Free Republic

New Yorkers are debating whether or not it is appropriate for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to attend the ceremonies commemorating the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001. But, like the one about his boycott of the city’s annual “Israel Day” parade, most of the arguments miss the point. The presence of a politician who has cheered on other Islamist terrorists in his career may be unwelcome to many of the families of the victims, and to other New Yorkers and Americans. But just as there was no way to force him to honor Israel by...

Buying a house, raising a family, spending Saturdays at kids’ sporting events – every aspect of normal life is touched by private equity.Your local doughnut shop got taken over by private equity and, like everything else private equity touches, things got worse. Gone is the experience of watching the conveyor belt fry doughnuts in front of you. No more biting into a freshly made pastry that melts in your mouth. Bad for you? Sure. Delicious? Yes.Now, it is just bad for you. Private equity stepped in and doughnuts are now shipped to nearly every location from a corporate shop. Krispy...

Cora Clancy was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months. I started there because apparently somebody has to. Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, strangled all three in the basement of their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in January 2023. She admits it. This week a jury couldn't decide whether she should be held criminally responsible. Eleven jurors reportedly favored acquittal. One didn't. After 38 hours of deliberation across seven days, the judge declared a mistrial. And outside the courthouse? Pink. Hundreds of people in pink shirts and bows, holding signs reading "Believe," "She Needed Help," and "Peace For Lindsay." Pink was Cora's...

Only if they vote for him. It's pretty obvious he's a phony. The Democrats' crazy train just keeps coming, each boxcar a wonderland of leftist lunacy. Michigan's swing 7th District has gotten a beaut, a mild-mannered J.D. Vance-looking Democrat named William Lawrence, who all of a sudden has deleted a lot of his tweets. Yeah, it's a lot of them. Hundreds. According to Mediaite: A Democratic congressional candidate is distancing himself from now-deleted social posts in which he cheered for open borders, promoted a Democratic Party “civil war,” and blasted the nuclear family as part of a “violent way or...

Remember the reluctant MAGA converts who assured us Donald Trump would moderate his tone and pivot to pragmatism after the election(s)? Well, he didn't do any of that. They failed to account for the fact that Trump will never change. Whether they like it or not, Democrats are in the same boat. Rosy-eyed party elites have convinced themselves that their voters and candidates will readily discard the "woke" nonsense that normal Americans cringe at. Bless their hearts, the poor things. "They're never going to change," writes Patrick Ruffini, a veteran pollster whose firm, Echelon Insights, recently assessed the willingness of...

Somewhere out there is my favorite of all time. Sure, I can say the same for maybe 200 more. I’m talking specifically about my Meyer Lansky column, the one where Jews of all kinds, rose up to be counted. Lansky was first among equals so far as Murder Inc. In a world of gangsters dominated by Italian Americans, the Jewish mob was no slouch. As the saying goes, they loved their mothers. These Jews were tough, and they were styled right here in America. Meanwhile, over in Germany, Hitler and his goons had begun to popularize the Nazis…early and mid...

The Left spent years destroying the norms it now invokes against Trump—and is outraged that Republicans learned the same playbook. One of the more surreal things about the new Democratic Party is its habit of charging Trump with legal and ethical transgressions that Democrats themselves normalized years ago. The result is a strange sort of projection, in which the Left’s charges often reveal its own prior wrongdoing. And after undermining norms, they now lament the loss of what they destroyed. Too Cozy an Attorney General? Democratic Senators voted unanimously against Todd Blanche for attorney general, claiming that, as a former...

The accounts showed suspiciously unusual activity, with some recording more than 500 posts a day and another logging 955 reshares in a single day, all traced to City Hall infrastructure.

Being a Nazi not enough to be disqualified, ..[if] he has a chance of winning... Mamdani . .., a direct attack on Jews for having the temerity to think of acting in their own interests or opposing genocidal Hamas supporters who want to see their beloved terrorists finish job Hitler started... Abdul El-Sayed won a narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens.. was much closer than the blowout polls had suggested, but that is scant comfort .. described as the “most antisemitic US Senate candidate in America" .. DSA.. he fully embraces their anti-Jew and pro-jihadist agenda .., endorsed the genocidal...

The headlines focus on negotiations, but the war’s real story is this: Iran is steadily being broken by sanctions, isolation, and relentless military pressure. One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators. Of the roughly 150 days since the first strike, about 90 have passed without major military operations. Iran believes time is on its side. The Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted, gas prices are too high, and antiwar House Democrats seem poised to win the midterms and bring Trump’s...

