Free Republic

The future for free expression in the West is looking bleak. Leftist students routinely intimidate and even physically menace those who dissent from their views, especially pro-Israel students. Conservative speakers are rarely invited to campuses, and when they are, face legions of hostile and even violent protesters. Universities are increasingly hostile to conservative views, and are mostly indoctrination centers for the hard Left. This is academia today, as I detail in my new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies). On September 29, 2016, retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel and former Congressman Allen West was scheduled...

America’s tech industry is undergoing a serious fall from grace. Once celebrated as the heralds of the future, the originators of new, disruptive business models, and the curators of the bleeding edge of free thought, the industry has since relapsed into defending the Obama-era status quo, relying on corporate welfare, and silencing any thought that doesn’t conform to an increasingly stifling and politically correct San Francisco liberalism. All this, while also often showing an appalling disregard for the rule of law, and for the legitimacy of an American election.Now, libertarian or liberal promoters of the industry may argue that part...

In an indignant sermon before a Chicago church, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) blasted President Trump as "a major criminal" who wants to destroy families and pollute the environment. Gutierrez spoke of how Trump promised to deport illegal alien "criminals" and others who have entered the country illegally. "The major criminal that exists in the United States of America is called Donald Trump [and] he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Av at the White House," Gutierrez stormed. "Someone who takes health care away from 33 million people is a criminal," he said. Gutierrez blasted Trump for choosing Scott Pruitt to be his...

... Just this week, the Women’s March celebrated a cop-killer; a self-proclaimed member of the “resistance” said, in Cosmopolitan, “My seven-year-old asked if the president was going to hurt him”; Phil Donahue called the election of Trump “the darkest political moment in American history” and USA Today complained that Dunkirk didn’t feature enough minorities and women. After using the term “fake news” while talking to a dinner companion in a Beverly Hills restaurant, the writer and non-Trump voter Bret Easton Ellis was accosted and yelled at by a total stranger who accused the novelist of “colluding with Russia” at a...

For years, far-left activists in Berlin followed the strategy of attacking property, not people. But that is changing, the Berlin interior ministry claimed on Tuesday. “2016 was marked out by a spiral in left-wing violence that not only led to a multitude of serious crimes, but also in part to a radicalized tone — which has seen calls for the murder of police officers and politicians,” the ministry warned in its security report for 2016, released on Tuesday. “The inhibition threshold regarding physical attacks is sinking, and we are now at the stage where targeted assassination of political opponents no...

Last week the NY Times published a piece titled “When is Speech Violence?” which purported to show that speech can have real world health consequences. If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?This question has taken on some urgency in the past few years, as professed defenders of social justice have clashed with professed defenders of free speech on college campuses. Student advocates have protested vigorously, even violently, against invited speakers whose views...

A reader strolling down the street in Chicago spotted a recruiting poster for “Activist Jobs,” a bit of an oxymoron. “Activism” by implication is volunteer work undertaken because the goal sought by the acts in question is so important to the “activist.” Goal-oriented acts that are compensated are called “work,” not “activism.” But in the photograph below, the two different categories of endeavor are conflated: The confusion is deliberate and speaks to a larger strategy of the Left, also based on deception. The American Left has relied on its mastery of the media – enthusiastically aided and abetted by the...

Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro he sees no crime in Donald Trump Jr’s behavior. “I’m shocked as a civil libertarian, and a criminal lawyer and a liberal at how liberals are, some of them at least, prepared to stretch existing laws, talk about treason, talk about other kinds of crimes that just don’t exist when it comes to the facts as we know them about this meeting,” he said. “So I’m going to keep insisting we stop accusing people of crime when there is no evidence...

It’s always hard in politics for people to take their opponents’ views seriously, but it has become ever harder in Trump’s America. People are more engaged with politics, but only because they want to beat the other side, not understand it. This means scholars have a greater responsibility than ever to help ordinary citizens understand how the people with whom they disagree think, and what their political opponents are actually doing. Most scholars get this. For example, political scientists and historians, who tend to range from the political center to the left wing, have written extensively about the origins and...

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer: We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety –...

I have returned! From Europe, that is, and I hope I met with no Russian agents while there. The soi-disant liberals are in a snit about the Russians. Apparently, Donald Trump Jr. and the mysterious senior White House adviser Jared Kushner met with an agent of the Kremlin in June of last year, and they did not report their meeting to The Powers That Be. Who are The Powers That Be? Actually, I have no idea, but Trump and Kushner should have reported their exchange, which had something to do with adoption or adaption or, possibly, Hillary Clinton's unwashed socks....

