Free Republic

In a reversal, President Trump appears to have backed off joining a European push for new sanctions on Russia, seemingly eager to move on to doing business deals with it.For months, President Trump has been threatening to simply walk away from the frustrating negotiations for a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.After a phone call on Monday between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that appears to be exactly what the American president is doing. The deeper question now is whether he is also abandoning America’s three-year-long project to support Ukraine, a nascent democracy that he has frequently...

Even before President Trump was re-elected, the Heritage Foundation, best known for Project 2025, set out to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.In late April, the Heritage Foundation dispatched a team to Israel to meet with power players in Israeli politics, including the country’s foreign and defense secretaries and the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee.The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power.Now the Heritage contingent was in Israel, in part, to discuss another contentious...

At home, President Trump is ordering up investigations into his political opponents and finding creative ways to use his executive power to ruin the lives of even some of his milder critics.Abroad, Mr. Trump has sent a different message: Let bygones be bygones. Even if those bygones involved trying to assassinate him or working with Al Qaeda.In a series of speeches and off-the-cuff remarks during the first major foreign trip of his second term, Mr. Trump has told audiences in the Middle East that he is willing to set the past aside in the interests of peace and profit.“I have...

Behind the scenes, a top department official pressed employees to gather a list of activists and investigate them, people familiar with the matter said.A top Trump appointee in the Justice Department ordered an aggressive investigation in the last several months of student protesters at Columbia University, raising anger and alarm among career prosecutors and investigators who saw the demand as politically motivated and lacking legal merit, people familiar with the episode said. The demand for the inquiry into students who protested Israel’s conduct of the conflict in Gaza also prompted pushback from a federal magistrate judge, who believed some of...

After their PR campaign for Mahmoud Khalil and Momoudo Taal fell through, the media is rallying for more foreign nationals who were terrorizing college campuses. Next up is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia U anti-Israel activist in his mid-30s, from Israel who is being billed as a “Buddhist” and a “pacifist”... About two-thirds of the way through his sympathetic profile, the Times has to reckon with Mahdawi’s views.

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining. “We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters....

Daniel Wakin, the New York Times Deputy International Editor of Opinion, had an "Opinion Today" item in the paper's April 14th edition promoting a guest essay on the Op-Ed page entitled, "The U.S. Must Now Reckon With a Hegemon in the Mideast: Israel." The beginning of Wakin's item [emphasis added] reads: "Ancient Rome in the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The United States in the Western Hemisphere, for that matter. History is rife with nations and empires seeking to become dominant in a region or larger swath of the world. It is called hegemony. Aaron David Miller and...

When Stephen Miller met with Mark Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago late last year, the 39-year-old Trump adviser was in a position of power that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Back then, Mr. Miller was a mere Senate staffer railing about the evils of immigration. Now he was holding forth on U.S. policy with the billionaire chief executive of Meta, a man he had vilified for years as a globalist bent on destroying the nation. The scale had flipped. Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald...

Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency. His rallies offer a steady stream of such promises and threats — things like prosecuting political opponents and using the military against U.S. citizens. These statements are so outrageous and outlandish, so openly in conflict with the norms and values of American democracy that many find them hard to regard as anything but empty bluster. We have two words for American voters: Believe him. The record shows that Mr. Trump often pursues his stated goals, regardless of how plainly...

The New York Times said it took disciplinary action against a reporter who acknowledged leaking data about a WhatsApp group chat for Jewish business people that led to its members being doxxed and harassed by activists sympathetic to Palestinians. Natasha Frost, a Times reporter who was based in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year, downloaded and shared 900 pages of content from the private WhatsApp chat that was launched by Jewish professionals in response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that claimed the lives of nearly 1,200 Israelis. Frost acknowledged to the Wall Street Journal that she shared the...

The New York Times has a well documented obsession with Gazan hunger that fuels hostility toward Israel and Jews, by falsely suggesting that the world’s only Jewish state is maliciously responsible for the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet, even though there are exponentially worse famines underway, and the blame for Gaza’s hunger is far more complex than the NYT’s coverage would suggest.The newspaper reinforces this incorrect impression through its many failures to cover stories that exculpate Israel and/or blame others for Gaza’s food shortage. Here are thirteen notable stories reported by Israeli news organizations that give crucial moral context...

The New York Times proudly announced last Monday that it had “won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.” Those prestigious journalism awards went to “Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times” for “photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.” The Times neglected to mention, however, one telling detail: Masoud has been unmasked as a member of Hamas who participated in the Oct. 7 jihad massacres inside Israel.The Paper of Record shows...

The New York Times ran an op-ed Sunday by Hamas’ handpicked Gaza City mayor — prompting outrage on social media from Israel supporters who slammed the Gray Lady for amplifying “Jew hate.” The essay by Yahya R. Sarraj published on Christmas Eve comes amid fury over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s social media post that denounced Israel as a violent occupying force and likened Jesus to Palestinians. Sarraj’s op-ed — titled “I Am Gaza City’s Mayor. Our Lives and Culture Are in Rubble” — condemned Israel for “caus[ing] the deaths of more than 20,000 people” and for destroying or damaging “about half...

Adolf Hitler is back in vogue at the New York Times. I never thought I’d live to see the day. Until now, the very nice liberals who run the newspaper were probably quite relieved that the world had mostly forgotten about that time in the 1930s, when it had a Nazi-loving Berlin bureau chief called Guido Enderis. Among his many failings, Enderis wrote a puff piece about chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, calling him ‘an outstanding go-getter’. But the New York Times leadership kept him on, despite complaints from colleagues, because they considered his high-ranking sources in the Nazi Party...

The New York Times has re-enlisted a Hitler-praising Hamas propagandist as part of its team covering the war in Israel and Gaza. When we last heard from Soliman Hijjy, it was back in 2022, when The Algemeiner reported under the headline “Unearthed: Another Hitler-Praising New York Times Gaza Journalist.” That article focused on the watchdog group HonestReporting’s disclosure of Hijjy’s social media posts from 2012, 2018, and 2020 with variants on the phrase, “How great are you, Hitler?” It also noted that a 2021 video that Hijjy created for the Times, titled “Gaza’s Deadly Night: How Israeli Airstrikes Killed 44...