Free Republic

As stocks soared this week and oil prices dropped amid an apparent cooling of tensions between the United States and Iran, it may have left the impression that the energy shock that rattled the world would quickly fade, along with the risk of sending the global economy into recession.The optimism may have been short-lived. On Saturday, Iran’s military announced it would reimpose restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the critical waterway’s status into doubt.The uncertainty highlights that beneath that surface, a starkly different reality is unfolding. It is defined by disrupted supply lines and damaged infrastructure, sparking increased concern...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and first lady Rama Duwaji have been invited to the Met Gala — but won’t be attending, sources tell Page Six. New York City’s mayor is traditionally invited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the lavish event every year, but we’re told that Mamdani, 34, won’t be joining Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour and her coterie of celeb guests on Monday, May 4. “He’s not coming,” said a source. “And it would be foolish if he did … can you imagine? It goes against everything he believes in.” Indeed, the event is being financially subsidized by Amazon...

Apr 8, 2026 @shadihamid · Follow My new @washingtonpost column: Why do Muslims need to be like everyone else? A case against assimilation. DataRepublican (small r)@DataRepublican · Follow Hello Mr. Hasim,You've already reached levels of institutional validation that remain inaccessible to nearly all Americans: a professorship at Georgetown, a position on the Washington Post's editorial board.At that point, saying you still need to prove yourself is like Taylor Swift insisting no one listens to her music. If assimilation feels out of reach, it isn’t because the system has excluded you. By any reasonable measure, it has already brought you into...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have both reportedly invested in Synchron, a new brain-computer interface startup that aims to compete with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink. On Thursday, Synchron announced that it had completed a funding round of $75 million, with Bezos Expeditions contributing a portion of the investment. The round was led by ARCH Venture Partners and included investment from Gates Frontier, the venture capital branch of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, as well as other investors. In addition, several previous investors, including Khosla Ventures and its founder, Vinod Khosla, who introduced Oxley to Gates, also...

For around 15 years, many American leaders — including all three presidents in that period — believed that the country was too deeply entangled in trying to reorder the societies of the Middle East. They felt the more pressing challenges included rebuilding America’s industrial base and confronting the rise of China. Yet here America is, once again, fighting a war to reorder a society in the greater Middle East. And like in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, this war seems unlikely to turn out quite as its proponents may hope. Why does this keep happening? To understand the present, look at...

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is ditching his longtime residence in Seattle for Florida, just as Washington Democrats are nearing the finish line on a proposed "millionaires tax." Schultz, who served as board director of the coffee chain until 2023, said in a statement on social media that he and his wife are moving to Miami as part of the "retirement phase" of their lives. Schultz, who has lived in Seattle for more than four decades, purchased a $44 million penthouse in Surfside, Fla., according to reports, and will relocate his private family office to Miami. Schultz, who owns roughly...

President Donald Trump has spent months touting his planned White House ballroom, but this week the public gets its first chance to formally offer him their thoughts. The verdict: They don’t like it. Members of the public sent more than 35,000 comments about the project to the National Capital Planning Commission ahead of its Thursday hearing to review the ballroom, according to a Washington Post analysis of comments posted on the commission’s website. The “vast majority” of comments came from those who oppose the plan, commission staff said. The Post found that more than 97 percent of comments were critical...

In the wake of Iranian Supreme Leader Aylatollah Khamenei coming down with a killer headache after getting a U.S. warhead on his forehead, on Saturday, The Washington Post published one of their infamous glowing remembrances of Islamic terrorists. The paper fondly remembered the brutal Islamic dictator as a “avuncular figure” with an “easy smile” and love for “Persian poetry.” Readers might remember when The Post fluffed up the former leader of ISIS as an “austere religious scholar”; well, they're back at it again with Khamenei in their obituary titled: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86.” The...

[snip] I just had to pull my video that I made last night about the leaks being solved. No more hydrogen leaks with Artemis and the launch being no earlier than March 6th. I literally just woke up and the information is now completely changed and it's not good. Jared Isaacman shared on X that after overnight data showed an interruption in helium flow in the SLS interim cryogenic propulsion stage, teams are troubleshooting and preparing for a likely roll back of Artemis 2 to the vehicle assembly building at NASA Kennedy. This will almost assuredly impact the March launch...

Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but grief. No election victories, no sway in Washington, just the hatred of the journalists he subsidizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Media power in the 21st century is about platforms, not publications. Bezos shouldn’t have needed Musk to teach...

