Free Republic

It was on April 2 that President Trump appeared at the White House to unveil his “Liberation Day” tariffs. The sweeping announcement roiled markets and helped set the tone for the president’s second-term tariff push — even though many of the country-specific tariff rates he held up in a chart would soon be paused until May and then tweaked throughout the rest of the year.

Most Americans are not antisemitic, but concerns over Israel reflect “a real backlash to consensus view in American foreign policy,” United States Vice President JD Vance assessed in a Monday interview… The vice president said Fuentes serves as a “useful foil” for some pro-Israel conservatives, allowing them to avoid a substantive discussion about US policy toward Israel. Vance said that while he believes “Israel is an important ally... we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel – and that’s OK.”

A “60 Minutes” segment on the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, where the Trump administration has sent hundreds of illegal immigrants, was postponed by CBS News on Sunday, sparking controversy within the newsroom now led by Bari Weiss. The segment was spearheaded by reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, who interviewed some of the illegal immigrants who were sent to CECOT and have since left the prison where they say they endured “brutal and torturous conditions” while incarcerated, The Wall Street Journal reported. CBS News said Alfonsi’s segment would air at a later date after the company “determined it needed additional reporting.”...

CBS program “60 Minutes” was accused of censoring an anti-Trump segment targeting the deportation of illegals to El Salvador’s notorious supermax prison. Teasers for the segment, titled, “Inside CECOT,” featured illegal aliens recounting horror tales of being deported to the CECOT prison.Reports claim the segment was pulled at the last minute just two and a half hours before it was set to air at the behest of new CBS News boss Bari Weiss, who claimed the story failed to meet standard editorial practices.“My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be,” Weiss...

California Congressman Eric Swalwell has accumulated an extraordinary record of controversy: his well-documented association with the Chinese intelligence asset known as “Fang Fang,” his removal from the House Intelligence Committee over national-security concerns, and his unforgettable on-air incident during a 2019 Hardball with Chris Matthews interview. These episodes alone raise questions about judgment. But recent disclosures expose something even more fundamental. Eric Swalwell appears unable to meet the basic legal, financial, and residency requirements of the office he now seeks, Governor of California.

What can Donald Trump do to stop morphing into Joe Biden? The two presidents could hardly be more different in most ways—but in the one that counts most with voters, Trump is in danger of resembling his predecessor. Americans rejected Biden and the Democrats last year because they were incensed at the lousy state of the economy. Right now, they’re not much happier with Trump’s economy. Inflation was the No. 1 concern on voters’ minds last year, and it’s still a top concern today. Trump’s team say they plan to tout “affordability” as a theme Republicans can win on in...

Megyn Kelly criticized Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss at AmericaFest on Friday, accusing them of trying to dictate what qualifies as conservative during a discussion with Jack Posobiec. JACK POSOBIEC, HUMAN EVENTS: Well, Megyn, you mentioned him, and your name came up on this stage last night in regards to pretty much all of this, would you like the opportunity to respond? MEGYN KELLY: Well, I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement, which shows a willful blindness about his position in it. It reminded me...

The ammunition boxes stacked on the stage opened up to reveal figurines of angels and an infant Jesus lying in his manger. Six actors sang plaintive carols, accompanied by readings of the brooding poetry of Kharkiv writer Serhiy Zhadan. The audience sat, transfixed by the almost unbearable intensity of the spectacle. The nativity play, performed on a recent evening at Kharkiv’s puppet theatre, was a reminder that conflict has seeped into the fabric of almost everything in Ukrainian life over the past four years. “We can’t just put on comedies and escape from reality,” said Oksana Dmitrieva, the nativity play’s...

Summary Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) ended her campaign for New York governor on December 20, 2025, weeks after launching it on November 7, despite leading in polls. She also announced she will not seek re-election to her House seat, which expires in January 2027. Sources close to Stefanik attributed the withdrawal to President Trump's refusal to fully endorse her, instead remaining neutral in the GOP primary against Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a longtime friend of Trump. Trump described both candidates as "fantastic people," hosted each separately at the White House, and expressed discomfort with their competition. New York Republican...

PHOENIX — For a second day in a row, a long-brewing internal fight among MAGA influencers spilled onto the stage of Turning Point USA's first annual conference since the September slaying of Charlie Kirk, the organization's co-founder.Podcaster Ben Shapiro, speaking on the AmericaFest convention's opening night Thursday, ripped into right-wing broadcasters Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, as well as white nationalist Nick Fuentes.At the core of his argument is a case that Owens has peddled conspiracy theories, without objection from Kelly and other prominent conservatives, about Kirk's assassination. Those theories include suggestions that foreign governments —...

