Free Republic

On Friday, The New York Times reported military review boards are defying orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to discharge transgender service members, with Navy and Marine Corps boards frequently voting to retain them.President Donald Trump's administration created three-person separation boards with narrow instructions mandating dismissal of the estimated 4,250 transgender personnel currently serving in the military.Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases. Marine Staff Sgt. Damien Contreras saw board members cross out instructions regarding "a history of cross sex hormone therapy" and circle "remains qualified."The Army and Air Force have...

Who edits this stuff? A rant from the New York Times editorial board compares the Trump administration to some of history’s worst dictatorships:The revocation of a political opponent’s citizenship has long been a tool of authoritarian repression.The Soviet Union stripped Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dissident author, of his citizenship in 1974 and deported him to West Germany. Czechoslovakia revoked the citizenship of Milan Kundera, another celebrated author, in 1979. East Germany and Romania, under Communist rule, took similar steps against critics, as did Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Greece under its military dictatorship, Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini. More recently,...

In a write-up of Wednesday night’s debate between Mike Rogers and Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed (aka Abdul-El-Sayed), the far-left New York Times referred to El-Sayed as a doctor a whopping 42 — 42! — times. Look for yourself. So to be clear, El-Sayed does not hold a license to practice medicine. He holds a Doctor of Medicine from Columbia University and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford. But he did not complete his residency after graduating from medical school. He is a doctor only by way of an academic degree. Still…DR. EL-SAYED a whopping 42 freaken times. So,...

We’re in the final weeks of the 2026 midterms, and some say a blue wave is coming. That’s just not happening. It won’t be like 2018 — a 25+ seat flip isn’t in the cards. Those days are over. Now, some top pollsters are skeptical of the latest tranche of surveys, including Frank Luntz, who admitted he got 2016 wrong and that Trump supporters don't respond to pollsters. Now, we have New York Times reporter and Michigan native Jeremy Peters noting that the thing we knew could happen — Jewish Democrats voting Republican — is a real thing in the...

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, FiftyPlusOne reached out to Wedgewood Polls, a self-professed polling firm, with a request for comment on an investigation we had conducted into their alleged survey research. They did not respond to our request, but instead posted a public statement on social media admitting that they had been fabricating data. They also reached out directly in social media DMs minutes before publishing their memo with an official comment: “**** you,” plus the name of an individual not affiliated with FiftyPlusOne. Their statement alleges that FiftyPlusOne, the New York Times, and other poll aggregators did not conduct appropriate...

In late August, during one of Karoline Leavitt’s final meetings with President Trump in the Oval Office, he pitched her on an idea in front of several senior aides. He told her to move reporters out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which would effectively remove news organizations from the White House. It would be, he told her, her “last legacy.” But the proposal never moved forward while she was there. The president had put the request to her several times over months, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions who were not authorized to speak...

Staying quiet is riskier than speaking up, Ukrainian officials say, as President Trump goes further than ever in prioritizing Russia’s interests.Ukraine has been here before with President Trump. But this time, as the American leader plays down Russian violence and makes it harder for Kyiv to respond, Ukrainian leaders have taken a different tack. They have punched back.A senior Ukrainian official likened it to a last chance to sound an alarm as a tsunami approaches. Even before the latest blowup with Mr. Trump, things were looking difficult for Ukraine. Daily strikes were ravaging its energy infrastructure and economy. Ukrainian air...

The transgender New York Times executive who was allegedly gunned down by his in-laws had previously threatened to hire a hitman to “get rid of” his mother-in-law, her defense attorney has claimed. Jonathan McKinsey was shot dead at Dublin Sports Grounds on Sept. 26, allegedly at the hands of his elderly in-laws, 77-year-old Shili Chen and 77-year-old Shouyong Zhang, who have been charged with murder. But their defense attorney has now revealed a potentially explosive twist in the case, claiming McKinsey previously said he was going to hire a gunman to take out Chen, according to KRON4. Curtis Briggs, who...

the 79-year old comic channels the satirist Jonathan Swift and offers a dozen “modest proposals” for the manifesto of the socialist organization “In our Socialist America, everyone will be so fulfilled spiritually and financially that the police department will be dramatically reduced to where an officer’s only job will be to adjudicate domestic disputes.” “Toward that end, stands will be set up at local farmers markets, where they will work to resolve marital issues in a folksy, farm-to-table manner,” he writes. He rapidly progresses to more outlandish ideas, including national paid leave for the death of pets, mandating that employers...

