Free Republic

Russia maintains its military bases and embassy in Syria after the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. The agreements with Turkey are obvious. But to what extent? The observer argues about this Pravda.Ru Lyubov Stepushova.Judging by the news feed on December 9, the Russian military bases in Syria are working, the evacuation of the contingent is not underway. The embassy in Damascus is also working full-time. It was not looted like the Iranian one. On the military base of the Navy in Tartus and the Khmeimim airbase signed an agreement with Syria for 50 years. Power in Syria was...

ou can get an idea of how gobsmackingly awful the Syrian Civil War was (is?) and how stupid Germany's immigration policy is with this one simple statistic: nearly one in 20 Syrians lives in Germany. Syria's pre-civil war population of Syria was about 21 million people, and the latest figures show the Federal Republic serving as home to 972,460 Syrian refugees. All that seems to have come to an end along with the Bashar al-Assad regime this weekend. Berlin says it will "freeze asylum processing for Syrian citizens," according to an al-Jazeera report today. "The Federal Office for Migration and...

Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that sought to overturn a ban on gender affirming care for minors in Tennessee. Of course you can't always tell how things are going to turn out by listening to the arguments but you can sometimes get a hint of what each justice is thinking. So here are some of the highlights (or lowlights depending how you look at it).U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar Argues the Ban is Sex DiscriminationFirst up and setting the tone for the opponents of the ban was Prelogar.She argues that the law is a...

“A failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, it isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball – no, this is a different order of failure,” the prime minister continued. “This happened by design, not accident. Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalize immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose, to turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders.” Following Brexit, net migration reached a previous peak of 764,000 in 2022. In 2015, before the referendum passed, net migration totaled to no more than 333,000. The latest immigration numbers are higher than previously thought.

Tell us something we didn't already know! (Yes, I'm stealing from paying homage to Wizard of Id. Sue me, peasants!)The first effects of a Democrat adjustment to their crushing loss in the presidential election may come in the chamber where they actually managed to hold serve. The New York Times reports that backbenchers may give their entrenched leadership the heave-ho in the next session of Congress to muscle up for the first two years of the Donald Trump restoration. House Judiciary chair Jerrold Nadler is their first target, but not their last:House Democrats are considering pushing aside some of their...

While polls of Democratic primary voters have been showing that they supposedly want Vice President Kamala Harris to run again, there's a new name out there, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a member of the far-left Squad. On Friday morning, The Hill put out an analysis of potential 2028 Democratic candidates, with Harris topping that list of seven candidates, and AOC closing it out. As their blurb on the congresswoman read:When Democrats talk about the future of the party, the 35-year-old New York congresswoman’s name always bubbles to the top.Democrats have long been impressed with Ocasio-Cortez’s ability to “cut through the...

Gov. Josh Shapiro was almost selected as Kamala Harris’s running mate, and he wants to be president more than Phillies fans want to win the World Series. As he reflects on the 2024 election, what does he see? How will the lessons he draws affect his governorship, his budget, and how he leads the state?Donald Trump carried Pennsylvania, all of the “blue wall” states, and a majority of the popular vote. Incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris – with over $1 billion in campaign cash and the open support of most of legacy media and Hollywood – got less votes than...

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) has unwittingly issued a major self-own, as he self-righteously announced that a “transgender” representative can use his bathroom. Of course, all Republicans wanted was for the biological man to use a man’s restroom. Thank you, John Fetterman. House Speaker Mike Johnson has banned biological men from women’s bathrooms at the Capitol, which outraged the first “transgender” elected to Congress, Tim “Sarah” McBride, who thinks slapping on some lipstick and high heels should allow him to invade women’s privacy and use their facilities. On Wednesday, Fetterman posted his response, showing his integrity has gone down the toilet,...

President-elect Donald Trump’s victory bodes well for US-Morocco relations. As King Mohamed VI recalled in his statement congratulating Trump on his election win, during his first term, Trump recognized Rabat’s full sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara. Trump made this recognition with a presidential proclamation on December 10, 2020, in exchange for Morocco reestablishing diplomatic relations with Israel. In his statement, Mohammed VI went on to say that “the Moroccan people will forever be grateful” for this recognition, calling Washington “our longstanding friend and ally.” While Morocco hopes to pick up where it left off in negotiations with...

As I’ve said numerous times over recent years, the tide is turning in the battle over gun rights as it becomes more apparent that anti-gunner propaganda isn’t working as effectively as it has in the past.A new Gallup poll reveals some positive findings for gun rights advocates, showing that the anti-gunner lobby is failing to convince people to abandon their Second Amendment rights. Support for banning handguns has fallen to a near-record low while the percentage of Americans supporting assault weapons bans has remained stagnant. A majority of Americans (56 percent) still favor stricter laws for gun sales, a figure...

