Free Republic

ABC’s axing of Terry Moran after the reporter called President Donald Trump a “world-class hater” on social media has drawn the ire of Jon Stewart who airily dismissed the network sneering, “They’re a f–king joke.” While taking listener questions on his Thursday’s episode of his Weekly Show podcast, Stewart was asked whether the network made the right call by showing Moran the door. “Of course not,” the Daily Show host replied. “So stupid. No, for God’s sake.” The Wrap reports he continued, “Literally everyday on Fox News they’re taking stuff out of context or their people are saying utterly vicious...

As President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” moves toward a final vote in the House, conservative budget hawks are livid that it largely fails to offer spending cuts to their satisfaction, marking the latest in a long line of punts for the House GOP that has repeatedly vowed to address the national debt. Republicans have long campaigned on addressing the debt, with the Tea Party movement notching historic election wins under President Barack Obama. In 2010, Republicans won control of the House and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate. Yet, even when Trump first took office, Congress did not...

David Zweig is a novelist and journalist who lives near New York City and was a early skeptic of Covid lockdowns and school closings. (In other words, he’s me, but nicer.) Somehow, Zweig didn’t get canceled. In 2020 he became one of only a few legacy media writers to push for school reopenings. Now he has a new book out: An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. It demolishes the false narrative that public health bureaucrats and teachers’ unions were just doing their best at the time with the information they had. I...

In 1993, Democrats voted against NAFTA by 156-102 and against it in the Senate by a narrower 28-27. Now, Democrats are mourning the death of what they claim is the last vestige of NAFTA. President Trump’s tariffs, they claim, are killing the ‘free trade’ that the Dems once opposed, before they supported it, and before they opposed it. NAFTA cost Republicans the White House, but Bill Clinton’s embrace of it cost Democrats the South. Clinton had manipulated and misled working class Democrats into believing that he would either reject or fundamentally transform NAFTA and lost the white working class vote....

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution vests the power to lay and collect tariffs with Congress. The Founding Fathers intended for legislative oversight on taxation, tariffs, and related financial matters, viewing tariffs as strategic levers to be used with caution and prudence. Historically, Congress set tariffs and maintained tight control over this power. However, over time, particularly after the Great Depression, there was a shift towards delegating some authority to the executive branch. This began with the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, allowing the President to negotiate trade agreements without separate congressional approval each time.Later acts, such...

Stocks plummeted Thursday, sending the S&P 500 back into correction territory for its biggest one-day loss since 2020, after President Donald Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs, raising the risk of a global trade war that plunges the economy into a recession.The broad market index dropped 4.84% and settled at 5,396.52, posting its worst day since June 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 1,679.39 points, or 3.98%, to close at 40,545.93 and mark its worst session since June 2020. The Nasdaq Composite plummeted 5.97% and ended at 16,550.61, registering its biggest decline since March 2020. The slide across equities was broad,...

Overview Elon Musk recently stated that “rich people” should “be caring more” about federal deficits because “if the ship of America sinks,” “we all sink with it.” This may seem like hyperbole, but a widely overlooked report from the U.S. Treasury shows it is a likely scenario unless major changes are made. The Treasury report, quietly released in January, shows that if the federal government reported its finances in the same manner that large corporations are required by law to report theirs, the primary measure of federal red ink wouldn’t be $36 trillion in national debt but $143 trillion in...

Your job as Democrats is to lead the opposition to Trump, which means making Trump unpopular. Right now there are only two engine governors on Trumpism: The courts and his popularity. You can’t influence the courts, but you do have input on public opinion. Stop wasting it. First rule of fight club: Pick your opponent. Ultimately you need to drag Trump’s numbers down, but right now he’s riding high. Elon Musk is a softer target.

The ISIS-inspired attack in New Orleans underscores how extremism online and political divisions at home have created “a perfect storm” for radicalization in America, experts say, with law enforcement struggling to track an increasingly fractured threat.....Ideology and terror Right-wing ideologies have fueled more than 70% of all extremist attacks and domestic terror plots since 2002 in the U.S., according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Sigmund Freud had a term for it—the “narcissism of small differences”. In this case, Wikipedia explains it well: “… the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences.” We all recognize this pattern that manifests in various ways from the bickering of married couples to successful rock bands breaking up. The most minor disputes explode into major ones that no one wanted in the first place with sometimes disastrous results. This fits the internal MAGA dispute over H1-B visas to...

