Free Republic

When I was looking desperately for a number of years two decades ago for voices that intelligently and courageously spoke up against the militarist excesses of Bush 2, I was astonished and delighted by what I found on The American Right - Congressman Ron Paul and Patrick Joseph Buchanan. IMHO there is nothing short on film from Buchannan to match the magnificence and power of Paul's "what if" speech. But the longer culture wars speech on youtube is for me an almost sacred text which I watch once or twice a year to restore my faith in truth. My own...

AJP Taylor died Sept 7th, 1990, in London, England. Wikipedia states that: “His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as “the Macaulay of our age”.” Taylor wrote: “Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.” “The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.” Taylor had a low opinion of Adolf Hitler’s intellectual abilities: “A racing tipster who only reached Hitler’s level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.” But he did not blame Hitler...

In the basement of an decimated church in eastern Mosul, rubble and debris tell a gut-wrenching story of ISIS' depravity towards Yazidi women and girls. On the floor of the iconic house of worship lie tiny pieces of pink and yellow underwear and flower headbands belonging to the very young Yazidi sex slaves the barbaric terrorist group took captive. Iraqi officials tell Fox News that at least 200 Yazidi girls and women were imprisoned in the historic Syrian Orthodox Church of St. Ephraim, one of the region’s largest Christian sites, which was freed by Iraqi forces several months ago. “We...

The Old Right/New Left/Neo-Nazi AllianceBy Steven Zak FrontPageMagazine.com | May 12, 2005 How much difference is there, really, between the far-Left, the far-Right, and overt white supremacists? How do the public stances of Michael Moore, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke compare? Proponents of both extreme views now think and sound so much alike, they sound like soulmates. Somehow these fringe characters have moved so far around the edges that they have arrived at the same territory, spouting identical positions in copycat rhetoric on such issues as Iraq, the broader War on Terror, and the Jewish state of Israel. Their own words...

BlackRock wants to control as much of Ukraine as it can

My book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History has received far more attention than I ever expected. Once the book hit number eight on the New York Times bestseller list, the Times’ editorial page condemned it without actually showing where its arguments were mistaken; several weeks later, to my surprise, the Times published a favorable profile of me. The controversy surrounding the book has reached at least two other continents: Brazil’s Folha de S. Paulo, with the highest circulation of any newspaper in Latin America, published a full interview with me, as did a major Catholic newspaper in Ireland....

I am making this appeal to New York City, because this is the only place in America where such an appeal can still be made. I just saw Billy Graham’s Qualcomm Stadium telecast on ABC, and I believe that there are legitimate grounds for the godless among us to demand equal time according to Section 315 of the 1934 Communications Act. Non-believers in America are far too polite, which will prove to be their undoing. There is a reason why the life of a typical atheist family resembles the Marshall-Will-and-Holly model from Land of the Lost. They live in caves,...

Likely we will never get to read the email exchanges between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, but we do have these, accidentally leaked to Mondoweiss, between the celebrated general and Romney the advisor and uberhawk Max Boot. The context is that in 2010 Petraeus submitted a statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee which said that the conflict between Israel and Palestine presented challenges for America’s ability to advance its interests in the Muslim world.

A group of anti-Israel activists and journalists are engaged in a coordinated campaign to stifle criticism of controversial secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel by attacking the former Republican senator’s critics, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. Fenton communications chief executive officer David Fenton, the Atlantic’s national correspondent James Fallows, former diplomat Charles ‘Chas’ Freeman, Just Foreign Policy director Robert Naiman, and American Conservative founding editor Scott McConnell participated in a recent email exchange dedicated to silencing Hagel’s critics, the emails reveal. The emailers targeted recent comments made by Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration National Security Council...

Snip In the aftermath of 9/11, when President Bush ordered the U.S. military to remove the Taliban, who had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda and Osama, America was with him. When he identified Saddam as an integral part of an Axis of Evil hell-bent on America’s destruction, the nation supported him. Now America is not so sure. Preventive war as the antidote to terror seems, now that Anbar province has become the world’s newest base camp of terror, to have failed us. Democracy as the surest guarantee of U.S. security, now that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Moqtada al-Sadr are...