Yesterday, Donald Trump joined Fox News host Lawrence Jones at a Bronx barbershop. Trump, a Queens native who spent a lot of time on construction sites, was clearly at home among these guys in a way that Kamala and Walz never could be. (JD Vance would be at home there, too.) There was no fakery. Trump may be a billionaire, but these are his people—and because Trump is real, he understood the pain the barber’s hyper-inflated energy bills are causing him. That pain and Trump’s recognition explains why he’s campaigning in New York, a place that ought to be a...

Al Smith, the beloved four-term governor of New York, was the first Catholic to appear on a major party ballot for president. The 1928 presidential campaign was marred by the Herbert Hoover organization unleashing a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry, aided by the Klu Klux Klan and other nativist groups, that accused Smith of being an agent of the papacy and hence the devil himself. Protestant preachers railed against him from the pulpit. Even mainstream protestant churches warned against Smith's "dual loyalties." The Smith campaign was such a disaster that neither major party would put up a Catholic candidate for thirty...

If true, then the 2024 election cycle could shift from merely forgettable for Democrats to downright catastrophic. They have based their electoral strategy on decades of near-total domination of the black-voter demographic to maintain their grip on power. While that applies to municipal elections in big cities, it applies even more to presidential elections. Four years ago, Democrats leveraged that into a stunning win in Georgia, normally a safe state for Republicans in presidential cycles. Joe Biden eked out a narrow 0.3-point margin of victory created mainly by a massive turnout of black voters against Donald Trump, winning 83% of...

The Polymarket betting odds quickly tilted so heavily in Donald Trump's favor — bettors prefer him 60/40 over Kamala Harris this morning — that Nancy Pelosi just put in another order with Long Knives. She ordered two sets, one for doing in Harris and the second for Tim Walz. Enter stage left, Gavin Newsom. I'm kidding, of course. It's much too late (I think) to pull yet another presidential candidate switcheroo. But you'd better believe it's a notion Pelosi entertained last night while finishing off her first bottle of chardonnay. Harris, you see, is flailing. Her latest pitch is to...

Democrats have been ramping up the rhetoric, not just about eliminating Donald Trump and MAGA, but about getting rid of the Constitution itself. The first two Amendments of the Constitution are constantly attacked by the left, followed closely by the Electoral College. Your right to speak, to defend yourself, and for people outside New York, California, and deep Blue urban areas to be represented are all under attack. The latest example of this fact is John Kerry, Special Envoy for the President for the Climate (yes, John Kerry is the Earth's representative according to the Biden/Harris administration), bemoaning the fact...

DON’T STOP SHARING THIS! Read this story to the end, as there is important information about how illegal alien crossings in one area were effectively stopped by private citizens. Recently, I spent about two months on the border in and around the small California town of Jacumba in San Diego County. I was filming the invasion of illegal aliens as part of my ongoing tour of the southern border I started in 2022. The San Diego sector has been the busiest part of the border in terms of illegal alien crossings. While I was there, I filmed roughly 10,000 illegal...

In a huge blow to cheating Democrats, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday ruled that undated ballots or improperly dated ballots won’t be counted. Democrats heavily relied on mail-in ballots in 2020 to get Joe Biden across the finish line. Recall that President Trump was ahead of Joe Biden by more than 750,000 votes in Pennsylvania at midnight on Election Day in 2020, but Democrats in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia kept counting ‘mail-in ballots’ for two weeks without GOP monitors present. Joe Biden ‘won’ Pennsylvania by approximately 80,000 votes after Democrats used mail-in ballots to cheat. Last month a lower court...

Axe-wielding Algerian was recently arrested and the entrance of a synagogue was set ablaze, adding to tension in the countrySuppressed identity politics has burst into the open in France, a country that hosts Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim population, as attacks against French Jews increase in number and violence. “Words like Jewish, Zionism and anti-Semitism are being used by different people with different intentions,” said Jewish human rights lawyer Arie Alimi. “There isn't enough education about what those words mean.” France's social model, in which citizens are expected to be moulded by Republican values and keep religious beliefs private, is...

The media have always engaged in mass lying about immigration, but they're really going the extra mile this election cycle. Lie No. 1 is the toughness of the "bipartisan" border bill, covered in last week's column. (Quotes on "bipartisan" because not a single congressional Republican supports it, even the guy who co-sponsored it.) Immigration Lie No. 2 is even more comically, straw-graspingly wrong: The Biden-Harris administration is deporting MORE illegals than Trump! It's been reported everywhere. I'll include bylines so you know whose reporting never to trust: -- Reuters by Ben Kellerman, Mica Rosenberg and Ted Hesson: "Biden is now...

On Tuesday night, Fox News’ Jesse Watters reported on shocking new revelations about the handling of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. These revelations raise serious concerns about the transparency of the Secret Service and FBI. According to Watters, “Every couple of weeks, the FBI and Secret Service give us, you know, drip, drip, drip. Little info on the Trump shooting, but it never amounts to anything. The real investigative work is being done by Congress.” He cited a new report from Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) that has uncovered crucial details about the incident. Higgins' findings reveal that a local...