Free Republic

The Alvin Bragg case has gotten grander at trial, but also more ridiculous. The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so. Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the election. He, thus, joins all the other progressives who have denied the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, although he finds the culprit not in Russia (at least not in this case) but in the shady maneuverings...

GLENN BECK* ANDREW C. MCCARTHY* EDWIN MEESE III* KATIE PAVLICH* THOMAS SOWELL* CAL THOMAS When conservatives desperately needed allies in the fight against big government, Donald Trump didn’t stand on the sidelines. He consistently advocated that your money be spent, that your government grow, and that your Constitution be ignored.

The euthanasia movement is continually looking for new ways to allow people to be made dead. One of the cruelest is known as VSED (voluntary stop eating and drinking). The idea is for doctors to help people commit suicide by self-starvation and dehydration by palliating the agony such a slow death would otherwise entail. Activists are also trying to pass laws that would allow people to prepare a written directive (VSED by Advance Directive) ordering themselves starved and dehydrated should they become incapacitated by dementia or other cognitive disability. This is even if they willingly eat or ask for food...

A new survey from CBS News finds that 48 percent of Democrats feel like they’ve heard “not much” or “nothing at all” about what Kamala Harris has done as vice president, and 48 percent of independents say her work in that role has made them think worse of the Biden administration. Joe Biden can’t pass the torch to a vice president seen as a sure loser in 2024. In 2024, the Democrats will have, “the same guy with the same team around him, but older.” Back in 2019, Biden himself reportedly signaled to aides that he would serve only a...

John Davidson asks at the Federalist, “Does DeSantis Know What Time It Is? Didn’t Sound Like It In That NBC Interview.” Responding to DeSantis’s assertion that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was in large part responsible for allowing Covid-driven rules changes that helped Democrats collect a lot of mail-in votes, this is Davidson’s thesis: "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020. . . . No issue is more important for DeSantis (and the entire GOP...

It was a bad week for anyone who thought China would cooperate on emissions reduction. President Xi Jinping reiterated that his country would set its own path on the issue and not be influenced by outside factors, according to the Washington Post and Bloomberg. This contradicts Xi’s 2015 Paris Agreement pledges to reduce its carbon emissions at the latest after 2030. Xi’s remarks came while climate envoy and former secretary of state John Kerry was visiting Beijing to reopen a dialogue. This was shortly after Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived, and just before former secretary of state Henry Kissinger,...

People in their right minds who care about the country could never defend the factual details of Donald Trump’s conduct, as alleged in the federal indictment unsealed last week. No one is going to say, “It makes total sense to me that he was storing the crown jewels of national defense — such as how other countries could go about attacking American military vulnerabilities — next to the toilet at a beach club.” No one is going to say, “I can certainly see why Trump would refuse to return such top-secret intelligence to government officials, who pleaded with him for...

Elections are supposed to be about the future, but Donald Trump is stuck in the past. He is dead set on running for president in 2024 by campaigning on the very worst part of his record. In his much-hyped return to the mainstream media, a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump doubled down on his claims that millions of fraudulent votes were the cause of his defeat in 2020. He said he had no regrets about his behavior before and during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and that he does not owe Mike Pence an apology for...

… Lewandowski has talked with American Exceptionalism PAC, an outside group that has been set up to bolster the candidacy of Ramaswamy, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The longtime GOP operative, who for a time led Trump’s 2016 campaign and has remained an ally of the ex-president, approached Trump within the last several weeks to tell him about the prospect of him joining the organization. Trump did not raise any objections, according to those people familiar with the talks. Lewandowski was previously at the head of a pro-Trump Super PAC until allegations of sexual misconduct toward a...

he decision to fire Tucker Carlson from his ratings juggernaut show on Fox News reportedly came straight from Rupert Murdoch. The exact factors which contributed to the anchor’s exit have not been officially confirmed by Fox, but sources have told various outlets that there were several factors involved in the decision. Persons familiar with the situation told the Los Angeles Times that Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman, was concerned about Carlson’s coverage of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in which Carlson downplayed events as “mostly peaceful chaos” and promoted the notion that it was provoked by...

