Free Republic

Top Republicans on Monday seized on House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ endorsement of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York, casting the self-described democratic socialist as the new face of the Democratic Party ahead of next year’s midterm elections. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called Jeffries’ endorsement a “seismic shift in politics.” “We saw our clearest sign yet that this radical insurgent movement in the Democrat Party is succeeding, and they are ending what has always been known as the Democrat Party in America,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol. “After a monthslong pressure campaign from the far left, House...

State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Monday that he anticipates the Trump administration, which last week announced plans to use federal election monitors in California, will use false reports of voting irregularities to challenge the results of the Nov. 4 special election.Bonta, California's top law enforcement officer, said on a call with reporters that he is “100%” concerned about false accusations of wrongdoing at the polling places. Bonta said it would be "naive" to assume Trump would accept the results of the Nov. 4 election given his history of lying about election outcomes, including his loss to President Biden in...

When I found Darshan Smaaladen earlier this month, she had joined several hundred of her neighbors at a “No Kings” demonstration in Orange County, California. Not that she was there to protest. “Rallies are great,” Smaaladen told me, “but they don’t get people out to vote.”A year ago, Smaaladen had helped lead a successful campaign to recall two ultraconservative members of Orange County’s school board. Now the 52-year-old mother of three was using the “No Kings” protest as a campaigning ground for Proposition 50, the ballot measure orchestrated by Governor Gavin Newsom that would redraw California’s district map to add...

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson argued that the phrase “illegal alien” strips away the humanity of the person in question. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a scathing rebuke of dehumanizing language at a news conference Friday after a question he was asked about the city’s spending on “illegal aliens.” Though Johnson was less than sincere when he suggested that “illegal aliens” are something you’d expect to find in a work of science fiction, he was correct to argue that such phrasing erases the humanity of the people in question.“We don’t have illegal aliens,” he said, before making the science-fiction remark. “The...

Acrowd of thousands gathered in downtown Washington, D.C., Saturday as part of the nationwide anti-Trump 'No Kings' rallies with a long list of White House actions they were protesting against: mass deportations of undocumented immigrants; National Guard deployments in Democratic-controlled cities ostensibly to combat crime; the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies, which is the main cause of the ongoing government shutdown. But Saturday’s event also was an opportunity for dozens of participating federal employees, many of whom have lost their jobs and seen their years of experience be discarded, to come together. “Connecting in person with...

A blind man protesting in front of a South Portland ICE facility was brutally detained by federal agents who allegedly dropped him on his head as they hauled him away. Quinn Haberl wore a neon vest as he sat on the side of the building's driveway during a protest on Saturday. While he was right beside a thick blue line painted on the ground to indicate where federal property begins, suggesting he had not passed the boundary. Gut-wrenching footage from the incident showed officers swarming Haberl - who was seated on the ground, holding his walking stick. Agents grabbed each...

A president steeped in constitutional lore might have been offended by claims he’s acting as a king. But Donald Trump and his entourage responded with mockery to weekend “No Kings” protests by millions of Americans — embracing the narrative in a way that explains his growing hubris and belief that he has unchecked power. The president and Vice President JD Vance this weekend both posted AI memes to social media depicting Trump in a crown. The one Trump shared was a mocked-up vision of the president flying a fighter jet emblazoned with “KING TRUMP” appearing to dump raw sewage on...

Unicorns are supposed to be rare and mythical. But at Saturday’s No Kings protests I saw the largest outbreak in America outside a Lisa Frank store. They were everywhere, but I was surprised to see almost a dozen of them down in New Braunfels, Texas. As at many of the No Kings protests across the country, attendees embraced the example set by the taunting frog outside Portland’s ICE facility and came in outfits that you could find threatening in only the most silly and specific of contexts: Cookie Monster was there.But you don’t pass up a chance to meet a...

MILWAUKEE, WI — A Wisconsin activist who began protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s says today's political tensions remind her of the anger and frustration she witnessed during that turbulent era. Connie Hughes, who has participated in demonstrations for more than five decades, recalls her first protest at the University of Wisconsin with about 100 people expressing outrage over young Americans being sent to war. "There were probably about 100 people, as I recall, and a lot of anger, because, of course, the people that were going to the war were our age, and they were being killed," Hughes...

