Free Republic

Sometimes history is history, sometimes history is a harbinger and sometimes history is current events. The story of Roman Emperor Aurelian is all three… Aurelian took power in 270 AD. The previous 35 years had been nothing short of a disaster for the Empire on a variety of fronts. The trouble began with the (well deserved) assassination of Commodus in 192 AD. Always a force to be reckoned with, from that point forward the army required ever increasing bribes to remain loyal. Not surprisingly, the power of the army increased accordingly. At the same time, the treasury had been reducing...

(The Epoch Times)—President Joe Biden said in a July 24 speech from the Oval Office that he plans to call for Supreme Court reform in his final stretch as America’s commander-in-chief. President Biden made the remarks after explaining his decision not to seek reelection and laying out his plans for his final six months in office. “Over the next six months, I’ll be focused on doing my job as president,” he said, highlighting key goals such as boosting economic growth, lowering inflation, tightening gun control, and safeguarding the planet from what he described as a “climate crisis.” “And I’m going...

A legacy of the Nazis. Unrest in the Middle East and Far East is to a considersble extend a Nazi legacy. Part of the background to the present conflict in Palestine is Nazi intrigue among the Arabs. The British press recently reported the discovery by the British counter-intelligence of a Nazi underground system in the Middle East which was set. up during the war and operated by a group of prominent Arab collaborationists. In Athens the Nazis ran a "sabotage school" where Arabs, together with Germans, received training for "long-term" activities. Some of these, according to' the reports, were parachuted...

The F/A-XX program is intended to develop a carrier-based sixth-generation fighter that can conduct the same missions as the Super Hornet but that also enjoys supercruise, stealth characteristics and that can operate as the communications hub of a system of manned and unmanned systems. The F/A-XX is a conceptual cousin of the NGAD program, but the projects have been kept at arm’s length, probably because of concerns over a replay of the F-35 program. Although the F-35 program eventually produced variants for the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps, the pursuit of commonality resulted in much confusion and...

Credit: @StefWKight ============================================================================= The corporate media’s whitewashing of Kamala Harris’s dangerous record is kicking into overdrive as they try to desperately keep President Trump from winning a second term. Conservative social media users caught one outlet’s “reporter” in the act of doing precisely this and did not mince words. Axios published an article on Wednesday titled “Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign.” The outlet notes that Joe Biden asked Harris to help him with the immigration crisis, which has arguably become her most significant vulnerability as her presidential campaign gets underway. But Axios then runs cover for Harris and...

House Republicans are raising concerns about the potential for more political violence, in this case against Supreme Court justices, following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., point to the “recent incendiary rhetoric directed towards other federal officials, including in particular the men and women serving on our nation’s highest court.” Far-left activist groups and lawmakers have repeatedly threatened to restructure the court if the justices do not rule the way that these groups desire. And Justice Samuel Alito himself has said that the May 2022...

The world does not revolve around the American political calendar nor do rogues take a pause because White House aides and Democratic politicos wish a smooth coronation for Vice President Kamala Harris or whomever comes out of an open convention. If Democrats cannot provide a strong commander because Biden chose a vice president based on race and gender rather than ability, so be it. Virtue signaling has a cost. Harris, at least, is cogent. She can make decisions around the clock when a crisis emerges.

Right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk has posted a rumor that President Joe Biden had a medical emergency in Las Vegas last week and may be in hospice care. This claim contradicted the official account of the president's COVID-19 diagnosis, and has sparked widespread speculation, but what are the facts? Kirk, who has a history of promoting questionable theories, shared the rumor Monday on X, formerly Twitter. He wrote: "Got a weird lead on a story that people should look into. I got a call from a source close to Las Vegas Metro. The official story was that Joe Biden's trip was...

The Su-75 is a single-seater with a Saturn AL-51F-1 engine that can push out Mach 1.8 with a range of 1,900 miles. However, many specs are unknown because this fighter may still be in development stage and is only appearing at air shows as a mockup. The first flight won’t happen until at least 2025. It is a light tactical fighter with five internal weapons bays for various unguided and guided munitions, hopefully, some of Russia’s best air-to-air or air-to-ground missiles. Russia believes it could someday employ a “loyal wingman” concept consisting of a tethering to an unmanned fighter or...

The decision by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 to oust the radicals controlling the state’s tiny liberal-arts college, New College of Florida, has elicited frenzied reactions from the global Left. The effort by a democratically elected government to bring political balance, educational excellence, and fiscal sanity to a failed public institution of 800 students is seen as nothing less than a collegiate March on Rome. The reaction has rather proven the point: The leftist control of higher education has become so totalitarian that even the slightest hint of deviance is viewed as a mortal threat to the revolutionary project....