Perhaps the most moderate candidate in the field as of this moment is Donald Trump. If you want a Republican who won’t cut spending or start foreign wars, Trump is still your man. Added to this now is clearly a discomfort with the fight over abortion in the post-Roe environment. Trump’s main line of attack against Ron DeSantis is from the left. He’s hitting the Florida governor hard for his past support for reining in Social Security and Medicare. He’s also called the governor’s culture-war clash with Disney “so unnecessary” and “a political stunt,” while not entering the fray in...

A new poll conducted for the Wall Street Journal by the polling firm run by Tony Fabrizio, the pollster for Donald Trump, finds Ron DeSantis leading Joe Biden by three points but Trump trailing Biden by three points: 🇺🇲 2024 Presidential Election Poll (D) Biden: 48% (+3) (R) Trump: 45% . (R) DeSantis: 48% (+3) (D) Biden: 45% Wall Street Journal | Apr 11-17 | 1,740 RV — InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) April 21, 2023 The good news for Trump is that the same poll finds Trump regaining his lead over DeSantis in a head-to-head GOP primary matchup. After the midterm elections,...

A new class of voter is waiting to shake up our politics. In 2016, we learned about the crucial importance of “Obama-Trump” voters. Some estimates held that up to 13 percent of Trump’s voters in 2016 had voted for Obama in a previous election. This reflects the moodiness of swing voters, the changing composition of the two parties, and the continuities between the two very different men. Notably, Obama and Trump both ran their campaigns as critics of NAFTA. Hillary Clinton lost about one out of every four Obama voters who were white men with only high-school education. Some analysts...

As the Republican base fragments and Christian conservatives consider a “fast” from politics, the polling data point to a mid-term Republican thumping. Less than two weeks from now, Republicans will begin their post-mortem soul searching. And as the corpses of their House and Senate majorities grow cold, so should Karl Rove’s 2006 campaign strategy.

A transgender-identifying male secured first place at an amateur female cycling event in New York City over the weekend. Tiffany Thomas stood atop the winner’s podium at the Randall’s Island Crit, a New York City-based race, next to two women who scored second and third place, according to a social media post from NYC Cycling News. Thomas is affiliated with the L.A.-based women’s cycling group L.A. Sweat. “Tiffany is a scientist by day, athlete by night,” Thomas’s bio on the L.A. Sweat website, first reported by ABC7 News, reads. “She has never met a barbell, a bike, or a dog...

A 200-pound Ontario middle schooler was getting ready to pummel his classmate when a group of teachers escorted him to an office where they hoped to calm him down — instead, he proceeded to ram into the two adults, a man and a woman, for the better part of an hour, leaving them shaken and bruised. He never faced any consequences. “You should have seen their bruises. The guy’s back is totally messed up. The girl still has arm issues,” Margaret, a teacher with over a decade of experience in Ontario’s public schools, told National Review. Worried about the potential...

We are only 20 months away from the next Presidential election, and at this stage, the Republican party should be starting to whittle down its field of contenders. Yet here we are with most of the people expected to run still sitting it out, silent. It’s true that Nikki Haley has started her campaign, as have a few outriders like Vivek Ramaswamy, to whom I wish much luck. But the serving or former officials who should have started their campaigns by now are still sitting it out. Leaving the ground open for Trump to do stunts like his Ohio trip...

Although Raytheon is producing 400 Javelins per month with Lockheed Martin as a manufacturing partner, he said, the ongoing fighting in Ukraine has burned through existing weapons stocks.“The problem is we have consumed so much supply in the first ten months of the war,” he said. “We’ve essentially used up 13 years’ worth of Stinger production and five years’ worth of Javelin production.”

On the 112th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, we commemorate his many monumental accomplishments as the greatest president of the past century. But it is also a good occasion for correcting the record regarding the persistent, never-ending efforts to obscure those accomplishments with misleading smears. One attack on Reagan that has grown in the telling over the years is the claim that he invented a wartime story about having been present at the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The problem: The actual evidence of Reagan saying this is vague, thirdhand, and contradicted on the record by people who were...

A newly restored documentary spotlights her despicable Team Communism cheerleading. Back around the time Jane Fonda was giving aid and comfort to America’s Communist enemies in North Vietnam, yukking it up with anti-aircraft gunners who shot down our troops — I wonder if there are any laws against that sort of thing — she also headlined an anti-U.S.O. tour. Despising the actual U.S.O. for its policy of giving aid and comfort to American troops, Fonda went on the road with a hippie rebuttal to bolster the chances of the North Vietnamese Stalinists who, after the war turned out the way...