If their plan is just to rely on Trump’s overreach, then they’ll be repeating Biden’s mistakes.Voters certainly seem to be going south on President Donald Trump’s war on non-White immigrants. In a New York Times poll conducted in late September, a slim majority of registered voters said the president had gone too far in aggressively trying to ferret out and deport non-Americans — and that was before federal agents started using tear gas and pepper spray on the streets of Chicago.It’s a rare glimpse of bluer skies for Democrats since last year’s presidential election. But if their plan on immigration...

A 30-year-old Texas businessman and owner of Boundaries Coffee in suburban Dallas, Daniel Keene, faced severe backlash after posting a video on X in early September showing a local Ganesh Chaturthi procession. In the now-deleted post, he criticised Indian immigrants and called for ending H-1B visas, stating, "We have to cancel the H-1Bs. I want my kids to grow up in America. Not India." The post went viral, leading to his expulsion from his church and gym, significant business losses, and alleged extortion threats. Despite the controversy, Keene remains unapologetic, claiming his intent was to highlight the policy's real-world impact....

A viral Instagram video shows a pro-Trump supporter using racial slurs to harass a woman during a dispute over a parking spot. The user Madinah recorded the entire incident on her phone while she remained her calm self, dealing with the white man. Wearing a MAGA cap, the man continued to threaten her, turning the encounter into a frightening ordeal. With the video going viral, many people have commented, deeply condemning the situation and, in turn, raising a broader question about what the accepted norms actually are in Trump’s second presidential run. The video starts with Madinah Muhammad, a graduate...

WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance indicated in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday that President Donald Trump was not opposed to invoking the Insurrection Act. Asked by moderator Kristen Welker whether the White House was seriously considering invoking the 1807 statute, Vance said, “The president is looking at all his options.”

Since immigration-enforcement agents began their descent on Chicago, acting with seemingly unprecedented speed and ferocity, Evelyn Vargas and her colleagues at Organized Communities Against Deportation have been in a frenzy. They help run an emergency hotline that refers people who have been detained to immigration lawyers and directs their families to support services such as food pantries, emergency housing, and mental-health care. (On a single day last week, it took 800 calls.) And they oversee a team of 35 “rapid responders” who have been sprinting across the city to film arrests, aiming for at least two to arrive on the...

Top brass at the Department of Homeland Security approached the Federal Emergency Management Agency this spring with a proposal: What if the agency blocked millions of dollars in security grants awarded to Muslim organizations around the country? The suggestion of a blanket ban left the FEMA leaders bewildered and deeply concerned, and they immediately pointed out such a proposal could be considered discriminatory and even illegal, according to three sources with knowledge of the episode who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal. While the DHS officials didn’t give a reason for disqualifying Muslim groups when they...

Former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather weighed in on David Ellison’s hire of Bari Weiss as editor in chief at CBS News, warning that it portends a culture of fear in the news division as staffers worry about their jobs. On his Substack, Steady, Rather put Weiss’ hire in the context of the Skydance-Paramount merger, noting that the companies bowed to pressure from the Trump administration in order to get the transaction approved by the FCC. “That deal and the hiring of Weiss signals to everyone, especially to the man in the Oval Office, that CBS is no longer...

Over the past six months, Greene has made waves in Washington for publicly breaking with Trump and the GOP on a number of high-profile issues and lobbing some pointed attacks at her fellow Republicans in the process. She was critical of the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran, referred to the situation in Gaza as a “genocide,” signed her name to an effort to force a House vote to require the Justice Department to release its files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case and, most recently, sided with Democrats in calling for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies amid the...

MAGA commentators are stepping up as soldiers in Trump’s culture war to provoke confrontations against “Antifa” with the backing of DHS.TWO WEEKS AGO, THE X ACCOUNT for the Department of Homeland Security was being, all things considered, relatively normal.There was a repost of a video about law enforcement at the Charlie Kirk memorial, a video on how the Secret Service had dismantled a digital network that could have carried out attacks near the United Nations General Assembly, a video of part of Trump’s tone-deaf, chest-beating speech at the U.N., and posts and news updates on the Dallas ICE field office...

Members of the Antifa movement have physically assaulted and beaten conservatives for nearly a decade, but apparently, it’s wrong to be angry about it. CNN anchor Erin Burnett stepped in it when she tried to downplay Antifa’s long history of violence on Wednesday. Burnett played a clip of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying, “This network of Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA, as ICIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous.” “That's pretty incredible, right?” Burnett quipped. “Hamas has just been engaged in a two-year war that we just announced...

President Trump has unleashed new weaponry in his war against Democrats, liberals and the left. Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition. Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten...