Free Republic

In a development that has rattled European capitals and raised alarms across NATO, the Pentagon has abruptly halted its working-level communications with Germany’s Defense Ministry, effectively severing one of the alliance’s most important military coordination channels. The revelation, reported by The Atlantic, comes from German Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, who described the sudden silence from Washington as both unprecedented and deeply worrying. According to Freuding, communications that once flowed freely “day and night” between U.S. and German military officials have now been cut off entirely. Messages go unanswered. Routine coordination has stopped. And Germany — a central pillar of Europe’s...

Since its founding in 1923, Hillel has become the most important Jewish campus organization in America and abroad, with a presence on more than 800 campuses across the world. Its programs and leadership are central to campus Jewish life and, looked at a certain way, reflect the broader failure of colleges to educate students these days. Hillel was established on the premise that Jews themselves need to take responsibility for Jewish prospering by participating in cultural events and social programs and by being intellectually challenged in in-depth classes and seminars. The organization also sought to respond to campus antisemitism and...

The conservative backlash against Nick Fuentes has yet to challenge the president who had him over for dinner.Last month, Tucker Carlson, the host of one of the country’s most popular podcasts, interviewed Nick Fuentes, a white-nationalist influencer, for more than two hours. The two men got along famously, and it was little wonder why. Carlson has become a fierce and obsessive critic of Israel; he has interviewed a Holocaust revisionist and said that “Christian Zionists” have “been seized by this brain virus.” Not everyone on the right was pleased. So in the aftermath of the Carlson-Fuentes conversation, Kevin Roberts, president...

Judge Mark L. Wolf, writing in The Atlantic, said he was stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law” by President Trump, who he accused of “targeting his adversaries.”A federal judge warned of an “existential threat to democracy” in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump. He accused Mr. Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”The judge, Mark L. Wolf, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that...

Barbara Wien posted flyers exposing White House adviser Stephen Miller’s address and calling for “NO NAZIS.” Drawing on Marc Caputo’s Axios story, Jessica Schwalb reports for the Washington Free Beacon (links omitted): On Sept. 11, a day after conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was killed by a politically motivated assassin, Barbara Wien, a retired 66-year-old American University professor, posted the flyers around Miller’s Arlington neighborhood showing a photo of the Trump adviser in a red circle with a cross through it. They also included a QR code that linked to the Instagram account of Arlington Neighbors United for Humanity, an activist...

In August, a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast said something that immediately caught his interest. The United States faces a fundamental rift “between heritage Americans and the new political class,” Auron MacIntyre, a columnist for Blaze Media, argued. “Heritage Americans—what are those?” Carlson asked. “You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” It is a specific set of people who embody an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and “have a tie to history and to the land.” MacIntyre...

Over the past five years, common good constitutionalism has taken tenuous root in elite legal academia. It’s now beginning to find its way into courtrooms. But scholars remain divided on its potential to reshape the legal landscape — and whose “common good” it seeks to advance. ***************************************************************** On March 31, 2020, when the United States was on Covid-19 lockdown, The Atlantic published “Beyond Originalism,” a cerebral essay by the Harvard Law professor C. Adrian C. Vermeule ’90. The essay urges legal conservatives to abandon originalism, the dominant school of constitutional interpretation for the conservative legal movement, which posits that the...

Stephen A. Smith on Sunday dismissed news about former Vice President Kamala Harris’s upcoming book, saying, “Who cares what she has to say?” Harris’s book on her 2024 presidential campaign, “107 Days,” will be released on Tuesday. “Well, there’s nothing to elaborate about,” the ESPN commentator said on ABC’s “This Week.” “Who cares what she has to say at this particular moment in time? I hope the book is successful.” Harris, who became the Democratic nominee after former President Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024, called her boss’s decision to run for reelection “reckless” in an...

Kamala Harris settled on picking Tim Walz to be her running mate last year because she felt Americans were too racist, antisemitic and homophobic to accept her preferred option – Pete Buttigieg. In an excerpt from the former vice president’s forthcoming book, “107 Days,” obtained by The Atlantic magazine, Harris describes Buttigieg as her “first choice” but later deemed the openly gay former transportation secretary to be “too big of a risk” on the ticket. Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner —if I were a straight white man,” Harris wrote. “But we were already asking a lot of America:...