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. . . . [Because we want history to render a negative verdict on Iraq to discredit the doctrine of preventive war.]

TrampZZ/Shutterstock Ross Douthat politely but definitively unloads on the liberal Catholic theologians who griped about his opining in The New York Times, critical of Pope Francis and his allies in attempting to liberalize Catholic teaching on marriage, divorce, and communion. Excerpt: At which point we come to the third argument, which makes an appearance in your letter: You don’t understand, you’re not a theologian. As indeed I am not. But neither is Catholicism supposed to be an esoteric religion, its teachings accessible only to academic adepts. And the impression left by this moving target, I’m afraid, is that some reformers...

It never ceases to amaze me how the populist Right, or what speaks in its name, overestimates its strength both here and in Western Europe. One needn’t be an enemy of these activists to recognize the exaggerated nature of their claims. Those in the media who now demand a border wall insist that the “people” want this goal achieved immediately if not sooner. In fact, according to Ann Coulter, Trump “scammed the American people” by not giving them the wall they’re clamoring for. But according a nationwide poll by The Hill, 51 percent of American voters oppose Trump’s project, while...

If presidential inaugurations are all about symbolism, what to make of this one? There was no grace present as Trump slunk off early in the morning, an embittered use of Air Force One while he still controlled it. No reports of Downton Abbey-like farewells with the White House staff. No first lady tea ceremony. Hell, it’s not like the Bidens haven’t seen the place before. The Trumps left the White House the way most people leave a hotel: might as well get an early start on it.

A State Department whistleblower has come forward to say the details of a former colleague’s account of the sifting of Benghazi-related documents to identify damaging material “ring true.” The Daily Signal reported Monday on Raymond Maxwell, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who says he observed an unusual after-hours session in a basement operations room of the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October 2012. Maxwell said a State Department office director told him those present were ordered to separate out any documents related to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi that could prove...

Wishing away the ghost of a slain predecessor, our president is trying to bury a living law. ********************************************************* Hypocrisy is never a good look. On June 30, our secretary of Education declared that the Supreme Court, by striking down President Biden’s student-debt forgiveness program, had “substituted itself for Congress.” On the very same day, Biden issued his “Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” decreeing that, from now on, executive-branch agencies would adopt the CIA’s “Transparency Plan” for releasing assassination related files they control. The problem: The federal...

West said he would make Jews work for Christians and have cameras in their living rooms if he ever became president. Kanye West defended Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis who brutally murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust for the second time in a week on Monday, urging Jews to "forgive Hitler" in a conversation with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. White supremacist Nick Fuentes mediated the interview. West reiterated his stance that Jews cannot tell him who he can and cannot love and added that they "cannot force their pain on everyone else." "Jewish people, forgive Hitler...

Winter has often proven an indispensable ally of Mother Russia.The impending winter of 1812-13 forced Napoleon's withdrawal from Moscow, a retreat from which his Grande Armee never recovered.The winter of 1941-42 sealed the ultimate fate of the invading armies of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.Vladimir Putin's new strategy in the war he launched on Ukraine in February is to conscript the coming winter of 2022-23 as an ally of his failing army.For weeks, there have been reports of Russian air, missile and drone strikes on power plants in every major Ukrainian city.The false report that a Russian-fired rocket had landed in...

"There never was a good war or a bad peace," wrote Ben Franklin at the end of the American Revolution. But that depends on the war-makers and the causes for which they fight. Six months into the war in Ukraine, launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24, when he could not get the U.S. or Kiev to rule out admission of Ukraine to a NATO alliance aimed against Russia, who appear to be the winners and who the losers?

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland? If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki's defense and fight Russia on Finland's side. What does Finland's membership in NATO mean for America? If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world's largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons. No Cold War president would have dreamed of making such a commitment -- to risk the...