Free Republic

If China invades Taiwan and cuts off its chip exports to American companies, the tech industry and the U.S. economy would be crippled.Federal officials have for years tried to wean Silicon Valley from its dependence on Taiwan, an island democracy roughly the size of Maryland that makes 90 percent of the world’s high-end computer chips. In secret briefings held in Washington and Silicon Valley, national security officials warned executives from companies like Apple, Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm that China was making plans to retake Taiwan, which Beijing has long considered a breakaway territory. A Chinese blockade of Taiwan, the...

New satellite imagery and flight tracking data show a base in central Jordan has become a key hub for the U.S. military’s planning for possible strikes on Iran. Imagery captured on Friday shows more than 60 attack aircraft parked at the base, known as Muwaffaq Salti, roughly tripling the number of jets that are normally there. And at least 68 cargo planes have landed at the base since Sunday, according to flight tracking data. More fighter jets could be parked under shelters. The satellite images also show more modern aircraft, including F-35 stealth jets, compared to the aircraft normally seen...

The good news is that the Trump administration has announced its repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding.” As Matthew Hennessey puts it in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter this morning, the finding is the “2009 determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. It was the legal basis for most federal climate regulation, allowing Washington technocrats to treat carbon dioxide, methane and four other gases as pollutants.” The White House trumpeted the repeal as “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Let us cheer while we can. Woo hoo! It represents a victory...

Republican officials and candidates in Texas have shifted their rhetorical attack lines from the border fears that dominated recent elections to the state’s growing Muslim population, with language that echoes the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric has unnerved many in the state’s Islamic community while sending signals to Republicans outside Texas who might be searching for rhetorical targets now that the nation’s southwestern border has grown quiet. Ads for Senator John Cornyn of Texas have touted his fight against “radical Islam.” Texas Republican lawmakers created a “Sharia-Free America Caucus” in Congress....

Turns out even a broken clock can get it right twice a day. The New York Times just plastered their front-page with an exposé connecting the sadistic Jeffrey Epstein empire with the politically radioactive Clintons. Following the release of long-awaited files pertaining to the Epstein case by the Department of Justice, Times investigative reporter Danny Hakim took a detour away from his employer’s never-ending Trump bashing to draft a February 8 story that’s sure to make liberal heads spin: “Epstein Files Reveal Scope of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Role in Clinton Circle.” What made this even more impression was it is something...

Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, hung an online help wanted sign for federal prosecutors last weekend that perhaps explained why so many valuable Justice Department staff members have left, and why so few candidates want in.Assistant U.S. attorneys are not typically recruited, as Mr. Mizelle sought to do, by a former federal employee who asks potential candidates to send a private message to his X account. Nor have they been asked in the past to prove political or ideological fealty.“If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President...

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested Vice President JD Vance's mother was right to have attempted to sell him for drugs in a Bluesky post on Wednesday. In a series of comments on the left-wing platform, Bouie criticized Vance for a recent interview with the Daily Mail where he declined to apologize to Minnesota shooting victim Alex Pretti's family after accusing him of showing up with "ill intent" at an immigration enforcement protest. "[T]his is a wicked man who knows he is being wicked and does it anyway," Bouie wrote. He added, "like, do you see that smirk? that...

This despicably misleading headline is exactly why the American people have completely lost faith in the mainstream media. This journalist knows the facts, was given the truth, and adamantly refuses to report it. Here are the facts: At 6:50 PM CT, federal law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted traffic stop in Minneapolis of an illegal alien from Venezuela who was released into the country by Joe Biden in 2022. In an attempt to evade arrest, the subject fled the scene in his vehicle and crashed into a parked car. The subject then fled on foot. The law enforcement officer...

President Trump again threatened on Friday to forcibly annex Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.” In a White House event discussing his plans to have American companies exploit Venezuela’s vast oil reserves under the threat of a military blockade, Mr. Trump advanced an imperialist vision of American foreign policy, where the U.S. must dominate strategically important neighboring countries because of the perceived possibility that rival powers might do so first. “If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland,” Mr. Trump said, falsely suggesting that Greenland,...

