Free Republic

The right has its own unwritten rules of political correctness. There are forbidden words, and while they might not be met with censorship, they do elicit eye rolls. One proscribed term is “misogyny.” It also happens to be the most accurate description of the right’s mood and trajectory these days. The right’s response to this trend has been to downplay it, or even deny that it is happening at all. But ignoring it will not make it go away. Political discourse often operates like a ratchet: the intensity around a given topic is constantly turned up, but the mechanism is...

Lawfare is the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate, distract, defame, or destroy an opponent. Over the past decade, the Left has built a powerful, well-funded network that is carrying out Lawfare against our advocate class. The Left raised at least $183 million last year. To examine lawfare, we must consider the current context, which is this: we are at war, a cold civil war, against a domestic regime which wants to overthrow America. It is correct to call it a “war,” and not just an unusually wide divide, because the contest is between two moral orders. From a...

Republican candidates lost out on an estimated $117 million in donations during two periods last year in which fundraising emails were being aggressively labeled spam by Google’s Gmail, Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo, according to a bombshell study. The first period identified by researchers ran from June 30th, 2025, when GOP consulting firm Targeted Victory first alerted Google that WinRed fundraising emails were being labeled as spam, through Sept. 15 of last year, when Google stopped using a popular spam “blacklist” that was improperly flagging emails, as The Post exclusively reported. The problem wasn’t just limited to Gmail, the study revealed....

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is urging “a resolution” to the Iran war, sending the strongest signal to date that Republicans on Capitol Hill are feeling the political sting of the long-drawn conflict heading into the midterm elections. “It’s been a priority and an objective of every administration, for 50 years nearly, to ensure that Iran didn’t have a nuclear capability. Now that’s done. Operation Epic Fury was an epic success. … The world is safer because of it,” Johnson said in an interview with a local TV station. “But now we’ve got to bring that to a resolution.” Johnson did...

🔵 GA: Ossoff +7 (LINK) 🔵 NC: Cooper +6 (LINK) 🔵 OH: Brown +4 (LINK) 🔵 MI: El-Sayed +2 (LINK) 🔵 TX: Talarico +1 (LINK)

CONCORD, N.H. - President Bush (news - web sites)'s New England campaign chairman stepped down Friday after the Democrats accused him of taking part in the jamming of their telephone lines on Election Day 2002. "The Democrats' allegations against me are without merit," James Tobin said in the statement. "But to avoid any harm to the campaign from their underhanded tactics, I elected earlier this week to step down from my voluntary position with the campaign." Get-out-the-vote phones run by Democrats and the nonpartisan Manchester firefighters union were jammed on Election Day two years ago by more than 800 computer-generated...

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., returned to the Capitol on Monday after a three-month absence following a fall that left him hospitalized and out of public view for 92 days. McConnell said he has assured Senate Majority Leader John Thune that he will “do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me.” “Today, I’ll cast my first Senate vote since I took a bad fall back in June,” McConnell said in a statement. “I’m really looking forward to being back on the Senate floor and seeing my colleagues.” The appearance is the first time the 84-year-old...

House Republicans propelled President Donald Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax breaks and spending cuts bill to final congressional passage Thursday, overcoming multiple setbacks to approve his signature second-term policy package before a Fourth of July deadline. The tight roll call, 218-214, came at a potentially high political cost, with two Republicans joining all Democrats opposed. GOP leaders worked overnight and the president himself leaned on a handful of skeptics to drop their opposition and send the bill to him to sign into law. Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York delayed voting by holding the floor for more than eight hours...

The “big, beautiful bill” is heading to President Trump’s desk. House Republicans on Thursday morning passed the core of Trump’s domestic policy agenda — including sweeping tax cuts, a crackdown on immigration, a boost in energy production and huge cuts in Medicaid — overcoming months of bitter infighting on Capitol Hill to deliver what could be the defining legislation of Trump’s second term. The 218-214 vote came together after more than a year of intense planning by GOP lawmakers, weeks of scrambling to reconcile the conflicting visions among House and Senate Republicans, and days of last-minute lobbying to cajole holdouts...

It’s finally passed and heading for President Trump's desk for signature. The recissions package has made it over the finish line in a 216-213 vote in the House. It had to be bounced back from the Senate, which passed it on a 51-48 vote, as the upper chamber had made slight adjustments to it during the vote-a-rama process. The GOP has slim majorities in Congress, but they’re getting the Trump agenda through. 216-213:House approved the Trump WH's 1st round of DOGE spending cuts, $9B in foreign aid & public broadcasting from previously approved funding by Congress. Republicans Fitzpatrick (PA) &...