In 2025, Rep. Maxine Dexter gave a speech comparing Israel’s campaign against Hamas terrorists to the Holocaust, falsely calling it “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”. “After the Holocaust, the international community made a commitment that such evil can never happen again to any people, anywhere. Never again, they said. That is why I recently signed on to a resolution recognizing Israel’s actions in Gaza led by the Netanyahu government as a genocide,” Rep. Dexter said in her speech, backing Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s pro-terrorist resolution “Recognizing the Genocide of the Palestinian People in Gaza.” The director of the United States Holocaust Memorial...

In August 2024, candidate Donald Trump told a rally crowd that Joe Biden was "using the strategic reserves, which is meant for military, which is meant for war," and pledged that "We have to fill up the strategic reserves immediately." Two years later, with the United States locked in a protracted conflict with Iran, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is doing the opposite of filling up. According to figures circulated by Geiger Capital and Hedgeye, the SPR has fallen roughly 25% in recent months and now sits at its lowest level in about 43 years, covering an estimated 16 days of...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his last in-person meeting at the White House, reportedly sold President Donald Trump on starting a war with Iran. Now, the GOP's America First wing fears he's about to pitch the president on ramping up attacks."I think all of President Trump's most ardent non-'Israel First' supporters are furious," said former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. "Netanyahu has had twice as many visits to the White House in 18 months as Churchill had in all of World War II — with every one of them a disaster for America First."The two men are set...

Federal agents are arresting spouses of Americans, tech workers and others whose visas have expired, including many who have active applications to stay in the country. The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation. Immigration agents in plain clothes have whisked away targets at check-in counters and arrival gates, with enforcement actions in at least 15 airports in recent...

The US delegation walked out of a UN Security Council meeting on Monday, in protest at comments made by France that compared Washington's voting on human rights to that of authoritarian states. The diplomatic row was initially sparked last week, when the US joined North Korea and Russia in voting against extending Volker Turk's term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. After the vote on Friday, France's UN mission criticised the US and compared it to North Korea and Russia. "The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore," it posted on X. In response, US...

Iran is a theology. It is no longer a country. Not in the way diplomats mean the word. Not in the bureaucratic sense that produces signatures, ministries, chains of command, and solemn communiques printed on heavy paper before disappearing into filing cabinets. What remains of Iran is something stranger: a prayer house where the faithful still answer a call no one can command. MAGA still behaves as though there’s a political switchboard secreted in Tehran, even after six destructive months of war. They imagine some paneled room where a weary official picks up the telephone, listens gravely, and relays instructions...

The Left’s socialist revolt did not come from nowhere—it was the inevitable offspring of years of Democratic radicalization, now turning against the party that created it. Who Caused Unaffordability? Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism. Yet annual inflation during Biden’s four years averaged almost 5 percent. It peaked at over 9 percent, while prices for some key staples rose by 30 percent over his tenure—all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9 percent. In his second term, it averaged 2.6 percent in 2025—and may rise to 4.5 percent in...

No primary—especially a Senate primary—should go on this long. But Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, having dragged on for months, has turned into an interminably vicious grudge fest—one that’s not likely to subside until voters finally go to the polls on August 4 and choose between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed.But the Michigan primary is also so bitter for the same reason that it has been so interesting. Of all of the 2026 races, this is the one that best captures the current fissures in the Democratic Party—and which seems to best predict where the fault lines of the 2028 presidential...

Sen. Ed Markey’s campaign released an ad this week meant to tout his progressive support. Instead, the ad — which featured quick cuts of his top endorsers, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), along with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) — only highlighted the progressive left’s gerontocracy problem that has dogged the Markey campaign for months. Markey is 80 and, after 53 years in elected office, is running for reelection to another six-year term, while Sanders, 84, and Warren, 77, are currently serving terms through 2030. The Democratic gerontocracy issue is well documented. There was Joe Biden’s forced departure...

For decades, the federal government has funneled big-ticket grants to local communities to help them take on ambitious construction projects to expand public transit. The grants, sometimes in the billions of dollars, have funded new railroad tracks, train stations and roads rebuilt for modern bus service. Today, they’re funding extensions of the Second Avenue Subway in New York and the Red Line in Chicago, as well as the Gateway Tunnel under the Hudson River and bus infrastructure in Indianapolis and San Antonio.But since President Trump returned to office, the Federal Transit Administration has not signed a single new agreement under...