Free Republic

Polling commissioned by a pro-Palestinian group found that New York Democrat primary voters overwhelmingly back Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s pro-Palestine views. “The dam has broken. Zohran Mamdani’s ability to energize new voters with his bold platform for Palestinian rights should be a wake-up call,” Margaret DeReus, the executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, which commissioned Data for Progress to conduct the survey, said in a statement. Sixty-three percent of primary voters said in the poll that the Big Apple should “enforce the arrest warrant” against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The survey found that...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Mornings with Maria on the Fox Business Channel to tout the stimulating effect Trump's economic policies are having on business investment, saying "the tariff is bringing back manufacturing to the US and the tax reforms in the One Big, Beautiful Bill are encouraging businesses to invest more. By allowing businesses to fully deduct costs for improved facilities and machinery rather than requiring them to be amortized over a longer period efficiency and productivity can be implemented more quickly. The way that countries get rich is through long-term investments that improve productivity." "Another important step...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The UN’s highest court is handing down a historic opinion on climate change Wednesday, a decision that could set a legal benchmark for action around the globe to the climate crisis. After years of lobbying by vulnerable island nations who fear they could disappear under rising sea waters, the U.N. General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice in 2023 for an advisory opinion, a non-binding but important basis for international obligations. A panel of 15 judges was tasked with answering two questions. First, what are countries obliged to do under international law to protect...

Billionaire In-N-Out owner Lynsi Snyder stirred up a storm of online controversy over the weekend when she revealed that she planned to move her family out of California to Tennessee. The news comes as In-N-Out begins to expand heavily into the South, launching a new joint headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee, near Nashville — where Snyder will also now be based. Snyder revealed the coming move on a recent podcast appearance, saying, “There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here.” The clip, from a new episode of...

With polls showing him favored to win the election in November, New York City socialist Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani vowed to "revolutionize the way this city will be governed. Half-measures will be swept aside and replaced with true equality for all." "For generations rent-control has produced huge housing inequities," he pointed out. "Those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time were awarded windfall benefits. Those less fortunate have had to pay outrageous sums for inadequate living space. I will tear down this rotten system by abolishing private ownership of property. Right now the majority...

Democrat Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh laid out his vision on Sunday to freeze rent, rapidly raise the minimum wage and refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Fateh, who is currently a Minnesota state senator, posted a video to his X account calling to “protect” Minneapolis from a “hostile White House,” increase the minimum wage by $20 by 2028 and prohibit the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) from “interacting” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The mayoral candidate, who announced his candidacy in December, has a platform that strongly resembles Democrat New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s. “Protecting all...

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — After driving through a downpour to take her son to day camp, Darleen Reyes told camp administrators the rain would have kept her away but her son insisted on going. As she marked her son’s name present on a clipboard at the Boys & Girls Club camp, she laughed about braving a flash flood warning to get there. Before kissing his mother goodbye, Aiden Cazares, 8, explained to a reporter, “I wanted to see my friends and not just sit at home.” Then he ran off to play. Aiden’s one of 1.4 million children and...

Our education system feeds them a fantasy version of socialism that makes all things better, a trend that must stop if America is to survive. Once seen as a taboo word in American politics, socialism has experienced a notable resurgence, especially among young voters. Polls show that more than half of millennials and Gen Zers now view socialism favorably. Politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have transformed what was once a fringe ideology into a highly popular political movement. Even more troubling, they’ve achieved this not through real policy solutions but by promoting a utopian fantasy rooted...

The climate science establishment is fond of lecturing us about the dangers of rising temperatures. With the return of Donald Trump as US President, however, it is rising scrutiny, not the rising heat, that has them most alarmed. In May, President Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Gold Standard Science," requiring federally funded agencies to ensure their work is accountable, reproducible, and subject to open debate. It was unremarkable in tone, bordering on mundane. Yet the reaction was swift and bitter. The clause insisting that scientists consider dissenting views and protect employees from retaliation for expressing them cuts across...

Jonestown is seared into the American psyche as one the darkest tragedies of the modern era, where 918 people “drank the Kool Aid” and ended their lives under the command of cult leader Jim Jones. Located in the remote Guyanese jungle, the site where the army first discovered the mass of dead bodies of People’s Temple members in 1978 is now opening as a somewhat morbid tourist attraction. It is designed to pay somber tribute in the manner of Auschwitz and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The curious can pay $750 to visit the clearing where Jones’ religious cult, mostly...

