Free Republic

South Africa, alas, is not our friend. Despite decades of financial and moral support from the United States, South Africa is drifting into alignment with our rivals for global supremacy. Daniel Greenfield reports for Front Page Magazine:In November 2022, Climate Envoy John Kerry announced a giveaway of $1 billion in foreign aid to South Africa. The failed racist state which regularly suffers blackouts from its socialist power system was being offered billions to subsidize electric cars and green energy.Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed that “President Ramaphosa and the South African Government have created a bold plan identifying a clear strategy...

By any standard, the treatment of January 6 defendants has been a disgrace to the Department of Justice, the DC federal bench, and the Constitution. Scores of people have been held in inhumane conditions in the DC Gulag, denied their constitutional right to speedy trial, and denied access to exculpatory evidence. The blanket media coverage excoriating them as “violent insurrectionists” has prevented these constitutional outrages from becoming a national scandal. But there is a chance, a small chance, that the release of CCTV Capitol video by Speaker McCarthy may change the national consensus (other than in conservative media) that there...

I know, I know; National Review is still the outfit that published the infamous “Against Trump” issue as a last ditch effort to foil the successful 2016 candidacy that led to four years of peace, prosperity, low inflation, and disproportionate gains for the lower end of the income scale under President Trump. But still, it comes as a bit of a shock that the publication I must credit for opening my eyes to the virtues of conservativism seems to be throwing in with Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and the rest of the J6 kangaroo court crowd that censored...

I will always be grateful for the presidency of Donald Trump and, if he is the GOP nominee for president in 2024, I will support him. But I am very disturbed that yesterday, at an airport rally in Pennsylvania, he attacked Ron DeSantis...with one of his derisive nicknames, except that this one doesn’t even make any sense: Trump mocks DeSantis as "Ron DeSanctimonious" at a rally tonight in Pennsylvania. pic.twitter.com/efTl2vNQRB — The Bias (@thebias_news) November 6, 2022President Reagan of blessed memory left us with a very useful 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not attack another Republican."In today’s political environment, with the...

This winter may see Europeans freezing to death, unable to heat their homes as natural gas supplies dwindle. Unemployment and bankruptcies will soar, as companies find themselves unable to cover their costs due to high energy prices. Germany’s vaunted chemical industry, heavily dependent on natural gas feedstock, is likely to wither on the vine. An economic and social disaster reminiscent of the 1930s is possible. The word “deindustrialization” is becoming real.And yet, as Bloomberg reports:Beneath the windmill-dotted marshlands of the Netherlands lies Europe’s largest natural gas reserve. The sprawling Groningen field has enough untapped capacity to replace, as soon as...

Conservatives rarely get opportunities to gloat as delicious as the rapid demise of the streaming service CNN+, reportedly the brainchild of Jeff Zucker, the now ex-head of CNN, the man who dragged the cable news pioneer far to the left. The humiliation stains not just Zucker and CNN, but also Chris Wallace, who left Fox News on a high horse, taking aim at Tucker Carlson and the prime-time opinion hosts at the cable news leader. Already shamed by the fact that Fox News Sunday ratings went up after he left, Wallace now has to contend with savage mockery by the...

Appearing on Media Buzz with Howie Kurtz on Fox News to discuss Elon Musk’s refusal to move forward with his acquisition of Twitter, Fox Business Network correspondent Charles Gasparino mentioned the f-word: fraud. Stating that if Musk’s contention is correct, that Twitter has been lying about the prevalence of bots in its traffic since its IPO in 2013, that would constitute securities fraud, and could land Jack Dorsey and other executives at Twitter in prison. On the other hand, Musk could face incarceration if he loses his case now that Twitter has hired a legal team to attempt to force...

We are in a very dangerous moment, as Democrat politicians are looking at the conflict in Ukraine for political salvation. This is no way to conduct brinksmanship with a nuclear power. We are in a very dangerous moment, as Democrat politicians are looking at the conflict in Ukraine for political salvation. In the face of disastrous polling on Biden’s presidency and the direction of the country under Democrats, there is one shining issue qwhere they think they see an opportunity. Via Politico’s Playbook: — The latest WaPo/ABC News poll on the U.S. response to Russia’s war in Ukraine has some...

There is a certain symmetry to the notion that the spokesmouth for the failing Biden administration reportedly is being assiduously courted by the two failing cable news networks, CNN and MSNBC, both of which have endured near-catastrophic ratings declines in the era of Biden. More Biden cowbell...yeah, that's the ticket.A scoop report by Dylan Byers, formerly of NBC and now the founding partner at media website Puck, gushes over Psaki and the reported talks she or her agent are having with the two networks. Earlier this month:CNN interim co-president Amy Entelis and CNN+ programming lead Rebecca Kutler were in Washington...

The Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin on Tuesday that sounds precisely like a prelude to a totalitarian crackdown on political dissent from the preferred narratives of the Biden regime and the Deep State. Read the opening of the summary:The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in...

After I wrote my Kamala Harris shopping-spree piece here, deriding Harris's rude refusal to speak French to the locals at a fancy cookware shop in Paris, AT editor Thomas Lifson pointed out something important: Kamala Harris actually ought to be able to speak French. Here's how she did: Turns out she was educated during her four high school years in Montreal, Canada, where her mother worked as a cancer researcher during the late 1970s, early 1980s. Montreal is Canada's top French-speaking city. In 1977, approximately just when she arrived, a law was passed in Quebec requiring the use of the...

With Democrats quaking in their boots over the plunging public support for Joe Biden and the political party that sold him as a moderate and as physically and mentally capable of doing the job, the White House messaging team and their media supporters face an enormous challenge. And they are bungling it as badly as the rest of the administration is bungling economic policy, diplomacy, and national security. The gist of the messaging lately is: 1. Things are really going well; don’t believe your lying eyes or empty pocketbook. 2. It’s your fault. 3. All this suffering is in a...

Expect all hell to break loose within the Democrat party, with powerful key factions at each others’ throats. Voters in multiple states repudiated the radical wing of the Democrat party that had seized control of the party’s agenda. Republicans swept the statewide offices in Virginia, a state that had recently tantalized Democrat hopes of national dominance by swinging from red to purple to blue. Even if Phil Murphy ends up winning the governorship of New Jersey as troves of mail-in ballots are added to the totals when counting resumes in the morning (a story replicating what happened in some swing...

Tucker Carlson is the left’s “current Bogeyman No. 2, after Donald Trump”. Tucker Carlson is the left’s “current Bogeyman No. 2, after Donald Trump,” observes J. Peder Zane in a commentary at Real Clear Politics, and I think he is right. Night after night, Carlson goes in depth uncovering hypocrisies, lies, and outrages being perpetrated by the powerful and connected elites that run the country and its media. So, as with Trump, powerful members of the media are willing to break the old rules of journalism to take him down. The object of Zane’s critique is Ben Smith, formerly the...

Thanks to a series of leaks from the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer, we know there is more than enough evidence to appoint a special counsel, or at least convene a grand jury to investigate bribery, tax fraud, and probably several other categories of crime involving the Biden Crime Family. Three recent articles by highly respected reporters Miranda Devine (who has a book on the subject about to come out and whose work informs the other two writers), Byron York, and Emily Jashinsky present evidence typed in Hunter’s own hand of the schemes whereby Hunter acted as...

I confess that like most Americans, I had no interest in watching Joe Biden's non–State of the Union address to a mostly empty House chamber hosting a joint session of Congress. That's why I missed a golden moment during the commentary afterward on Fox News Channel, one that surely stands as what the progressives like to call a "Profile in Courage." You may have noticed that in recent weeks, FNC has been trying out various personalities from its stable of commentators as hosts of Fox News Primetime that airs in the 7 P.M. Eastern timeslot, the lead-in to Tucker Carlson's...

The relentless campaign to demonize supporters of President Trump entered the realm of self-parody this past week, with warnings that the U.S. Capitol and democracy itself were in danger on March 4 because QAnon saw that date as the real inauguration day. It was all balderdash, a PsyOp aimed at delegitimizing support for Trump or questioning the integrity of the presidential election. Even the Washington Post admitted there was nothing to it, calling the reports a "mirage." At the Capitol, a March 4 threat from militant Trump supporters proves a mirage https://t.co/pHUgunuHEN — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 4, 2021...

We received a lengthy letter from Dominion's defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement: American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively “Dominion”) of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories...

Kenneth R. Timmerman today properly reminds us that it is leaders, not institutions, that have betrayed us. James S. Corum reminds us today of the deep bench that resides in the party below the level of top congressional leaders — and the formidable power of state governments and political organizations under GOP control. Discarding these tools amounts to unilateral disarmament just as we need them in the critical elections ahead. Leaders can be influenced and discarded, but institutions take a long time to build. We have state-level redistricting in immediate prospect and a midterm election in less than 22 months....

A sickening feeling is spreading among some of the smarter Democrats that they have royally screwed up their election strategy. The plan that seemed so smart, once they realized that COVID was a golden opportunity to distract from President Trump's massive foreign policy and economic triumphs, is backfiring. The plan, in short, was to terrorize Americans with fear porn over the purported dangers of COVID (despite it being 99%+ survivable for all but those over 70, and despite huge progress in therapeutics driving the survival rate even higher), while emphasizing mail-in voting for their base. Republicans, they thought, could be...