’s taken so long because most conservatives, especially older ones, were habituated to a previously prevailing political climate in which there was at least an idealised public consensus that these traits were how you “did politics...

Celebrities, activists, environmentalist organizations, the UN, government entities and sadly, even the Vatican support the theory that humans cause climate change. However, in this exclusive interview, “global warming” expert and author Marc Morano gives you hard-hitting arguments and facts that dispel the artificial fear propagated by “climate emergency” alarmists.

The tiresome “HATE!”, “HATE!””, “HATE!” of the Progressives is now running Hollow, Hollow, Hollow The real reason why Progressives “HATE!” President Donald Trump? It’s because Trump’s against-all-odds survival in the political hatefest against him shows clearly how pathetically powerless Progressives really are. Nothing they have thrown at him ever sticks.

Politicians ignore felonies in their midst, preferring to hector the misdemeanors of the universe. ne of the weirdest characteristics of our global politicians and moral censors is their preference to voice cosmic justice rather than to address less abstract sin within their own purview or authority. These progressive virtue mongers see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of the United States and thus can impotently theorize about problems elsewhere when they cannot solve those in their own midst. Big-city mayors are especially culpable when it comes to ignoring felonies in their midst, preferring to hector the misdemeanors of...

August eight just came and went. Supposedly, now the date has significance to neo-Nazis. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and "Heil Hitler" is HH, or "88." The number has long been used as a neo-Nazi symbol. The link to August 8 is tenuous. Nevertheless, there is a leftist meme started on MSNBC that President Trump ordered the U.S. flag to be raised on August 8, following is lowering in response to last week's shootings, as a message to his neo-Nazi supporters. Despite Trump's support of Israel and Jews, or rather in part because of it, "progressives" regularly...