Free Republic

Donald Trump’s Manhattan “hush money” trial has been the place for prominent Republicans to see and be seen in recent days — with some hoping the 45th president will remember their loyalty if he gets elected the 47th president this fall, sources tell The Post. On Tuesday, Trump was flanked by former 2024 primary rivals Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and a pair of Florida GOP congressmen, Byron Donalds and Cory Mills. Other boldface political names to swing by Manhattan Criminal Court include Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Tommy Tuberville...

Retired four-star Army General Barry McCaffrey said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “All In” that MAGA loyalists were acting similar to “the 1930s in Nazi Germany.” Monday on Truth Social, former President Donald Trump said the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley had committed “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” McCaffrey said, “This is worth being extremely concerned about. During the follow on to Trump’s lost election, he actually made moves, which I had said at the time, to run a coup against the government of the United...

Stubborn Trump supporters, especially the most fervent, seem unwilling to challenge the deedless covenant, ask the hard questions that if answered truthfully would confirm that Donald Trump has been a supreme letdown, and his failures -- including the re-election debacle -- self-inflicted. Promises made, promises kept? Not when it mattered. Drain the swamp? Spinning around in an airboat. Trump never cleaned up the FBI, instead hired the Dem sympathizer Christopher Wray as Director, and except for a few gratuitous tweets about his incompetence, left him in place. Gina Haspel, CIA chief, kept the job until the last day despite the...

MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd declared Thursday on “MTP Daily” that former President Donald Trump and “his loyalists,” who he claimed had “hijacked and radicalized a part” of the GOP, were attempting to undermine democracy. “If it’s Thursday, President Biden tries to lead a global effort to revive democracy,” he said. Can the U.S. be a beacon for democracy abroad unless he first confronts the efforts to undermine it right here at home? We’ve said it before, and we’re going to say it again, the biggest story in American politics is and will continue to be this homegrown effort to undermine...

Masked loyalists are seen after hijacking and setting a car on fire at the Cloughfern roundabout in Newtownabbey, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Saturday, April 3, 2021. Masked men threw petrol bombs and hijacked cars in the Loyalist area North of Belfast. Loyalists and unionists are angry about post-Brexit trading arrangements which they claim have created barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. (Peter Morrison/PA via AP) The disturbances followed unrest Friday and Saturday in unionist areas in and around Belfast and Londonderry, also known as Derry, that saw cars set on fire and projectiles and gasoline bombs hurled...

Britain officially leaves the EU tonight at 2300 GMT (6pm EST / 3pm PST). Live coverage from the UK's Sky News.

On the radio this past week, I mentioned Alan Jay Lerner, author of My Fair Lady, Camelot, Brigadoon, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, etc. And about twenty minutes after I came off-air I remembered a conversation I had with him decades back. The Pope was on tour somewhere (my estimate from the time period would be eastern Canada): he'd landed at the airport to be greeted by a shy moppet bearing a garland of flowers, and he'd kissed her head. And Alan showed me the headline above the picture in the newspaper: Thank Heaven for Little...

And as a path forward was finally plotted through the Megxit crisis, Her Majesty also seemed determined to move on from the disruption caused by Andrew with a public show of forgiveness. Although he cut a solemn figure as he marched into church, Andrew seemed pleased with his first 2020 appearance at the Queen's side and was pictured grinning as he was whisked away from the service.

Police in Belfast are investigating a photo posted to social media on Monday in which a group of masked men yielding baseball bats, axes and stakes stand before a wall of graffiti that threatens to crucify Catholics. “Taigs will be crucified,” the shocking message reads, using a derogatory term for Irish Catholics. The letters “VTOT” are written below, with a cross. They are believed to stand for “Village Team on Tour,” the name of a loyalist gang in South Belfast. The graffiti was discovered on Monday, when the photo was first shared on social media. It has been widely viewed...

A ship’s bell from a wreck found off St. Augustine has yielded another clue to the possible identify of the ship that may date from the American Revolution. The clue: a button found in the concretion still attached to the bronze bell that was discovered in 2010 by archaeologists with the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program. “It’s in rough shape,” Sam Turner, director of archaeology at the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum, said of the button. Even so, the top part of a crown can be seen on the button and similar crowns are found on Royal Provincial buttons plus the...

The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government and the monopolistic East India Company that controlled all the tea coming into the colonies. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and other political protests often refer to it.

