Free Republic

As Israel’s war with Hamas passes the six-month mark, here are some updates:The IDF is withdrawing troops from the southern city of Khan Younis; Hamas rejected an Israeli ceasefire proposal and Israel set a date for an offensive into Hamas’s last stronghold in Rafah.Israel and the US are preparing for a significant attack by Iran in response to Israel’s strike in Damascus last week.Israel is also preparing for a second war on its northern border with Hezbollah.Iran is arming fighters in Iraq to join Hezbollah in an attack on Israel.The UN recently adopted what Israel’s envoy to the group called...

[snip] It may be true that a remnant of the old constitution — the old American nation — remains alive in the hearts of some portion of the American people. But if so, it is now battered and bloody, struggling for breath as the new constitution seeks to finish it off once and for all. Perhaps this is the best way to describe the true cause and nature of the existential political and cultural clash that has riven the American body-politic and continues to grow fiercer by the day: it is indeed, as Joe Biden has put it, a final...

When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an...

Have you ever been listening to someone talk and have déjà vu, even though you’ve never seen or heard of the person speaking, and the interview you’re watching happened just a few hours ago? I have. Once. A couple of weeks ago. I was listening to Tucker interview Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese native who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. She eventually immigrated to the United States and has lived here for 40 years. As I was listening to her talk about how the Cultural Revolution rolled out and how she was seeing many of the same things...

A recent study revealed that 42 percent of individuals belonging to Generation Z, born between 1990 and 2010, have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. The prevalent diagnoses include anxiety, depression, ADHD, and PTSD. Furthermore, twenty percent of them have sought therapy, and sixty percent are currently taking medication.

During the mid and late 1990’s, my mentor and boss at Defense Watch, the late Colonel David Hackworth frequently reported on the military’s descent into the PC maelstrom. What had merely been the rantings of the feminist fringe in Washington in the 1970’s and 80’s, had materialized into policy the moment the great draft dodger swore to protect and defend the constitution in 1993. The self-immolation of a phenomenal fighting force had begun. Highly decorated and a veteran of three wars, Hack knew more than anyone that the Pentagon’s perfumed princes didn’t have the intestinal fortitude nor the foresight to...

Gender ideology has a reality problem. Just look at the latest cover story for New York Magazine, in which the trans-identified writer Andrea Long Chu denounced reality itself, writing that “the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism.” Well, that is a … novel philosophical assertion. It is tempting to dismiss Chu’s denunciation of reality as an insane gambit by a flailing ideology, but declaring war against reality might just be crazy enough to work. This approach provides the collapsing gender ideology movement a...

Will our historical era be remembered as the “Age of Fakes”? We have fake news, fake meat, fake elections, fake genders, fake vaccines, fake budgets, fake democracy, fake truths, fake hate, fake Russian collusion, fake insurrections, fake climate emergencies, fake freedoms, fake outrage, fake speech crimes, fake money, fake justice, fake intellects, fake women, fake borders, fake wars, and even a fake president. In some ways, it is a very silly time to be alive. So much of our fake world has been built on two monstrously fake foundations: fake progress and fake liberalism. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson...

Men, like any group, cannot be neatly categorized into a one-size-fits-all box. However, that doesn’t stop a large part of the population from assuming they’re all the same. It’s important to challenge these stereotypes and recognize the unique qualities and differences among men. Here are 10 common myths about men and why they just aren’t true. 1. Men Aren’t Emotional. 2. Men Are All About Physical Strength. 3. Want a partner? Attract love with the power of your mind. 4. Men Don’t Need Companionship. 5. Men Aren’t Good Communicators. 6. Men Don’t Appreciate the Arts. 7. Men Aren’t Nurturing. 8....

Editor’s Commentary: While corporate media and local authorities do their best to downplay the immigration status of suspected murderer Jose Antonio Ibarra, it seems crystal clear that he’s an illegal alien. He’s allegedly from Venezuela and is not a U.S. citizen. Fox News, to their credit, did at least highlight that Ibarra is not a U.S. citizen. Other news networks danced around and often never mentioned that part at all. This story has been in the national news spotlight since it broke Thursday. Let’s see how fast the coverage disappears now that it’s an illegal alien in custody. Here are...