With the end of their convention, the Republican Party and Donald Trump have reached what in military theory is called the “culminating point.” “The culminating point of victory,” according to the Modern War Institute at West Point, “is the threshold when military advantages peak and then rapidly turn into disadvantages.” As an infantryman, I was taught that the culminating point is a paradox; it’s a moment of maximum vulnerability at a time when you believe you are at maximum strength. Let’s say your platoon has just taken a hill. Exhausted and jubilant, you’ve achieved your objective. Your troops have sent...

Donald Trump scored a significant court win Saturday as a state judge in Florida turned down attempts by the Pulitzer Prize Board to toss out a libel lawsuit Trump filed in 2022 relating to a series of reports in the New York Times and Washington Post on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. In a 14-page ruling issued Saturday, Senior Judge Robert Pegg turned down arguments from the prominent journalism awards panel that their decision to bestow the national reporting prize on the staffs of the two newspapers in 2018 amounted to a statement of “pure opinion” rather than...

Russia’s Su-57 Felon Next-generation Fighter Has Its Wings Clipped: It hasn’t been a good summer for the Russian Air Force, and now the Ukrainians are adding insult to injury. One of Russia’s most vaunted warbirds – the Sukhoi Su-57 Felon – was destroyed by a Ukrainian drone strike in June. The resilient and intrepid Ukrainians have raised the stakes in the war against Russia by using drones in deep attack mode. The destruction of the single-seat twin-engine Su-57 Felon must have created another headache for air force leaders in Moscow because it is one of the jewels in the Russian...

J.D. Vance’s rise to the vice-presidential nomination is a watershed moment in American politics. For young conservatives like myself, the moment feels like a triumph, the culmination of curiosity and organization. For the country, the moment offers the first uncompromising choice for change in a generation. The moment calls for a reflection on how we arrived here and the choice before us. Will middle America forge a new consensus, achieved with echoes of the Jacksonian age? Alternatively, will the great city-states of the Democratic Party stymie the tide of discontent and preserve the neoliberal status quo?

Spencer is Associate Director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. KEY TAKEAWAYS It’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. The policy book Mandate for Leadership represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success. The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for...

Joe Biden has been in Washington, D.C., for 52 years. Multiple generations have been born who have never known a time when Biden wasn't a figure in national politics. Multiple generations of Democrats have risen through the Senate in the time since he first went to Washington, D.C. All of that is to say that Joe Biden has not been a spring chicken since before the end of the Cold War. This is a man who, by any rational assessment of his past actions, campaigns, statements, and behaviors should never have been a contender for the presidency. The Democratic Party,...

On the Sunday evening after the attempted assassination of Trump, President Biden addressed the nation to say "we need to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember that while we may disagree, we are not enemies, we are neighbors, we are friends, coworkers, citizens, and most importantly we are fellow Americans. We need to cool down our political rhetoric." Ironically, only four days before the assassination attempt it was President Biden who told his supporters "it's time to put Trump in the bullseye." Biden admitted that "using the word bullseye was probably unwise." He said nothing about the...

How fares the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) project? The NGAD is designed to produce a new generation of fighter aircraft, replacing much of the Air Force’s legacy fleet and bringing a suite of new capabilities to the long-range strike mission. The NGAD was also supposed to revolutionize the defense industrial base (DIB) and change the way that the United States builds and buys fighter planes. But there are evidently some troubles. The Air Force seems to be backpedaling on its commitment to the NGAD, and the entire project appears to have left the DIB cold.

Upset that the Supreme Court's recent decision that a president has immunity for his official actions, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) has proposed legislation that "would declare that the actions taken by Trump on January 6, 2021 were unofficial and illegal. This will ensure that justice is done and eliminate the need for long and complicated court proceedings." Schumer explained that "a power that legislatures have invoked in the past was to specifically identify a person known to be a criminal as an outlaw. This meant that it would be legal for anyone to slay this outlaw. Every decent...

The Republican concern with China’s threat to America is understandable, arguably even laudable, as many of China’s economic, security, and human rights policies do, in fact, challenge America. When that laudable concern turns into a single-minded obsession, however, then it does more than a disservice to America. It becomes exactly that which it was supposed to deter: a threat to America’s security. Both former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, along with the Heritage Foundation and scores of conservative analysts, suffer from this obsession. If China were the only big country that matters in the...