Free Republic

What are Pete Buttigieg’s politics?If you read CBS, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, and a host of their friends, the former mayor is decidedly a moderate. According to The Washington Post and a few more, he’s “a traditional centrist” who embodies “the Democratic primary’s rightward drift.” And if you listen to the left-wing activists trailing him around, he’s “Wall Street Pete” and “will kill us.”His supposed moderation and support (almost solely) among white liberals torments Lucy, a white liberal who graduated high school more than a decade ago but writes for Teen Vogue. “Why I’m Not...

A group of House Democratic centrists is warning its caucus that any case against President Donald Trump should steer clear of Robert Mueller - resurfacing an ugly internal debate on impeachment that could complicate the coming weeks. Multiple moderates - including freshman lawmakers deemed most at risk in 2020 - have urged Democrats not to relitigate the issues in the Mueller report in their own investigation into the Ukraine scandal. But key Democrats, including House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, have suggested that it could be included in eventual articles of impeachment, with many in the caucus still eager to repudiate...

For anyone wondering if there were any centrist or “moderate” Democrats who could appeal to independent voters and threaten President Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, the first two debates answered that question. There aren’t. In 2004, Rep. Dennis Kucinich ran on the ideas of socialized medicine and taxpayer-paid education from kindergarten to college. His platform was derided by the majority of political commentators as far outside the mainstream, even downright wacky. Kucinich’s proposals were bad then, and they’re bad now. But in this election cycle, most Democrats running for president are either lined up with 2004 Kucinich or further to...

Joe Biden is the frontrunner for the Democrat Party nomination for president of the United States in the 2020 presidential election. Out of a field of eighteen Democrat candidates so far, Biden is polling at between 26 percent and 33 percent. That is a commanding lead. When voter preferences are divided 18 ways, it is an even more significant lead. Laughably, Biden is talked about as the "moderate" Democrat candidate for president. To be sure, Biden has a far better persona than any of the other candidates. Biden is the far-left extremist you can take home to meet your tradition-minded...

Earlier this week the Democrats now running the House of Representatives strutted their stuff with passage of a bill aiming at the ancient liberal target of the gun background check “loophole” for private sales. It was passed by a 240-190 margin on what was basically a party-line vote. But before that vote, Republicans offered an unexpected “motion to recommit” the bill to add language instructing law enforcement officials to notify ICE if an “illegal immigrant” attempted to buy a gun. Twenty-six Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of that motion, and embarrassed House leaders added the language as an amendment...

This year, the hit HBO series The Sopranos is celebrating its twentieth anniversary of launching. If you miss Tony Soprano like I do, don’t worry, there’s a new mob boss on the scene. She’s just like Tony too, except for the likability, believability, respect, and humor. So, actually, she’s nothing like New Jersey’s favorite don at all, except maybe in her delusional brain. Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) is more of a typical liberal Democrat nowadays. She talks tough but does nothing for the betterment of America. You know, dress like me, think like me, and do what we say, or...

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) noted on Thursday that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is pushing a return to “the tolerant, moderate Islam that is open to the world, to all the religions and traditions of its people” as part of Saudi Arabia’s major economic reform plan. At the heart of Saudi Arabia’s recent cultural and political upheaval is an understanding that the country must become more compatible with the Western world and more hospitable to foreign investment, in order to manage the transition away from an oil-based economy with limitless deep pockets. Possibly the trickiest aspect of this...

Following President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a Texas-based Islamic cleric has posted a recorded prayer on his Facebook page calling for Israel’s destruction, along with “their allies, and those who assist them and those who allowed them into the abodes of the Muslims.” While Sheikh Ramadan Elsabagh does not mention Trump’s Wednesday proclamation ( the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which translated the message from Arabic, interprets it as a “clear reaction.” Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2017/12/texas-imam-calls-for-israels-destruction-in-arabic/#FO1MoC1lR5KKdtbW.99)[snip]“Oh Allah save [Al Aqsa] from the hands of the accursed violators, whom you have cursed in every book, and cursed them through...

"These epithets of 'moderate Islam' are very ugly, it is disrespectful and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it." — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In keeping with Erdoğan's assertions, the Turkish government-funded Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) published in July a detailed 140-page report, which stated that Islam is "superior" to Judaism and Christianity, and that "interfaith dialogue is unacceptable." "The word kafir is the worst word in the human language. It is far worse than the n-word, because the n-word is a personal opinion, whereas, kafir...

