Free Republic

Steven Witkoff, the Trump administration’s official envoy who had past business ties to Qatar, sat down with Tucker Carlson, the former FOX News talking head turned Qatari apologist who had recently featured Qatar’s leader, to talk about how wonderful Qatar is... Qatar is not a mediator. It’s a state sponsor of Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups. By collaborating with Qatar, Witkoff is by definition collaborating with Hamas.

This isn’t even first-year law student or high school level argumentation, it’s stuff worthy of The View.Clinton judges were bad, Obama judges were worse and Biden judges are just unhinged shrieking activists who don’t understand the law.Meet Judge Ana Reyes who was put in charge of deciding whether the Pentagon can remove servicemembers with mental problems that cause them to believe they’re women.Judge Reyes said that the government “egregiously misquoted” and “cherry picked” scientific studies to incorrectly assert that transgender soldiers decrease the readiness and lethality of the military.There is no reality in which having mentally ill and delusional people...

Conflict of interest.. Out of the three federal judges who staged a judicial coup and demanded that the Trump administration do whatever they say, two, Judge Loren AliKhan, a Pakistani Muslim, and Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali, an Egyptian Muslim, are Muslims. All three are highly unqualified and extremist Biden nominees who do not belong on the bench. Judge Amir Ali’s order that Trump must disburse foreign aid is particularly egregious since Ali’s ancestral Egypt remains a major beneficiary of that aid. USAID has funneled $30 billion to Egypt since 1978. Today US aid to Egypt last year was $1.5...

In the weeks since President Trump took office, federal judges have arrogated to themselves the authority to control how the government spends money, whether the government can issue orders to government personnel and even the content displayed on government websites... A president with no initiative or independent thinking is a mere administrator, not a leader. If his decisions follow precedent, law and existing policy alone, he ceases to represent the people. By contrast, a judge who follows his gut instincts, thinks independently and advocates for causes is a tyrant...

After inauguration protests fizzled, President’s Day was scheduled for a soft relaunch of the ‘resistance’ under the umbrella of something called 50501 Movement which called for conducting Not My President protests in all 50 states. They met that relatively low bar (probably) but the rallies were very underwhelming compared to Trump’s first term. If the media hadn’t reported on them with lots of close up photos to hide the low sizes of the latest ‘resistance’ rallies, no one would even know they had taken place. Who’s behind them? The 50501 Movement pretends to be a grass roots effort, a hashtag...

In 2022, the DA Afghanistan Bank showed off photos of $40 million in stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. The Taliban controlled central bank described this as one of three shipments of “humanitarian aid” amounting to over $100 million. DAB, Afghanistan’s central bank, was headed by Noor Ahmad Agha, a “specially designated terrorist” who had been named as the “financier of bomb-making”, including the IEDs which had killed over 1,000 American soldiers, and sending money to a sanctioned figure was illegal. Despite that someone had sent a massive fortune in U.S. cash to...

California has long been the most insurrectionist of the states. Some states promised sanctuary to illegal aliens. California promises to go after law enforcement if they follow the law and cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Now California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who hopes to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom, is threatening hospitals that they must ignore Trump’s executive orders and go on sterilizing kids. California Attorney General Rob Bonta today reminded California hospitals and federally-funded healthcare providers of their ongoing obligation under California anti-discrimination law to provide gender affirming care amid confusion resulting from President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget...

After President Trump’s near assassination, the Secret Service complained that it needed more money. My take was that this is what government officials always claim after a massive screw-up and that more money is not needed. Does the Secret Service actually need more money? It has a $3 billion budget. That’s around double what it was in 2000. Only about $1.2 billion of that goes to protective operations and only about $73 million gets spent on providing security at presidential campaigns. $138 million gets spent on training and professional development. ... I did a deeper dive back in December. The...

“It is really, really a sad day in America,” Rep. Ilhan Omar declared at a rally by Democrats outside USAID headquarters protesting President Trump’s reconstruction of the aid agency. It wasn’t a sad day for America, but it was so for Somalia. Over the last two years, USAID had funneled $2.3 billion in “humanitarian assistance” to Omar’s native Somalia. Last year it reported a request for $1.6 billion in aid and even with the Biden administration on the way out the door, it sent an additional $29 million in December 2024. USAID support for Somalia had doubled under the Biden...

At least part of the way. The Biden administration’s open border Kabuki theater required pretending that the mass invasion was beyond its control to rein in all the while vigorously fighting any state action in court. After Arizona fell into leftist hands, that mainly meant an extended legal battle to block Texas from protecting its border. But now there’s an administration in office that actually wants to close the border. And Texas gets to play. The Texas National Guard will now be able to not only secure the border, but also detain border invaders, this is important beyond the moment...

