Free Republic

The abject cruelty Democrats inflicted on American citizens over the last ten years has no parallel in our history. They have conveniently forgotten about their suicide-inducing Covid lockdowns, forced masking and experimental vaccinations, and how they made you watch from behind a window as your mother died alone in a nursing home. They showed zero empathy or tolerance for dissent, and routinely targeted people for termination, cancellation, and suspension for speaking out. The party of sadistic cruelty is simply accusing the Right of doing what they have always been guilty of. The Democrats’ petty anger knows no limits. How many...

President Trump has placed this once relatively obscure legal issue into the public square of American political democracy. He has, in essence, democratized the issue. Automatic birthright citizenship is no longer solely a technical question confined to legal elites, but a vital political and policy issue, a space where the people’s voice should be heard. Trump’s executive order and the proposed congressional legislation mean that the democratically elected branches of government have joined the conversation in deciding the critical question of who should or should not automatically become an American citizen. This is not a transient issue that will simply...

To fulfill President Trump’s mandate for “the largest deportation operation in American history” and to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion,” we must radically rethink and resource our approach to policing illegal presence in the United States. The Trump administration should look to the successful “Broken Windows Policing” strategy of the 1980s for both operational and policy guidance. It’s time for broken windows immigration policy. In their landmark 1982 article on the subject, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling argued that addressing minor crimes and disorder prevents more severe criminal activities. They explained: That link...

The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country. As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show...

Amid last-minute rule changes, widely reported ballot irregularities, and an unprecedented movement away from secure, in-person voting, the 2020 election that installed Joe Biden became one of the most hotly contested in American history. Given this uncertainty, Donald Trump and his allies, including a number of highly qualified attorneys, raised their concerns in the avenue provided by the Constitution: our court system. For this, Trump’s lawyers have been smeared relentlessly in the media, dragged through costly and damaging professional reviews, and bullied into silence or retreat. That persecution did not happen organically. The intimidation campaign against Trump’s lawyers, and against...

An elderly man in Hancock, Michigan, is in critical condition after what police are calling a “politically motivated” attack on Sunday. The man, who has not been identified, was putting up a yard sign supporting President Donald Trump around 5:45 p.m., when a suspect driving a Honda ATV drove onto the man’s yard and ran him over with the vehicle, the Hancock Police Department said in a press release. The driver reportedly began to pull out the yard signs, and when the victim tried to put them back in the ground, the driver ran him over. The victim was taken...

Last fall, a congressional report revealed that I was on a secret list of public figures compiled by agencies within the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, in conjunction with Stanford University, that was used to pressure social media companies into suppressing and censoring my public statements. This was all part of an “Election Integrity Project” that was created in the summer of 2020. Ostensibly, the goal was to prevent the spread of so-called “disinformation,” which the Washington establishment considers a threat to “democracy”—words that in recent years have become political weapons divorced from any meaning. In reality,...

Now that former President Trump is the Republican nominee for President in 2024, it’s time for Republicans, including those who doubt him or even can’t stand him, to get behind him. The times demand it. We are in a war, fighting an enemy of revolutionaries that kick and spit on America. I call our enemy the “woke regime” or the “group quota regime.” This war is a contest between those who love America and those who hate it. But we do not have a commander-in-chief. You can’t win a war without one... Trump is the most towering figure of our...

We see this almost everyday now in the news. An illegal alien is arrested in a sanctuary city for a violent crime, ICE issues a detainer request for the local jurisdiction in which the criminal is being held, that jurisdictions then ignores the ICE detainer and releases the criminal from custody. What is the solution to this? In my opinion jurisdictions should be held liable for the actions committed by illegal immigrants after they are released from custody. The victims and families should have the right to sue these jurisdictions.

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board – the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored "Ministry of Truth." In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he...