Democrat Ralph Northam has won Virginia's race for governor. Early unofficial results show Northam defeated Republican Ed Gillespie on Tuesday. Virginia's hard-fought race was closely watched as a swing-state test of President Donald Trump's popularity. Northam, a pediatric neurologist and the state's lieutenant governor, repeatedly tried to tie Gillespie to the president during months of divisive campaigning overshadowed by racial overtones and attack ads. Northam's victory was in large part due to a surge in anti-Trump energy since the president took office. Democrats said they had record levels of enthusiasm heading into the race. Gillespie kept Trump at a distance...

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s vow to turn Saudi Arabia into a moderate Islamic country may have been welcomed by the West, but it did not go down well in Turkey — especially among Islamists — and fueled long-standing suspicions about "imperial US designs against the Islamic world."Ever since former US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared Turkey to be a “moderate Islamic republic” in 2004, the concept of moderate Islam has raised the hackles of Turkish secularists and Islamists alike. Still smarting over 9/11, Washington was searching at the time for a model against radical Islam that reflected...

THE family of the man accused of carrying out a terror attack at Notre Dame cathedral have said the terror suspect is "not an extremist". Farid Ikken, 40, was shot in the chest as he lunged at a police officer outside the world-famous cathedral on Tuesday afternoon and is currently under guard at a Paris hospital. The Algerian journalist reportedly shouted “this is for Syria” as he attacked a police officer with a hammer outside the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. A video of the suspect pledging allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS) was later found in his flat in the...

Spanish authorities have arrested a Muslim cleric — whom the New York Times once praised for his efforts to fight radicalization within Germany’s Islamic community — for alleged ties to the Islamic State. Hesham Shashaa (aka Abu Adam), a 46-year-old Egyptian-Palestinian, was detained near Alicante in southeastern Spain on April 26 on charges of aiding the Islamic State, extolling terrorism and promoting Salafi-jihadism. The Spanish Interior Ministry said that Shashaa had facilitated the travel to Spain of Islamic State jihadists from Syria and Iraq by providing them with money, refuge and fake documents. Most recently, Shashaa had made arrangements for...

"President Trump is abandoning a number of his key campaign promises on economic policy, adopting instead many of the centrist positions he railed against while campaigning as a populist. Trump will not label China a “currency manipulator,” he told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, despite a campaign pledge that he would apply the label on his first day in office. He also said he was open to reappointing Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet L. Yellen after saying last year that the central banker should be “ashamed” of what she was doing to the country. And he embraced the Export-Import...

Connor Cruise O’Brien back in 1995 tried to warn the world that what is happening is not some aberrant phenomenon called radical Islam, but a revival of authentic Islam itself I remember several years ago reading the words of the late and much missed Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien. The good doctor was referring to the erroneous belief that there is such a thing as moderate Islam set against radical Islam.

Moderate Muslims cannot save us because they do not have a theological leg to stand on. These moderates provide cover for the activated Muslims. They do not hold rallies against jihad, Islamic jew-hatred, creed apartheid,gender apartheid, and holy war. On the contrary, their silence speaks volumes.

As far as the White House is concerned, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's top reporter, is President Barack Obama's unofficial mouthpiece. This was one of the many things we learned from The New York Times in David Samuels's profile of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. In the course of explaining how Rhodes was able to sell Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, despite the fact that it cleared Iran's path to a nuclear arsenal while giving the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism more than a hundred billion dollars, Samuels reported that "handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic......

A powerful Pakistani religious body that advises the government on the compatibility of laws with Islam on Thursday declared a new law that criminalizes violence against women to be "un-Islamic." The Women's Protection Act, passed by Pakistan's largest province of Punjab last week, gives unprecedented legal protection to women from domestic, psychological and sexual violence. It also calls for the creation of a toll-free abuse reporting hot line and the establishment of women's shelters. But since its passage in the Punjab assembly, many conservative clerics and religious leaders have denounced the new law as being in conflict with the Muslim...

Dale L. Bumpers, a liberal governor and four-term Democratic senator from Arkansas who came out of retirement in 1999 to make a passionate closing argument defending President Bill Clinton against removal from office in a Senate trial, died on Friday at his home in Little Rock, Ark. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his granddaughter Linn Bumpers. Mr. Bumpers was part of a generation of moderate Southern Democrats, among them President Jimmy Carter, who emerged in the late 1960s and the ’70s. He always said his proudest achievement had come early in his career when, as a small-town...

Donald Trump is one of the most extreme presidential candidates to gain widespread support in contemporary American politics. Despite championing policies like the end of birthright citizenship, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and a registry of Muslims living in the United States, Trump has consistently polled atop the Republican field since July. A popular perspective thus attributes Trump's success to a "right wing fringe" of GOP voters. But this conventional wisdom misses something important: Trump meets the textbook definition of an ideological moderate. Trump has the exact "moderate" qualities that many pundits and political reformers yearn for in politicians: Many...