Rather than condemning violence and calling for unity, the president of the United States accused his political opposition of being accessories to murder. It is possible that, in the history of America’s radicalization spiral, the horrifying, cold-blooded assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk will be recorded as only the second-most-dangerous event of September 10, 2025. If so, the more significant development will instead have been the speech that evening by President Donald Trump. If you did not listen to Trump’s remarks, which have received only light attention from the media, you might have missed the chilling message they contained. Trump...

And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win. “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were...

Former Vice President Kamala Harris says that Democrats made a mistake and it was "recklessness" to allow President Joe Biden to make the decision alone on running for reelection, saying the choice should not have been "left to an individual’s ego.” In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, "107 Days," published in The Atlantic Wednesday morning, Harris, in a remarkable turnaround, said "as loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country," and lamented her time in Biden’s administration, saying "getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost...

The Atlantic published this story yesterday about grade inflation at Harvard of all places. It opens with members of the faculty bursting into laughter when someone read out the average GPA of graduating students.During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average....

Democrat Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett threatened to bar The Atlantic from publishing a profile about her after a reporter for the outlet reached out to several of her congressional colleagues without her permission. The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reached out to dozens of Democrat congressmen, including members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, to give insight on Crockett for the lengthy profile, according to The Atlantic’s profile on the congresswoman. Four days before the profile’s publication, Crockett reportedly “expressed frustration” when she learned that Godfrey had spoken to her colleagues without informing her first and threatened to shut the interview...

In this first year of his second term, President Donald Trump has claimed broad powers to unilaterally restructure much of how the U.S. government functions. Some of these assertions have gone completely unchallenged. Others have been litigated, and although lower courts have been skeptical of many of these efforts, the Supreme Court has been more approving. Trump has taken as much advantage of his new powers as he plausibly can, prosecuting his political enemies, firing independent agency heads, and dismantling federal agencies almost at a whim. One salient question now is: When and if the Democrats return to power, how...

Talk about getting Jim Cramered. The Atlantic’s pompous loudmouth of a staff writer David Frum committed an unforced error by publicly showcasing how he literally knows nothing about the Trump Doctrine on military strategy or foreign policy. Frum attempted to make it seem like Iran had President Trump’s number in a June 21 screed, “The mullahs of Iran join the bet that Trump always chickens out.” Frum was responding to Trump’s retrospectively deceptive tactic to make it appear he was waiting two weeks before making a decision on whether the U.S. would conduct targeted strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “A...

"Esteemed Comrades of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs! Today we ask you to review your files for any communications you may have had with unreliable elements who are critical of our Party and our leader. If you have had contact with journalists, researchers, or other subversives, we ask you to report these interactions in full to the senior comrades responsible for the important work of ideological vigilance. Also, please also indicate if you have encountered any suspicious use of the following terms…" That’s not actually how Acting Undersecretary of State Darren Beattie communicated his request for information - snip =,...

Roman Africa The economic and political fault lines that separated Carthage and Numidia are the ones that separate Tunisia and Algeria—and the Romans drew them by Robert D. Kaplan From the parapets of Le Kef, on a rocky spur in northwestern Tunisia, one can see deep into the mountains of Algeria, whose border is a short distance away. A fort of some kind has existed here since Carthaginian times, 2,500 years ago, and the ocher ruins of ancient cities are all around. Dominating the view to the southwest is Jugurtha's Table, a massive mesa atop which the Numidian King Jugurtha...

Give The Atlantic high marks for chutzpah, along with several thousand demerits for integrity. At a time when the rest of the Protection Racket Media struggles to explain their propagandizing for the Bidens over the last several years, only The Atlantic has the courage to say, You saps got what you deserved if you couldn't figure it out yourselves.

American farmers are pleading for exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Republican members of Congress from farm states are working to deliver the relief farmers want. But farmers do not deserve special treatment and should not get it.