Let me throw down this marker: The West is superior to the rest of the world in every significant way, we should aggressively back our allies over our enemies, and the guiding principle of our foreign policy should always be America’s interests. No apologies. No equivocation. No doubt.What are your questions?Well, if you're a normal American, you won't have any questions - these truths are self-evident. But if you're a progressive, you're gonna have a little sissy snit fit like so many libs did in the wake of the President’s triumphant Warsaw speech. There’s one thing that always sets...

What a miserable week it’s been for Democrats. Not that they’ve had many good weeks of late, nor have Republicans for that matter. But for the political left it’s been deliciously bad…and a whole hell of a lot of fun to watch.The week was capped off by dueling hypocrisies from the radical progressive of the party. After days of breathless condemnation of a joke tweet from President Trump about CNN, the pearl-clutching claims that a few seconds of video will lead to violence against their employees gave way to insistence that words don’t matter.Anti-American progressive hero Linda Sarsour declared...

Something strange has happened over the last couple of months: the most outspoken leftist politicians and "journalists" have suddenly presented themselves as foreign policy hawks who hate, among all countries on earth, Russia with a vengeance. That's remarkable because it was the left who, several years ago, applauded Hillary Clinton for pushing a "reset" button with regards to the relationship with Russia, and because Democrats had a long history of working with Moscow when Russia was still called the Soviet Union. Nowadays, however, you only have to mention the name "Vladimir Putin" and leftists truly go insane, especially if you...

As the left becomes more intolerant, its various factions are encountering more conflict with each other. Black Lives Matter and other minorities create “spaces” where white people aren’t allowed — which exclude sympathetic white liberals. Transgenders and feminists get into vicious fights over whether transwomen are really women. Radical immigration groups crash LGBT marches. Feminists on college campuses broadly paint male co-eds as rapists — even liberal men. Comedians who routinely mock conservatives are finding themselves chased away from college campuses by snowflakes who don’t like their LGBT and race jokes. Bernie Sanders’ supporters are investigating the mysterious death of...

WASHINGTON - It seems counter-intuitive that ultra-leftists would find common ground with radical Islamists - the kind of people who automatically sentence homosexuals to death. The Washington DC-based think tank Center for Security Policy (CSP) is highlighting why those forces that seem so far apart can come together and why some liberals cover up or excuse the violent acts of these jihadists. What’s strange is these leftists will do it despite the fact that history shows that once radical Islamists gain power, they would likely wipe out their Leftist collaborators - it happened in revolutionary Iran. “They’re the first to...

Years ago Marxist-socialist leftists, embarrassed at being Marxist-socialist leftists, made up a shiny new name for themselves, “progressives.” It’s a word that sounds like a garden of forward-thinking delights, but is simply code for the failed, human-spirit-destroying government-command-and control that birthed all the evil “isms” of the past. That’s why every time I hear a conservative commentator in print, radio, or on TV call lefty-socialists “progressives” my 200 billion brain cells swoon. The Fourth of July brings to mind how far alleged progressivism deviates from this nation’s founding freedoms. The government command-and-control against which the American revolutionaries fought was King...

A new Rasmussen poll reports that a majority of voters think so, and it certainly feels that way. Since Donald Trump’s election in November, the pace and intensity of deeply divisive rhetoric has accelerated. Antifa and the Alt-Right are literally fighting in the streets. Combative talking heads on cable news, vicious social media exchanges, riots at universities, a bitter special election in Georgia, and even the shooting of a congressman have both sides rethinking the entire political process and talking about abandoning the “rule of law.” It is an uneasy time, a time for hard questions. Can politics really provide...

you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger. There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t. James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black...

After a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to commit mass murder last week -- the second homicidal Bernie supporter so far this year -- the media blamed President Trump for lowering the bar on heated political rhetoric by calling his campaign opponents cruel names like "Crooked Hillary" and "Lyin' Ted." As soon as any conservative responds to Trump's belittling names for his rivals by erupting in a murderous rage, that will be a fantastically good point. But until then, it's idiotic. Unlike liberals, conservatives aren't easily incited to violence by words. What we're seeing is the following: Prominent liberals repeatedly tell...