Free Republic

As images of protests in Southern California have flooded television and social media in recent days, a key question has emerged: Why are so many protesters carrying Mexican flags at an American political protest? The sea of red, white and green Mexican flags at anti-deportation protests this week in Los Angeles has been seized upon by conservatives who argue that the demonstrations are inherently un-American, causing some protesters to consider leaving them at home. Photos of masked provocateurs waving Mexican flags atop burning Waymo taxis spread instantly across conservative social media this weekend. Republicans pointed to them as a prime...

President Trump continues to walk back his original tariff assault, and markets are pleased. They rose again Wednesday after Mr. Trump said he won’t fire the Federal Reserve Chairman and is likely to retreat from his highest China tariffs. Is this Mr. Trump’s François Mitterrand moment? Readers of a certain age will recall how the French Socialist President swept into power in 1981 promising a far left agenda of government control over the private economy. The market reaction was brutal. Within a year he had put socialism on pause and by 1983 he had abandoned most of it. He went...

After Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s presidential election, .several MAGA influencers cheered the prospect of him trampling on women’s rights. And Republican lahttps://www.yahoo.com/news/house-gop-tramples-women-rights-225055817.htmlwmakers have acted on that ethos with startling speed.Democratic women sounded the alarm Thursday following the House’s passage of the so-called SAVE Act, which would require all states to obtain proof of citizenship from people registering to vote, as well as mandate that states have a program to remove undocumented immigrants from existing voter rolls and allow Americans to sue officials who don’t follow the proof-of-citizenship requirements. Voting rights activists have condemned the measure as a voter...

America is at risk of losing a generation of scientists. Amid sweeping cuts to federal research funding by the Trump administration, job opportunities for young scientists are being rescinded, postdoctoral positions eliminated and fellowships folded as labs struggle to afford new researchers. As countless scientific projects come to a halt, the researchers who will suffer the most are those just beginning their careers. Times Opinion has heard from more than 100 readers who have shared stories of how they’ve been affected. Kristen Gram is a 22-year-old graduate student researching the type of materials and hardware that might one day help...

Move over, Smoot and Hawley. President Trump has anointed himself America’s greatest protectionist, and he’s launching a global trade war to prove it. On Wednesday, Trump slapped a minimum 10 percent tariff on all imports, plus additional “reciprocal” tariffs on 60 other countries that have the temerity to sell us things we want to buy. He dubbed it “Liberation Day” to mark the freeing of Americans from the supposedly oppressive burden of trading with others.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump did not rule out the possibility of seeking a third term in the White House, which is prohibited by the Constitution under the 22nd Amendment, saying in an exclusive interview with NBC News that there were methods for doing so and clarifying that he was “not joking.” “A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said in a Sunday-morning phone call with NBC News, referring to his allies. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.” “I’m focused on...

Republicans are pulling out all the stops ahead of the special election in Florida’s 6th Congressional District as worries of a narrower-than-expected margin grow in the district President Trump won by more than 30 points in November. Trump called into two tele-town halls for state Sen. Randy Fine (R) in an effort to drive out the Republican base ahead of Tuesday. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s America PAC spent roughly $10,200 in the race earlier this week and dropped another $66,000 into the race on Thursday. The efforts come as Democratic candidate Josh Weil has outraised Fine, while an internal poll from...

What’s a good analogy for Signal, the commercial, publicly available encryption app?Have you ever watched a public hearing of the Senate or House Intelligence Committee? It happens almost every time: A witness from one of our intelligence agencies is asked a question that, whether the interrogating lawmaker realizes it or not, calls for an answer that includes national defense information — in the main, classified intelligence.... So what happens next is a commonplace: The agency official will tell the panel that he or she cannot answer the question in public, but may be willing to address the matter in the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — As congressional lawmakers scramble to respond to President Donald Trump’s slashing of the federal government, one group is already taking a front and center role: military veterans. From layoffs at the Department of Veterans Affairs to a Pentagon purge of archives that documented diversity in the military, veterans have been acutely affected by Trump’s actions. And with the Republican president determined to continue slashing the federal government, the burden will only grow on veterans, who make up roughly 30% of the federal workforce and often tap government benefits they earned with their military service. “At a moment...

We are all undocumented now. We Americans no longer have undeniable legal status in this country. Our rights, our organizations, our jobs, our health, our schools, our laws, our Constitution — all are now provisional, subject to the whims of the self-proclaimed “King” in the White House.

