Free Republic

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading. Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times. Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future,...

My guest today is Andrew Kolvet, who was Kirk’s close confidant. Since the assassination, he’s taken on many of Kirk’s responsibilities, including hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show.” Andrew Kolvet: …“Now, Charlie’s mission was to say: Hey, before us are two roads. You can either go grievance politics, socialism, free stuff populism, Mangione-ism, Mamdani-ism, or you can go MAGA.“ …“I think this is the through line for Israel — is you do not have to support Israel to belong to the team, at least in a traditional historical sense…I’m an American. I’m born in this country. My kids are going to...

The United States would suffer a devasting defeat and lose its biggest aircraft carrier if it tried to stop China invading Taiwan, according to a top secret Pentagon report. War games showed the U.S. would be overwhelmed by China's arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons, along with missiles and nuclear submarines. The grim assessment, revealed by the New York Times, confirmed the conclusions of previous war games, but it also highlighted wider concerns about the future direction of the U.S. military and its continued reliance on outdated methods. *** Ships like the $13 billion USS Gerald R. Ford - the...

President Donald Trump assailed The New York Times, accusing the paper of "seditious, perhaps even treasonous" behavior as it and other mainstream media outlets circulate "fake" reports suggesting he's slowing down. "There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me," Trump said in a Tuesday night statement on Truth Social, pushing back on claims about his stamina and sharpness. He touted what he described as a record of achievements, saying he "stopped Eight Wars," built "the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country," rebuilt the military, delivered the "Largest Tax Cuts and Regulation Cuts, EVER,"...

After successfully holding strong in the face of a Democrat-led government shutdown over Obamacare, a cabal of House Republicans is now waiving the white flag on the issue.On Thursday, nearly three dozen Democrats and Republicans introduced a proposal to extend taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies. As Federalist Senior Contributor Christopher Jacobs has regularly reported in these pages, these Biden-era subsidies — which are set to expire at the end of this year — have been a complete and total disaster. Spearheaded by Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Jen Kiggins, R-Va., the measure “would extend and reduce the tax credits in a two-step...

A new White House policy document formalizes President Trump’s long-held contempt for Europe’s leaders. It made clear that the continent now stands at a strategic crossroads.The Trump administration has not exactly kept its low regard for Europe secret. President Trump has long portrayed European allies as freeloaders that fail to pay enough for their own security and argued that the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”Now, that hostility is official White House policy.The Trump administration issued a national security strategy paper this week that called for European nations to take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, indicating...

It was a clear attempt to project Russian power. Hours before meeting U.S. officials in Moscow this past week about their plan to end the war, President Vladimir V. Putin claimed that Russia’s forces had seized the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after a monthslong fight. The reality was murkier. Slivers of the city were still contested, according to battlefield maps and the Ukrainian military. But Mr. Putin’s claim, even if premature, reflected a trend shaping his unbending approach to negotiations: Russian forces are on the march. “The Russians do have the upper hand,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst...

The new Pentagon press corps entered the imposing building on the Potomac for the first time this week as those disgruntled members of the former press corps took to their pages to complain about it. The New York Times went a step further and is suing the Pentagon over what they say is a violation of the First Amendment. The Times claimed that the outlets that are currently covering the Pentagon were selected "based on viewpoint." They state that in "In describing the '[n]ew media outlets' willing to accede to the Department's 'media access policy,' [Sean] Parnell wrote that they...

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Times filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Pentagon, attempting to overturn new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that have led to most mainstream media outlets being banished from the building. The newspaper said the rules violate the Constitution’s freedom of speech and due process provisions, since they give Hegseth the power to determine on his own whether a reporter should be banned. Outlets such as the Times walked out of the Pentagon rather than agree to the rules as a condition for getting a press credential. During her briefing Tuesday, Pentagon...

