Free Republic

Since he was sworn in four months ago after an airtight confirmation vote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to be at the center of controversy. We have seen Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app on an unsecure personal phone to discuss sensitive military operations, his firing of three senior aides, and a Pentagon chock-full of internal turmoil. ince he was sworn in four months ago after an airtight confirmation vote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to be at the center of controversy. We have seen Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app on an unsecure personal phone...

We have been frequent critics of Donald Trump’s tariffs, but we understand that there is a case to be made for reconsidering some of our trade policies. The place to make that case is Congress — not by unilateral presidential declaration of open-ended worldwide “emergencies.” The Founders rebelled against taxation without representation; they did not mean for the executive to control the duties on all imports by daily whim. It is Congress that was granted power by the Constitution to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” and for good reason. It...

William F. Buckley Jr.’s centenary arrives as free speech falters and truth-telling grows perilous—a reminder that every generation must fight anew for civilization’s soul. William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in February 2008, would have been 100 years old in November of this year. There are many tributes planned to celebrate his centenary. The huge, authorized biography by Sam Tanenhaus will be out in just a few weeks. I will not say anything about that book apart from noting that its subtitle—“The Life and the Revolution That Changed America”— is apt. For five or six years at the end of...

When Americans were experiencing inflation and shortages during the Biden presidency, there was an internet meme going around that juxtaposed a paltry egg with the iconic 2019 image of a grinning Donald Trump, welcoming the national championship–winning Clemson Tigers to the White House, spreading his arms to display a massive bounty of burgers piled in front of him. The underlying message behind that joke became a central part of the 2024 campaign: Under Trump, Americans had plenty; under Biden-Harris, they had less. Yet bizarrely, the man who for decades has been a symbol of unapologetic American excess is now defending...

New York Magazine’s Ben Terris saved the most important part of his extensive profile of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman for last: “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired,” he wrote in its concluding paragraphs. That is not the impression that a reader would have gathered from the worried former Fetterman staffers, jilted progressive activists, and anecdotes detailing the senator’s declining mental health that preceded this observation. The piece paints a portrait of a broken man, a shadow of his former self, plagued by depression and demented episodes. None of that was especially apparent to...

... In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Garcia to America from El Salvador so that his claims can be adjudicated. (He currently sits there under an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for the use of his notoriously brutal mega-prisons to house potential deportees.) This weekend the Trump administration refused, claiming, on stunningly disingenuous logic, that because Garcia had been dumped quickly into El Salvador he was now beyond American jurisdiction. (“He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”) Why not...

What a difference a year makes. A year ago, Michael Mann was riding high after winning his 12-year-old lawsuit against journalist and pundit Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg over comments sharply critical of Mann’s famed “hockey stick” graph. That graph purported to demonstrate a sharp rise in global temperature following industrialization, supposedly caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The offending comments were by Steyn in a National Review blog post and by Simberg in a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog post. Mann brought suit against all four, but in 2021 National Review and CEI won “summary judgment” (a peculiar term...

What’s a good analogy for Signal, the commercial, publicly available encryption app?Have you ever watched a public hearing of the Senate or House Intelligence Committee? It happens almost every time: A witness from one of our intelligence agencies is asked a question that, whether the interrogating lawmaker realizes it or not, calls for an answer that includes national defense information — in the main, classified intelligence.... So what happens next is a commonplace: The agency official will tell the panel that he or she cannot answer the question in public, but may be willing to address the matter in the...

Predictably enough, the Ukrainian government has objected to its exclusion from the peace talks Trump administration officials held with their Russian counterparts this week in Riyadh and, for its trouble, is getting slammed by what is supposed to be its ally, the United States. In breathtaking remarks to reporters, President Trump poured contempt on Ukraine for its frustration. “But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a...

Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 @julie_kelly2 Andrew McCarthy is out with his 3rd of 7 consecutive articles criticizing AG Bondi and her efforts to depoliticize the DOJ. In today's installment, McCarthy describes Bondi's "Weaponization Working Group" as "Orwellian." McCarthy blasts Bondi for naming names in her working group memo--Jack Smith and Leticia James specifically--and says that's not how law enforcement works. He even condemns Bondi for naming James in a civil suit brought against New York for refusing to enforce federal immigration law.