From tariffs to Ukraine to cuts to the federal workforce, President Trump has invoked the idea of fairness.Experts said the focus is effective, tapping into the sense among many Americans that they have been left behind.In a sit-down interview with Fox News last month, President Trump and his billionaire “efficiency” advisor Elon Musk framed new tariffs on foreign trading partners as a simple matter of fairness.“I said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do: reciprocal. Whatever you charge, I’m charging,’” Trump said of a conversation he’d had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “I’m doing that with every country.”“It seems fair,”...

When President Trump threatened tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China in January, saying those countries needed to do more to stop the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States, Canadian and Mexican officials raced to Washington, bearing charts and videos detailing their efforts to toughen their borders. Canada created a “fentanyl czar” and committed fresh resources to combating organized crime, while Mexico dispatched troops to the border and delivered cartel operatives into U.S. custody. As a result, Mr. Trump paused tariffs on America’s North American neighbors for 30 days. China never made these kinds of overtures and, in...

According to MSNBC's Joy Reid and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), if you're someone who wants to see the economy reopen and get back to work, you must be some sort of Confederate racist. "Black people are being left in a situation where they're more vulnerable by default: less health care, jobs that are hourly, jobs where you're closer to people, stuck working near to each other," Reid said. "When you hear Donald Trump talking in this sort of faux-Confederate language about these lockdown orders – which are meant to save lives – and you see people with these...

France's far-right leader Jordan Bardella Friday said he had cancelled his speech at a right-wing meeting in Washington after a "gesture alluding to Nazi ideology" by conservative firebrand Steve Bannon. The president of France's National Rally party, who is in the US capital, said he was not present when Bannon, one of the masterminds behind Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, made a gesture that has been described as a Nazi salute on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

this is a fight most Americans didn’t want—and it’s over a wall most Americans don’t want, either. Americans are largely pro-immigration; three-quarters of us believe that immigration is a good thing. And two out of three Americans think that immigration should either stay at its current level, or increase. More importantly, one survey found that more than half of Americans don’t want a new wall, or any broad security barrier at the border. In another survey, 40% of Americans polled chose the president backing down and accepting the $1.6 billion Democrats have already offered for border security as the most...

President Donald Trump loves to take a phrase and drain it of all meaning. In his first term, he transformed the term "fake news" from describing a specific problem with a type of misinformation into an attack on any journalist he didn't like or a piece of journalism that made him look bad. Now he's doing the same to the word "lawfare," and the stakes are even higher — including, potentially, the guardrails of our democracy. Coined in 2001, "lawfare" refers to the use of courts and other legal systems to damage or delegitimize a political opponent. After Trump left...

Blocking reporters from covering news events at the Oval Office. Ousting journalists from their working spaces in the Pentagon. Investigating public media companies that are often the targets of conservative attacks. In the three weeks since he returned to the White House, President Donald Trump and his administration have moved beyond his usual anti-news media rhetoric to take a variety of actions that have limited some outlets’ access while hitting others with lawsuits and directives that critics say are naked attempts to bend news coverage to his will. “I don’t know if Trump himself has a ‘game plan’ per se,...

BRUSSELS — Dozens of American students at a U.S. military installation in Germany walked out of their middle school on Tuesday as part of protests aimed at an official visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, underscoring the scope of disillusionment with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.The students attend Patch Middle School in Stuttgart, Germany, and peacefully walked out of class for nearly an hour, according to three people familiar with the matter and a letter sent to parents by a school administrator. Separately, a small group of adults dressed in civilian clothing — likely...

In the recent frenzy of commentary seeking to interpret U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s increasingly adamant comments about territorial expansion to Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, too much of the discussion has focused on matters of secondary importance. These range from assessing whether Trump is merely engaging in a game of showmanship or distraction, to deciphering how those regions’ inhabitants feel about ceding territorial control to the United States, to determining how much it would cost to purchase their acquiescence. From a policy perspective, though, more fundamental matters have gone surprisingly unaddressed, beginning with the question of whether any of...

President Donald Trump's sweeping executive orders have drawn comparisons to Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint aimed at reshaping the federal government under a Republican administration. Newsweek examines the similarities. Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email. Why It Matters Project 2025, a 900-page document spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, set out plans to expand executive authority, replace civil servants with ideologically aligned appointees, limit abortion rights and impose much tougher restrictions on immigration. Democrats have painted the initiative as a road map for Trump's second term in an attempt to portray him as ideologically extreme. Trump...