Free Republic

In successfully lobbying Congress for an additional $61 billion in Ukraine war funding, an effort that ended this month with celebratory Democrats waving Ukrainian flags in the House chamber, President Biden has cast his administration’s standoff with Russia as an existential test for democracy. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas,” Biden declared in his State of the Union address in March. “History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on January 6th.” While Biden’s narrative is widely accepted by Washington’s political establishment, a close examination of...

Month-over-month inflation has been rising on average 0.4% for the past three months and 0.3% for the past six months. If inflation continues to rise at this pace for the rest of the year, then year-over-year core CPI inflation will increase from currently 3.8% to 4% to 4.5%, see chart below. Even if month-over-month increases in core CPI comes in at the historical average of 0.2% for the rest of the year, then year-over-year inflation will still end the year at 3%. To get inflation back to the Fed’s 2% inflation target, core CPI for the rest of the year...

Lital Shemesh, a TV news anchor on Israel’s Channel 14, knows terror almost first hand. Last August, her life was suddenly transformed. “I was at home when messages about two murder victims began circulating on the WhatsApp groups of media people,” Shemesh recounts in her new book (in Hebrew). “Shockingly, the Palestinians on the ground snapped photos of the ID cards of the victims, and those pictures were also widely circulated. That is how, on the sofa in my living room, I suddenly saw the beloved faces of my uncle, Silas, and his son Aviad. A terrorist arrived at the...

Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.” The post-Christian world, which...

During the coming decades, it may become increasingly difficult to induce Americans to help defend any of the increasingly numerous countries with birth rates far too low to replace their population, even if a country in question is democratically governed. There is scant evidence that a country’s having a birth rate far lower than is needed to replace itspopulation now diminishes Americans’ willingness to help it defend itself. US Senator JD Vance, speaking on the Senate floor on February 12 to oppose further US military aid to Ukraine, pointed out that “not a single country – not even the US...

Ukraine’s American-backed fight against Russia is being waged not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield – to win hearts and minds. A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just worked to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets, disseminated disinformation of its own, and sought to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor...

The past week of Swedish politics has been a mysterious case of a dog that should have barked, but then simply didn’t. In a barely covered press release, the Riksbanken — Sweden’s central bank — announced that it had lost some 44 billion kr (£3.2 billion), and needed that much money from the state in order to return to the minimal level of capitalisation stipulated by the law. For a small country such as Sweden, this is a very large sum: it represents fully half of what the state spent on defence during the 2023 fiscal year. The reasons for...

The consumer price index, a key inflation gauge, rose 3.5% in March, higher than expectations and marking an acceleration for inflation. Shelter and energy costs drove the increase. Energy rose 1.1% after increasing 2.3% in February, while shelter costs were higher by 0.4% on the month and up 5.7% from a year ago. Following the report, traders pushed the first expected rate cut out to September, according to CME Group calculations.

Big trouble may be brewing in little Moldova, which is starting to look like a staging area for the European Union to offset an emerging Russian victory in Ukraine. Whether such a plan, if attempted, would succeed is not clear. But Moldova is not the most stable country in the world with the nation split between pro-EU and pro-Russian elements. US troops are now in Moldova with Romanians, ostensibly for a military exercise called JCET 2024 (Joint Command Exchange Training). The exercise started on April 1 and will continue until April 19. According to a Moldovan Ministry of Defense statement,...

Economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs weighs in on the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war during an interview with The Hill's "Rising." JEFFREY SACHS: You can't make sense of this, it's a zoo. If I am just hearing now, the plan is to illegally seize Russian assets, well kiss goodbye to America's role in the international monetary system. There are limits to what you can do, but I don't think our members of Congress really understand much about this. ... This is purely money down the drain. If they want to rip up another $61 billion, which is not...

Russia violates the laws of war and uses chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to the Operational Command North of the Armed Forces of Ukaine. "The other day, the enemy threw a gas grenade into the dugout of an infantry battalion. However, the soldier, nicknamed Yaryi, reacted instantly and threw the grenade outside," the statement says. The Russian occupiers dropped a gas grenade from a drone at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. It was filled with gas that affected the respiratory system... ...The munitions dropped by the Russians are similar to those used by the police...

Across my career at the intersection of national security and our economy, I have witnessed firsthand several game-changing technological revolutions. From GPS to the internet and from smartphones to artificial intelligence, our nation’s unmatched capacity to innovate has created unprecedented benefits for the economy and security. Another wave is upon us: Blockchain and crypto offer America the chance to lead another generation of critical innovation, but policymakers must do their part, or this opportunity will slip away. If the Biden White House and Congress don’t provide the support and regulatory certainty this burgeoning industry requires, there is little doubt it...

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Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump is not the race America needs, but it is the one we deserve. A political system that has spit out a race few voters want is the perfect symbol of a nation – and a people – bent to the point of breaking. Biden vs. Trump appears to be a welcome diversion in a country whose government seems unequipped to face its biggest challenges and whose people are increasingly unwilling to take responsibility for their own problems. Eight months arguing about two angry old men – hearing our own side praise us to the hilt...

The next summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is set for July of this year in Washington, D.C., following the 75th anniversary of the alliance’s founding on April 4. The organization’s leading lights will discuss “important issues” and “provide strategic direction” for NATO. The NATO website also explains to curious readers that the organization is devoted to an “understanding” and “awareness” of the “security environment.” Those of us who have grown skeptical of NATO and its intentions can only imagine what this press release verbiage might mean, as an organization established to counter the Soviet threat during...

Almost unnoticed amid the drama and crisis that hit Latin America every week, in the last days of February the Cuban government asked the United Nations for aid to address a growing food shortage. The unprecedented cry for help from a communist regime that has always prided itself on its social welfare model captures Cuba’s dire economic straits. Hurt by tightened U.S. restrictions, decaying domestic production, a weak post-COVID-19 tourism industry and indifference from its allies, the island is living through its worst economic days since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago. A string of...

Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous Did they tell you the part about giving the president sweeping new powers? It’s funny how things work. Last year at this time, Americans overwhelmingly supported a ban on TikTok. Polls showed a 50-22% overall margin in support of a ban and 70-14% among conservatives. But Congress couldn’t get the RESTRICT Act passed. >As the public learned more about provisions in the bill, and particularly since the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, the legislative plan grew less popular. Polls dropped to 38-27% in favor by December, and they’re at 35-31% against now. Yet...

Here’s what’s actually going on with the TikTok fight right now. Deep State toadies are taking advantage of anti-China sentiment to transfer TikTok’s surveillance apparatus from China’s evil surveillance state to the U.S. government’s evil surveillance state. TikTok isn’t going to be banned, because neither the CCP-run Chinese government nor the CCP-owned U.S. government wants to lose such a valuable tool for spying on Americans and poisoning the minds of their children. Instead, the corrupt U.S. intelligence bureaucracy wants control of TikTok, which is why it included the divestment mandate. Only a handful of U.S. companies are capable of buying...

Two crypto influencers on X have called on their followers to snap up Bitcoin BTC, gold and silver, citing the risk of rising national debt in the United States. In an X post on March 11, entrepreneur and angel investor Balaji Srinivasan argued that Bitcoin is the only realistic solution to escape the inevitability of unsustainable government spending and potential asset confiscation. “We’re in the looting-the-treasury phase of imperial collapse,” the former Coinbase chief technology officer told his 994,000 followers. Srinivasan argued that government debt and wasteful spending continue to grow rapidly at unsustainable levels. U.S. national debt is currently...

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