Free Republic

Voters who backed Democratic former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 are far more enthusiastic about casting ballots this November than those who supported President Donald Trump, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found, in a potential warning sign for Republicans heading into the midterm elections. The six-day poll, completed Monday, also found that men were more enthusiastic about voting and more certain to cast ballots than women, and that male voters showed signs of shifting toward Democrats. That could signal erosion in Republican support among a demographic that was a pillar of Trump's 2024 victory. Some 48% of 2024 Harris voters said...

On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sparked outrage with a statement that opened with a brief nod to those killed in the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack but devoted most of its length to accusing Israel of genocide. The statement began, “This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others.” Then he turned to Israel-bashing: “The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s...

Hamas is generating as much as $5 million a day from goods entering Gaza while rebuilding tunnels, accumulating weapons, and planning possible attacks on Israeli troops, including attempts to kidnap soldiers, according to separate Israeli television reports this week citing security officials. Neomi Neumann, a former head of research at Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, told the Kan public broadcaster on Thursday that Hamas continues to exercise effective control over Gaza’s population through a decentralized system of taxation, aid distribution, and covert enforcement. Neumann, now an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, estimated that Hamas earns...

No one would claim that the Iran War has been a political godsend for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But some Israel-First conservatives are willing to say—and lately have been incessantly saying—that the Iran War hasn’t been a political scourge. Those Israel-First conservatives are wrong, even if the devil is, at least partly, hidden in the details. The Iran War has damaged Trump’s approval ratings, consumed his presidency, and darkened the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections. A chief proponent of the argument that Trump hasn’t suffered all that much from the Iran War is Ben Shapiro...

The U.S. average retail price of diesel was $5.97 per gallon the week of September 7, 2026, up $2.25 from its February average of $3.72, before the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz began. Crude oil accounts for 68 cents of that increase. The refining margin — the gap between the wholesale price of diesel and the cost of the crude it is made from — accounts for $1.71. The world is short of refined diesel rather than crude oil. Russia, once Europe’s largest diesel supplier, has nearly stopped exporting refined products after Ukrainian attacks on its refineries and a...

Women in Gaza are being traded for food and forced into marriages with their rapists, according to a pair of reports from the United Nations — underscoring the critical importance of President Trump’s Board of Peace in the war-torn enclave. There was a 123% increase in the number of early and forced marriage incidents across Gaza in the first quarter of 2026, with women between the ages of 18-59 suffering 68% of all gender-based violence (GBV) in the Palestinian enclave, the United Nations’ Population Fund (UNFPA) found. Researchers spoke to women who said young girls were married off to rapists,...

I want to set the tour drama aside for a moment, because underneath the chanting and the flags is a premise nobody in that crowd seems to have actually examined: free Palestine from what, exactly, to become what, exactly? There has never been a sovereign Palestinian state. Not once, not ever, not under any government, any constitution, any flag flying over internationally recognized borders. The land in question passed from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate to a 1947 partition plan the surrounding Arab nations rejected outright, choosing war instead. From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank sat under...

The German federal prosecutor’s office recently announced that it indicted seven people for allegedly securing weapons for the Hamas terrorist organization, with the goal of launching terrorist attacks on the second remembrance date of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. The indictment has catapulted the danger of Hamas’ network in Europe to Israeli, American and European installations and citizens into the spotlight. According to the prosecutor’s office, "All of the accused belong to the foreign terrorist organization Hamas. Some time ago, the organization’s military wing (the so-called Qassam Brigades) began establishing weapons depots in Europe. No later than July 2025,...

Crooner Ed Sheeran called Israel’s actions in Gaza “unjustifiable” as he wept and broke his silence during his first concert since booting rapper Macklemore from his tour for tirades against the Jewish state. “I’ve never wanted to be an activist musician, but this put me in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet,” Sheeran told the Philly crowd of concertgoers Saturday night. Sheeran spoke multiple times about the controversy during Saturday night’s show at Lincoln Financial Field, growing progressively more upset as the night wore on...

The New York Times came under fire Wednesday over a baffling passage that appeared in an article about an Israeli documentary — which said the Jewish state “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.” .....