“We were out en masse, like different organizations were out."... ICE raids at the moment are targeting illegal aliens with a history of criminal behavior. Those arrested in Chicago include illegal alien pedophiles. This makes this campaign to sabotage ICE raids a case of aiding and abetting criminals. When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities in dark SUVs arrived on the streets that day, another operation began. The community launched its own counteraction: an urgent system of text chains, social-media groups and calls between local leaders. The response was nearly instantaneous. “Videos are coming in, text messages, people are hitting...

Philosophers, writers and thinkers insisted that the Holocaust was an inflection point in history, but it’s clearer now than ever before that it did not change history, it only accelerated it. Israel was not, as politicians all too often insist, “born out of the ashes of the Holocaust.” It was born out of the blood, sweat and determination of a relatively small group of Zionists who defied the traditionalists and leftists in their own communities to go and rebuild their own homeland. Liberal Jews have made “If you will it, it is no dream” into an airy cliche when it...

New York City, Chicago and Boston are among the sanctuary cities collapsing after waves of migrants stormed across the open borders. Even cities that once boasted of providing sanctuary to illegal aliens from federal immigration enforcement are now running away from the name. Sanctuary cities were always intended to be destructive. They were not, as many Democrats now wrongly claim, about providing safe harbor to refugees, but about bringing down America. The sanctuary cities did not emerge in response to the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or any actual genocide, but to provide support and sanctuary for Marxists fleeing the civil...

Trump is getting more of a honeymoon in Term 2 than in Term 1, and while part of it is due to the shock of the 2024 win, a lot of it has become tactics. The first stage of the plan is to infiltrate his decision-making loop and to make his various policies backfire. That’s why it’s helpful to understand what malicious compliance is. The last ‘resistance’ movement among federal employees focused on more direct sabotage, at least initially this time they’re using malicious compliance, that is to say they’re implementing executive orders in the most destructive fashion. And then...

President Trump’s decision to rename Mt. Denali back to its former name of Mt. McKinley has touched off the usual outrage from politicians, media types and activists whose only knowledge of the country’s Pre-Columbian tribal population comes from Kevin Costner movies and shows. Mt. Denali, they insist, was the original ‘indigenous’ name for Mt. McKinley. But the National Park Service notes that, “no fewer than nine Native groups… used unique names for the mountain. There are five Athabascan languages surrounding the park, each with its own oral place name.” And Mt. Denali is not even the right tribal name. Sen....

The Biden administration promised that post-pandemic, federal workers would have to go back to work. Then it flipped around and cut a deal with pro-Biden unions to have federal workers go on ‘working’ in their PJs. Now the feds are being told they have to go back to work. And they are not happy. After President Donald Trump directed agencies to return the federal workforce to the office full-time, many federal employees said productivity will suffer under a blanket return-to-office mandate, according to the results of a Federal News Network survey. Uh-huh. Yes, making federal workers work will hurt their...

I have said it before and I will say it again, the 14th Amendment is by far the worst amendment to the Constitution. It broke every possible rule of constitutional government beginning with simplicity and timelessness. The 14th is a sprawling mess meant to deal with immediate problems that used sloppy broad language and quickly became a magnet for every leftist effort to conduct backdoor rewrites of the law. Consider that in just the last few years, Democrats used 4 of the 5 sections of the 14th to argue that… 1. That Trump was ineligible to hold office 2. That...

That didn’t take long, but we knew it wouldn’t. Lefty organizations have been fundraising off their promises to fight Trump for a decade now. And since most of them aren’t going to be organizing protests and there are no more presidential elections coming up featuring Trump, that mostly means suing the federal government. Don’t underestimate lawfare. A barrage of lawsuits helped slow the Trump agenda to a crawl in his first term so it was always going to be a rush out of the gate. And the ACLU got in first with a lawsuit challenging an end to birthright citizenship...

A man in a lunatic asylum shouted, “I am Napoleon.” Another man asked,, “How do you know?” The first patient said, “God told me!” Just then, a voice from another room shouted, “I did not!”The very real state of contemporary identity politics.Dr. Rick Levine, who likes to go by ‘Rachel’ and ‘Admiral’, and was made Assistant Health Secretary and an admiral by the Biden administration (which still couldn’t make him a woman) was deemed worthy of a high-profile exit interview at Politico since he will now leave office to pursue whatever it is men in admiral and female drag do.He...

The enemy within is already trying to burrow inside. “The time may be soon to go back home,” Imam Husham Al-Husainy told CBS News. The year was 2003 and Al-Husainy, along with the other Iraqi Shiite ‘refugees’ filling Dearborn’s Muslim community, had gotten their fondest wish when the United States removed Saddam Hussein. Imam Husham Al-Husainy never did “go back home” to his native Iraq. Instead, alongside urging his congregants to vote in Iraq’s elections, spent the next 20 years interfering in ours, exploiting faked hate crimes to call for Sharia law, and moving back and forth between parties. While...