Free Republic

Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let's take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today's environmentalists' predictions. In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of "The Population Bomb," declared that the world's population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he...

I had to spend some reflective moments before saying this out loud-- the notion that these first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency are the best opening 14 weeks of any presidency since I’ve been alive. I’m not eighty, but I’m not thirty, either. I was born in the year of Dwight Eisenhower’s second inauguration, 1957. So, presuming my choices will be culled from Republican presidents, my choices are Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes and Trump. The ascendancy of Gerald Ford, splashed across our history in the messy wake of Watergate, did not exactly unfold with the kind of initiatory...

Are you freaking kidding me? Thirteen-term Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Beltway barnacle permanently affixed to USS Government, is now the fresh-faced "rock star" of the Democratic Party. "Auntie Maxine" is stoking the resistance, inspiring millenials, combating hate, crusading against corruption and invoking the counterinsurgent cry to "stay woke!" I do not have enough guffaws to give. This new spokesmodel for civility and clean government has stoked division and exploited taxpayers for decades. Change agent? She has served on the Democratic National Committee since 1980 -- when the Atari 2600 was cutting-edge, Kim Kardashian was a newborn, and Al Franken was...

As a former editor at The New York Times (I ran The Times Magazine for 10 years, from 1977 to 1987), I am often asked by friends to explain why the paper has abandoned all pretense at impartiality in its news pages and become a tedious mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and the “resistance” movement against President Trump. This question came to mind when I picked up The Times on April 20 and was hit between the eyes by the paper’s hyperbolic coverage of Bill O’Reilly’s ouster from Fox News, which The Times had helped engineer with its splashy reporting...

In the bonfire of the vanities that is the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s campaign of 2016 one quote from Shattered, the book of the week, stands supreme. [C]lueless Hillary Clinton... to a close friend, “I don’t understand what’s happening in the country.” People like Hillary Clinton won’t understand what is happening to the country until they carve out the cataracts in their eyes that prevent them from seeing what their politics hath wrought. And it is pretty obvious that the same applies to the rest of elite liberaldom. The political movement that built the welfare state and the administrative state...

Politically, the Democratic Party is the home of progressivism, or liberalism. At least today’s Democratic Party. JFK, a Democrat from fifty years ago, would be politically to the right of many current Republicans. Compared to today’s Democrats, JFK would be in Trump territory. Conventional wisdom views the media as the public relations arm of the Democratic Party. Commonly referred to as “Democrat party operatives with bylines,” big media trumpets the progressives' message 24-7, from the nation’s major newspapers, network news shows, and most cable outlets, with a few exceptions, such as at Fox News. But where is the mothership of...

The "weekend cops" beat is not the most glorious job in journalism, but it is the easiest. All you have to do is check into the newsroom, grab a portable scanner, go to breakfast, visit the cop shop, ask a few questions, check the police blotter, eat lunch, scribble a few paragraphs about a car accident, then meet your fellow scribes for an after-work libation. But you do have to do one thing. Always listen to the police scanner. Every newspaper has its own horror story. The one related to me during my first turn on the cop beat in...

The press is starting to pile on Hillary Clinton for losing to President Trump, but the real cause of the Democrats' defeat is never discussed. It is Obama himself. According to Gallup, averaging his two terms, Obama was the most unpopular President since President Truman, save only for Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Even Nixon was more popular. That poll will never be reported in the liberal press. But Democrats can’t ignore this astounding precinct map, that shows how tiny the blue islands have become in a sea of red voters. Obama thinks Democrats should continue to write off those...

The left has gotten away for too long with the false assertion that Christians are judgmental. It is at a frightening level that is progressing toward totalitarianism. But they know if you call a red crayon blue enough times, people will start to believe it. This is to deflect from their own high level of judgmentalism, which I described in a previous article.The truth is Christians are not aggressively trying to prosecute and sue people based on who they are. It is the left that is viciously targeting Christians, including first lady Melania Trump. Several fashion designers said they refuse to design...

At the Starbucks on Fort Campbell Boulevard in Clarksville, Tenn. -- two miles from the U.S. military base -- store manager Shannon Feltz pours hot coffee for a group of veterans seated at a communal table. On a shelf next to the register are rows of green-and-white mugs reading: "Proudly serving those who serve." On Tuesday, the Clarksville store became one of 37 around the country designated by the coffeehouse chain as "Military Family Stores" -- stores staffed primarily by veterans and military spouses as part of a larger effort to employ service members and their families nationwide. "Seventy-five percent...

