Free Republic

Since 1970, Earth Day has provided an opportunity for all Americans to come together to celebrate the majestic natural beauty of our Nation and the world. The United States is blessed with breathtaking and plentiful natural wonders and resources, providing recreation and sustenance to millions throughout our country. On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we pay tribute to our Nation’s long history of environmental stewardship and conservation, and we reaffirm our commitment to protecting our natural treasures for the benefit and enjoyment of all Americans. Following in the rich tradition of environmental leaders like Gifford Pinchot and President Theodore...

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Commonwealth of Virginia over a law that requires someone to sign the envelope of another person's absentee ballot if that ballot is submitted by mail. Under Virginia law, any voter who submits an absentee ballot by mail must open the envelope containing the ballot in front of another person, fill out the ballot, and then have that other person sign the outside of the ballot envelope before it is mailed back. "In the midst of the pandemic and during a stay-at-home mandate, the witness requirement amounts to an unconstitutional burden on the...

“On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against,” reads the first sentence of Friday’s essay by Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University. Harris is just the latest in a string of academics to levy criticism on Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project. She is the first, however, who actually took part in the project as a fact-checker. During the publication process for 1619, Harris “vigorously disputed” the idea that the American Revolution was actually about preserving slavery....

Mary Grabar's book, 'Debunking Howard Zinn,' takes aim at the celebrated historian who is as influential as he is ideological and dishonest. Howard Zinn’s book, The People’s History of the United States, is one of the most famous American history textbooks ever written. His goal was to change the way Americans saw their own history by writing from the perspective of those he called “underdogs.” In doing so, he thoroughly distorts the true historical record and paints America as an inherently unjust nation.Mary Grabar believes that at the root of his agenda is a desire to see America turned into...

Liberalism died in 2016, in his fourth century. He was ill for quite some time, and after a series of tumultuous brushes with death over the last hundred years, he passed not quietly but spectacularly by climbing a tree and sawing off the very branch he was sitting on. Many have refused to accept his death, and his body is currently propped up on bumper stickers and mainstream news networks with sunglasses in some weird Weekend-At-Bernie’s-esque charade, preventing his proper entombment. He will be remembered for the way in which his valorization of moral neutrality made it seem like everything...

For decades we have said that there is a liberal slant in education, a leftist bias. But the concept of tacit liberal influence is in the distant past. Today, liberalism is at the forefront. Liberalism is the curriculum. Grade schools throughout the country are rewriting their history curriculums based on today's leftist politics. Some Illinois, New York and New Jersey public schools are teaching a collection of New York Times leftist opinion essays known as the 1619 Project as factual objective history. This leftist propaganda project audaciously rewrites our history as a country that was started as a "slavocracy" in...

The vote to impeach President Trump last week was the culmination of a trend in the Democratic Party that is just plain weird.  The vote to “formalize” Adam Schiff’s one-sided, secret Star Chamber impeachment hearings in the basement of the House and send the process to the House Judiciary Committee took place on Halloween. One Democratic member, Katie Porter of California, wore a Batman costume to cast her vote that day. Then the vote by the House Judiciary Committee to recommend impeachment and send the matter to the full House for a vote took place on December 13. That was a...

House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) wrote to President Donald Trump Friday, giving him until Friday, Dec. 6., to answer whether he and his lawyers would participate in the “impeachment inquiry.” ... Nadler added that Trump is being investigated for obstruction of justice, relating to actions described by Mueller in the second volume of his report, though Mueller did not recommend prosecution and Attorney General William Barr rejected obstruction charges against Trump on the merits. ... Nadler has invited the president and his counsel to call and question witnesses, in accordance with the House resolution authorizing the impeachment...

The former senior director for European and Russian affairs for the Trump administration, Fiona Hill, testified last week in the House impeachment hearings. At one point, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., asked her: “Would you say that these different theories, these conspiracy theories that have been targeting you, spun in part by folks like Mr. Stone as well as fueled by Rudy Giuliani and others, basically have a tinge of anti-Semitism to them at least?” This was Hill’s response: "Well, certainly when they involve George Soros, they do. I’d just like to point out that in the early 1900s, the czarist...

Trump took aim at House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who has faced controversy for his handling of the impeachment effort, and called on Republicans to release their own transcripts. "If Shifty Adam Schiff, who is a corrupt politician who fraudulently made up what I said on the 'call,' is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes," Trump said in a tweet Sunday evening. The president suggested that Republicans "should give their own transcripts of the interviews to contrast...