Tucker Carlson backs Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race

Prices increases remained stubbornly high in August with little relief in sight for weary American consumers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that consumer prices rose by 0.4 percent in August month over month, leaving the annual CPI inflation rate at 3.4 percent, flat with the 3.4 percent figure in June. 'Apart from the hot core inflation, today’s data doesn’t even cover the most recent oil price spike above $100,' Nic Puckrin, markets expert and former Goldman Sachs analyst, told the Daily Mail. The August inflation numbers are the last impactful data report to come out before the Federal...

There's a danger in any anti-elite movement that, at some point, it goes beyond opposing elite arrogance and starts opposing knowledge itself. You can see a strain of this in the Chinese Communist Revolution where professors were routinely denounced and made to kowtow by their own students who had become Red Guard revolutionaries following Mao. Mao taught that only the "pure people" who worked with their hands were virtuous. Those who taught subjects in schools were considered to be corrupted by capitalism and therefore were enemies of the revolution. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge took this even farther, murdering anyone...

When Britain confirmed last September that it would recognize a Palestinian state, it was pulled in the wake of France, which had signaled a few months earlier that it planned to take the symbolically freighted step. On Tuesday, almost a year later, Britain was the one to seize the initiative. The British government announced, followed by France and Canada, that it would stop trading with Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It went so far as to accuse some settlers of engaging in the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. This diplomatic sequencing speaks partly to domestic politics in each country. Last...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was directly warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive just days before the militant group attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, according to an Israeli newspaper report. UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke with Netanyahu 10 days before the attack and said Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time, was planning an operation, the Haaretz daily said. Bin Zayed said it would lead to bloodshed and could destabilize the region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab and...

The Israeli government is running advertisements on a popular podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), raising questions about whether the staunchly pro-Israel lawmaker is indirectly receiving campaign funding from a foreign country. Radio and podcast giant iHeartMedia has syndicated Cruz’s show, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” since 2022. Because of lobbying-related restrictions, the company cannot legally pay the senator for ad revenue. But, it turns out, that’s not the only way to ensure the money benefits Cruz. Under an unusual licensing deal, iHeartMedia agreed to donate revenue “associated with (the show’s) advertising sales” to the Truth and Courage PAC, a...

Paramount clapped back at Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo and accused him of invoking “antisemitic tropes” in an unhinged rant where he raged against the company’s proposed Warner Bros merger. The media giant swiftly issued a lengthy statement on Friday after the Hulk-portrayer spouted off on social media, criticizing the intended $110 billion merger as “crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world.” “We are, as always, troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far, and...

The number of U.S. troops killed or wounded in the war with Iran has risen to 774 after the Pentagon added dozens of injured service members to its casualty count in recent days. The number listed as wounded climbed from 697 on Wednesday to 756 on Thursday, an increase of 59, according to the War Department's Defense Casualty Analysis System on Friday. The number of American military deaths remained at 18. The Pentagon did not immediately explain the sharp increase, including when or where the newly recorded injuries occurred. The War Department has divided the casualties into two categories following...

A Missouri judge has issued an arrest warrant for three-time presidential candidate Jill Stein after she skipped a scheduled Monday court appearance in connection with her alleged assault on a police officer at an April 2024 anti-Israel college protest. Stein — the Green Party nominee in 2012, 2016 and 2024 — had been charged with one count of first-degree trespassing and one count of fourth-degree assault following her apprehension during a chaotic demonstration at Washington University in St. Louis. Protesters, including the now-76-year-old, marched to the school’s Danforth Campus on April 27, 2024, and erected tents in the John M....

The West’s selective hatred of Israel says less about Israel than it does about the values—and prejudices—of those who condemn it. Hamas or Israeli Values?Israel dominates the daily news in this 2026 midterm election year—almost always in a boring, fatiguing, negative light. Tens of thousands of innocents may be slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, butchered, and tortured by the world’s dictators, yet an overwhelming and obsessive abhorrence is reserved for tiny, democratic Israel. Such perverse asymmetry is strange, since, at least privately, most Americans would concede that of the 18 Middle Eastern nations, only Israel is a genuine consensual democracy. As far...