It is nothing less than an unmitigated disgrace that hate-consumed leftist ideologues have been permitted to unleash violence upon their political opponents for at least as long as Donald Trump has been a serious contender for the presidency. There’s been an explosion of political violence in America, and it is all courtesy of leftist thugs, or “protesters,” as their sophistic ideological ilk in the media routinely describe them. It is thugs, not lawful protesters, who have spared no occasion to assault those who, in labeling them as “fascists,” “racists,” and “neo-Nazis,” they have rendered non-persons.The latest incarnation of militant leftist...

In “A Big Bang in a Little Room,” Zeeya Merali describes the consensus among science’s biggest brains: “The notion that a god made our universe is several rungs on the wackiness ladder above the idea that it was made by aliens.” Nevertheless, Merali describes herself as both a believer in God and the holder of an Ivy League Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so she asks a good question: If God desired to send us a message, how would He do it? Thirty-two years ago Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact” included speculation about finding a code in the digits of pi, which...

The multiple thousands who marched throughout America and the world last weekend hoped to whip up support for "Science." Well. I'm sold. And what next? Do more than a handful of people doubt the indispensability of science to the enrichment of the human condition? Science's God-given nature may, in these secularizing times, meet with less affirmation than in the old days. But who turns his back on William Harvey, Louis Pasteur and Jones Edward Salk, not to mention Thomas Edison, Willis Carrier and the inventor of the triple-blade razor? The question posed last weekend: "Are we Americans pro- or anti-science?"...

Should French Jews fear the potential election of Marine Le Pen? Should they leave France if she wins the presidency, per the advice of a leading rabbi? Is she rightly characterized as a “hate” candidate, following in the footsteps of her Holocaust-denying father? And is she right in calling for France’s Jews to make certain sacrifices, since she will ask Muslims to do the same?The short answer is: It’s complicated but clear. Let me explain why.According to Francis Kalifat, president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, Le Pen is a “candidate of hate” and Jews should unite...

For the French establishment, Sunday's presidential election came close to a near-death experience. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a "damn near-run thing." Neither candidate of the two major parties that have ruled France since Charles De Gaulle even made it into the runoff, an astonishing repudiation of France's national elite. Marine Le Pen of the National Front ran second with 21.5 percent of the vote. Emmanuel Macron of the new party En Marche! won 23.8 percent. Macron is a heavy favorite on May 7. The Republicans' Francois Fillon, who got 20 percent, and the Socialists'...

As is almost always the case, signs of trouble preceded the latest shooting in Paris, which left one police officer dead and wounded two bystanders before police killed the gunman, later identified as French national Karim Cheurfi, a known criminal with a long, violent record. ISIS claimed to be behind the attack. According to police, a note praising ISIS fell out of Cheurfi's pocket when he fell. Cheurfi was of Algerian descent, born in a Paris suburb. The Washington Post reported he had a criminal record and was known to authorities. His rap sheet included four arrests and convictions since...

President Donald Trump is nearing his 100th day in office. Unlike his predecessor, President Trump doesn’t spend much time on the golf course. He’s busy issuing executive orders, appointing strong conservatives, bombing Islamist terrorists, and safeguarding our borders. Some of the president’s critics didn’t think he’d make it through the first 100 days. They imagined that they could drive him from office—using the violent tactics that work so well to shut down debate on college campuses. Others on the Left figured the courts would do their dirty work. Activist judges would issue a few rulings blocking his plans and he’d...

Unless you've been in a coma, you've seen the video -- about 8 million times -- of what I will delicately call the incident involving United Airlines at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. You've seen the doctor turned into a bloody mess after airport cops hauled him off the plane because United needed the seats for its own crew members who had to be in Louisville for work -- just like the doctor who said he couldn't leave the plane because he had patients to see in the morning. And you have come to your own conclusions as to who is...

Six anti-free speech Democrats have done the unthinkable in the State of North Carolina. They have voted to prevent HB 527 from passing through the higher education committee and onto the house floor for a full vote. Dubbed as a bill to “Restore and Preserve Campus Free Speech,” it is difficult to understand how anyone could be opposed, regardless of his political persuasion. (For more details on HB 527, click here). The need for HB 527 is clear given that only one UNC campus, UNC-Chapel Hill, has been rated by the non-partisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) as...

Now that student mobs at universities around America (and elsewhere in the West) have silenced conservative speaker after conservative speaker, it has dawned on a small number of left-wing professors that the public is beginning to have contempt for the universities. As a result, a handful of academics at a handful of universities have signed statements on behalf of allowing "diverse" views to be heard at the university. These statements are worthless. While some of the professors who have signed them may sincerely believe that the university should honor the value of non-left free speech, one should keep in mind...