Free Republic

The Daily Wire was once ascendant in right-wing media. Now, the “anti-woke” company faces contentious layoffs, ideological battles and dwindling relevance online.The conservative media company Daily Wire was once a star of the MAGA digital universe, dominating social media feeds and podcast apps with a blend of “anti-woke” commentary, viral Facebook posts and culture-war stunts. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the company co-founded by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro ranked as Facebook’s top English-language publisher for three straight months. Its sarcastic news items on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s salon visits gained millions more views than the websites of...

‘My ambition is to change the country,’ AOC says when asked about seeking higher office in 2028 New York’s Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brushed off question about run for presidency.

Sir Keir Starmer has insisted he will not quit as prime minister and "plunge the country into chaos", as Labour reels from significant election losses. The results in England, Scotland and Wales have piled pressure on Sir Keir, with some Labour MPs calling for him to set a timetable for his departure, although his cabinet allies have backed him for now. Labour has lost power in Wales, ending its 27-year rule, while the SNP remains the largest party in Scotland. Reform UK has been the big winner in England, picking up more than 1,400 seats and taking control of councils...

I was 22 when my grandmother forgot me. It took her 12 years to die from Alzheimer's. It started with little things, like where her glasses were or what day it was. Soon she didn't know who I was. For a while, she addressed me as her son, but then, as the disease ate away more of her mind, she forgot him too. Then I was the young, handsome version of her husband, until he too faded away. After a while, I was just a nice young man who came to visit her. The rest of the time, she was...

“The antiabortion movement is turning on Trump,” was a headline that ran in The Wall Street Journal this week. Pro-life groups, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, are frustrated with President Trump, as the article detailed, because his administration’s policy allows states (and thereby their residents) to decide abortion policy. Total abortions in the U.S. have slightly increased since the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, despite widespread state bans. “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony, told The Journal. No, Marjorie. President Trump is not the problem. He has been...

Today’s Democratic Party has abandoned its traditional working-class, patriotic roots and embraced a radical Jacobin ideology built on division, coercion, and political extremism. For the past century, the agendas of the Democratic Party were predictable. They professed concern for working Americans and supported blue-collar unions. Unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, and Social Security were their trademarks—often rapidly achieved by growing government bureaucracies and continually raising taxes. Still, many Democrats were socially conservative. By the 1970s, Democrats still deplored antisemitism. Party officials had rejected their own segregationists to champion civil rights. Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and...

China had a head start on controling rare earths. Trump cut off oil from Iran to China, and uses that as leverage to get access to China rare earths. Israel is pioneering new rare earth extraction technology in the Negev, and working on recycling old electronics and batteries for their rare earth content.

Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported. The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites...

AB 1608 would rename and expand the powers of the High-Speed Rail Authority’s Inspector General while creating broad exemptions to withhold records California’s high-speed rail project, originally pitched to voters as a $33.5 billion endeavor under Proposition 1A in 2008, has spiraled into a staggering taxpayer nightmare with estimates now exploding as high as $231 billion — a more than 700% increase. Against this backdrop of relentless cost overruns, Assembly Democrats are advancing legislation critics say is explicitly designed to conceal the extent of the waste and shield the failing project from public accountability. AB 1608, authored by Assemblywoman Lori...

The Iran war didn’t just break Tehran—it shattered old alliances, exposed Europe’s weakness, checked China and Russia, and accelerated an American-led geopolitical realignment. No one ever quite knows the nature of the aftermath of any war in the Middle East. The current effort to disarm and neuter the Iranian theocracy is no exception. But contrary to European and American left-wing consensus, the ripples of the Iran war are already remaking the postwar world as we knew it—and in ways that are all bad. For more than half a century, OPEC has terrorized the industrial world with threats of oil shortages...

Venezuela’s deposed president, Nicolás Maduro, never enjoyed the charisma or genuine popularity of his predecessor, ‘El Comandante’ Hugo Chávez. So all the murals, billboards and installations dotted around Caracas urging the release of the 63-year-old statesman – along with his wife Cilia Flores – from American captivity, don’t exactly feel like a grassroots effort. ‘Bring them home!’ reads one mural, evoking the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Meanwhile, a stopwatch installed in Caracas’s Bolivar Square counts how long it has been since the presidential couple were abducted by the US army in early January. Maduro currently resides in the Metropolitan...

