Free Republic

What drives Trump’s politics is nostalgia for the age of coal, when dirty fuel and no environmental regulations created his version of a great America.Arguably, no technology freed the world from the drudgery and cold of premodern times more than coal. It fueled the Industrial Revolution and rising standards of living that transformed what a human life meant after 1800. The cost of this freedom soon meant slaughtered workers, rising carbon dioxide levels, and the threat of planetary ecological catastrophe. Today, arguably no technology dooms the world’s future more than coal, with its environmental destruction, pumping of carbon dioxide into...

The Trump administration is using an imagined enemy—“antifa”—to justify turning ICE into an ultra-violent, unaccountable army invading US cities. Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s hard to portray someone dancing in an inflatable frog or chicken costume as a terrorist. This, of course, hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from officially designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Secretary of...

A roving reporter who covered Italy’s top politicians explains to The Grayzone how his country was reduced to a joint US-Israeli “aircraft carrier,” and raises troubling questions about an Israeli role in the killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.For years, Israel’s Mossad monitored and secretly influenced a violent communist faction that carried out the March 16, 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, veteran investigative journalist Eric Salerno has documented.Having worked closely alongside multiple Italian heads of state during his 30-year career as a correspondent, Salerno published an expose of their secret relationship with Israeli intelligence in...

The ‘House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party’ was in session when a Code Pink activist disrupted it by holding up a sign reading, “China Is Not Our Enemy.” “The United States needs collaboration, not competition, with China,” she insisted. Collaboration was the correct term. While most people stopped paying attention to Code Pink in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the leftist anti-war group never went away, but beyond the backing for Venezuela, Iran and the other usual terror states, it’s become a vocal defender of China. The level of collaboration between Code Pink and China is unusual...

George Soros has been the go-to bogeyman for the American right — and right-wing leaders around the world — for years. The 95-year-old billionaire has funneled money into causes around the globe, supporting democratic endeavors, immigration efforts and criminal justice reform through his Open Society Foundations, which he founded in 1979. In the intervening decades, Soros, with his large network of progressive causes and opposition to strong-arm governments, has become the target of conspiracy theories in areas that range from Malaysia to his birth country of Hungary, where a so-called “Stop Soros” law made it illegal to aid undocumented immigrants...

Politico’s knee-jerk reaction to trust but not verify leftist magazine The Nation’s retort to Vice President J.D. Vance’s connection of the latter to billionaire George Soros is the epitome of what happens when journalists let Trump Derangement rot their brains so much they throw ethics to the wind. During his guest-host appearance for the Charlie Kirk Show September 15, Vance argued that Soros “funds” The Nation, which drew the ire of the magazine’s president Bhaskar Sunkara, who falsely accused him of “lying” in an X post. “[W]e're not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation,” Sunkara railed....

Many people attacked a grieving widow last night as she publicly addressed the nation. Erika Kirk mourned her late husband Charlie Kirk, who an extremist shot and killed on Wednesday with a bolt-action rifle from about 200 yards away on a college campus in Utah. The father turned in the 22-year-old to the police. If convicted, the shooter might face the death penalty. Tim Shorrock, who covers Korea for The Nation, a progressive monthly magazine, posted: "The evil doers have no idea what they've done." Charlie Kirk is apparently Jesus 2.0 and is "sitting next to his savior." A new...

Federalizing the National Guard in response to ICE protests risks bloodshed—which is exactly what this administration wants.

We are having enough problems in the war with Islam, just dealing with Muslims. Then on top of that, we have to deal with naive non-Muslims of the world, that help advance Islam. Muslims constantly play the victim card, and people like Stein fall for it over and over. Stein you are part of the problem. Smarten up. About Jeff Stein: SpyTalk columnist Jeff Stein is a longtime investigative reporter specializing in U.S. intelligence, defense and foreign policy issues. An Army Intelligence case officer in Vietnam, Stein has authored three highly regarded books and has been a frequent contributor to...

I’m not much good at timing. I was visiting Jordan on a lecture tour when the Israelis assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin. Amman closed down and much of my program had to be canceled; Americans weren’t welcome on campuses where student groups were mourning the sheikh and vowing revenge. I was in Indonesia when the Israelis invaded Lebanon; I was able to go ahead with the program, but all the audiences wanted to discuss was the war and America’s responsibility for Israeli crimes. I first came to Pakistan about the time then-Senator Obama called for escalating the drone strikes in...