Ellie in Space interviews Christian Davenport, author of Rocket Dreams. Moon vs Mars, SpaceX IPO & The China Question w/ Christian Davenport | 45:11 Ellie in Space | 217K subscribers | 4,809 views | February 16, 2026

It is not momentous events that are the most meme-worthy. Rather, it is moments when liberals show their true colors and embarrass themselves, often in relatively trivial ways, that set meme-creators to work. This week, along with the ongoing fiasco in Minnesota, we had severel such events. The Washington Post, hemorrhaging losses, laid off a large portion of its staff, causing its newly-unemployed reporters to demonstrate outside the building. They marched in defense of the moral principle that Jeff Bezos is obliged to support them forever, no matter how much money they lose. I wonder whether some of the newly-laid-off...

The Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Will Lewis announced Saturday evening he would depart after just two years at the paper, a tenure marked by controversy and crisis.Lewis called his time "two years of transformation" in his resignation note, but it was defined by turbulence rather than a clear path, and it ended with brutal job cuts. The paper's chief financial officer, Jeff D'Onofrio, will serve as acting CEO. More than a third of the newsroom was laid off Wednesday after Lewis' promises of radical innovations failed to staunch several years of annual losses in the tens of millions...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos didn’t really buy the Washington Post to keep democracy out of darkness or whatever, he bought it to build influence and decided that the Resistance branding was poison in the post-woke era of the second Trump administration. His staff doubled down. So he tried bringing in editors and people from conservative British papers and Washington Post staffers worked to sabotage them. The ongoing battle over the Washington Post between its actual owner, Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, who paid $250 million for it, and the staff, show that, at least when it...

Today, I am rejoicing about the Washington Post existential spasms. Here is what I said on Free Republic ("Post Mortem" was the title, over 20 years ago!) about the Washington Post and its relentless imbedded leftist bias. "The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine . . ." ========= "POST MORTEM" (transcript of letter to the WAPO editor; posted 10/29/04) On October 27, 2004 Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. penned an op-ed entitled, “A Strict Separation”. Therein Mr. Downie, the self-described “ultimate gatekeeper” (Post, “Live Online” 10/6/04) for everything printed in the newspaper, reassures readers...

A company backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos is set to build a large-scale nuclear fusion demonstration plant in Oxfordshire. Canada's General Fusion is one of the leading private firms aiming to turn the promise of fusion into a commercially viable energy source. The new facility will be built at Culham, home to the UK's national fusion research programme. It won't generate power, but will be 70% the size of a commercial reactor. General Fusion will enter into a long-term commercial lease with the UK Atomic Energy Authority following the construction of the facility at the Culham campus. While commercial details...

Sometimes leftist media outlets try to out-dumb themselves like it’s some sort of prestigious competition for who can churn out the most ignoramus hot take of the year. The Washington Post is definitely in the running for first place with its latest stupidity about inflation. Post reporter Julie Zauzmer Weil published a piece of propaganda with a headline that defied any modicum of common sense: “Why you may not want lower prices as much as you think you do.” Her sub-headline was just as bad: “Though Americans might be clamoring for relief on groceries, housing and energy costs, economists say...

President Donald Trump hosts Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for an opulent White House state dinner attended by global titans Elon Musk, Cristiano Ronaldo, Jeff Bezos, and leading CEOs. This star-studded "Royal Night" signals massive U.S.-Saudi investment deals, energy partnerships, and a bold diplomatic realignment reshaping Middle East power dynamics. For more details, watch our story and subscribe to our channel. Live coverage of the private White House dinner between U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the East Room at 0015 GMT (November 19, 2025), following greetings at 2340 GMT. The evening concludes...

It’s too good. It’s beyond comical. For the past week or so, liberal America has been apoplectic over President Trump’s new addition to the White House. He’s renovating the East Room so that a proper ballroom can be on the grounds, a venue that can accommodate at least 650 people. The president of the United States will forever have a place for official state dinners and other events—no more tents on the lawn. And yet, you’d think Trump ordered a slash-and-burn of the entire residence. Other presidents have done this—it’s not a big deal. The project is being funded by...

The White House announced plans to construct a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that will cost approximately $200 million. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said construction will begin in September. “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure. The United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications,” the White House said in a release. 🚨Just in: The White House has announced plans to construct a new 90,000 sq. ft. ballroom, with construction set to begin in September. The $200 million project will be fully...