Free Republic

Our military campaign against Iran has been a great success, whether or not it leads to the downfall of the mullahs’ regime. We have badly degraded Iran’s ability to threaten us or our allies, and some changes will be permanent. Thus, for example:Mossad Commentary@MOSSADil · Follow ‼️PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU SIGNALS DIRECT COOPERATION WITH SAUDI ARABIA AND OTHER GULF STATES Netanyahu: Post-war plans include energy and economic cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including pipelines to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran must be stripped of this leverage.” Iran’s only effective response to our bombardment has been its disruption of the Strait of...

The Pentagon is sending ground forces to Iran. Trump administration officials gave a story to the Washington Post that is being repeated everywhere: The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of boots on the ground operations in Iran, a major escalation in President Trump’s goal to dismantle the remaining faction of the murderous Iranian regime, according to a report. Thousands of US Marines would be sent to the Middle East to conduct raids that include Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops, the Washington Post reported, citing sources. Officials have been discussing plans for sending troops into Iran for weeks. ***...

The United Nations chief condemned the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran on Saturday and called for an immediate return to negotiations “to pull the region, and our world, back from the brink.” Secretary-General António Guterres told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council that everything must be done to prevent further escalation. “The alternative,” he warned, “is a potential wider conflict with grave consequences for civilians and regional stability.” Guterres said the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes violated international law, including the U.N. Charter. He also condemned Iran’s retaliatory attacks for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan,...

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke on Tuesday of a “deep rift” with traditional ally the United States and said the US-Israeli war on Iran was a “breach of international law”. In unusually strong comments, the German head of state said that just as there was no going back from Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “there will be no going back to before January 20, 2025”, when US President Donald Trump entered the White House for a second time. “The rift is too deep and the trust in American power politics has been lost, not only among our allies but…...

Following our bombing of Iran, we are hearing the usual caterwauling from the Left about international law. Of course, no one invokes international law when Iran kills our servicemen, or when Hamas massacres Israelis, or when Iran launches missiles against the United Arab Emirates, and so on. There is a certain asymmetry in the invocation of international law.I took a course in international law when I was in law school. It was taught by a distinguished scholar in that field. As I recall, the first section of the course was devoted to the question, is there such a thing as...

Who is moving to California or New York? Or Chicago. No one, pretty much. The only rival to Florida is Texas. Austin is an enormous tech hub, while both Dallas and Houston are economic powerhouses. Dallas has become a financial center and now has its own stock exchange. Florida and Texas are poised to be the great rivals of the 21st century, as New York and California were in the 20th. What do Florida and Texas have in common? No income tax, to begin with. That is obviously a huge factor. But it is more than that: both are competently...

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Bill Glahn in Crime, Illegal immigration, Judiciary Rule No. 4 I spent countless hours in 2025 sitting in the back of federal courtrooms in Minnesota observing two types of cases play out: illegal immigration and welfare fraud. The one thing that both had in common was the application of Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals Rule No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” It’s a distillation of the Cloward-Piven “overwhelm the system” strategy. Federal bureaucracy was designed to handle a system where we had a few thousand illegal immigrants...

Okay, John Hinderaker went and did it last week! He has abused his stewardship of TWiP and went full Die Hard Christmas Movie Denialist! As the Dude says in The Big Lebowski, this aggression will not stand, man! To restore proper balance in the universe, I am staging a coup d’tat, and am taking over this week’s TWiP. To mix movie references further, John has done a Denethor-level job as Steward of TWiP; time for the Return of the (TWiP) King! Actually, like the Gaza and (prospective) Ukraine ceasefires, we’re going to share power, and alternate TWiP each week. And...

In the wake of news stories about the massive frauds that have been perpetrated in Minnesota–stories that we have been writing about here, for years–President Trump is moving to revoke temporary protected alien status for Somalis in Minnesota: [President Trump's X post] Unfortunately, this action (assuming Trump follows through) will have no practical impact, since there are only a few hundred Somalis on TPS in Minnesota, and fewer than 1,000 across the country. The Somali situation in Minnesota reflects different problems in our immigration laws–specifically, the broad “refugee” entitlement and chain immigration of alleged relatives. The Star Tribune weighed in...

It has been a while since we have checked in on polar ice. I’m sure you remember the hysteria of a few years ago–Arctic sea ice is melting! Al Gore predicted, in 2009, that the Arctic would be “completely ice-free” by 2014. Far from having disappeared, there are still 1.8 million square miles of ice floating in the Arctic Ocean. The annual Arctic sea ice minimum has arrived once again, and as usual, it provides far less drama than the media headlines would suggest. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Arctic sea ice extent bottomed out...

