Free Republic

...Judge James Boasberg, who confronted the Trump administration over its 2025 deportation flights, was a nine-time host for a Chinese law exchange funded by a Chinese Communist Party-linked spy front. Six of those annual host credits came while Boasberg served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. One came in 2020, when he was its presiding judge. The court reviews some of the government’s most sensitive applications for foreign-intelligence surveillance and searches.... ...CUSEF, is part of Beijing’s United Front system, which combines political influence with intelligence operations. ...

The FBI has now released its eighth tranche of files on Thomas Matthew Crooks — the 20-year-old who came within an inch of killing Donald Trump in Butler, Penn. Like the earlier drops, this one is 181 pages of interview summaries, invoices, evidence logs, and internal communications from FBI Pittsburgh. It’s heavily redacted, and 95 pages are withheld outright. In June I went through the fifth tranche, and found that the redactions said more than the visible text. What survives the redactors is still stranger than most of what you’ve heard about this case on television. Here’s what stood out...

Last September 11, every Muslim congressmember and some radical allies teamed up on a congressional resolution demanding reparations to Muslims for 9/11. House Resolution 741, introduced a week after the anniversary of September 11, claimed that “in the aftermath of September 11, 2001” Muslims “experienced hate and were targeted by the government” and called for “various forms of relief to support those affected.” The money would have potentially gone to Islamic groups listed as terror co-conspirators. While the resolution did not specify which “community-based organizations” that “center the experiences and demands of Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern” and others would have...

Leftist activists in the UK are mourning the apparent suicide of scholar plagiarist Jason Arday. Arday was a fabulist whose rich inner world would put Walter Mitty to shame. Called out for his violations of academic ethics, it quickly became apparent to anyone outside of Cambridge that his outlandish claims, both in academics and his personal life, could not possibly be true.

...The taxpayer-funded housing program sets aside millions for families “targeted” by federal immigration enforcement—and says immigration status does not have to be disclosed. Even worse? L.A. County diverted $5 million originally approved for wildfire victims to pay these illegal aliens. ... L.A. County did not merely place wildfire victims and immigrant households inside the same newly created program. It took money already assembled specifically for wildfire rent relief—and redirected half of it to households claiming hardship from federal immigration enforcement. Following the Eaton and Palisades fires, county officials identified $10 million to establish a fund for tenants and landlords unable...

I live in New York, which is a very expensive city, so I have become somewhat desensitized to paying stupid amounts of money for normal things. I don’t regularly experience sticker shock because, to some extent, I live inside the sticker shock. But lately, even I have been losing the plot. A few months ago, I paid $35 for tortellini at a restaurant and received four pieces of tortellini. I recently saw supermarket strawberries listed for $15. The other day I was shopping for a trash can and discovered that a distressing percentage of them cost more than $100. And...

Shi Zhengli is recruiting researchers for “pathogen discovery/coronavirus” and “cross-species infection risk” work. NIH-backed scientists continued collaborating with her after COVID, including on research using materials she supplied from her new Chinese laboratory. Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist whose years of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology made her one of the most scrutinized scientists in the world after COVID-19, did not disappear. She moved on to another powerful Chinese state laboratory, where she is now helping train a new generation of coronavirus researchers. Chinese-language records reviewed for this report show Shi is currently affiliated with Guangzhou...

You've Gotten a Glimpse Into the Future of Mamdani's Commie Groceries. “Teenage grocery store shelf stockers have taken to carrying tasers in their pockets in case they have to defend themselves from customers at the Sun Fresh Linwood at 31st Street and Prospect Avenue in East Kansas City.” So reporte the Kansas City Star in September 2024. What makes the article interesting is that Star editors had championed the idea of a city-run grocery store. To their credit, they ate their crow in public, crow being about the only thing left to eat. Much has been made about the possibility—since...

Democrat nominees are creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky. They’re all together ooky.Democrats should be in the driver’s seat this fall. Mid-term elections usually go to the party out of power. The SAVE Act won’t be passed in time to stop fraud and corruption at the polls. The president is unpopular. The war is unpopular. The economy is as slow as Jessica Tarlov. And MAGA is almost as enthusiastic as Detroit Tigers fans. The problem for Democrats are the openly communist Democrats who primaried the ones who can pass for normal. The crop of Democrat nominees this year look like...

Executive summaryAutism is a huge problem in America and other countries. In my state, 5% of the kids are autistic and it keeps getting worse.Even though this is a crisis, we do not really want to know the true cause of autism.Why? Because if we used a time proximity analysis, it would reveal that the parental decision to follow their pediatrician’s advice and vaccinate their kids is the cause.Congress will not investigate because they will lean on large studies which use methods designed specifically not to find a signal to claim vaccines don’t cause autism. But those studies only prove...

