Free Republic

A Kuwaiti paper reveals another monstrous Obama betrayal. We thought the Obama administration could stoop no lower when it was revealed that the administration transferred $1.7 billion in untraceable cash to the Islamic Republic as ransom for the release of four Americans hostages they were holding. We were wrong. In its twilight weeks, the administration gave its consent to allow the Iranians to receive 116 metric tons of natural uranium from Russia as compensation for its export of tons of reactor coolant. According to experts familiar with the transaction, the uranium could be enriched to weapons-grade sufficient for the production...

Former President Trump issued a lengthy and blistering attack on Bill Maher Saturday after the late night host and his guests weighed in on the Republican presidential nominee’s recently claim that if he lost the election, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with it.“The ratings challenged Bill Maher, on his increasingly boring show on HBO, is really having a hard time coping with TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. He is a befuddled mess, sloppy and tired, and every conversation, with B and C list guests, seems to start with, or revert back to, ME!,” Trump thundered on Truth Social....

Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I have to make a confession: Kamala Harris had a much stronger start than I expected. She appears competent, in command and she is connecting to voters — everything she wasn’t when she ran for president five years ago. I gather you’re not surprised ….Gail Collins: Bret! Does that mean you’re going to vote for her? I was planning on torturing you until you joined the team.Bret: I’m not there yet, though the rumored choice of Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, as her running mate would go far to reassure me about a Harris administration. What...

Deal with it. You knew that the New York Times wouldn’t let a patriotic holiday like Independence Day pass without taking a subversive shot at patriotism or America itself or her founding. Sure enough, author, editor, and Times columnist Pamela Paul wrote a July 4th opinion piece with a headline that, in addition to being wrong, was insulting to all Americans of faith: “Your Religious Values Are Not American Values.” Predictably, it regurgitates many of the Left’s usual negative tropes about Christianity and our country’s founding.Allow me to address some of those tropes, and please forgive the belated response to...

Now is the summer of Republican content. The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him. Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one...

The New York Times proudly announced last Monday that it had “won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.” Those prestigious journalism awards went to “Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times” for “photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.” The Times neglected to mention, however, one telling detail: Masoud has been unmasked as a member of Hamas who participated in the Oct. 7 jihad massacres inside Israel.The Paper of Record shows...

The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.” This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them...

Their normal human sympathies have atrophied. They live in the desert of their own inhuman politics. They are cold and apparently lack a spiritual life. Desperate to look down on other people, they take fatuity to a new level. David Atkins, recently elected as a California member of the Democratic National Committee, mused on Twitter (Nov. 21, 2020): "How do you deprogram 75 million people who would literally die to stick it to the domestic enemies the teevee and youtube conspiracy vids told them to hate? No, seriously...how DO you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?...

The most harrowing story I’ve read in The Times in recent days was Miriam Jordan’s account of a car crash last month in Southern California involving a Ford Expedition that had come from Mexico, straight through a breach in the border wall. The Ford was crammed with 25 people when it hit a tractor-trailer rig on Route 115, 110 miles east of San Diego. “Few of the survivors have been able to describe what happened next,” Jordan writes. “The crunch of metal and glass, the bodies flung dozens of feet across the pavement. Twelve people died on the spot, a...

The New York Times has killed a column by Bret Stephens that took issue with the paper's handling of the resignation a star health reporter over his use of the N-Word. Pulitzer-winning Stephens wrote to colleagues Thursday about his piece focusing on the Donald McNeil Jr. saga. He said: 'If you're wondering why it wasn't in the paper, it's because AG Sulzberger spiked it.' Sulzberger is the chairman of The New York Times Company and the publisher of The New York Times.

The New York Times' Bret Stephens took a lot of heat for arguing New York lockdown rules don't fit the rest of the country. I know the feeling. Bret Stephens has a tough job. I don’t mean like 19th-century coal miner tough, but as one of the “conservative” opinion contributors at The New York Times, he winds up pleasing none of the people a lot of the time. This is because much of the Grey Lady’s leftist readership doesn’t think the Times should run conservative views at all and much of the American right finds the anti-Trump “can’t we go...

Donald Trump’s first instinct when it came to the coronavirus was to dismiss the threat as overblown, over there, and “totally under control.” His second was to use the pandemic as an opportunity to show off his world-historical leadership skills by treating the virus as a threat on par with World War II. Both reactions were driven by politics, not evidence. The first was unquestionably wrong. The second needs to be questioned aggressively before we impose solutions possibly more destructive than the virus itself

SNIP Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations? The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3...

After a public uproar, The New York Times has revised a column by Bret Stephens that cited an academic paper co-authored by an anthropologist who has been branded a white nationalist. An editor’s note, appended to the column headlined “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” says a reference to the 2005 study was removed and that Stephens did not know the author “promoted racist views. “Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically,” the note said. “The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens...

Back when Donald Trump was running for president — and Republicans were still capable of feeling politically ashamed — a conservative friend made what was, to my mind, the decisive case against voting for him. No, a ballot for Trump did not automatically mean that his voters shared his bigotries. Nor did it necessarily mean that they weren’t embarrassed by them. It just meant that those bigotries weren’t deal-breakers. If their candidate was a birther, they could live with it. If he thought celebrity was a license for sexual predation, they could live with it. If he wanted to impose...

Donald Trump ought to be impeached and removed from office. This isn’t what I thought two months ago, when the impeachment inquiry began. I argued that the evidence fell short of the standards of a prosecutable criminal act. I also feared impeachment might ultimately help Trump politically, as it had helped Bill Clinton in 1998. That second worry might still prove true. But if the congressional testimonies of Marie Yovanovitch, Bill Taylor, Gordon Sondland, Alexander Vindman and especially Fiona Hill make anything clear, it’s that the president’s highest crime isn’t what he tried to do to, or with, Ukraine. It’s...

The miserable specter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bowing like a little pawn to her far-left Squad and calling for impeaching President Trump, something she's known better to do up until now, seems to have snapped some sense into #NeverTrump New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.He's got an excellent one out, pointing to the pattern of Democrats stewing in their own rage, firing into the dark without information, and then moving to impeach. Fire first, find out what was shot at later. And as he notes, they're doing it a lot. Once upon a time, prominent Democrats called for the impeachment of a powerful...

President Trump slammed New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, suggesting he's "loaded up" with bed bugs. After the president floated the idea of hosting next year's G-7 summit at his Doral resort, a report resurfaced that his resort settled a lawsuit in 2017 after a New Jersey man named Eric Linder alleged he woke up one morning at Trump's property with bites all over his body. Trump denied of having any bed bugs at his resort Tuesday morning, blaming "Radical Left Democrats" for spreading "nasty rumors."

The victory of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s election is a defeat for the New York Times. The Times threw everything it had against Netanyahu. The Times’ tone was set in a March 1 column by Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer prize-winning former editor of The Jerusalem Post whose hiring by the Times in April 2017 was interpreted as an attempt by the Times to bolster its faltering credibility among pro-Israel readers. “Time for Netanyahu To Go” was the headline over the Stephens column, describing Netanyahu as “toxically flawed.” The same column described Netanyahu as “a man for whom no moral consideration...

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said on Friday he would "love to see" what Fox News host Sean Hannity would say if a future Democratic president declared "a national emergency over climate change" or for another reason. Stephens made the comment on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," hours before Trump declared a national emergency in an announcement from the Rose Garden. "The powers that Trump appropriates for himself now and that Republicans like Mitch McConnell willingly grant him are powers that future Democratic presidents are certainly going to seize using this as a precedent," Stephens said. "And real conservatives already rue...