The New York Times sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday over the Pentagon's new policy that requires media outlets to pledge not to gather information unless defense officials formally authorize its release. That policy, unveiled in September, includes a ban on credentialed journalists reporting even unclassified material that isn't expressly approved for public consumption by Defense Department brass. The Times said the Pentagon policy represents an attempt to force reporters to rely solely upon officials for news involving the military and would unlawfully permit their punishment for failing to do so. The Times — and NPR — are among...

A federal appeals court said on Monday that Alina Habba had been serving unlawfully as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, dealing a blow to the Trump administration and most likely setting up a showdown at the Supreme Court. In its ruling, the three-judge panel, based in Philadelphia, affirmed an earlier ruling by a Federal District Court judge, shooting down each of the government’s arguments for why Ms. Habba could continue to serve. In their opinion, the judges wrote that the Trump administration appeared to have become frustrated by the legal and political barriers that have prevented its preferred U.S....

Juan Orlando Hernández was accused of receiving millions in bribes and partnering with cocaine traffickers. He was convicted in Manhattan in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in prison.President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built...

Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump’s adversaries.Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and “deep-state” operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office.But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump...

The New York Times scrambled to run cover for leftist billionaire George Soros after a groundbreaking report exposing his pro-terrorism funding served as the pretext for the Justice Department launching an investigation into his Open Society Foundations (OSF). The Times tried October 10 to attack the Capital Research Center’s investigative report showing that Soros had funneled at least $80 million into “groups tied to terrorism or extremist violence” both in the U.S. and abroad. The headline: "Report on Soros Cited by Justice Dept. Does Not Show Funding for Terrorism." One heavily Soros-funded group, Al-Haq, is “a nongovernmental organization (NGO) based...

Ms. Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”Nobody thinks the N.F.L. is run by a bunch of woke libs. Or for that matter, that most N.F.L. fans fit that description. In fact, the team owners, many of whom trend MAGA oligarch, donated $23 million to Republicans in the 2024 election, versus $2.5 million to Democrats. And of course there’s a reason Colin Kaepernick’s career was so resolutely benched. Many woke libs won’t even let their kids play football, not wanting to risk that their meritocratic brains...

The actress joined Spike Lee, Billie Eilish, Pedro Pascal and others in reviving the Committee for the First Amendment, a group that her father, Henry Fonda, was a member of in the 1940s.Jane Fonda and hundreds of members of the entertainment industry have revived the Committee for the First Amendment, a free-expression group that was originally formed by Hollywood stars including her father, Henry Fonda, during the McCarthy era.The original group was formed in 1947 to oppose the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose investigations into the film industry led to the blacklist of actors, writers and directors...

During a panel discussion featuring world leaders and philanthropists in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, Alex Soros said the $23 billion philanthropic organization he leads would not cave to pressure from President Trump. Mr. Soros, the son of the billionaire investor and Democratic megadonor George Soros, defiantly told attendees that it had done nothing wrong and would back away from its human rights work “over my dead body,” according to two people who attended the panel who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was an invitation-only event. The remarks came in response to a question about a report in...

​​​​​​As expected, President Donald Trump’s rebuke of the climate change hysteria in front of the pious apparatchiks at the United Nations sent the media into a tailspin, with The New York Times leading the pack. Times climate reporters Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman snorted at Trump following his September 23 speech at the U.N. for alleging that the so-called “scientific consensus on global warming was created by ‘stupid people’” and having “lashed out at wind turbines, environmentalists and allies around the world while dismissing the dangers of climate change.” Sengupta and Friedman railed that Trump’s remarks were “an extraordinary diatribe...

Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh was declared guilty on Tuesday on all charges, but The New York Times accidentally published the wrong article. In journalism, outlets often pre-write obituaries, election outcomes and potential court verdicts of major cases before they occur, using the basic facts of the story and adding whatever key details are essential on the day of. However, a screenshot indicated that the New York Times accidentally published a headline, “Man Found Not Guilty of Trying to Assassinate Trump in Florida.” The lede of the now-scrubbed article added, “In a surprise verdict, a federal jury acquitted Ryan Routh...

Donald Trump has sued the New York Times and others for defamation, alleging damages of $15 billion. While the Times has smeared Trump in many ways over the years, this case focuses on a book written by two Times reporters, and related coverage in the newspaper. The book is Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. Defendants include the Times, Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, who wrote Lucky Loser, Peter Baker and Michael Schmidt, who authored anti-Trump columns in the Times, and Penguin Random House, which published Lucky Loser.Lucky Loser...