Free Republic

Editor's note: The Washington Free Beacon has exclusively obtained the final draft of the New York Times obituary for Yahya Sinwar. The Hamas leader and architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack is believed to have been killed Wednesday in a firefight with Israeli forces. Yahya Sinwar, a formerly incarcerated novelist and scholar known for his mastery of the Quran and Semitic languages, was martyred Wednesday while resisting Zionist bullets with his formidable brain in the southern Gaza Strip. He was 61. An Arabic Studies major and father of three, Sinwar assumed leadership of Hamas, the anti-colonial activist organization,...

The cardinal should go to confession. Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump. At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor. “We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the New York fat cats. “It’s a...

Throughout American history, business leaders have been able to assume that an American president of either party would uphold the rule of law, defend property rights and respect the independence of the courts. Implicit in that assumption is a fundamental belief that the country’s ethos meant their enterprises and the U.S. economy could thrive, no matter who won. They could keep their distance from the rough-and-tumble of campaign politics. No matter who won, they could pursue long-term plans and investments with confidence in America’s political stability. In this election, American business leaders cannot afford to stand passive and silent. Donald...

Donald J. Trump turned his back to the crowd and stared up at the screen. Ominous music rang out. For the next minute and a half, the former president and his audience in Atlanta stood and silently watched clips of news reports of undocumented immigrants committing horrific crimes. When the montage ended, Mr. Trump said out loud what he has been telling his advisers in private for weeks: that, in his view, immigration is the “No. 1” issue in the 2024 election. “That beats out the economy. That beats it all out to me, it’s not even close,” Mr. Trump...

House Democrats on Friday accused former President Donald J. Trump of accepting “hundreds of unconstitutional and ethically suspect payments” through the Trump International Hotel in 2017 and 2018, moving weeks before the election to remind voters of the ethical issues raised by his refusal to divest from his businesses while in office. The 58-page report from Democrats on the Oversight Committee includes their final findings in a yearslong investigation digging into the Trump Organization’s management of the hotel. It accuses Mr. Trump of ripping off the Secret Service by charging the agency exorbitant rates and of inappropriately accepting payments from...

Donald J. Trump and the assorted fat cats to whom he was speaking seemed to be processing many complicated emotions all at once. “You think this is easy?” the former and perhaps future president asked. “Standing up here in front of half a room that hates my guts, and the other half loves me?” There he stood, the godhead of a populist revenge movement, tucked into his satiny cummerbund, a black bow tie around his neck. It was the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Midtown Manhattan. This charity event, held Thursday evening in the ballroom of the Hilton...

For over a year, as I’ve talked to Black men and voting organizers, I’ve picked up on discontent with the Democratic Party from some Black men, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it or how widely that sentiment stretched. Apart from my reporting, polling suggests an erosion of Democratic support among Black men, though I remained somewhat skeptical. But when a campaign unfurls a closing-stretch strategy to reach and retain a particular group of voters, as the Harris campaign clearly has done with Black men, it means that something — whether in public polls or in its internal...

Donald Trump is so dependent on racial and ethnic antagonism that without it, he would be a marginal figure, relegated to the sidelines. Trump’s constant demonization of Black people and immigrants has inured the public to the fact that he is the first — or certainly the most explicit — modern president and party nominee to transparently generate, not to mention exacerbate, fear and white animosity toward people of color. Despite his appeal to a small if potentially crucial segment of Black and Hispanic men, racial bigotry has been central to Trump’s appeal from his initial quest, in 2015 and...

How far does your head need to be buried in the sand to convince yourself that Bidenomics has been absolved of all the disaster it wrought on the U.S. economy? Only New York Times economics pseudo-savant Paul Krugman appears to know. Krugman's desperate attempts to rewrite the pathetic story of Bidenomics continues to get worse with each new column he spits out on The Times’s homepage. “All the Good Economic News Vindicates Bidenomics,” read Krugman’s latest drivel-laced headline. “It’s hard to overstate just how good recent economic numbers have been,” pointing to a small string of meaningless anecdotes that get...