When I heard Kash Patel had been tabbed by Donald Trump to run the FBI, I could already imagine the pushback and moved immediately to start the just-published article “The Bell Finally Tolls for the FBI” piece. The thought was that the role Patel played in preparing the “Nunes memo” was both the clearest example of media corruption from Trump’s first term and also the most easily demonstrated episode of FBI malfeasance. Since I had to spend an unnatural amount of time on the topic over the years (it even intersected with the Twitter Files and Hamilton 68) I quickly...

If you have spent any amount of time online as a Trump supporter, you have certainly seen the rhetoric. Both liberals and the DeSantis crew like to call MAGA a cult and seem excited at the thought of Donald Trump’s demise. They long for the days of a pre-Trump Republican party. The reality is that while Trump is the current figurehead of the movement, it was birthed under Ron Paul. Ron Paul took fringe conversations such as no foreign wars and sound economics onto the main stage. Donald Trump then took many of these same conversations from the main stage...

In the most blatant move of hatred of the United States Constitution to date, U.S. Representatives Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Jamie Raskin (MD-08), Melanie Stansbury (NM-01), and Senator Richard Blumenthal (CT) have filed legislation which will create an Office of the Inspector General to ensure accountability of justices in the Supreme Court of the United States.The U.S. Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch (makes the law), the executive branch (enforces the law), and the judicial branch (interprets the law). This bold move by house Democrats basically erases the separation of powers in United...

As someone who values liberty and limited government, I’ve always been skeptical of unchecked federal power – especially when it comes to matters of war and peace. The Founders warned us about the dangers of standing armies and entangling alliances, and history has shown time and again the perils of a trigger-happy foreign policy.Yet for decades now, the American people have been fed a steady diet of interventionism from the Washington establishment. We’re told that the United States must be the world’s policeman – that we have a moral obligation to spread democracy at the point of a gun, and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULk8-DGC7Hs

In a recent trio of posts to X, Elon Musk wrote that (1) illegal immigrants “are not prevented from voting in federal elections,” (2) “you don’t need government issued ID to vote,” and (3) Democrats “are importing voters.” To rebut those statements, the New York Times published an article by Jim Rutenberg and Kate Conger claiming that Musk is “spreading election misinformation” about “illegal voting by noncitizens” and echoing a “conspiracy theory” spread by Donald Trump. While Musk’s words are imprecise, the gist of what he wrote is correct, and the Times is categorically wrong.

We should remember the now modern proverb of Nixon-era economic advisor Herb Stein to the effect that what cannot go on (without destroying the nation), simply will not go on.In some sense, the country for recent years has been cruising on the fumes from prior and likely better wiser generations and institutions. In 2024, the tab for our current apathy, toxic politics, and incompetence will come due.

The New York Times‘s so-called “conservative” columnist David French has claimed in a new opinion editorial that supporting Donald Trump is worse than supporting slavery. French’s bizarre op-ed essentially argues that slavers did not know any better, while MAGA supporters should, oddly comparing the forced ownership of human beings to supporting America First policies.

There are only a handful of counties in this country that can authentically claim their voting habits are bona fide bellwethers for elections in battleground states. Bucks County, a suburb near Philadelphia, is one of them. (snip) On Tuesday, voters decided to change the balance of power on the Central Bucks School District's school board, which previously had a 6-3 Republican majority. This week, voters flipped it to a pending 6-3 Democratic majority. At issue for these voters, known for swinging back and forth between Republicans and Democrats, was the restriction of political advocacy that the Democratic candidates called "harmful...

Times Square has found its groove heading into the crucial holiday season, with new businesses opening, hotel sales picking up and retail rents again on the rise.The entertainment district recently recorded its 180th business opening since the pandemic, surpassing the 179 closures that resulted from Covid-19 turning one of the U.S.’s most heavily trafficked districts into a ghost town. ....... Crime in Times Square remains below 2019 levels, despite issues involving people suffering from mental illness and drug use, said Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of the neighborhood and its businesses....