Free Republic

Feckless and clueless, Donald Trump is lost in Iran, unable to find a way out of the disastrous war he started. Once again, the US military is pummelling the country and, increasingly, its civilian infrastructure. As before, this unlawful bludgeoning strengthens the resistance of a hardline regime that cares little for its people’s suffering. How often have Trump and Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon’s wildling lord of bones, hailed a bogus victory? The president claimed this week to be “winning big”. No one believes him. Even as it counts the vast human and economic cost of his Persian folly, a watching...

The American flag: To some, it’s Old Glory. To others, it’s a MAGA hat on a stick. To fly or not to fly an American flag? That was never a question for Bruce Watson, who has put his national pride on display for years — and nudges neighbors in his small New England town to do the same. “I’m very proud of our flag,” the writer said. “It’s the symbol of ‘We, the People.’” But as the polarized nation marks its 250th birthday, Watson, 72, worries his Stars and Stripes may now need an asterisk. “If we do fly the...

At a Spanish port 50 miles northwest of Gibraltar, four Turkish Navy ships, including a brand-new amphibious assault ship that doubles as an aircraft carrier, were set to arrive Friday to take part in NATO military exercises. Heavy winds had delayed the Turkish vessels, but once they dock at the Spanish Navy port, they will form a fleet with Spanish ships, sail around the continent and rendezvous with French, German, Polish and Dutch vessels. They will then travel to Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, bringing tanks, landing craft, helicopters, drones and troops from southern Europe to northern Germany. About 10,000 troops...

Civilisational decline happens slowly at first, and then all at once. Britain has not been this weak and irrelevant on the global stage since the early 1500s; France and Germany are facing equally severe existential crises. It took Donald Trump to call our bluff, exposing our impotence and insignificance to a world we once dominated. British and European politicians cannot stop Trump from buying Greenland, or kidnapping Latin American tyrants, or taking out the Mullahs’ evil nuclear programme, or sanctioning Left-wing international judges, or doing whatever else he wants. Eighty-one years after the end of the Second World War, the...

The future of cars could be up in the air... A #flyingcar may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But in China, it's on the cusp of going into mass production. In a huge leap toward the age of personal air travel, #XPeng has opened the world's first flying car factory. CGTN Jen Copestake reports.

On Oct. 9, 2009, President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) renewed her call for a “national divorce” to divide the country along partisan lines on Monday — this time citing the fractured response to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and federal funding disputes in Congress. “There is nothing left to talk about with the left. They hate us,” Greene wrote on the social platform X. “To be honest, I want a peaceful national divorce.” “Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us,” she added.

Imagine that President Donald Trump actively wanted to encourage radical right-wing groups and “lone wolf” individuals to wage open violent warfare on anyone they deem a leftist anywhere in America. If Trump wanted to send that precise message, he could hardly do much better than the words he actually did deliver on Fox and Friends on Friday morning.“We have radicals on the right, as well—we have radicals on the left,” Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt said as Trump listened during a discussion about the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk. Earhardt continued: “How do we fix this country?”“I’ll tell you something that’s going to...

Washington, D.C. — Today—on President Trump’s 100th day in office—Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, released a new tracker detailing how President Trump is freezing at least $430 billion in federal funding that Congress has promised to communities across America. As President Trump marks 100 days in office, he, Elon Musk, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought are trampling over our nation’s laws and choking off critical investments that families, businesses, and local governments in every zip code are...

MILWAUKEE — When the Republicans put the final gavel to the wreckage of their convention in Cleveland eight years ago, they were in a state of nuclear meltdown.Yes, they had a nominee in reality television star Donald Trump. But the party itself was a collection of warring factions that agreed on little by way of principles, beyond their collective desire to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. Strategist David Urban, who helped organize the 2016 convention for Trump, recalls that the floor of Quicken Loans Arena felt like “enemy territory.” Tensions were thick between Trump’s campaign and the...