New York Republican Congressman Anthony D'Esposito is in hot water after bombshell allegations that he had an affair with a woman and then put her on his taxpayer-funded payroll. According to the New York Times, the 42-year-old first-term lawmaker was having an affair with Devin Faas. It attributed news of the relationship to four people familiar with it. Last April, Faas started receiving $2,000 a month for a part-time job in his district office. The job came soon after D'Esposito also hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter to work as a special assistant in that same district office shortly after he...

The far-left New York Times disgraced itself Monday by clearing sitting Vice President Kamala Harris of obvious and blatant plagiarism. Now the expert used by the Times to exonerate Harris says he did not do a full analysis. ... Christopher Rufo dropped the bombshell that Harris “plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal justice book, Smart on Crime.” ... With the help of Dr. Stefan Weber, an internationally famous “plagiarism hunter,” Rufo provided one jaw-dropping example after another of Harris directly copying and pasting paragraph after paragraph into her book that were written by others. She did this...

One day each month, Charlie Kirk, one of the country’s most influential Republican activists, holds an event called Freedom Night in America at Dream City Church, a Pentecostal megachurch on the outskirts of Phoenix. “I truly believe that God has voted early in this election,” he said on a Wednesday in early October, addressing well over 1,000 people from a stage bathed in red, white and blue lights. “I believe that God voted early on July 13, when he spared the life of Donald Trump.” Kirk was only 18 when he helped found the group Turning Point as a sort...

Republican vice presidential hopeful JD Vance calmly fended off questions from a reporter who suggested a crackdown on illegal immigration could exacerbate the housing crisis. Vance, 40, who has long contended that illegal immigration reduces the housing supply and therefore sends prices soaring, brushed aside any notion that illegal immigrants are paramount in building more houses. “About a third of the construction workforce in this country is Hispanic. Of those, a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working...

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns. Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a...

As the presidential campaign begins its final sprint, Donald Trump has made crystal clear how he will respond if he loses. He will refuse to accept the results; he will make baseless claims of voter fraud; and he will turn, with even more ferocity than he did in 2020, to the courts to save him.Mr. Trump has made clear that he views any election he loses — no matter how close or fair — as by definition illegitimate. The question then is whether there will be lawyers willing to cloak this insistence in the language of legal reasoning and therefore...

As Vice President Kamala Harris vows to crack down on illegal immigration at the nation’s southern border, she has played up her experience as California’s attorney general pursuing criminal groups that traffic drugs, guns and people across the United States and Mexico.“I was the top law enforcement officer of the biggest state of the country, California — that is also a border state,” she said on Thursday at a town hall in Nevada. “I took on transnational criminal organizations.”Ms. Harris’s surrogates and allies say her push on transnational crime sheds light on how she might address challenges at the border....

In 2016, Donald J. Trump became the Republican nominee and ultimately won the presidency after calling many Mexican immigrants rapists and falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.Eight years later, the polls suggest that he might well return to the White House by faring better among Black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.How is this possible? It’s a question I get often, and the latest New York Times/Siena College polls of Black and Hispanic voters nationwide represent our best effort at answering...

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that black men were “not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers.” Dana Bash said, “A New York times poll released this weekend shows Vice President Harris at 78% among black likely voters. That’s nearly 10 points behind what President Biden got according to the 2020 exit polls. One and five, black men are saying that they’re supporting Donald Trump. Why do you think that is?”

If Donald Trump wins, the people who voted for him would have a range of reasons for putting him in office. There are a lot of potential Trump voters who don’t like him that much, or who really like only parts of his personality or platform and tolerate the rest.There are probably also those who have their own understanding of what they’re getting, possibly rooted in the way they felt about the Trump administration or feel about the Biden one. Some of this could be summarized by how Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, pitched it recently: “Look, you may not...

In 2015, Barack Obama submitted to interviews with three YouTube stars, one of whom was notable for eating cereal out of a bathtub. It was a moment that opened a window into the media landscape of the future, after the mainstream media as we have known it — while also making that future seem basically absurd. A year later Donald Trump won the White House, and there was a rush to find the sources of his victory in the darker reaches of the internet, in misinformation factories and troll farms. It was another window into the media future — but...