Free Republic

President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.

In the movie The Rainmaker, when Matt Damon’s character tries to help an abused woman, her husband attacks him. The enraged man becomes extremely violent, going so far as to tear a shelf off the wall to use as a weapon. During his attack, he shouts to his wife, “See what you made me do?” ------ Where have we seen this type of behavior before? Well, we saw it in L.A. in 1992 and again last June. We saw it in Ferguson in 2014, and we saw it there again ten years later. We saw it in hundreds of U.S....

Securing an outdoor event like the one where Kirk was assassinated is among the most difficult challenges in the field. Much has been made of the fact that only six uniformed officers and a few plainclothes officers were at the Utah Valley University event the day Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while speaking to a crowd on campus. But in truth, doubling or even tripling that number would not have made a difference. Ticket checks and metal detectors can screen attendees in the immediate area, but they cannot defend against a sniper on a rooftop 175 yards away. Preventing that...

Conservatives have pushed for people who made social media posts celebrating the killing of Republican activist Charlie Kirk to be fired from their jobs, sparking debate about whether they are now embracing the "cancel culture" they once rebuked. … Conservatives have urged that businesses fire individuals who made celebratory posts over his death, fueling questions about free speech and cancel culture…Steve Bannon wrote in a statement to Newsweek, "Fire Them All, and Fire Them Now." Matt Wallace, an influencer with more than 2 million followers on X, wrote on the social media platform last week that his team has gotten...

In the fall of 2015, a student government colleague hustled me into a private room in the University of Oregon library to meet a visitor I “had to meet” before his flight out of Eugene. Tall, skinny, and with a grin from ear to ear, Charlie was in Eugene to flip our student government conservative. At a place like Oregon, just scraping together a slate of non-liberals was a stretch. But Charlie was ambitious and wanted to use Oregon as a trial run for flipping student governments at deeply progressive universities across the country. I was involved in student government,...

A predictable reaction to the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk among legacy media outlets has been to condemn the ugly tenor of America’s political debate and call for a timeout. On its face, the plea sounds reasonable enough, but it rests on the false idea of both-sidesism, as if left and right are equally to blame for the frightening rise of political violence. Count that as another Big Media lie and a repugnant effort to obscure the actual source and motivation of the assassination scourge. There are not two sides contributing to the horror and equally responsible for it. The...

Dozens of social media posts and messages about the murder of Charlie Kirk, including some that celebrated his death, are being spotlighted by conservative activists, Republican elected officials and a doxxing website as part of an online campaign to punish the posters behind the messages. Prominent far-right influencer Laura Loomer, a US senator, and a site called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” have all drawn attention to people who have posted messages about Kirk’s Wednesday assassination. The campaigns show how social media posts or personal messages — even by accounts with few followers or from people who are not public figures —...

Kirk, like all victims of gun violence, was someone’s family member — a husband, a father, a son. He was a professed Christian and a provocateur who took his message to places that were often hostile; he welcomed a back-and-forth with those who disagreed with his views. He was a media savant who leveraged his views into the algorithms of young people, particularly men, who have been historically reluctant to engage in politics. Many people who couldn’t have picked Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens out of a police lineup knew Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, the political organization he co-founded...

Donald Trump Jr. rebuked the transgender community during the anniversary of 9/11 by comparing them to Al-Qaeda terrorists. The president’s son made his remarks during a Thursday interview on the 'Megyn Kelly Show.' Trump Jr. also claimed transgender individuals are probably responsible for other ‘mass killings’ that the public is not aware of ‘because you’re not allowed to talk about the truth.’ ‘I can’t name, including probably like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans moment,’ Trump Jr. told Megyn Kelly. ‘I’m sure people are totally sane after jacking themselves up...

President Donald Trump wants to bring the death penalty back to Washington for those convicted of murder amid his crime crackdown in the District — even though capital punishment has been outlawed there for decades. While Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court that handles local trial matters is barred from utilizing the death penalty, and any changes at that level likely would require intervention from the D.C. City Council or Congress, the death penalty is legal at the federal level. As a result, Trump would seek to capitalize on capital punishment in Washington for those convicted of federal crimes, according to Matthew...