Local news outlets in Colorado Springs received a shocking email in late April of last year: A photo and video of a burning cross and a campaign sign of mayoral candidate Yemi Mobolade, a native of Nigeria, defaced with the N-word in red spray paint. “What has this city come to?!” read the email, signed only by “Citizens of Colorado Springs.” This, according to the email, was “another one of their tactics to keep Yemi out.” The writer then opined on who was likely behind the racist message: supporters of Mobolade’s opponent, center-right Republican Wayne Williams. “Candidate Wayne Williams is...

Leftists are losing their minds over a cartoon depicting “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) with an exploding pager, howling “Islamophobia” over the satirical depiction of the virulently antisemitic lawmaker. In what is being described as an “ingenious” operation attributed to Israeli intelligence, the pagers belonging to members of the Hezbollah terror organization were remotely detonated after a message was sent to the devices which aren’t as easily trackable as cellphones, causing a major disruption to the network that left hundreds badly wounded and reportedly claimed at least 20 lives. The cartoon which portrays the Muslim Michigan bomb thrower sitting...

A new ad for Pennsylvania Democratic senator Bob Casey features a married couple with different politics but who find common ground on the incumbent senator. "On politics, we just don’t agree — except for Bob Casey. He’s independent. That’s right! Casey’s leading the effort to stop corporate greed-flation and price gouging. Casey bucked Biden to protect fracking and he sided with Trump to end NAFTA and put tariffs on China to stop them from cheating." First, don’t buy the spin that Bob Casey is some independent maverick; he voted with the Biden administration’s position 98.5 percent of the time. Second,...

It seems that Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review, has been canceled from two speaking engagements. One was at Indiana State University and the other at the Badger Institute, which Lowry describes as “a right-of-center institute in Wisconsin.” This was in response to Lowry appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show where, apparently, he committed a disastrous speaking error when explaining the Haitian migrant problem in Springfield, Ohio. From Lowry’s account, it would seem that he slurred the word “migrant” in pronouncing the phrase “Haitian migrants,” and it sounded to his listeners that he was engaging in a racial insult. Retribution...

The remarkable thing about Russell Rickford is that there is nothing extraordinary about him. The Cornell University prof gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 by declaring that he found the terror attack “exhilarating.” Afterward, Rickford apologized for his “horrible choice of words.” After the controversy over his warm words for Oct. 7, Rickford took a “voluntary leave” and is now back in the classroom. What’s outrageous isn’t that he hasn’t been disciplined by the school, but that he fits in so seamlessly. If Rickford, a history professor, went somewhere else to ply his wares, he’d in all...

Folks online are calling out National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry after he seemingly used a racist slur while discussing the Republican-launched anti-Haitian rhetoric that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating domesticated animals.

Fifty years after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon is back. At least, some people on the right would like us to believe that he is and that it’s time for conservatives to embrace his legacy wholeheartedly and to reject the stale leftist narratives about Watergate (among other things) that have sullied his reputation. It is necessary to reject the standard left-wing gloss on Nixon. But doing so hardly absolves Nixon of his sins. From a conservative perspective, there was good to the man and his presidency, but also bad — and ugly. Conservatives will only learn the right lessons...

A crash is coming. We find ourselves deep into the irrational-exuberance phase of Kamala Harris’s surprise ascension to her role as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. All of five full days have elapsed since Joe Biden was dragged unwillingly to the conclusion most Americans came to well over a year ago. Already, Harris’s political star is said by her allies to have eclipsed even Barack Obama’s. “I covered the Clinton campaign, the Women’s March, the anti-Trump resistance, the wave of women in the 2018 midterms,” TIME Magazine correspondent Charlotte Alter asserted, “and the momentum for Harris over the last five days...

National Review editor Rich Lowry reacts to the report that 34 Democratic lawmakers are calling for President Biden to exit the race on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend.’ #foxnews

"har-dee-har-har! just a fictionalization!"