Strange to relate, in last night’s speech to the nation on election chicanery, President Trump managed to both overwhelm and underwhelm public expectation. He touched on voting machine shenanigans, registration skullduggery, cyber-fuckery, labor union toolery, ballot fraud, and especially China meddling.Internal CIA / FBI docs at the time said that China’s policy around the 2020 US election was to “leverage all domestic and foreign elements” opposed to the President to prevent his re-election. The Intel bunch never sent that memo to the White House. They were too busy pushing fake Russia meddling, fake impeachment, and a fake Covid-19 pandemic. Then...

See that guy above? His name is Akos, and I’ve been seeing him around ever since I moved to Hungary. Big man with a big heart, loves Orban. There he was last night at the Fidesz Party’s election gathering, bathed in orange light (orange is the party color), waiting for the first election results to come in. (snip) The thing is, Magyar is not a figure of the political Left, which remains unpopular in Hungary. What he basically offered voters is “Orban, but without the corruption.” On the key issues that infuriate Brussels about Orban’s Hungary — his hardline on...

As we cross the one month mark of the Israeli-American war on Iran, a sufficient corpus of data is emerging to contemplate the kinetic dynamics of the conflict. This is a very strange war. It is not merely the fact that the roster of combatants and associated parties - Netanyahu, President Trump, Lindsay “Holden Bloodfeast” Graham - comprise the most polarizing figures in world politics today. As if to punctuate this fact, I fully anticipate angry comments berating me for using a sanitized and emotionally titrated word like “polarizing.” But we digress. Far more interesting than endless apoplexy over Israel...

Grandma didn’t make 3,000 donations. So who did? Here’s a graphic version of the breaking ActBlue scandal for easy consumption. The NYT Allegations: Foreign Donations and Misleading CongressActBlue is the engine behind nearly all Democratic small-dollar fundraising. It has processed billions of dollars in online donations. But a growing pile of evidence — from the New York Times, congressional investigators, James O’Keefe’s undercover reporters, and ActBlue’s own lawyers — now suggests the platform was a fundraising machine comprised of illegal foreign money and fake donors. Worse, internal memos show ActBlue’s leadership seemingly lied to Congress about how safe their vetting...

Trump supporters have known for years that the fake news lies. CNN, ABC, The New York Times, MSNBC—they manufacture narratives, anoint heroes, and demonize conservatives to demoralize and divide. That’s not news. The harder pill to swallow is that a parallel grift operates inside the right-wing tent, wearing MAGA jerseys while running the same playbook. For years, I’ve called these saboteurs the “Koch Libertarian RINOs” and warned my readers about them. They may call themselves different names and operate in different ways, but the result is always the same. They built empires on the back of MAGA, and then they...

https://larrys.substack.com/p/a-short-musical-bio Sometime in the late 1970s I abruptly became a history professor. Prior to that, I was a rocker who was "almost famous." Here is a little of my drumming bio, experiences, and influences.

Like most people in the western hemisphere, I woke on February 28 to an overwhelming rush of footage, reports, and rumors from the Middle East. The United States and Israel had launched a surprise attack on Iran overnight (after the markets closed for the weekend), and were pummeling the Iranians with massed air strikes. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei - a longtime fixture in regional politics - was dead, according to soon to be confirmed Israeli reports. A few hours later, Iran began retaliating with missile strikes on targets all around the region, including Israel, American bases, and the...

An attempt to OSINT the current state of affairsEnergy: The US is a net petroleum exporter. At $100+ Brent, US shale producers benefit. The US saves approximately $250 million per day compared to Asia and Europe on energy costs during the war. [CONFIRMED — Forbes, March 16]China hurt directly: China was purchasing ~90% of Iran’s sanctioned oil — ~1.7 million barrels/day at deeply discounted prices. That supply is now disrupted. China’s teapot refineries face acute shortages. A direct strategic blow to a US competitor.Taiwan deterrence signal: Chinese intelligence watched B-2s deliver GBU-57s against hardened targets successfully. The US capability to...

On March 6, 2026, Mark Levin described what may be an unprecedented moment in American history: a major political party actively undermining the military and the commander-in-chief during the onset of a military operation. With Operation Epic Fury targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, ballistic missile programs, and the entire Islamist regime, Levin and guest Lee Smith laid out a damning case — with quotes, polling data, and roughly 50 years of Iranians killing Americans — that the Democrats’ war is focused on political power, not American interests. Unprecedented Political Sabotage? The Democrat Party’s immediate response to Operation Epic Fury is unique:...

AUTHOR’S NOTE I’m a civilian data analyst. I am not a former military officer, intelligence analyst, or defense policy professional. I did something stupid for this article: I pirated a lot of military texts, mirrored multiple websites such as CSIS, loaded my workstation with every bit of data that I could think of, and threw it at AI agents. This was for my own education as much as it was yours. For military strategy and doctrine, I have relied on credentialed professional analysts: CSIS, ISW, CEPA, the Institute for Science and International Security, CENTCOM and IDF public statements, and Gen....