Free Republic

Friends, This week’s shooting of two National Guard members by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national was horrific. But Trump’s response has been disproportionate and bigoted. He vows to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” He intends to deport legal immigrants born in countries the White House deems “high risk.”

The Panamanian-flagged and Turkish-owned oil tanker, M/T MERSIN, alleged to be affiliated with the Russian Shadow Fleet, is currently sinking off the coast of Dakar, Senegal in Western Africa, after reportedly coming under attack overnight by several uncrewed surface vessels, in possibly the third attack in the last week by Ukrainian Intelligence Services against a tanker linked to Russia.

The Afghan man accused of gunning down two National Guard members blocks from the White House last week had been unraveling for years, unable to hold a job and flipping between long, lightless stretches of isolation and taking sudden weeks-long cross-country drives. His behavior deteriorated so sharply that a community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, fearing he was becoming suicidal. Emails obtained by The Associated Press reveal mounting warnings about the suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an asylum seeker whose erratic conduct raised alarms long before the attack that jolted the nation's capital on the eve of Thanksgiving....

They didn't have a problem when Jon Stewart used it as his go-to insult again and again. Gov. Tim Walz is retarded. Not because he suffers from developmental disabilities or other medical problems, but because he’s an idiot. Everyone who isn’t Gov. Tim Walz knew exactly what President Trump was saying when he called Walz “seriously retarded”. The fake outrage over this is just that… fake. No one is seriously outraged over Trump using “retarded”. They’re pretending to be outraged to scuttle the investigation of Somali fraud under Walz’s watch, the redistricting battle in Indiana and because being professionally outraged...

If that snowstorm felt unusual for this time of the year, it was. Saturday was the snowiest November day ever recorded in Chicago, according to the National Weather Service. The storm dumped over 8 inches of snow on parts of the city. O’Hare International Airport got 8.4 inches as of Sunday morning, and Midway had 6 inches, forecasters said. But the storm isn’t over yet. The area’s winter weather advisory was extended from 6 a.m. to noon Sunday. “A band of snowfall is moving across Chicago, bringing a quick coating of snow again,” Weather Service meteorologist Zachary Yak said. “We...

~How was your Thanksgiving? On a day to give thanks for all the blessings of America, it fell to Gary Beckstrom to announce to the world the death of his twenty-year-old daughter, Sarah. That will taint Thanksgiving every year for the rest of Mr Beckstrom's life - in part because his child's blood is on the hands not just of her killer but of the public policy that enabled the murderer to be on the streets of what passes for the national capital. Thanks, America!Bill Kristol @BillKristol · Follow Almost every Afghan refugee will turn out to be so much...

GasBuddy reported that the national average price of gasoline has fallen below $3.00 per gallon for the first time since May 2021."We haven't seen the national average fall this low in over four years, and the speed and breadth of the decline are remarkable," said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.The company reported the drop as a major milestone for drivers heading into the winter season and noted that average prices declined in all 50 states during the last seven days."Every single state has seen relief at the pump over the past week, a rare feat that...

This is CNN’s version of the story, by Natasha Bertrand: “US military carried out second strike killing survivors on a suspected drug boat that had already been attacked, sources say.” The US military carried out a follow-up strike on a suspected drug vessel operating in the Caribbean on September 2 after an initial attack did not kill everyone on board, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. That September strike was the first in what became a regular series of attacks on alleged drug boats. While the first strike appeared to disable the boat and cause deaths, the military assessed...

Life is apparently so disagreeable in Donald Trump’s America that 40 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 want to leave. That is four times higher than the 10 percent who wanted to quit the US in 2014. According to Gallup, which conducted the poll, nearly half the nation’s younger women have “lost faith in America’s institutions.” This disenchantment accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which enshrined the constitutional right to abortion. Younger American men are bearing up better. Only 19 percent share women’s distaste for the Donald, a 21 percent differential which...

Quote of the DayFrench-American here — spent 20 yrs in France, 13 in the US. Let me speak to this.I think the only reason Europoors tolerate their miserable existence is because they tell themselves lies about what the rest of the world is like. They eat gruel in their AC-less social housing while the most awesome party in history is being thrown just next door.If you hang out in France, you’ll routinely hear them say things like: “in the US, people die in front of hospitals” (they literally believe this to be the case) or “our social system is the...

