Free Republic

"Why aren't you seeing Harry Potter?" an usher said to the reporter sitting alone in the audience

The Newtown shooting led gun-control advocates to try the same failed strategies again. And once again, they didn't work. After the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, many in the American media insisted that the tragedy should prompt a "conversation about gun control." These articles were written as if there had never been such a conversation. In fact, the issue had been debated for decades. Given the results, I argued, there was no reason to presume that a new conversation would end in more gun control. That conversation has now come and gone. The result? "Perverse as it may sound, the...

What is the telos––the purpose, end, or goal––of the university? In a thought-provoking 2016 lecture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that the answer ought to be “truth,” but that lately, more of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as a second or alternative telos. While acknowledging that those goals are not always at odds, he argued that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable,” and he urged academia to affirm the primacy of truth-seeking. A recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education recognizes the same conflict, but implies that it sometimes ought...

It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored...The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy... Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored...The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world... Far from...

JERUSALEM, Israel -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he's under fire because he won't compromise the safety of Israel. "When there is pressure on Israel to give up on its security, the easiest thing is to give up," Arutz Sheva quoted Netanyahu's response at the Knesset. "As prime minister, I stand for the security of Israel," he continued. "The life of every single citizen and soldier matters to me, and I am not prepared to make comprises that will endanger our country." "Our interests are not on the minds of those who attack us -- or me -- personally,"...

Rep. Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican who fiercely guards his political independence, doesn’t love being on President Trump’s bad side. He would prefer not to have the president’s allies spend millions to defeat him in a primary. In fact, if Massie had his way, he’d be working for Trump right now. In his telling, in the weeks after the 2024 presidential election, the two men talked about Massie, a farmer who champions raw milk, becoming Trump’s agriculture secretary. Massie had formally endorsed Trump late in the campaign, offering to help him win over libertarians who might be tempted to...

As RedState previously reported, the latest media hit piece against a member of the Trump administration dropped on Friday. Not surprisingly, it was from The Atlantic, the same left-leaning "news" site that ran with the infamous 2020 "suckers and losers" hoax that was debunked in part by people who were and are not exactly fond of President Trump (to put it mildly), like former National Security Adviser John Bolton.The focus this time around was on Kash Patel, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The allegations in the piece, as we noted, centered around claims that Patel was...

FBI Director Kash Patel has sued The Atlantic magazine over a 'malicious and defamatory hit piece' alleging he has a serious drinking problem. Patel, 46, brought his lawsuit on Monday against the magazine and staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick, accusing them of publishing an article that was 'replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations' meant to 'drive him from office.' The article shared on April 17 ran with the headline, 'The FBI Director is MIA', and alleged that Patel 'has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.' Fitzpatrick cited anonymous sources within the FBI that said Patel's drinking...

If only Atlantic magazine had published just the first four paragraphs of its tribute to the Artemis II mission it would have been an inspirational piece. Unfortunately the author of the story on Tuesday, "An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive," was Charlie Warzel who has a history of leftist bias including his extreme anger at Twitter (now called X) for embracing free speech rather than maintaining its previous Orwellian censorship after Elon Musk bought it.The first four paragraphs, containing praise for the Artemis II mission sound normal although the subtitle does give a hint as to where Warzel's derangement...

Me, Hillary, and The War on EmpathyA Response to Madam Secretary When I first saw that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had called me “an extremist pastor” in The Atlantic, I immediately thought, “I should probably double my life insurance.” My next thought was “This should be fun to answer.” After all, we have very different worldviews. Probably the only two things we agree on is that 1) Empathy is central to our cultural divide, and 2) Epstein didn’t kill himself.Clinton identifies me and Allie Beth Stuckey as part of a “cadre of hard-right Christian influencers who are...

Sunday's edition of MS NOW's The Weekend stoked paranoid fears of "black and brown" people being targeted by ICE, and the Trump administration at large. Co-host Eugene Daniels primed the persecution complex, teeing up The Atlantic author Adam Serwer: "Trump and co. get to decide who gets the benefit the entire Constitution and who gets to say that they are an American living in this country. And often the people left out of that are black and brown people."Serwer was only too happy to ratchet up the paranoia: "This entire immigration operation has been an excuse to violate the 14th...