Residents of Smithtown were proud patriots during the Revolutionary War. During the Revolutionary War, from 1776 to 1783, Smithtown was under British occupation. Residents suffered poverty, destruction and the loss of property and loved ones at the hands of British soldiers and loyalists. Smithtown historian Bradley Harris said one-third of Long Islanders were loyalists, one-third patriots and one-third neutral. Most loyalists were found in Nassau, and the majority of those who were neutral were Quakers. According to the historian, Suffolk County is where you found the majority of patriots. As for one’s alliance, Harris said, “Where you were on Long...

SANAA, YEMEN - Libyan warplanes and helicopters fired from the air and loyalist militias fatally shot protesters in the streets as the government of Moammar Gaddafi fought back viciously Monday against demonstrations that appear to be fast eroding the autocrat's four-decade-long hold on power. In Tripoli, the capital, residents reported seeing heavily armed mercenaries hunting down demonstrators as buildings burned, looters ransacked police stations, and fighter jets and helicopter gunships rained ammunition from the skies.

Imminent Ulster car bomb attack foiled by police (Filed: 19/04/2006) Police in Northern Ireland have seized 250lb of home-made explosives, foiling a potentially devastating car bomb attack. Local youths threw petrol bombs at police after the raid A senior policeman said those behind the plot - likely to be dissident republicans - planned to explode the device "as soon as possible". Four men were arrested during the raid on a breaker's yard in Lurgan, Co Armagh. A car was also taken away for forensic examination. Superintendent Alan Todd, Lurgan's police commander, said the police had no knowledge of a specific...

He is not a criminal, says Adams Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams yesterday stood by alleged former IRA chief Thomas "Slab" Murphy. The businessman, whose farm is at the centre of a police probe into a multi-million pound smuggling operation, has been wrongly demonised, he claimed. Mr Adams said: "Tom Murphy is not a criminal. He is a good republican." Murphy's sprawling estate, straddling the Irish border, was among 15 properties searched yesterday during police raids planned in Belfast and Dublin. Around £200,000 in cash, 30,000 cigarettes, 8,000 litres of fuel and weapons were all seized in the offensive against...

This spring, a forgotten battle will be remembered. It happened in Fort Lee 225 years ago, in the final years of the Revolutionary War. On one side: some 300 Bergen County militiamen, loyal to the rebel cause. On the other: 200 Americans still loyal to King George. Behind the clash was a desperate shortage of firewood in British-controlled New York City after the harsh winters of 1779 and 1780. What is today Bergen County offered a plentiful supply of wood, and Britain's Loyal Refugee Volunteers wanted it. The skirmishes between the two sides in May 1781 came to be known...

The Garda Commissioner, Noel Conroy, has said no link has been established between last night's pipe bomb attack and another bomb that exploded near in Coolock two days ago. The Garda Technical Bureau has spent the day examining the scene of last night's explosion in the driveway of a house. The device was placed under a car parked in the driveway of a house on Roseglen Avenue in Kilbarrack exploded. The spare wheel of the Renault Clio bore the brunt of the explosion, which seriously damaged the car and also blew in the front window on the ground floor of...

US PRESIDENT George Bush's special envoy to Ireland is to meet the family of a Dublin man who they say was murdered by republicans. Ambassador Mitchell Reiss said yesterday that there were a number of "serious concerns" about the killing in April last year of Joseph Rafferty and similarities with the death of Robert McCartney who was killed by the IRA. The 29-year-old was murdered after leaving his home near Clonsilla in west Dublin after what that family said was a long running row with republicans. He was shot twice by a gunman disguised as a construction worker as he...

IRA in link to £70m property empire Garda specialist units seize documents in series of raids By Tom Brady 01 February 2006 An IRA link to a massive £70m-plus property empire in the Republic is being investigated by several Garda specialist units. A series of raids on businesses, houses and the offices of professional advisers has been carried out in four counties in the past week. A huge dossier of documentation, seized in the searches which began a week ago and ended yesterday, will now be analysed to establish if any of the businesses were used to launder IRA monies....

The Independent Monitoring Commission is due to hand its latest report on paramilitary activity to the British and Irish Governments later today. Ahead of the public disclosure of the contents of the report on Wednesday, NIO Minister Shaun Woodward said that he had "absolute confidence" in the Commission. However, Sinn Fein Chief Negotiator Martin McGuinness said that he did not consider the IMC to be an independent body. The report is likely to reflect favourably on the lack of Republican paramilitary activity, but may also reflect the PSNI's expressed view that paramilitaries are involved in organised crime. Set up in...