Free Republic

In a reminder that there are actually rational people living in The People’s Republic of Vermont, the voters of Rutland have just turned out their incumbent mayor, Chris Louras, after he attempted to deluge their town with Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq. While ignoring the public’s deep discontent with our government’s refugee resettlement programs-when not imputing racism and bigotry to Americans who express reservations about these schemes-is the norm, even the alternative weekly was forced to concede the enormous political consequences of this decision. -For those of you who were wondering whatever happened to the thousands of unaccompanied minors...

Rigidly defending the President’s precise formulations will always pose a problem for his supporters. I think even his staunchest backers will acknowledge that Donald Trump isn’t Churchillian in his eloquence. That said, nearly every time he is assailed by his pseudo-sophisticated, morally inverted critics in the culturally Marxist press, it turns out that he was correct. The manufactured controversy surrounding his remarks about Sweden is simply the latest example of the media’s malicious lying and/or stupendous ignorance. No, President Trump wasn’t referring to a specific terrorist attack in Sweden, although there have been jihadist assaults in that nation, including suicide...

The temporary restraining order against President Trump’s executive order is still in effect, as you probably know. Josh Blackman has a good analysis of the ruling on his website, which I would recommend reading. There are a number of fascinating and disturbing elements of this decision, including the imposition of a “no evidence” standard upon the Trump administration. Although some are attempting to put the best face on what is a sweeping, unprecedented ruling, the truth is that we are entering uncharted waters. We have the largest circuit court in the federal system essentially erasing the plenary power doctrine as...

As you can see by the photo above, our critics-in this case, the feral, reflexively violent antifa thugs who met us at Foley Square-were not eager to be photographed. Whether that was out of concern for being identified by NYPD officers the next time they attempt to assault a peaceful assembly of dissident voices, or out of respect for the hundreds of visitors who would be forced to look at their faces in the following days is something I’ll let you decide...

Contrary to the misconceptions perpetuated by the news media, the latest Twitter purge is not confined to accounts belonging to the alt right. Nor is it targeted exclusively at those accounts which violate Twitter’s terms of service. As acclaimed actor James Woods explained in his farewell to the social networking behemoth, this is actually a debate about freedom of expression and the narrowing limits of allowable opinion under our not-so-liberal hegemons. As we’ve been pointing out for months, Jack Dorsey and his underlings view their website as an outlet for repeating the metanarrative of the left and suppressing any dissenting...

Taking a break from the towering inferno that is our presidential election, it’s worth noting some disturbing, yet sadly predictable, developments in our own backyard. The ad you see below is now plastered over subway cars taken by straphangers traveling to and from their jobs, which they have obtained legally in most cases. Even though the Obama administration’s attempt at unilaterally rewriting federal immigration law was rejected by the Supreme Court, the Jacobins who run the Mayor’s Office Of Immigrant Affairs never call it quits. In addition to helping illegal aliens take advantage of a federal program of dubious constitutionality,...

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Charlotte riots-and despite media social conditioning, that’s precisely what they are-is how unsurprising this reaction is. Whether it’s a clear cut case of police brutality/excessive force against an innocent civilian, or an example of a law enforcement officer defending his life in the face of lethal aggression, this is what we as a society have come to expect after every police shooting. Regardless of the race of the officer, what quickly ensues is an anti-white pogrom, as well as press justifications for this atavistic savagery, despite reporters being targeted by the same...

Yesterday’s press conference was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least because it revealed the naked contempt this nation’s media has for the men and women who’ve served in the Armed Forces. A sneering condescension that they can’t mask, even as they bang the drums for more interventions in the quagmire of the Mid-East, i.e. more chaos, more refugees deluging Europe and North America, and more power for jihadists of every stripe and sect. You can just imagine the sulfuric rage these reporters had to suppress as they were forced to listen to a group of reactionary knuckle-draggers who...

One of the arguments which has preoccupied American journalists-and I’m being generous when I use that term-since Donald Trump’s nomination revolves around who is ultimately responsible for his political ascent. Likewise, conservative Never Trump pundits have spent the last few months assigning blame for his capture of the GOP-offering culprits which range from Barack Obama to the seemingly ubiquitous scapegoat, the social justice warrior. The shared conceit among these two very different groups being that the rise of Trump is a regrettable, even horrifying, political development. While it’s perfectly understandable why someone who works for The Weekly Standard, Commentary or...

So far Swiss authorities have not come to the conclusion that the stabbing spree/arson attack on train passengers was linked to terrorism. Then again, we should recall that German and Scandinavian law enforcement have engaged in a systemic coverup of migrant sexual violence and crime against indigenous Europeans. Of course, it's entirely possible that this attack is simply an isolated outbreak of psychotic violence, a la the man who murdered over a hundred people on a South Korean subway. However, if this was indeed another example of Islamic terrorism, it would fit what social scientists, in any other context, would...