The story didn't appear in such periodicals as Breitbart or the Blaze or National Review. Instead, quite shockingly, it appeared on Thursday in Atlantic magazine where assistant editor Marc Novicoff and Jonathan Chait went full smackdown on Newsom. The authors are both liberals but they fear that Newsom, with his disastrous record in the Golden State, is sure to cause a horrible electoral loss for the Democrats in 2028 should he become that party's presidential nominee.So fasten your seatbelts as Novicoff and Chait sound remarkably like 2028 GOP attack ads in "Gavin Newsom’s Record Is a Problem."

Remember during Covid when liberals kept insisting that they were the ones who believed in "THE Science?" Well now that "THE Science" has proved to become politically inconvenient for them we see the hilarious spectacle of those same liberals denying basic science such as during a recent Senate hearing when a leftist doctor refused to answer the simple question of "Can men get pregnant?"We can now also see that same pathetic denial of obvious scientific reality taking effect in the current arguments surrounding the Supreme Court case about upholding state bans of biological males aka trans-women participating in women's sports....

U2 frontman and activist Bono has publicly backed a campaign calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti from an Israeli jail. Barghouti has been serving multiple life sentences since 2002 for orchestrating murderous terrorist attacks against Israelis. He is widely believed to have planned the Second Intifada, which claimed thousands of Israeli lives from 2000 to 2005. Barghouti has continued inciting terrorism from his jail cell. Despite his convictions, he is viewed by many Palestinian Arabs as a unifying figure and potential future leader. In a personal essay published in The Atlantic, Bono described Barghouti as “a leader of vision,...

Is The Atlantic magazine trying to send its readers a not so secret message? Although it's profile of California Governor Gavin Newsom by Helen Lewis on Tuesday, "The Front-Runner," was generally positive it was also chock full of Gettys as in the oil fortune family of patriarch J. Paul Getty.In fact the name "Getty" was so important in Newsom's personal, business, and political background that it appeared a total of 22 times in the article (including the Getty Images attributions of five of the photos used). Although a Republican presidential hopeful so attached to a family whose fortune was based...

In a development that has rattled European capitals and raised alarms across NATO, the Pentagon has abruptly halted its working-level communications with Germany’s Defense Ministry, effectively severing one of the alliance’s most important military coordination channels. The revelation, reported by The Atlantic, comes from German Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, who described the sudden silence from Washington as both unprecedented and deeply worrying. According to Freuding, communications that once flowed freely “day and night” between U.S. and German military officials have now been cut off entirely. Messages go unanswered. Routine coordination has stopped. And Germany — a central pillar of Europe’s...

Since its founding in 1923, Hillel has become the most important Jewish campus organization in America and abroad, with a presence on more than 800 campuses across the world. Its programs and leadership are central to campus Jewish life and, looked at a certain way, reflect the broader failure of colleges to educate students these days. Hillel was established on the premise that Jews themselves need to take responsibility for Jewish prospering by participating in cultural events and social programs and by being intellectually challenged in in-depth classes and seminars. The organization also sought to respond to campus antisemitism and...

The conservative backlash against Nick Fuentes has yet to challenge the president who had him over for dinner.Last month, Tucker Carlson, the host of one of the country’s most popular podcasts, interviewed Nick Fuentes, a white-nationalist influencer, for more than two hours. The two men got along famously, and it was little wonder why. Carlson has become a fierce and obsessive critic of Israel; he has interviewed a Holocaust revisionist and said that “Christian Zionists” have “been seized by this brain virus.” Not everyone on the right was pleased. So in the aftermath of the Carlson-Fuentes conversation, Kevin Roberts, president...

Judge Mark L. Wolf, writing in The Atlantic, said he was stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law” by President Trump, who he accused of “targeting his adversaries.”A federal judge warned of an “existential threat to democracy” in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump. He accused Mr. Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”The judge, Mark L. Wolf, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that...

Barbara Wien posted flyers exposing White House adviser Stephen Miller’s address and calling for “NO NAZIS.” Drawing on Marc Caputo’s Axios story, Jessica Schwalb reports for the Washington Free Beacon (links omitted): On Sept. 11, a day after conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was killed by a politically motivated assassin, Barbara Wien, a retired 66-year-old American University professor, posted the flyers around Miller’s Arlington neighborhood showing a photo of the Trump adviser in a red circle with a cross through it. They also included a QR code that linked to the Instagram account of Arlington Neighbors United for Humanity, an activist...