The Fields Medalist Terence Tao is on the front lines of a debate about artificial intelligence and the future of his field. Terence Tao is typically described as one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians, but right now he is doing very little math. “I’m on a war footing,” he said while grabbing coffee during a two-day math workshop at the University of California, Los Angeles, that was rife with talk about the existential crisis that artificial intelligence has created in his field. Days earlier OpenAI had announced that it had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven “Millennium Prize...

The United States wants a reactor on the moon by 2030. A Russian-Chinese alliance is working on one for 2036. Some leading scientists say the danger is great.In late August, NASA asked contractors to prepare to build a nuclear reactor that could survive a space voyage and run without maintenance near the moon’s south pole. That may sound like science fiction, but the agency wants it ready to be launched by December 2030.There is a reason for the rush. Russia aims to have a lunar reactor running by 2036 as part of a secretive partnership with China. NASA has already...

On Tuesday, he signed a document that paves the way to expanding the U.S. military presence on the island, opening new bases. But it explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one — especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space — wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as “tremendous for Europe and for the US.” Mikkel Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, described the final document, which was released Tuesday, as only a moderate improvement...

The New York Times came under fire Wednesday over a baffling passage that appeared in an article about an Israeli documentary — which said the Jewish state “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.” The Sept. 14 article, penned by Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner, covers the controversy over the documentary film “NAZA,” which chronicles the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and just won the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The article details the criticism about the 80-minute film lodged by some Israeli officials — who called it “based on blood libels” and...

The package would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions to Israel.The Trump administration has approved a $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, according to a U.S. official, in what would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions there even as American public support for the country declines.The proposed sale would include 40,000 one-ton bombs whose use by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon has drawn international anger because of the civilian harm caused by their wide blast radius.Human rights groups and some foreign governments have condemned Israel for dropping the giant munitions in densely populated areas,...

When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise. For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer. In July, Mr. Trump dubbed the fresh-faced lawmaker “Pee-wee Herman.” The next month, upset over Mr. Ossoff’s criticism of the president, one aide called Mr. Ossoff a “feminine theater kid” and a “lightweight loser,” and another derided him as “a miserable person” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while deploying a sexually explicit moniker unfit for a family-friendly publication. Mr. Ossoff...

'The Odyssey' is the political movie of the decade. Christopher Nolan's Finest Trick | The Ezra Klein Show | New York Times Opinion | 15:23 New York Times Podcasts | 749,018 views | August 2, 2026Sidebars:Taming Odysseus [08/16/2026]The Real History Behind Homer's 'Odyssey' [08/02/2026]

The confrontation, over a strategic ridge in southern Lebanon, challenged a fragile cease-fire between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had killed several Hezbollah members overnight on a strategic ridge in southern Lebanon, challenging a fragile cease-fire between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.The encounter happened in the area of the Ali al-Taher ridge, a hilltop about six miles from the Israeli border where violence has flared in recent days. The Israeli military said it had “struck” Hezbollah fighters in an Israeli-occupied area where its soldiers were operating, and that an Israeli soldier...

A Russian missile crashed in Poland on Thursday during an overnight assault on neighboring Ukraine, NATO said, an event that could risk bringing Russia closer to direct confrontation with the Western military alliance, to which Poland belongs. Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, said the incident was a “violation of Poland’s airspace by a Russian missile” and vowed to strengthen alliance defenses. The missile — which the Polish authorities originally called an “unidentified object” — struck a field in southeastern Poland, causing no injuries. On Thursday morning, Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland told an emergency meeting that the missile...

“The Turner Diaries” is a work of white supremacist agitprop. It purports to be the diary of a neo-Nazi militant, Earl Turner, who is working to overthrow the United States government — or as the book calls it, “the System” — through a group called “the Organization.” Turner castigates “the System” for promoting integration, encouraging nonwhite immigration and placing Jewish people, Black Americans and other minorities in positions of authority over whites.Among other atrocities, the novel describes nuclear attacks on predominantly Black cities, a Holocaust of Jewish Americans, the total ethnic cleansing of California, the subjugation of women and the...

As the war with Iran has continued, some are finding that the stress is bringing back old anxieties.A 4-year-old child began having behavioral problems when his father left for war.A wife whose husband works in Army intelligence is already dealing with heightened anxiety, even though he hasn’t been deployed yet.A woman found this year that she is struggling to cope with the news of conflicts at home and abroad, nearly 20 years after she lost her fiancé in combat.More than 80 percent of military families have reported elevated stress from the war with Iran, driven by safety concerns, deployment changes,...