The Senate voted to proceed on President Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill in a rare drama-packed Saturday night vote. They key procedural vote on the motion to proceed is a significant victory for the President and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and clears the path for amendment votes to begin, likely late Monday night. The bill contains many of Trump’s key campaign promises and addresses immigration and border security, energy, national security and defense, and taxes – notably extending the bulk of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and instituting no tax on tips and overtime. The vote was 51 to...

The Indiana Supreme Court has declared incumbent Senator Spencer Deery the winner of his primary race against Trump-backed Paula Copenhaver. When reached for comment, Deery said the court’s decision made him proud. “This was a lot bigger than me,” he said. “It says that Indiana is a place where if you do everything right as a voter: you vote, you check all the boxes, you show your ID, you register, your vote should count.” Paula Copenhaver did not respond to WFYI’s request for comment. The decision ends a months-long legal battle over who is the rightful winner in Indiana’s 23rd...

Right on cue, Democrats are in full meltdown mode after Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) made a video that was shown at Republican National Committee's midterm convention Wednesday night. As RedState's Sister Toldjah reported, Fetterman made a video introduction for his Keystone State colleague, Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), before McCormick addressed the crowd in Dallas.Said Fetterman in the video:Yes, I’m Senator John Fetterman [from] Pennsylvania. Yes, I am a Democrat.Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I’m a common sense Democrat. I’m always going to stand with America, I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism, and...

When Georgia Republican Rep. Mike Collins announced his candidacy for Senate last year, his official “war room” account on X posted a short campaign video that ended with the on-screen slogan: “Georiga, Let’s Ride.” From that widely mocked spelling mistake on day one to a House ethics probe to revelations that his son-in-law made white nationalist posts on social media, Collins has suffered a series of setbacks that have hobbled his campaign. Meanwhile, incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has developed a national profile by blasting President Trump and surged in state polls. The latest polls show Ossoff, 39 years old,...

James McMaster, 94 years old, lost about $1.3 million in the collapse of First Liberty Building & Loan, the Georgia investment firm built by a family of Republican power brokers. He recently got a call to contribute to a GOP campaign. “I said, ‘OK, let me tell you. Here’s where I’m at,’” McMaster said. “‘When you get all the politicians that have received funds from them and get them to return them, then maybe we can talk.’” The saga of First Liberty and the Frost family that ran it—and were long among the Georgia GOP’s most influential names—haunts the midterms....

Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D) has hired a top staffer from the office of the Senate Republican he hopes to replace, a move political commentators viewed as strategically savvy to help him win over independent and crossover GOP voters. The incumbent Republican, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), lost a viciously contentious primary to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who scored President Donald Trump's endorsement but is widely viewed as a weaker candidate in the general election due to a series of scandals, lawsuits, a messy and contentious divorce, and other controversies. Talarico, the Democratic nominee, has had a slight lead...

DONALD TRUMP was jubilant. “Great news for the Republican Party”, he wrote on Truth Social on August 5th, one day after the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed, a leftist insurgent and former public-health official, had just eked out a one-percentage-point win over Haley Stevens, a congresswoman backed by most of her party’s establishment. Archived link

National Republicans are rallying around a complete political unknown who stunned the party by winning a Michigan congressional primary over President Trump’s hand-picked candidate. Thomas Smith, a retired GM engineer who sells salsa that retails at Flint farmer’s markets, spent virtually nothing yet convincingly beat Trump-backed Amir Hassan — a US Navy vet and former federal law enforcement officer who raised $727,000. “He’s just as shocked as everyone was on election night,” a Smith campaign consultant told The Post. “He understands that this was not expected, but he also understands that people have spoken.” Smith won 50.4% of the vote...

The most interesting race in California may be Gloria Romero’s run for the oft-ignored position of Lieutenant Governor. What makes this race different is that Romero is a different kind of Republican whose background constitutes a vigorous challenge to the standard-brand Democrat, Treasurer Fiona Ma. Romero is a 71-year-old Republican — but also a former Democratic State Senate majority leader and onetime leftist firebrand. Republican National Committeeman Shawn Steel calls her nomination “the most important development for the California GOP in a generation.”

Non-college voters, the base of the MAGA movement, are abandoning the GOP. MAGA's net favorability is -22 pts (down 28 pts) with them. Trump's now at -19 pt net approval with them. Dems actually lead in the race for Congress with them. This is what blue waves are built on. ...