Interesting analysis this morning from Axios in a “Deep Dive: Inside the Mind of Gen Z.” The piece pulls together a bunch of data points and quotes from experts to provide a snapshot of a generation that, at least in my humble opinion, is in deep trouble.Here’s the key data from the Axios analysis: “By the numbers: Gen Z (defined as people roughly ages 12 to 27) reports the poorest mental health of any generation, according to a Gallup and Walton Family Foundation report.“Just 44% of Gen Zers say they feel prepared for the future. “The big picture: They dodged...

I believe we should rename the Democrat Party, the Bizarro party. Why not? After all, when you compare what the Democrat Party considers normal today compare to what was their normal was in 1999, we can clearly see they created a weird type of Bizarro World. Let us look at the evidence, what was racist yesterday is now acceptable, what was was evil is now righteous, what was illegal is now legal, what was child abuse is now a child's right, what was boy is now girl, and what was a girl is now a boy. An example of...

A generation that wanted for nothing grows up to hate everything. It’s not news that children have always enjoyed rebelling against their parents. It’s hardwired in kids, maybe as an evolutionary defense mechanism so that even helicopter parents are inspired to help baby pack and get the hell out at 18. Each of the last few generations has developed its own quirky spin on the perennial teenage impulse to rebel. Millennials rebelled by delaying “adulting” as long as they could—dressing like four-year-olds as they approached 40 in cargo shorts and superhero t-shirts, chomping edibles, and channeling repressed biological instincts into...

American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable. In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture. The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes. Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not...

If you haven’t lost your job yet, you should be very thankful. Artificial intelligence and robots are taking more of our jobs with each passing day, and there will be no end to this high tech invasion. Eventually we could get to a point where AI and robots can do virtually everything far more efficiently and far more inexpensively than humans can. So what will happen to the vast majority of the human population when their labor is no longer needed? Will a way be found to quietly deal with “useless eaters” that are considered to be “just taking up...

We are in a dark place as a country. This is a direct result of the extreme shift to the Left by the Democrat Party. Prior to 2020, President Barack Obama was our most far-Left President. But even Obama was still on the cusp between being an extreme liberal and being a communist. In a recent book, John Drew wrote about his occasional meetings with Obama in the early 1980s and that Drew -- a leftist at that time -- had persuaded Obama to accept a more moderate position than that of the hardcore Marxists. In another article in the...

On December 29, on Facebook and X, I asked this question: “What do you personally believe was the biggest revelation in American society in the last year — in other words, the cultural or political or spiritual phenomenon that suddenly became crystal clear?” Naturally, I received a wide range of responses, but more than anything, I saw responses like this: “The blatant Antisemitism that is allowed, and apparently encouraged in this country without consequence.”

My friend Glenn Reynolds, who also has an excellent Substack you may want to subscribe to, just released a piece called Civilizational Jenga. The main focus of it was the Colorado Supreme Court’s foolish decision to pull Trump’s access to the ballot in Colorado over his supposed “insurrection” on January 6, 2021. Setting aside the fact that a large percentage of the country, myself included, doesn’t believe the Jan 6. riot was an “insurrection,” it puts the cart before the horse. Trump has yet to be put on trial for insurrection. For a handful of leftwing judges (and yes, they’re...

If you think eggnog and caroling are fun, wait until you get your bald-headed niecephew so mad zhe poops zher Che Guevara manties. FACT-O-RAMA! The commies hate when we mock them, so mock I shall until we lock the doors of Ark 2.0 and listen to them get flushed away like the human feculence they are or, should we lose, until they learn how to load, aim, and fire a gun as I face a firing squad for the hundreds of articles I've written making fun of the joyless frown clowns. But first a quick reminder from our favorite KGB...

A young boy is recovering in the hospital after being critically shot in Lawton, Oklahoma. Zachariah Bannister, who had just celebrated his eighth birthday, was sitting in the back seat of his mother's vehicle enjoying a Christmas light display with his family when a bullet struck him in the head. The suspected shooter, Jullian Phillips, has since been arrested. According to Fox59, the incident took place on December 10 while Zachariah's mother, Nichole Groshong, was delivering food for DoorDash in southwest Lawton with him, his brother, and their grandmother. Groshong explained that throughout her shift, she repeatedly stopped outside homes...