Free Republic

President Donald Trump on Thursday brushed off Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton’s insistence that he will stay in the Republican U.S. Senate race even if Trump endorses his rival, incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. After Paxton said he won’t drop out of the May 26 runoff, the president reportedly suggested Paxton’s defiance could backfire by nudging him to support Cornyn.

This is for the benefit of those FReepers who inexplicably refuse to believe these protests are organized and paid for but who ludicrously and preposterously and insanely believe are the result of individuals who just all happen to walk into their local Kinkos or Office Depot and have signs printed on the spot and fastened to the exact same kind of wooden poles and then purely coincidentally all find themselves at the same street corner. 😀

"Tucker has lost his way,” Trump told me. “I knew that a long time ago, and he's not MAGA. MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that."

Explanation: Earlier this week, Earth’s shadow swept across the full Moon in the year’s only total lunar eclipse. This stunning sequence combines images showing the Moon’s path across the night sky. Each lunar image captures our planet’s shadow gradually engulfing the Moon, culminating in its red glow. Sunlight scatters and refracts as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere toward the Moon. Shorter wavelength light (blue and green) scatters more efficiently, leaving red, orange, and yellow hues to paint the lunar surface. Tsé Bit'a'í (”rock with wings”, also known as Shiprock), located in Navajo Nation, provides a powerful volcanic foreground central to...

In major events in Jerusalem on February 16 and 17, the State of Israel and world Jewry celebrated the reclamation of the 3,000-year-old Mount of Olives, the historic burial site of more than 150,000 Jews over the ages; among them prophets, many great rabbis, and notable modern Israeli leaders. The events were sponsored by the International Committee for Har Hazeitim ICHH in conjunction with the Israeli government and Municipality of Jerusalem. The highlight of the two-day mission was the ceremony marking the completion of the first floor of the Visitor Education Center which ICHH is building in partnership with national...

President Donald Trump has spent months touting his planned White House ballroom, but this week the public gets its first chance to formally offer him their thoughts. The verdict: They don’t like it. Members of the public sent more than 35,000 comments about the project to the National Capital Planning Commission ahead of its Thursday hearing to review the ballroom, according to a Washington Post analysis of comments posted on the commission’s website. The “vast majority” of comments came from those who oppose the plan, commission staff said. The Post found that more than 97 percent of comments were critical...

Falling birth rates have governments worldwide in a state of panic. From Brussels to Tokyo to Beijing, policymakers are scrambling to reverse fertility decline, yet expensive pro-natal programs in countries such as South Korea and Hungary have delivered little results. To be clear, serious analysts do not claim that population decline mechanically produces economic collapse. But demographic aging does create real fiscal, labor-market, and growth headwinds. The more productive question is not whether demography matters, but which policy frameworks allow societies to adapt successfully to it. China and Singapore suggest that institutional design shapes how demographic pressures play out. Despite...

Circuit: Albert Park First Grand Prix: 1996, Number of Laps: 58, Circuit Length: 3.295 km, Race Distance: 306.124 km, Lap Record: 1:19.813 Charles Leclerc (2024)

President Trump, Obama, Bush Approval on March 5, Second Year, Second Term 🔴Trump: 43.3% 🔵Obama: 42.5% 🔴Bush: 38.7% RealClearPolitics Polling Average

The captain of a ship of the Iranian Navy has handed his vessel over to the Sri Lankan government, a neutral party, for internment, saving the lives of his crew hours after another Iranian warship was destroyed nearby by the United States Navy. Sri Lanka (Ceylon) has assumed control of the Islamic Republic of Iran Ship (IRIS) Bushehr, a fleet supply ship (oiler). Sri Lanka has sent craft to receive the 1970s-era ship within its territorial waters and, per local media, has taken off 208 officers and men, who are to be sent ashore. The ship will now be taken...