You are reading the 1,500th post to American Rattlesnake, a project which began in the febrile imagination of my friend and colleague, Michel Evanchik. If you had told me in 2010 that over half a decade later this website would exist, let alone be flourishing, I would have scoffed. Those of you who are regulars know how fond I am of hyperlinking useful information that illustrates a relevant point. One of the discoveries you make while curating these old posts is how ephemeral this medium is, as many of the sites linked to have long since disappeared into the Internet...

Without being able to peer into the mind of Donald Trump, it’s hard to discern what prompted him to pick Governor Pence. If we take his words at face value, party unity was one of the primary motivating factors. That undoubtedly played a role, although I doubt it will sway Republicans in the Dump Trump camp, whose obsession borders on the pathological and will undoubtedly persist through Cleveland. My take is that this choice is a bid to boost the perceived statesmanship of the GOP going into November. The gravitas deficit, a la Dick Cheney and Gaffes Biden, who was...

So many have opined on Black Lives Matter over the past 3 years that it’s difficult to imagine anything novel being said or written about this organization. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to add my 2 cents, if for no other reason than the fact that I’ve never tackled this subject before on this website and my readers are entitled to know what I believe. There are a number of characteristics that distinguish BLM and its supporters from previous civil rights movements and which identify it as part of the current wave of millennial, leftist political activism, the most prominent being...

While I’ve had to delay this post for obvious reasons, here are some of my thoughts on Donald Trump’s national security speech delivered in New Hampshire this past week. Although I’ve criticized Donald Trump’s deficiencies, re: prepared speeches, in the past, even while acknowledging the rhetorical brilliance of his extemporaneous remarks and verbal ripostes, I don’t think you can describe Monday’s speech as anything other than superb. He not only articulated the defining issues in this election brilliantly, he also boldly clarified the differences between himself and Hillary Clinton going forward. The fact that the intellectually and financially bankrupt media...

One of the benefits of the Trump campaign, regardless of one’s thoughts on the merits of a Trump presidency, is its exposure of the conservative establishment. The irony of an undisciplined and at times extremely uncouth candidate, whose grasp of policy is tenuous, to say the least, obliterating the intellectual veneer of a movement with hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments and countless scholars at its disposal is one which will be endlessly analyzed in the years to come. Professor George Hawley’s book, Right-Wing Critics Of American Conservatism, does not seek to analyze or deconstruct the Trump phenomenon, but...

Yesterday saw yet another series of attacks upon peaceful Donald Trump supporters by violent, open borders Marxists. Predominately, although not exclusively Mexican. Naturally, this prompted the news media-with a few notable exceptions-to castigate the people who were peaceably assembling. Hats off to the cretinous lackwits at Vox though, for actually endorsing Robespierrean political terror. Remind me again why building a wall is a bad thing? Hopefully, Newt will address this subject, among others, in his periodic Facebook live chat. You can watch Newt Live here.

To paraphrase the late Joe Sobran, hate speech is any speech liberals hate. Now that leading Web giants and the EU superstate have cemented a pact to target this pernicious threat to civilization, we’ll all have a better understanding of what exactly the egalitarian left considers to be hateful. The question remains, what do we to in order to make our voices heard in the face of an open conspiracy to silence them? The first step is refusing to be cowed into submission. A perfect response, which utilizes Twitter’s platform in order to expose the cowardice and hypocrisy of this...

I think we’ve established that those who control new media, our primary means of collective communication and social interaction, share neither our beliefs nor goals. The decision by Internet behemoths to enforce draconian abrogations of speech at the behest of the European Union merely crystallizes what we’ve known for some time, i.e. Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues are not our allies, or even politically disinterested capitalists seeking to maximize their profit margins. They are ideological enemies, although posing as neutral parties, who want to see our ideas, insofar as they militate against egalitarianism, social democracy, open borders, multiculturalism, progressivism, feminism,...

Perhaps the greatest part of living in the current year is the access our civilization has to a virtually limitless supply of information. Although many refuse to take advantage of it, the fact is that we are living during an era which is unprecedented for acquiring and transmitting knowledge at light speed, which I-as someone who narrowly missed out on being a millennial-can appreciate. From the Khan Academy, to more structured online universities, to Web tutorials on how to construct 3D models, there is no domain of expertise concealed from anyone with a reliable Internet connection and a morsel of...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the value of a moving image is incalculable. That’s why the impact of a website like Youtube should never be underestimated. Although often marginalized as an endless repository for cat videos and dwindling supply of unlicensed songs and films, the truth is that Youtube, especially since its takeover by the Internet hydra known as Google, exercises a profound influence upon how we view the world. It’s why the people behind that website devote enormous resources to sponsor presidential debates, interview the President, and generally influence the tenor of political debate within this...