The national retail average for a regular gallon of gas was $4.457 on Monday. That's a 1-cent increase from Sunday, according to the American Automobile Association, and 35 cents more than last Monday. At this time last year, a gallon of gas was $1.29 cheaper. The surging prices seemed to stabilize or even decrease for about two weeks, following a temporary ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran that has been indefinitely extended. However, the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route where roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes, has effectively remained closed or extremely limited to passage...

[...] “You may still be seeing the inflationary impact of food industry costs for the next 12 to 15 months,” he said. [...] If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the importance of fertiliser. Some 40-50 per cent of the world’s food production depends on artificial nitrogen-based fertiliser, which is created by combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from natural gas to make ammonia. In turn, this is combined with either nitric acid or carbon dioxide to produce ammonium nitrate, or urea. The problem is that 34 per cent of global urea passes through the Strait of Hormuz, having been produced...

Six supreme court justices handed down a ruling built, ostensibly, on the belief that the US has changed so much as to render the protections of the Voting Rights Act unnecessary. No one should be that gullible.In 1901, the same year my great-grandfather was born, George H White rose to address the 56th United States Congress for the last time. He was a Republican congressman from North Carolina – the only Black member of the entire body. He was leaving because the state he represented had passed legislation making his re-election impossible. Reconstruction had already been undone. The powers that...

Nato is “disintegrating”, Poland’s prime minister has said after the United States announced it was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany. Donald Tusk made the dire assessment of the Western alliance on Saturday amid an escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Germany over Berlin’s criticism of the war on Iran. In a post on X on Saturday, Mr Tusk wrote: “The greatest threat to the transatlantic community are not its external enemies, but the ongoing disintegration of our alliance. We must all do what it takes to reverse this disastrous trend.” On Friday evening, the US department of defence...

The establishment consensus is hardening. President Trump’s war with Iran is the culminating disaster of the most damaging and misguided American foreign policy in history. Iranian leaders are humiliating the U.S., German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned. “Superpower suicide” is how Wendy Sherman, a top Iran negotiator under President Obama and Joe Biden’s deputy secretary of state, described Mr. Trump’s Iran policy to ABC News. As Ms. Sherman sees it, the Iran war has alienated allies, assisted Russia financially, and weakened America’s position vis-à-vis China. For Fareed Zakaria, the question is no longer whether the administration’s policies will backfire but whether...

The White House is arguing to lawmakers that President Donald Trump does not need to disengage troops from the conflict with Iran in order to comply with the War Powers Act because an extended ceasefire has effectively ended military hostilities. The Trump administration faced a Friday deadline under the 1973 law that is designed to end military operations after 60 days unless Congress has formally blessed the mission. The White House essentially states that the 60-day clock no longer applies, in letters sent Friday to Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate President Pro Tempore Charles E. Grassley and obtained by CQ...

We’re approaching 60 days of the so-called Iran war, and we’re still getting these loud voices that Donald Trump has failed, that the war’s not going well. It’s completely nonempirical. It’s antithetical to the evidence. Here we are at 60 days, and Iran is losing about $500 million in input per day. It’s running out of storage space in a week or two for its daily output of oil, at which point they either have to stop pumping or they’re going to have—if they don’t stop pumping—their wells will collapse. They either have to stop pumping, or they have to...

Lord Hayward forecasts Labour to lose in 75 per cent of the wards it is defending, with net losses standing at 1,850. Sir Keir Starmer has been left bracing for a Labour wipeout in the upcoming 2026 Local Elections. Polling guru Lord Hayward, who is also a Tory peer, is predicting a torrid night for the Prime Minister at the ballot box. The forecast suggests Labour could lose three-in-four seats, with net losses standing at 1,850. Such a result would prove far more catastrophic than Labour’s haul in the 2025 Local Elections, when Sir Keir’s candidate was defeated in just...

The Trump administration is arguing that the war in Iran has already ended because of the ceasefire that began in early April, an interpretation that would allow the White House to avoid the need to seek congressional approval… While the ceasefire has since been extended, Iran maintains its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Navy is maintaining a blockade to prevent Iran’s oil tankers from getting out to sea... Under the War Powers Resolution, the law that sought to constrain a president’s military powers, President Donald Trump had until Friday to seek congressional authorization or cease fighting....