Free Republic

It's hard to explain just how much some people in rural California dislike and distrust the rest of us, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. It's not something hidden under the surface, and it's not just the radical fringe. Drive up past Sacramento, and there's a real sense among many that urban California has betrayed them, ravaged their resources and simply doesn't respect or value their way of life. There's no denying that the extremist turn of MAGA Republicanism is flourishing throughout the state's pastoral parts. As climate change worsens, water gets more scarce and the land becomes hotter, drier and harder...

With fewer than 100 days until Election Day, talk of massive Republican gains in Congress has faded substantially amid a series of victories for the president and his fellow Democrats. Republicans have spent much of the last 18 months planning for 2023 and beyond. They're not just measuring the drapes in majority leaders' offices, they've been plotting to eject certain Democrats from House committees, preparing to investigate President Joe Biden's son and metaphorically rubbing their hands with glee at an anticipated ability to stop Biden's agenda – including his judicial nominees – in its tracks. That wasn't hubris. Biden's approval...

The Pelosis may want to skip the wine tasting this time. A little more than a month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was busted for DUI in California — leaving him facing jail time — the multi-millionaire couple was spotted at a ritzy resort on the Italian seaside owned by legendary tenor Andrea Bocelli. The Post exclusively obtained photos of the couple — Nancy dressed in all white with Paul clad in dark-colored shorts and shirt — hanging with Bocelli, his wife Veronica Berti, and others at the Alpemare Beach Club. The California Democrat was also pictured in...

As the Jan. 6 select committee prepares to unveil some of the findings of its investigation into the riot at the Capitol by those who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday offered his spin on who was to blame for the attack: everyone. During a news conference on Capitol Hill, McCarthy was asked whether he still agreed with his own public and private comments following the Jan. 6 riot that former President Donald Trump bore some of the responsibility for the violence. “Look, I’ve answered that many times,” McCarthy responded....

Representative Tom Rice (R-SC) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that if the Republicans take the majority in Congress, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) would make a “great” Speaker of the House. Rice was one of the ten Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The victory party took on the feel of an evangelical worship service after Doug Mastriano won Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary this month. As a Christian singer led the crowd in song, some raised their arms toward the heavens in praise. Mastriano opened his remarks by evoking Scripture: “God uses the foolish to confound the wise.” He claimed Pennsylvanians’ freedom would be “snatched away” if his Democratic opponent wins in November, and cast the election in starkly religious terms with another biblical reference: “Let’s choose this day to serve the Lord.” Mastriano, a state senator and retired Army...

Joy Behar — “Women in the world have conducted sex strikes in history. In 2003, a sex strike helped to end Liberia’s brutal civil war. The woman who started it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In Kenya, they forced a sex ban until fighting ceased. In one week, there was a stable government. We have more power than we think we have, and some of it could be right in the bedroom, just saying.”

Right now, the fight for control of Ukraine is taking place in the skies above Kyiv and in the streets of Mariupol. However while the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the sky and on the land has ground to a stalemate, Vladimir Putin and his virtual war machine dedicated to sowing disinformation are decidedly losing the information war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine marks the first major conflict in Europe to take place in the age of social media, an online space that Vladimir Putin has spent decades working to dominate. Over the years, Putin has carefully constructed...

Letter from Rome: The old order is passing awayThe Church's implosion accelerates as cardinals call for major doctrinal changes and a former pope tries to save a legacy. There was more turbulence in Roman Catholicism this past week -- at least on the Old Continent.A number of recent events verified -- to those who are willing to open their eyes and face reality -- that the Roman Church's ongoing implosion is picking up pace.Here are just a few things that happened when many people were probably not paying attention:- Two cardinals close to Pope Francis publicly called for radical changes...

During Donald Trump's second impeachment trial last February, his lawyers argued that he bore no responsibility for the riot that interrupted the congressional tally of Joe Biden's electoral votes on Jan. 6 because "the breach at the Capitol was planned several days in advance." In their view, that meant the violence had nothing to do with the inflammatory speech that Trump gave that day, during which he urged his supporters to "fight like hell" and "stop the steal." That defense elided the months that Trump spent promoting the fantasy that systematic election fraud had deprived him of his rightful victory,...