A man already accused of stabbing four people was free to strike again — and last week that man, Abdul Jalloh, was arrested, this time for murder. A Richmond Highway bus stop became a bloody crime scene last week. Jalloh was charged with murder, accused of fatally stabbing Stephanie Minter. Larry Gross said when he heard about the crime, it reminded him of when he was attacked in February 2023. Gross said he was pulling his shopping cart to a Richmond Highway 7-Eleven near his townhouse when Jalloh came at him, first stealing his cellphone. “He came right at me,...

CONCORD, N.C. – Alex Bowman, driver of the No. 48 Ally Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports , will not compete in the March 8 NASCAR Cup Series event at Phoenix Raceway due to vertigo diagnosed this week. Bowman, 32, began experiencing symptoms during Sunday’s road course race at Circuit of The Americas before exiting the car at lap 71. The Tucson, Arizona, native underwent two days of medical evaluation this week and drove laps today in a streetcar at the Ten Tenths Motor Club road course in Concord. “Alex has worked very hard over the last several days,” said Jeff Andrews,...

With Hezbollah’s Iranian patron on the ropes, Jerusalem gets another shot at completing the job it was forced to pause two years ago. It took barely 48 hours after the United States and Israel began their joint operation against the Iranian regime for Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israel. As it became clear that regime decapitation was part of the operation’s objectives, the group’s involvement was all but inevitable. Israel retaliated immediately with a wave of targeted strikes and has now begun limited ground operations in south Lebanon, even as its air force maintains an unprecedented tempo of sorties over...

Attention DePaul University donors! Do you want to check out how your funding is being put to use? The institution just initiated an obnoxious, new anti-ICE journalism institute in partnership with radical ex-Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot and another Chicago-based left-wing group financed by some of the most notorious leftists in American politics. The supposedly Catholic DePaul — which sits comfortably on a roughly $1.15 billion endowment — announced that it was launching the cringely-named Institute for Journalism and Racial Justice (IJRJ) during a February 25 campus event, according to student newspaper The DePaulia. The announcement came following a “community...

🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: President Trump has named Sen. Markwayne Mullin as the next U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is out.https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2029629285720314087

Prediction: This war will end with Iran’s mullahs still in control. (At least, the ones that haven’t been killed yet.) Because it has to: We’re hoping the Iranian civilians will rise up and overthrow the government, but they can’t do that until the bombing stops.Which means that immediately after America and Israel conclude their air strikes, Iran will claim victory because it’s still standing.Whatever happens next will determine the long-term PR fallout of the Iran War — both in America and worldwide. If the Iranian people rebel, seize control of Tehran, and turn it into a Western democracy, President Donald...

John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist accuses Benjamin Netanyahu of forcing President Trump to invade Iran. But as in so many situations, the accusation of “force” is not that straightforward. And Davidson doesn’t make a successful argumentAdvertisementDavidson opines on a statement made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio:‘It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the U.S. or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond against the United States,’ Rubio said. But later he added this: ‘We knew there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would precipitate an attack against American...

Editors say the decision raises serious questions about press freedom and readers’ access to primary sources. J. D. Vance delivering his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2025 THOMAS KIENZLE / AFP. A Belgian online news outlet has been reprimanded by the country’s press ethics body after publishing the full text of a speech by U.S. vice president J.D. Vance, sparking debate about censorship and media freedom. The controversy stems from a speech delivered on February 14th, 2025, at the Munich Security Conference, a major annual gathering of Western political and military leaders. Speaking the day after a deadly...

In May 2025, a 15-year-old migrant gunned down a 52-year-old father in Sweden, after being paid almost twenty thousand euros in a murder-for-hire plot; the killer is currently in prison, sentenced to a brief three years and six months, meaning he should be out some time in 2029. Upon his release, prosecutors were asking that the “boy” be repatriated back to his country of origin, but the judges with the power to decide rejected the request, “ruling that expulsion would be disproportionate given the boy’s personal circumstances.” (The “boy” had come to Sweden as a child.) Mind you, the “boy”...

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.” In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics. Interspersed throughout were discussions about events promoting the Republican Party at Florida...