For two decades, Muhammad Abdulrahman, 58, lived with his wife and his beehives on a remote hillside in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. But in May, Israeli settlers set up camp about 200 yards away and took control of the road leading to Mr. Abdulrahman’s home, blocking him from returning, he said. Israeli soldiers then evicted him and his wife, Suha Abdulrahman, the couple said. The Israeli military said that Mr. Abdulrahman left voluntarily, but he said that he has still been unable to return home. Last month, a video shared by an Israeli lawmaker on social media showed his house...

The Trump administration fired eight immigration judges in New York City on Monday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The firings followed an earlier round of job cuts in New York immigration courts and are part of a broader disruption across the country, which is taking place as the president seeks to accelerate deportations. They were confirmed by an official at the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union representing immigration judges, and a Justice Department official who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The immigration courts are under the control...

After several bruising weeks for Speaker Mike Johnson, a soft-focus podcast interview alongside his wife, conducted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s top advisers, had all the ingredients for a flattering reset. What emerged from the interview instead was a portrait of a Republican leader barely keeping his head above water in a job to which he does not appear particularly well suited, a conversation full of tragically revealing details packaged as rueful humor but with the biting sting of truth. “We have this joke that I’m not really a speaker of the House,”...

One of the most notable and puzzling factors is the lack of young people. If you have participated in a No Kings protest or seen one in person, you have surely noticed the upward skew in the age of participants. Only 8 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they took part in the protests in October, compared with 13 percent of those age 65 and older, according to YouGov. Students are most conspicuous in their absence. The Rice University student newspaper counted only “about 30” students out of a crowd of more than 13,000 at...

President Trump has always defied the laws of political gravity, seemingly impervious to setbacks that would sink any other figure and immune from the traditional ebb and flow of campaign cycles. But his capitulation in the fight over releasing the Epstein files, and other recent developments, suggest that, when it comes to Congress, the president is subject to at least some of the same currents as his predecessors, as the first signs of his lame duck status emerge. The willingness of congressional Republicans to defy Mr. Trump and back legislation requiring the disclosure of federal files on Jeffrey Epstein, the...

Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.This is why, watching President Trump’s fight to keep a lid on the Epstein files, I have been struck, delighted even, that among the vanishingly few Republican lawmakers with the courage to defy him have been three fire-breathing congresswomen: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made...

We have met the enemy of civilization, and it’s women. Not individual women, mind you. Because any given individual woman can possess masculine characteristics. And certainly not homemakers — those are the women who are doing the job they’ve done for millenniums, taking care of the family. No, the challenge to civilization is presented, in the view of Helen Andrews, a writer and editor who served as a senior editor at The American Conservative, by the women who are entering the workplace in such great numbers that they now make up large portions or majorities of their professions. In that...

Judge Mark L. Wolf, writing in The Atlantic, said he was stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law” by President Trump, who he accused of “targeting his adversaries.”A federal judge warned of an “existential threat to democracy” in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump. He accused Mr. Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”The judge, Mark L. Wolf, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals over the past nine months in a series of ousters that could reshape the U.S. military for years to come. His actions, which are without precedent in recent decades, have come with little explanation. In many cases, they have run counter to the advice of top military leaders who fought alongside the officers in combat, senior military officials said. The utter unpredictability of Mr. Hegseth’s moves, as described in interviews with 20 current and former military officials, has created an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust...

Tuesday’s results are a reminder that nothing is forever in politics. Pronouncements that coalitions have changed and one party has captured the hearts of a demographic group are always susceptible to events. Groups like young voters, or Latino voters, did not become forever Republicans after the 2024 elections. In short: Parties have to deliver or voters will look to the alternative.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer who was assassinated in September, and Nick Fuentes, the young Hitler-loving white nationalist at the center of a growing schism on the right, were bitter enemies. Fuentes despised Kirk for his support of Israel, and, more broadly, for his efforts to marginalize Fuentes’s gleefully racist and fascist brand of politics. In 2019, seeking to expose Kirk as “anti-white” and a “fake patriot,” Fuentes organized his army of young fans — known as Groypers, after a variant on the alt-right Pepe the Frog meme — to flood events held by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point, and ask...