WARSAW, Poland -- Do unarmed protestors who risk their lives to replace murderous and corrupt regimes with law-based, liberal democracies deserve our support or not? For simple folk like you and me, this is not one of life's more demanding ethical conundrums. But then again, you and I are no match for some of the great brains at Britain's Guardian newspaper, who -- along with like minded members of the international left -- are currently mounting something approaching a hate campaign against the brave men and women fighting for democracy in Ukraine, and indeed against their predecessors across eastern Europe...

That’s a basic premise of American democracy, as US Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minnesota, pointed out Monday during a press conference with fellow Democratic members of Congress, where Musk’s assault on USAID—the federal government agency that is responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance—was decried as “a constitutional crisis.” Musk may say that he is going to feed the agency into “the wood chipper,” but Congress has a bigger say, explained Omar. “We get to decide, we have the power of the purse. We get to decide where money is allocated, and it’s the executive’s power to make...

n the aftermath of Kamala Harris’s loss, many pundits and politicians are turning to a familiar scapegoat. Critics like Adam Jentleson, a former aide to senators Harry Reid and John Fetterman, claim that “woke” advocacy groups made Democrats adopt extreme policies and drove voters away from the Democratic Party, sealing Donald Trump’s victory. But the truth is simpler—and more uncomfortable for the Democratic establishment. Despite the noise, voters didn’t reject Harris because of leftist rhetoric or activist slogans.

Within just a few hours of President Joe Biden’s welcoming President-elect Donald Trump to a cozy two-hour Oval Office meeting (which honestly made me queasy), Trump made any right-thinking American queasy, too. He quickly nominated former Democrat-turned-quisling Tulsi Gabbard his director of national intelligence, accused pedophile Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and womanizing, serial liar, dead-baby-bear-defiling, whale-head-removing, worm-in-his-head anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services. That was just after he nominated Christian nationalist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. What to do? Well, if Republicans decide to hold on to their power to confirm the...

Elie Mystal is a man who writes for 'The Nation'. He is very mad at white women right now. Even white women who voted for Kamala. They did not do enough. He can't tolerate even an 'ally' right now. His latest meltdown should be used as the greatest example of why people are fleeing the cult of Leftism. No matter how much you fall at their feet and wrap yourself in sackcloth and roll around in ashes, they won't be happy.

A New York Times report was discovered on Sunday mentioning Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, who was caught targeting Trump, armed with a scoped AK-47 rifle in West Palm Beach before shots were fired by the Secret Service. The New York Times was actually in contact with and interviewed Routh for their article. In an oddly coincidental Truth Social post, just hours before the attempted shooting, Trump said, “THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES IS A TRUE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!” https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/113142180434016846 The article from the Times ties the would-be shooter to nutbag MSNBC terrorism analyst Malcolm Nance, who once called for ISIS...

The Democratic convention’s giddy vibe shift is shadowed by ongoing war and a failure to hear Palestinian voices. his year’s Democratic National Convention is more likely to be remembered for its giddy mood than for any memorable turns of phrase or innovative policy ideas. Democrats have been on an emotional high ever since Joe Biden withdrew his presidential bid and Kamala Harris was elevated as the party’s presumptive nominee. Suddenly, all the anxiety of the last year—much of it based on a realistic fear that Biden was not up to the job of defeating Donald Trump—evaporated, practically overnight.

---SNIP--- The strongest argument against picking Shapiro is rooted in his hardline stance against both the Gaza protests on Pennsylvania university campuses—some of which he compared to white supremacist encampments—and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement seeking to reverse Israel’s brutal human-rights record in the Occupied Territories. In The New Republic, writer David Klion made the case that Shapiro’s elevation to the ticket would kill off much of the movement energy now marshaled behind Harris’s run.

…But as the 2024 Republican National Convention in the garrison state of downtown Milwaukee winds down, a more definitive transformation of the Trumpist creed is under way, chiefly in the selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. Trump’s own listless, meandering, and astoundingly long acceptance speech on the convention’s last night only made it all the more clear that the MAGA torch is being passed to a more focused and clear-eyed generation of ideologues, with Vance as their de facto leader. But the party’s fulsome embrace of a blood-and-soil brand of economic nationalism, as epitomized by Vance’s...

The Wednesday essay, titled "The March for Israel Was a Hate Rally," and penned by The Nation's sports editor Dave Zirin, begins by calling the roughly 290,000 strong rally's crowd likely "inflated," despite the author having seen a "massive turnout."Organizers claimed 290,000 people attended the rally, with an additional 250,000 watching via live stream​​, making it the largest pro-Israel gathering in American history.Describing it as a "political event like nothing I've seen in two decades of covering rallies in this town," Zirin claims the "incessant calls to keep bombing Gaza" made the event a "celebration not just of war but...