Tom Klingenstein frequently, and correctly, points out that the first step in winning a war is to acknowledge that you are in one. Similarly, one might say that the first step in resisting encroaching tyranny is to understand what it looks like. If the American experiment in self-government is unprecedented (as the founders, as well as Lincoln, believed) then its transformation into something unjust and oppressive would also be unprecedented. To notice the signs of America’s descent into illiberalism—assuming such a thing can be contemplated—it would not be sufficient merely to examine the historical record of how totalitarianism emerged in...

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known as Devils and perhaps less accurately as The Possessed) provides a welcome opportunity to reengage this timely and timeless literary dissection of moral and political nihilism. In it, Dostoevsky gathered all his imaginative and prophetic powers to confront the spirit of radical negation that defines the modern revolutionary project. This powerful novel is at once an unerringly accurate diagnosis of the sickness of soul that drives the totalitarian temptation as well as an inexhaustible literary monument to the ideological scourge that is coextensive with late modernity. It is at...

We need a wartime President, someone to rally around. A war without a commander-in-chief is no war at all. There is a Lincoln or Churchill among us, there always is. But he must stand up. This is not the time for polling or focus groups. It’s the time for someone to lead. Someone with the courage to stand alone, someone of honorable ambition, who will call the woke charge that we are racist; what it is, rubbish. Someone who believes that America’s traditional culture is exceptional and is committed to keeping it that way. Someone who will recall the great...

Republican Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently sat down for an interview with me in what is Ramaswamy’s most politically combative interview to date. Ramaswamy makes the case in the interview that America is in a state of war, not with foreign countries, but with ourselves. The country, he notes, seems for many—left and right—to have two regimes or two societies that have radically different, perhaps unbridgeable understandings of what constitutes a just society. As Ramaswamy puts it: “We are absolutely in a [Cold Civil War] with the fate of the country at stake. And you had better know it…Either you...

Since early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border. The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the “border is secure.” He is now written off as a veritable “Baghdad Bob” propagandist. But how and why did the Biden administration destroy immigration law as we knew it? The Trump administration’s initial efforts to close the border had been continually obstructed in the Congress, sabotaged by the administrative state, and stymied in the courts....

In the latter part of 2023 Americans have come to a much better understanding of the medical failures behind the COVID pandemic responses. Whether these measures were political failures remains to be seen. To consider that question, we would have to know whether any of the responsible officials had ulterior agendas behind, or in addition to, protecting public health. More than a few analysts have speculated that the most constitutionally dubious pandemic measures were pretexts to solidify and embolden an emerging authoritarianism on the part of global elites. Such concerns are not evidence of paranoia. This May, the Rockefeller Foundation...

Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land. Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable —a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to precivilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, a DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women’s sports and their locker room privacy? We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to...

While nobody denies that racist people exist all over the world, including in the U.S., racism in America today is, to a very significant degree, a manufactured problem, crafted by woke Leftists in order to overthrow the American way of life. The Left claims there exists an intolerable, all-pervasive system of white oppression and if you disagree, they will destroy you and may even inflict violence. The woke tell us that racism has gotten worse, but this is drivel. As I explain in my speech “Racism in America Today,” the less actual racism there is, the more of it the...

On Independence Day, Federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden that blocks the White House and numerous federal agencies from communicating with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The Government filed a Notice of Appeal, and requested a stay on enforcement of the injunction until its appeal is decided. Doughty denied the stay, though he nominally clarified the injunction’s scope. The Government then filed for an emergency stay with the Fifth Circuit...

Drag performances took place on board the USS Ronald Reagan under the command of a Navy captain whose promotion to rear admiral is currently being blocked by Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville. Capt. Michael Donnelly served as commanding officer of the aircraft carrier the USS Ronald Reagan from April 2016 to September 2018. During that time period, Yeoman 2rd Class Joshua Kelley was performing as a drag queen at Morale, Welfare, and Recreation department-sanctioned events on the carrier under the drag name “Harpy Daniels.” As commander of the USS Ronald Reagan, Donnelly would have been aware of, and responsible for,...