‘If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” That’s the quote from the late economist Herbert Stein. Some facts to consider:- U.S. share of world population: 4% - U.S. share of world GDP: 26% - U.S. share of world wealth: 29% - U.S. share of world debt: 35% - U.S. share of worldwide military spending: 37% - U.S. share of worldwide foreign aid: 40%The above figures are not sustainable. Well, actually, they were not sustainable, past tense.Many will look at the first three bullets above and conclude that America has been exploiting the rest of the world to get...

Does it seem like Trump is already president? If his first week following the election is compared to a football game, he isn’t just throwing long bombs or running a smashmouth fullback right up the middle; he’s more like a run-and-shoot offense that completely confuses the defense and leaves it breathless. I’m hoping he names Steve Bannon to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, because that will ensure that Democrats will support their instant abolition. And why did Biden look so happy this week? I’ve got two theories. . .

I’m currently working on a long series of articles I’ll be posting on my new “Political Questions” Substack on the topic of “leftist fragility,” but there’s an example of what I’m after yesterday that is perfect for our short form here. The editor of Mother Jones magazine, Clara Jeffery, was offended and alarmed when an Alaska Airlines flight attendant triggered her with visions of fascism and the whole Handmaid’s Tale nightmare:I’ve circled what is known in the Twitterverse as “the ratio,” that is, when Comments exceed the number of Likes by an almost 10-to-1 margin as it does here, you’ve...

Some years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates was the hottest thing on the Left, viewed as an intellectual of world-historical importance. Scott performed the excruciating task of reading Coates’s Between the World and Me. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction, but Scott called it the worst book he had ever read.Coates made a lot of money from his racist grifting, and then disappeared from sight. He hasn’t been heard from for a while. Apparently he was writing comic books.But now Coates is back, with a new political cause: kill the Jews!His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just...

A society can reach a point where it is literally too stupid to survive. Are we getting close to that fatal juncture? Here is one of many thousands of data points: a judge in Indiana has ordered that state to pay for sex-change surgery on a convicted murderer.Not just any murderer, but Jonathan Richardson, who is serving a 55-year sentence for strangling his own stepdaughter. He now goes by Autumn Cordellionè. The accent is a nice touch.The inmate has sought sex reassignment surgery, including an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty, arguing it is the “only remedy” to treat “persistent gender dysphoria”.The state...

You just knew that as soon as Biden got caught (deliberately?) on a hot mic saying “No one f—- with a Biden,” someone would go out at f— with Biden. In particular the Saudis, who—how shall can we put this delicately?—have some experience with this sort of thing. When the Saudi foreign ministry puts out a public letter calling out the president for his nakedly political pleading to bail out his party at the midterms, you know that foreign respect for the president has sunk below 40 percent. Let’s go Brandon indeed.

I think [Vance] is a bad decision for a number of reasons. At 39, Vance is too young...with less than two years in the Senate as his only political office, he has nowhere near the experience that a VP should bring to a ticket. Vance, who is unknown to the general public, won’t bring Trump a single new vote. In fact, there is no reason to think that he is any kind of political powerhouse: in his only race, he ran far behind the other statewide Republican candidates in Ohio. ...Vance’s political views are...half-baked. He is still evolving...he denounced Trump...

Europeans Aren’t As Crazy As We AreOr, to be more specific, their left isn’t as crazy as our left. One instance among many is the United Kingdom’s relatively sane reaction to the “trans” hysteria that gripped the world’s leftists a few years ago. In America, “trans” ideology remains rampant, but in Europe it has been reined in. Thus, for instance, Britain has shut down its notorious Tavistock “child gender identity clinic.”In the last days of the Conservatives’ majority, they enacted an emergency ban on prescription of puberty blockers for children, the heart of the “trans” regime. In the wake of...

The Biden Administration is determined to limit America’s production of fossil fuels, of which we have the largest supply in the world. This will transition us from a position of energy independence, and potentially energy dominance, into a position of subservience to the Chinese Communist Party, on which we will depend for the vast quantities of materials that are needed for wind turbines, solar panels and batteries–which we will not be allowed to mine here. If this plan isn’t outright treasonous, it is possibly the stupidest program ever carried out by a government in world history. The stated rationale for...

Today is the anniversary of the birth of America’s great or greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. As a politician and as president, Lincoln was a profound student of the Constitution and constitutional history. Perhaps most important, Lincoln was America’s indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom at the exact moment when the country was on the threshold of abandoning what he called its “ancient faith” that all men are created equal. In 1858 Lincoln attained national prominence in the Republican Party as the result of the contest for the Senate seat held by Stephen Douglas. It was Lincoln’s losing...