The U.S. House voted 232-196 on Thursday morning to pass the resolution that lays out the rules for the impeachment inquiry into President Donald J. Trump, as it heads into a more public phase. The Times tracked how every representative voted, live from the House chamber. No Republicans broke ranks with Mr. Trump and voted in support of the resolution and two Democrats, Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, joined the Republicans in voting against it.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., admitted on Sunday that he should have been clearer about his contact with the whistleblower who filed a complaint about President Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian president. “I should have been much more clear,” Schiff said during an interview on CBS’ “Face The Nation.” Fox News reported earlier this month that the intelligence community whistleblower did not disclose contact with Schiff’s staff to the intelligence committee inspector general (ICIG). The sources said ICIG Michael Atkinson told lawmakers in a closed session that the whistleblower did not disclose the contact with the...

President Trump ripped Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) during a rally in her district in Minneapolis on Thursday, accusing the freshman congresswoman of hating America. In torrent of attacks, the president accused Omar of speaking favorably about Al Qaeda, called her an "America-hating socialist," and questioned how Minnesota voters could allow her to serve in Congress. "Congresswoman Omar is a America-hating socialist. She minimized the September 11th attack on our homeland, where far more than 3,000 people died. Saying, 'some people did something,' " Trump said, referring to remarks Omar made before a Muslim-American group which Republicans have argued minimized...

Former CIA Chief John Brennan is ramping up his attacks against President Trump after his first coup attempt using the Russian collusion canard failed. Brennan this week said Trump deserves to be ousted from office and called on Republicans in Congress to abandon the President. BRENNAN: Press conference with Finnish President shows President Trump is a national disgrace who deserves impeachment, conviction, & ouster from office. Republicans in Congress must abandon him now if they care about our country & have any hope of salvaging a political future for GOP.

The Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times cited the words of pop superstar Taylor Swift in an attack on President Donald Trump on Monday after she accused him of “gaslighting” his opponents into questioning their own love for the country. In a piece titled “Why Are the Chinese Brushing Aside Trump’s Tweets?” opinion writer Mu Lu tries to downplay Beijing’s reported concern at Trump’s warnings against China last week, when he ordered American companies to immediately leave China and move their production back to the United States. “The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United...

'The only reason' for spying was to 'inform the president' Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy pointed out that counterintelligence operations by the FBI, Justice Department and are carried out for the president. So it would have been the responsibility of the Obama administration's counterintelligence investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign to make sure Barack Obama knew what was going on, he said in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. "What I'm saying is not that the president sits there and directs that there be counterintelligence investigations, McCarthy explained, according to BizPacReview. "What I'm saying is that...

Several of the largest, most well known corporations in America also happen to be some of the most left-leaning. Indeed, in today’s hyper-partisan political era, intensified and arguably defined by the election and administration of President Donald Trump, left-wingers in positions of corporate power have used their leverage and political leanings to effectively add a whole new term to America’s political lingo - Woke Capitalism.Under the Woke Capitalist model, companies aren’t just producing and selling a product to create shareholder wealth and provide for employee livelihoods, they are also assuming the mantle of social justice, or fairness and equality as...

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise rebuked Democratic Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro on Tuesday for tweeting out a list of Trump donors and their employers in the San Antonio area. “People should not be personally targeted for their political views. Period. This isn’t a game. It’s dangerous, and lives are at stake. I know this firsthand,” Scalise wrote on Twitter. Scalise was shot in the 2017 attempted mass assassination of Republican congressmen and nearly died. Castro’s tweet listed the names and employers of 44 San Antonio residents, including 11 retirees, who donated the federal maximum of $2,700 to President Donald Trump’s...

As America prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, The New York Times is busy celebrating the Soviet space program and bashing America’s. A Times op-ed Thursday highlighted how the Soviet Union was oh-so-diverse, sending women and people of color into space long before stuffy, old America got around to doing the same. As the USSR retreats into the rearview mirror of history, there is a growing tendency to romanticize its disastrous reign through the lens of contemporary wokeness. Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags —...

We Americans are currently in a civilizational state historians William Strauss and Neil Howe would call the "Third Turning": an unraveling. The so-called Left is making it happen, too, with conservatives enabling it by conserving yesterday's liberalism and being those nice guys who finish last. In Marxist circles, this stage would be called "destabilization" — the second of a four-part process to subvert a society and seize control. The first, third, and fourth stages are, respectively, "demoralization," "crisis," and "normalization." The demoralization stage, which essentially is the undermining of a target nation's morality (the process of radically changing the population's...