When the world’s top climate diplomats gathered in Bonn earlier this year to prepare for COP29, one issue cut through the noise, not just the usual challenges of finance and emissions, but something more intangible and potentially more corrosive: the rise of targeted misinformation and disinformation in the climate space. In 2024, the World Economic Forum identified misinformation and disinformation as the world’s top short-term risk. Disinformation doesn’t just delay climate action; it destabilizes the institutions, policies, and coalitions needed to deliver it. Dr. Fredrik Bertley president and chief executive officer of COSI, the Center of Science and Industry (COSI)...

As a teenager in the late 1970s, Steve Richardson was sweeping and stocking shelves at a toy store on the edge of L.A.’s Skid Row when he noticed the first signs of a monumental change in the city. Day after day, workers, hired from the surrounding streets to unload trucks full of toys, would take the empty boxes and transform them into makeshift shelters where they would spend the night. “They were called cardboard condos,” said Richardson, a Skid Row leader now known as General Dogon. “They went on block after block.” At the same time, Los Angeles Times columnist...

Key Points: The Defense Department will buy $400 million of preferred stock in MP Materials. MP Materials owns the only operational rare earth mine in the U.S. at Mountain Pass, California. It will build a second magnet manufacturing facility in the U.S. with the support of the Pentagon. **** JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are providing $1 billion to help finance the manufacturing facility. MP Materials also expects to receive a $150 million loan from the Pentagon to expand its rare earth separation capabilities at Mountain Pass.

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Beat,” House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) responded to a question on if there’s room in the party for New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s (D) views on democratic socialism and Israel by saying that “the bigger the tent, the more likely it is that we can reach the greatest number of Americans.” Jeffries began by saying that Mamdani’s platform on affordability is “very provocative…I look forward to sitting down and talking to him about his plans to actually implement that platform, to deal with some of the challenges that the communities...

University of Houston professor David McNally proposed renaming his school to "George Floyd University" and abolishing tuition and grades at the Socialism 2025 conference Saturday. While wearing a keffiyeh, McNally spoke on a panel in Chicago about what fighting the state would look like in the "context of growing an insurgent mass movement."

It looks like a case of the bigger they are, the harder they fall: Konstantin Strukov, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen and once close to President Vladimir Putin, is now facing criminal charges and the threat of state asset seizure. His flagship company, the gold mining firm Uzhuralzoloto, is set to be nationalized by the Russian government amid a broader wave of corporate takeovers by the state. With an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion, Strukov comes 78th on Forbes' list of Russia’s richest people. In addition to his business ventures, he was also active in politics, having served as deputy...

He walks with a cane and is a bit hard of hearing. Yet Boris Chertok, 95, a former deputy chief designer in the Soviet bureau that put the first Sputnik satellite into orbit 50 years ago, still has strong opinions on the evolution of the country's space program. Chertok says the free-market changes instituted by President Boris Yeltsin after the Soviet Union fell apart were disastrous for Russian science. "We need to restore what we have lost over 15 years of destructive reforms," said Chertok, whose very name was once a state secret. "The market economy is incapable of fulfilling...

The buildup to race socialism has been decades in the making, and Mamdani could be the politician to make it mainstream. The far-left publication Canadian Dimension published a column in February that called for a wealth tax and explicitly linked it to race: “It’s no secret that extreme wealth in western democracies is overwhelmingly held by white people, and Canada is no exception.” There is no doubt that Mamdani is a charismatic figure, with a readily deployable smile and a soft millennial bearing that makes him appear rather harmless. It is an excellent shield for a man whose ideology strays...

Self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mamdani expressed "surprise and relief that the socialist takeover of the government of New York City was so easy. Lenin and Mao had to fight years of bloody warfare before they achieved complete control of their countries. Last week, the plurality of votes I got in a low-turnout primary election opened the way for a true socialist revolution in the most important city of America. Hitler had a similarly easy ascension to power when a plurality of voters enabled him to become Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Hitler used his victory for evil purposes. I will use...

The Founding Fathers who gathered in Philadelphia to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 picked a nice day to do their work. It was a Thursday, and the temperature at 6:00 a.m. was 68°F, going up to a warmish but still pleasant 76°F at 1:00 p.m., according to daily records kept by Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson. The planetary metabolism at the time was set more for such balmy days than it was for the increasingly suffocating summers we experience in the 21st century. It was in 1867 that scientists would first define the epoch that includes the late...