Free Republic

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...

The White House has cut or paused billions in funding to Democratic-run cities and states since the federal government came to a halt.President Trump has embarked on a legally dubious campaign to weaponize the federal budget during a contentious government shutdown, halting more than $27 billion in approved funding in a bid to punish Democratic-led cities and states. Rather than broker a legislative truce or seek to ameliorate the fallout of a costly fiscal stalemate, the president has leveraged the crisis to exact revenge on rivals, slash federal spending and pressure Democrats into accepting his political demands. Since the shutdown...

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...

Federal investigators have subpoenaed records related to travel they believe Fani Willis took around the time of last year’s election, but it was not immediately clear why.The Department of Justice has issued a subpoena for records related to the travel history of Fani T. Willis, the Georgia district attorney who charged President Trump in a sweeping election interference case, according to a federal grand jury subpoena reviewed by The New York Times. The scope of the investigation is not yet clear. Also unclear is whether Ms. Willis is the target of the inquiry and whether she will ultimately face charges....

Residents of Palmetto Bay, Fla., have demanded the resignation of Councilman Stephen Cody, who wrote a post mocking Charlie Kirk’s support for gun rights.One by one, the angry residents who had packed the council chambers on Monday night in Palmetto Bay, Fla., stepped to the podium to express their disgust over online comments that a councilman, Stephen Cody, had made about Charlie Kirk.One man called Mr. Cody’s comments “vile.” Another called them “abnormal and dangerous.” A third man said that the councilman’s Facebook post, which went up a few hours after Mr. Kirk was fatally shot in Utah, “smells like...

President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.

Recently declassified documents indicate that people close to former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff were connected to leaks of classified information to prominent reporters designed to portray Donald Trump and his allies as being in league with Russia. Reporters from the New York Times and Washington Post shared a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for articles that used classified leaks to advance the Russigate hoax. Columbia University, Photo by Eileen BarrosoWritten in 2017, the FBI documents expose how selected Washington reporters, including Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, scored a...

The New York Times issued a correction Thursday, admitting it had wrongly attributed an antisemitic remark to Charlie Kirk when the late Turning Point USA founder was actually critiquing the comment. As part of its story on where Kirk stood on key political issues in the wake of his assassination, The Times reported Kirk was "repeatedly accused of antisemitism." Kirk was a staunch supporter of Israel and has been praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was...

When Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, dispatched his National Guard troops to Washington to support President Trump’s crackdown on crime, Democrats and other critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines. Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to F.B.I. statistics. Nashville has a higher rate of violent crime than Washington as well. The same questions could be asked of other Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas, Mike DeWine in Ohio and Mike Kehoe in Missouri,...

President Trump has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs from the federal work force, disproportionately affecting Black employees.When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation. She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target. But her 35-career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she...

The deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops has caused some Black parents to return to the days of “the talk” about policing that they had hoped was no longer needed to keep their children safe.Days after President Trump ordered a surge of federal law enforcement agents in Washington, D.C., Charlene Golphin told her 17-year-old son that his curfew was being cut short by two hours. Ms. Golphin feared that as a Black boy, her son would be caught in the dragnet set up by officers tasked by the president with cracking down on the “roving mobs of wild...

... Mr. Moran, 44, is the pasha of a new power tribe in the capital: the gay men of the Trump administration. These are the A-Gays. They’re (mostly) out, they’re proud (to work for President Trump) and they have big jobs inside (or alongside) this administration. They wield influence all over town, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House to the Kennedy Center. “We’re like Visa,” Mr. Moran said. “Everywhere you want to be.” He sipped a dirty vodka martini and surveyed the room. Two Republican men waved at him from across the club. “Both gay,”...

It’s not just you. It really is impossible to keep track of all the political news. But one thing is pretty reliable: When Donald Trump has a bad week, he will use social media to make a presidential announcement.Last week was one of those bad weeks. President Vladimir Putin of Russia landed in America as if he had V.I.P. tickets to a private Taylor Swift meet-and-greet. He made no concessions in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Trump belatedly realized that he had been played. Plus, that Jeffrey Epstein thing just won’t go away.So, true to form, the president took to...

Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it...

For quite some time, the leftist political establishment has been accusing President Donald Trump of abandoning the US Constitution. Now they have me wondering why that’s supposed to be a criticism. Just last week The New York Times, the establishment’s chief house organ, boosted the arguments of writer Osita Nwanevu in a column headlined: “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.” Why? Because “The left can’t win without a new Constitution.” He’s hardly the first Democrat to say so. I’ve noticed that whenever the Constitution stands in the way of something the left wants at the moment,...

Thousands gathered in cities across the country on Saturday to protest President Trump's plan to keep control of Congress after the 2026 midterms by pushing Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps in favor of Republicans. The president’s push for the rare and aggressively partisan redistricting, while centered on Texas so far, has set off a furious response among many Democratic state leaders and party activists. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Friday that he was moving forward with a plan to redraw his state’s lines, and allow voters to approve it in November. On Saturday, progressive activists, labor...

By ordering 800 National Guard troops to Washington, on the pretext of an illusory crime wave, President Trump has further dragged the U.S. military into domestic law enforcement, in a move credibly perceived as an ominous “test case.” This continues what the administration started in California in June as part of the its deportation efforts. Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution. Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to...

The administration’s claims are overblown, but newly declassified information provides some messy details about a January 2017 intelligence assessment of Moscow’s election interference.The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump’s first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning.That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the...