Shepherding the Flock Out of the 1962 MissalThe time has come, says God to Moses. You must lead my people out of Egypt, out of captivity, toward the Promised Land.1 Unfortunately for the eager travelers, the journey lasts 40 years,2 and along the way the people murmur; they look back in nostalgia at the good things they once had.3 And they doubt that they will ever make it to the Promised Land. Many of them, in fact, die along the way.4 It is not easy to shepherd a people from one place to another physically; it is much harder to...

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was a result of former President Trump's lies about the 2020 election being stolen, CNN reported. "I think everything that he was saying from election night forward incited people to that level of anger," Christie told CNN in his episode of the "Being..." series as the former governor mulls his own run for president in 2024. "I think people minimize what happened on the 6th by pointing to the speech that he gave on the Ellipse on the 6th," he added.

What if Donald Trump has to fight a grudge match against Liz Cheney and Chris Christie on his way to a second term? This scenario is probably more likely than you might think—one with significant consequences. Both Cheney and Christie are tough pugilists, and both are in the news flirting with a presidential run. In a sense, they are already running against him. This past week, Cheney traveled to Manchester, New Hampshire, and delivered a “standing ovation” speech that was interpreted by CNN as “testing the waters” for a presidential bid. During the speech, she staked out conservative ground criticizing...

Researchers inventoried 298 "sex spots" on the beach, over a total area of over two square miles, mainly among "bushy and dense vegetation" and nebkhas -- dunes that wad up around vegetation. They studied them during May 2018, a period which included the local Gay Pride festival. The tourists' sex, and "cruiser trampling," impacts "directly" not only on the nebkhas, but also on eight native plant species, three of which are endemic, they found. Tourists trample over the vegetation, remove plants and sand, make their own "nests" -- even fencing them off -- and dump waste including cigarettes, condoms, toilet...

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said that White House press secretary Jen Psaki is "one of the best press secretaries ever" after hearing her response to a question from Peter Doocey, the network's White House correspondent, about President Joe Biden claiming that he had been to the southern border.After Biden said during Thursday night's CNN town hall that he had previously visited the southern border, Doocey pressed Psaki during a press briefing Friday on the validity of such statements."There’s been reporting that he did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008," Psaki replied.Wallace,...

Rep. Adam Schiff recalls Robert Mueller’s testimony during the Russian “collusion” inquiry as being “painful” in a new interview — dodging on whether cognitive decline should have disqualified the former FBI director from leading the investigation. In his new book and an interview this week, Schiff (D-Calif.) revealed he would not have wanted Mueller to testify if he knew how “painful” it was going to be, saying Congress had to stick to shorter questions for the beleaguered special counsel. “I did understand immediately why his staff had been so protective and why they were so reluctant to have him testify,”...

U.S. used to rally behind a president when bad things happened abroad. Not any more. What happened in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, was an American president’s worst nightmare — especially when that president already had an approval rating hovering at just 30%, thanks to a lousy economy. An angry mob riled by that year’s Islamist revolution overran the U.S. Embassy in the Iranian capital, and by nightfall more than 50 Americans had been taken hostage. For a nation still reeling from its failure in the Vietnam War that ended just four years earlier, the Iranian hostage crisis made the...

George H. W. Bush had reason to hate Bill Clinton. Clinton defeated Bush in the 1992 presidential election, only to be impeached after lying about an affair he had in the White House. And yet, after leaving office, they became the most unlikely of friends—a lesson in humility for the rest of us as we venture into an increasingly acrimonious public square. Jean Becker, author of The Man I Knew: The Amazing Story of George H. W. Bush’s Post-Presidency, said the first hint of the growing friendship between the two ex-presidents came when Bush gave kind remarks at the dedication...

The debacle in Afghanistan is still unfolding, but it is already one of the signal disasters of American history. It’s usually premature to assess contemporary events in history’s light, so it’s a sign of just how bad things are in Kabul that I — a historian — am ready to put it alongside the Bay of Pigs, the Fall of Saigon, the Black Hawk Down incident, and 9/11 itself in the list of era-defining American humiliations. It’s bad enough that it’s happening - what’s worse is that we chose it. And it’s not an aberration for our unmoored American federal...

Is Pope Francis warning the Roman Curia?How the pope can effectively reform the Church's central bureaucracy in the image and likeness of Vatican Council II.Pope Francis made it clear recently that unless one accepts the magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), one is not "with the Church".He was speaking to the catechists of Italy, but that part of his message was clearly addressed to a wider audience. The media understood this and gave it widespread coverage. The pope said there could be "no concessions" or "selectivity" and that "we must be demanding and strict on this point".His uncharacteristically...