Free Republic

More than 2,700 “No Kings Day” demonstrations are scheduled nationwide Saturday, four months after the first protests drew five million people. Organizers say Trump’s actions have escalated since June, including expanded immigration raids, prosecutions of political opponents and pressure on universities. Trump allies brand them “anti-American” When millions of demonstrators took to the streets in June for “No Kings Day” — depicting President Trump as a wannabe monarch intent on violating American democratic norms — it was still fairly early in his administration. The immigration raids in Los Angeles were just getting under way and Trump had deployed military troops...

The New York Times desperately tried several times to downplay the left-wing political unrest and violence in Portland, Oregon generated by the domestic terrorists of Antifa, passing the blame to "right-wing influencers" instead. First it was the paper’s benighted columnist Nicholas Kristof, perennially optimistic about the relative harmlessness of the regime of Saddam Hussein and public support for radical Islam, embarrassing himself on X with a sarcastic video post from “the perilous front lines” of Portland – a post taken on a leafy sidewalk in broad daylight, a two-mile walk from the protest action currently around the U.S. Immigration and...

The Illinois governor, a potential presidential candidate, is fighting the presence of National Guard troops and the activities of ICE agents in Chicago.When President Trump ordered the National Guard to Chicago last week, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois became the latest Democrat to bear the brunt of managing an aggressive federal government. He has concluded it must be combated with a national campaign. Aside from instructing his attorney general to file a lawsuit to block troops from other states coming to Illinois, Mr. Pritzker has few formal options to resist what he described this week as an “unconstitutional invasion of...

President Trump has unleashed new weaponry in his war against Democrats, liberals and the left. Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition. Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten...

The Iranian foreign minister said on Sunday that he was heading to Russia to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday, as Iran weighed a response to a wave of U.S. strikes on its nuclear sites. There was little sign that Russia was prepared to provide military assistance to Iran, its closest remaining Middle East ally, as it prioritized its own war against Ukraine. Iran has not received concrete support from any allies through 10 days of war with Israel and, now, an attack by the United States, leaving the country more isolated than it has been in decades....

Schools say the Trump administration’s cuts to higher education are forcing them to consider extreme cost-cutting measures, even as more students than ever are heading to college this year.Public universities in the Midwest are raising prices for out-of-state students, as Florida schools consider making the same move for the first time since 2012.Cornell and Duke are among the colleges weighing layoffs. The University of Minnesota is cutting hundreds of jobs, even as undergraduate tuition soars as much as 7.5 percent.Just as America’s colleges are preparing to welcome what could be the largest freshman class in the nation’s history, political and...

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Nearly one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the country’s war against Ukraine, according to a new study, a staggering toll as Russia’s three-year assault on its neighbor grinds on. The study, published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that close to 400,000 Ukrainian troops have also been killed or wounded since the war began. That would put the overall casualty figure, for Russian and Ukrainian troops combined, at almost 1.4 million. Officials cautioned that casualty figures were difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war...

The administration is not only allowing more greenhouse gases. It is undermining the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.But President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its...

At least 44 of the government contracts canceled on the orders of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative have been resurrected by federal agencies, wiping out more than $220 million of his group’s purported savings, according to a New York Times analysis of federal spending data. But Mr. Musk’s group continues to list 43 of those contracts as “terminations” on its website, which it calls the “Wall of Receipts.” The group even added some of them days or weeks after they had been resurrected. The result was another in a series of data errors on the website that made the group seem...

Feb. 28 was one of the darkest days for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion three years earlier. An Oval Office visit by President Volodymyr Zelensky meant to win favor with President Trump turned into a televised shouting match, prompting Mr. Trump to banish his guest from the White House without even serving him a planned lunch. Mr. Trump was already a deep skeptic of U.S. support for Ukraine. But after the disastrous meeting with Mr. Zelensky, he accelerated his diplomacy with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, drafting a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine that offered major concessions...

...ending the war with Russia that has been raging for more than three years is only the first hurdle that will need to be overcome before the United States can realize any potential windfall. Maps showing trillions of dollars of mineral deposits scattered across Ukraine — including in areas occupied by Russian forces — are based largely on outdated studies, and proper surveys could take several years to complete, experts said. The deposits might not be easy to extract; investors will need to pump billions into Ukraine to pull the resources from the earth. And the nation’s energy infrastructure —...

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...

The text of the agreement, made public by Ukraine’s government, made no mention of the security guarantees that Kyiv had long sought. The minerals deal signed between the United States and Ukraine on Wednesday could bring untold money into a joint investment fund between the two countries that would help rebuild Ukraine whenever the war with Russia ends. But Ukraine’s untapped resources that are the subject of the deal will take years to extract and yield profits. And those could fail to deliver the kind of wealth that President Trump has long said they would. It is not yet clear...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat. Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

As President Trump imposes tariffs on products from countries around the world, foreign governments are answering back with tariffs of their own. China has targeted corn farmers and carmakers. Canada has put tariffs on poultry plants and air-conditioning manufacturers, while Europe will hit American steel mills and slaughter houses. The retaliatory tariffs are an attempt to put pressure on the president to relent. And they have been carefully designed to hit Mr. Trump where it hurts: Nearly 8 million Americans work in industries targeted by the levies and the majority are Trump voters, a New York Times analysis shows. The...

The railroad tracks that slice through downtown Freehold, N.J., used to be lined by dozens of men, waiting for work. Each morning, the men — day laborers, almost all from Latin America and undocumented — would be scooped up by local contractors in pickup trucks for jobs painting, landscaping, removing debris. In recent weeks, the tracks have been desolate. On a gray February morning, a laborer named Mario, who came from Mexico two decades ago, said it was the quietest he could remember. “Because of the president, we have a fear,” said Mario, 55, who agreed to be interviewed on...

A leftist group financed by America’s most notorious billionaire George Soros launched a lawsuit against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by X owner Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy just moments after President Donald Trump took office. That’s not even enough time for anyone in the Trump administration to pass gas.

California has focused on fortifying communities against wildfires. But with growing threats, that may not be enough. This week’s fires around Los Angeles present a puzzle: Why is California, the state best equipped to deal with wildfires, seemingly unable to prevent blazes from consuming entire chunks of the country’s second-largest city?California’s building code for wildfires is among the most protective in the nation. Its local fire departments are backed up by CalFire, the state fire agency, which has a $4 billion budget and some of the best trained firefighters in the world. The state’s huge tax base generates effectively unlimited...

The first- and second-wave feminist movements really just wanted women to have equal footing with men, which was noble, even if we disagree with some of the methods and outcomes. But the late-stage feminism, with its capitulation to the transgender agenda, has literally undone over a century of work on behalf of women. To the point where women are not only second-class citizens to delusional men who pretend they're women, but we can't even be called women anymore. They've had a list of euphemisms for us -- womb owner, egg producer, birthing person -- but now we're literally being redefined...