Leaders of the MAGA movement have a new warning: Don’t let America become like Britain. That was the howling conclusion at a conference of MAGA-aligned policymakers and think tanks this week in Washington, where elite voices, many with close ties to President Donald Trump, painted a dystopian, misleading and anti-Muslim picture of England as a bastion for dangerous immigrants. Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief of staff who continues to be an influential adviser, decried the “threat of Islamism in the U.K.,” positioning Britain as a cautionary tale of how mass migration could affect the United States. Others called the...

Hours after claiming that the United States has "lost" India to China, US President Donald Trump toned down his rhetoric, saying that ties with New Delhi remained "special" and he continued to share a strong personal bond with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Shortly after, PM Modi tweeted that he "appreciates and fully reciprocates" Trump's sentiments and positive assessment of India-US ties. When asked whom he held responsible for "losing India" to China, the US President replied, "I don’t think we have. I have been very disappointed that India would be buying so much oil, as you know, from Russia. And...

In his book Empire of the Raj (2004), historian Robert Blyth argues, “The Persian Gulf was the heart of the Indian sphere.” Indeed, the Indian subcontinent had been connected to the Gulf region through trade and migration for centuries, a reality that was built upon by the British when they established their empire in India. Contrary to what modern maps of British India might make us believe, the territory of influence of the British Raj expanded far beyond the contours of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As Sam Dalrymple points out in his book, The Shattered Lands (2025), “As recently...

Trump is enlisting tech titans to secure U.S. dominance in AI, biotech, and national security—reviving a modern-day War Production Board for the 21st century. The left weighs in on anything that Trump is against, which drives it to lionize criminals like Abrego Garcia, champion open borders, and oppose increased oil and natural gas production. And they are against anything Trump is for. So often, they did not care much about big-city crime rates, supported biological men’s usurpation of women’s sports, and opposed taking out the Iranian nuclear threat. However, recently, some former and, no doubt, current Trump opponents now seem...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump, once a casino owner and always a man in search of his next deal, is fond of a poker analogy when sizing up partners and adversaries. … Seven months into his second term, he has accumulated presidential power that he has used against universities, media companies, law firms, and individuals he dislikes. A man who ran for president as an angry victim of a weaponized “deep state” is, in some ways, supercharging government power and training it on his opponents. And the supporters who responded to his complaints about overzealous Democrats aren’t recoiling. They’re...

President Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner last month because he didn’t like the monthly jobs numbers. He claimed the numbers were “rigged.” But Friday’s monthly report for August confirms that job creation has stalled amid his tariff barrage. Employers added a mere 22,000 jobs last month while the numbers were revised down for the previous two by a combined 21,000. This means only 107,000 new jobs were created in the last four months—an average of 27,000. Monthly job gains averaged 167,000 last year. Nearly all of the new jobs last month were in social assistance and healthcare...

I regret the downfall of the soi-disant Ginger Growler. As corrupt and talentless as she was, the Deputy Prime Minister was, in a certain sense, real - in a way that Sir Keir never can be, except perhaps to favoured Ukrainian rent-boys. And her boast that she threw Boris Johnson off his stroke at Prime Minister's Questions by "flashing me ginger growler" was, by the standards of the age, a harmless jest that added to the gaiety of the nation. However, politicians only matter if politics matters. And the consistent message from the courts, the cops, the press and the...

Jeff had this earlier today, but it’s a long time coming for some groups. The Justice Department is mulling banning gun ownership for those who identify as transgender. It goes beyond the horrific mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that occurred on August 27, where two kids were shot and killed, with another 17 injured. Since 2020, 40 percent of mass shooters, or would-be mass shooters, have been identified as transgender or suspected of being one. If those clamoring for government to “do something,” this is a good first step: A DOJ source told the Daily Wire that...

No matter what dictionary you consult, the definition of “emergency” is never “a chronic situation that the leader of a country would like to address using powers not otherwise available to him.” This, though, is how the Trump administration tends to define the term. A national emergency is British troops winning the Battle of Bladensburg and heading toward the White House in 1814. A national emergency is Iranian radicals breaching the US embassy in Tehran and taking 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage in 1979. A national emergency is a pandemic reaching our shores, killing the particularly vulnerable and sickening...

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia, in a hearing on Wednesday, told the room: The notion that rights don't come from laws, and don't come from the government, but come from the Creator... That's what the Iranian government believes... So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.