SACRAMENTO — The Republican Party will hold a presidential candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan library Wednesday. It’s a bad fit. The GOP’s modern idol is exactly the opposite of Reagan in personality and character. For upbeat Reagan, America was a “shining city on the hill.” For whining Donald Trump, it’s a waste bin for venom and lies. Reagan’s soaring rhetoric made people feel good about themselves. There was “always a bright dawn ahead” — “Morning in America.” Yes, maybe that was a tad naive and corny, but it brought a collective smile — and won over many Democrats.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Donald Trump of siccing supporters “known to be violent” on the judge in his case and “publicly intimidating’’ the jurist himself. The lefty New York Democrat made the assertions in a tweet late Tuesday that included a clip of Trump’s remarks at Mar-a-Lago after his arraignment earlier in the day, in which the ex-prez called Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan “a Trump-hating judge with the Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris.” AOC fired back on Twitter, “[Trump] is publicly intimidating a judge and pointing a spotlight on their family to...

A new poll found that a majority of Black voters approve of President Biden’s job performance and think he should run for reelection in 2024. HIT Strategies’ first BlackTrack survey since the 2022 midterms found that 59 percent of Black voters say Biden should run for President in 2024 while 74 percent approve of his job performance. These numbers come before Biden has announced his plans for 2024 and ahead of his second State of the Union address on Tuesday. Biden’s approval spans across generational lines, with 66 percent of Black voters 50 years and older approving of the president...

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland honored the five Capitol Police officers on Thursday who, he said, died after defending the legislature from the January 6 riot in 2021 — though none were killed during the violence. In a statement on the second anniversary of the Capitol riot, Garland appeared to link the riot to the deaths: “Two years ago, the United States Capitol was attacked as lawmakers met to affirm the results of a presidential election. Perpetrators attacked police officers, targeted and assaulted members of the media, and interfered with a fundamental element of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of...

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is certainly having a moment. In the wake of the failed “red wave” the media kept warning us about, DeSantis has been declared “the biggest winner of an otherwise dark election cycle for Republicans.” This week, Time magazine — responsible, you may recall, for the 2014 “transgender tipping point” — short-listed DeSantis for its 2022 person of the year award. This award isn’t necessarily granted to the best person in a given year: For example, past recipients include DeSantis’s current nemesis and then president-elect Donald Trump in 2016, and Adolf Hitler in 1938. But it’s another...

Mary Trump speculated Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that her uncle, former President Donald Trump, took “top secret classified documents” related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Host Joy Reid said, “Do you have some speculation as to what he wanted with this documents? Trump said, “I think that there are a couple of different reasons that can all be true at the same time. Clearly, he likes to hang on to things. He thinks they belong to him. It is sort of a way of establishing his street cred if you will, but Donald doesn’t do anything without...

The Biden administration introduced a new regulation Tuesday that would make it harder for employers to misclassify workers as “independent contractors” to avoid minimum wage and overtime laws. The proposal from the White House would replace an earlier, more business-friendly rule created by the Trump administration that set looser guidelines around who could be considered a contractor in the workplace. Labor Department officials said the previous administration’s rule increased the likelihood of workers being exploited. Employers often mislabel their workers as contractors in order to evade workplace laws or shift certain costs of employment onto workers. Gig companies like Uber...

Asenior member of the state Duma, Russia's parliament, said that any U.S. states that want to break away from the country and instead join the Russian Federation will be considered. The comments come only a week after Russia declared that four regions of Ukraine had become Russian territory, following referendums that were widely criticized by Ukrainian and Western officials as being sham. These were Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. The votes supported the regions changing from Ukrainian to Russian territory. State Duma deputy Alexander Tolmachev was responding to an online poll that...

The Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday tweeted — and then hours later deleted — a message that called on Democrats to “end the gift-giving to Ukraine” while featuring a fluttering Russian flag. The tweet also referred to “Ukraine-occupied territories,” appearing to legitimize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims to annex provinces based on a referendum that the U.S. and allies view as illegal. CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp on Saturday said the tweet did not clear the normal approval process because he was traveling for a conference in Australia. “Due to my travel into a distant time zone it was never...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday on “CBS Evening News” that President Donald Trump led a “seditious conspiracy against the government of the United States” to hold on to power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Referencing the hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 riot, anchor Norah O’Donnell asked, “What is your takeaway about the January 6 committee and Donald Trump’s actions?”