Profitability soared alongside it, with adjusted EPS climbing 60% and margins reaching an impressive 73.4%.Key PointsNvidia’s blowout quarter confirms AI demand is still accelerating.Palantir’s AIP adoption is surging as enterprises operationalize AI.Multiple simultaneous computing shifts are fueling a long-lasting AI boom.Nvidia’s Results Don’t Support the “AI Is Over” NarrativeMost striking was Nvidia’s data-center performance. Revenue from this segment hit $51.2 billion, up 66% year over year. That growth reflects real hardware orders from cloud providers, sovereign AI buyers, and large enterprises racing to scale their training infrastructure.Supply-chain analysts note that Blackwell-generation GPUs are being pre-ordered a year in advance, and...

The only reason a person or people would stay in a country they openly despise is because they wish to conquer it. Muslim “migrants” are a rapidly increasing share of the population of most (formerly) Western nations. In America, every state in the union has at least one mosque; most have dozens. There are well over 100 Muslim elected officials, 39 of them in Michigan alone. Recently, in Dearborn, Michigan, nearly everyone in a crowd chanted “Death to America.” In the middle of Dearborn, Michigan an entire crowd chants “Death to America.” Rashida Tlaib, when asked, refused to condemn it.pic.twitter.com/yZ2SgjSD3S...

Recently, during a social gathering, someone who reads my column regularly asked me if I had lost any friends because of my politically conservative leanings. Rather than respond with the usual sanitized comment about the unlikely chance of losing “true” friends simply because of my opinions, I told him that my friends and I never talk politics or religion. In fact, my friends and I have an understanding about controversial subjects. If we’re at a dinner or another social function and someone expresses a political opinion that one of us disagrees with, we might briefly attempt to refute what was...

Explanation: Yes, but can your sunset do this? Looking west from Tucson, Arizona, USA one day last month, the sunset sky looked strange when it briefly lit up with the plume of a rocket launched from California a few minutes earlier. Appearing at times like a giant space fish, the impressive rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California, was so noticeable because it was backlit by the setting Sun. The Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered to low Earth orbit 28 Starlink communications satellites. The plume from the first stage is seen on the right, while the soaring...

We hear it everywhere: housing affordability crisis, health care affordability crisis, childcare affordability crisis. The language is so common that we don’t stop to ask what it actually means — or what it conceals.Here’s the problem: “affordability” isn’t a real thing you can fix. It’s a word that makes concrete problems disappear into fog.The Language TrickCompare these two statements: “I can’t pay my rent because my wages haven’t kept up with costs.” “There is an affordability crisis.”The first one is clear. You know what’s happening and why. The second one? All the critical details vanish. Who raised the costs? Why...

The late conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer maintained of the U.S., “Decline is a choice.” This isn’t quite right with regard to Europe, whose great powers were kneecapped by the cataclysms of the early 20th century. France bore the brunt of World War I, suffering 1.4 million dead and 4.3 million wounded and a ruinous economic cost. As for Britain, stretched to the max, it got steadily eclipsed in power and influence by the United States as World War II progressed. The less said about Germany’s role in all this, of course, the better. And then the European colonial empires inevitably...

Tom Stoppard did something no writer had ever done before: He wrote his masterpiece at the age of 82, after having written other masterpieces that would have been the capstones of any other writer’s career in his thirties, his forties, his fifties, and his sixties. That masterpiece was Leopoldstadt, and it was first staged in January 2020—45 years after the initial production of his first unambiguously great work, the astoundingly inventive and thrillingly alive farce called Travesties. It had come to the stage eight years after Stoppard had stunned the theatrical world at the age of 29 with Rosencrantz and...

Sen. Cory Booker has married his fiancé Alexis Lewis in Washington, DC, less than three months after announcing their engagement in an Instagram post. Only close family were present as the New Jersey Senator, 56, tied the knot on Saturday in an interfaith ceremony blessed by both a pastor and a rabbi — Lewis is Jewish and Booker Christian, according to the New York Times..... The pair were introduced in May 2024 by a mutual friend known for matchmaking, the Times reported. Ms Lewis, 38, who was living in LA at the time, went on a blind date with Booker...

A NEW poll has put Keir Starmer's Labour Party in fourth place behind Reform, the Greens and Conservatives. The Find Out Now survey carried out this week put Labour on just 15%, a staggering three points behind the Greens as Zack Polanski's party continues to surge in popularity with voters. The poll of 2717 people put Reform UK on 33%, the Greens on 18%, the Conservatives on 16% and the LibDems on 11%. Labour came just 12% ahead of the SNP, who voters can only opt for in Scotland. Translated into seats, it means Reform would win a General Election...

More than 400 employees of the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) accused Gov. Tim Walz of failing to act on widespread fraud warnings and retaliating against whistleblowers. The Minnesota Department of Human Service Employees account, which says it consists of more than 480 current staff members at the Minnesota DHS, wrote on X that Walz is "100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota." "We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response. Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his...