Marian Morgan, for example, was sentenced in 2013 to nearly 34 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme and was ordered to pay $17.5 million to dozens of investors, most of which remains unpaid. In 2021, she filed a statement in court saying, “I want to pay restitution to my victims so they know I am truly sorry for the damage I caused.” But in May, Trump commuted her sentence “to time served with no further fines, restitution, probation or other conditions.”

The other day R. Bruce Dold, the great Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Chicago Tribune, died. And our friend Cory Franklin wrote a beautiful column about Bruce. At the church there were many people there, people I knew, former colleagues at the Tribune who loved and respected Bruce. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were not there for Bruce alone, but that we also were mourning journalism itself. At least Chicago journalism, the Chicago newspapers. I’m not trying to redo Dr. Franklin’s great work about Bruce, but I did add an editor’s note explaining that while he...

The federal government will launch a new gun buyback scheme in response to the Bondi beach terror attack in what Anthony Albanese says will be the biggest collection of weapons since the Port Arthur massacre nearly three decades ago. It comes as New South Wales announced a suite of gun control measures including capping the number of firearms most recreational shooters can hold at four. Costs for the buyback, which is expected to see hundreds of thousands of weapons destroyed, will be split between the federal government and the states, the prime minister said on Friday. States and territories will...

Noise machines installed by LA Home Depot ‘torture’ for day laborers, advocates say Advocates call for removal of machines and demand that company speak out against ICE raids in parking lots Victoria Bekiempis Thu 18 Dec 2025 21.23 EST A Home Depot in Los Angeles installed three high-pitch noise-emitting machines outside to deter day laborers from seeking work there, causing them to suffer headaches and nausea, advocates alleged at a press conference on Wednesday. The Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (Idepsca), an advocacy organization that helps day laborers, called for the removal of these machines from Home...

During testimony behind closed doors, former special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers he believed he could prove President Donald Trump engaged in a "criminal scheme" in order to overturn the 2020 election. NBC News' Ryan Reilly reports on Smith's investigation and what members of Congress had to say. Summary Former special counsel Jack Smith testified in a closed-door House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 17, 2025, after being subpoenaed by Republicans. He defended his investigation into President Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, stating that his team found proof beyond a reasonable doubt of Trump's involvement in a criminal...

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims during his prime-time address from the White House on Wednesday night, most of which have been debunked before. Here is a fact check of some of his assertions. Inflation and the economy Inflation under Trump: Near the end of the speech, Trump falsely claimed, “Inflation is stopped.” Inflation hasn’t stopped; the most recent available year-over-year inflation rate at the time he spoke on Wednesday, 3.0% in September, was the same as the rate when Trump returned to office in January – in fact, if you go to multiple decimal places,...

The U.S. government admitted Wednesday that the actions of an air traffic controller and Army helicopter pilots played a role in causing the Jan. 29 collision between an airliner and a Black Hawk near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people, including a group of elite young figure skaters. It was the deadliest plane crash on American soil in more than two decades. The figure skaters, their parents and coaches who had just attended the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas, were among those on the plane. The official response, made in court documents responding to the first lawsuit filed...

Reading political tea leaves three years before an election is a bit like predicting the weather for your 2028 summer vacation—entertaining, perhaps, but utterly useless for packing your bags. Yet here we are, with breathless headlines announcing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has “taken the lead” over Vice President JD Vance in a hypothetical matchup. The progressive left is practically popping champagne.For those who haven’t followed their trajectories, the contrast between these two couldn’t be sharper. AOC burst onto the scene in 2018, unseating a longtime Democratic incumbent and quickly becoming the face of democratic socialism in America. The Green New Deal,...

Once the darling of American transplants, Florida’s appeal seems to have dimmed. Just three years ago, Florida ranked among the nation’s top destinations for people making a move. But that momentum seems to have faded. Florida still offers the warm climate and favorable tax structure that remain major draws, but it’s lost ground on the crucial affordability factor. In the year through November, just over half of global moving company Atlas Van Lines’ Florida-related moves were inbound, the firm said in its annual Migration Patterns Study — a near-even split between people moving in and moving out that marks a...

One of President Donald Trump's top aides has some thoughts on Elon Musk. In a series of interviews with Vanity Fair published on Tuesday, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles weighed in on Musk's time as the de facto leader of DOGE, her thoughts on the Musk-led shuttering of USAID, and Musk's personality quirks. "The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him," Wiles told the outlet, calling Musk an "avowed ketamine" user who "sleeps in a sleeping bag" in an office building adjacent to the White House during the daytime. "He's an odd, odd duck, as I think...