Free Republic

As stocks soared this week and oil prices dropped amid an apparent cooling of tensions between the United States and Iran, it may have left the impression that the energy shock that rattled the world would quickly fade, along with the risk of sending the global economy into recession.The optimism may have been short-lived. On Saturday, Iran’s military announced it would reimpose restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the critical waterway’s status into doubt.The uncertainty highlights that beneath that surface, a starkly different reality is unfolding. It is defined by disrupted supply lines and damaged infrastructure, sparking increased concern...

LONDON — Nigel Farage, who led the charge on Brexit, Britain’s push to quit the European Union, and more recently founded the anti-immigration Reform UK party, was euphoric when Donald Trump swept back into the White House. Farage had campaigned for Trump, visited him at his Mar-a-Lago estate and compared him, favorably, to Winston Churchill. ... Farage was an early supporter of Trump’s strikes on Iran, but as anger at the war — and at the president — grows among Britons, who will vote in local elections May 7, he is backtracking. Reform UK’s standing has dipped in recent weeks,...

Castro's (unregistered) agents-of-influence are frantically busy this week thanks to their (unregistered) accomplices in the Fake News Media. All claim an earth-shaking "transition" is underway in Cuba! Needless to add, according to these (unregistered) foreign agents, President Trump should promptly avail himself of this golden opportunity to embrace those harmless, innocent, free- health-care providers that U.S. policy has unjustly and vicariously “bullied” for ‘lo so many years. Could anything be more transparently facetious and idiotic? To quote the late Joan Rivers: “Can we talk?” In fact, what’s happening as Cuban “President” (dictator) Raul Castro “steps down” in favor of Cuban...

Goodfellow’s BedfellowsWho’s in Bed with the Washington PostBy Fedora Introduction I. A Radical Education: Boston University and Cambridge-Goddard II. Vietnam Roots: Indochina Resource Center A. Luce at International Voluntary Services B. Luce and Cornell’s Hanoi for Lunch Bunch C. Luce’s Tiger Cages and the Indochina Mobile Education Project D. Luce and Branfman: The COLIFAM Connection E. Luce, Branfman, Winter Soldier, and Project Air War F. The Indochina Resource Center: Branfman, Luce, and Goodfellow G. The IRC and the Indochina Peace Campaign: The Hayden-Fonda Link III. Post-Vietnam Transition: Campaign for a Democratic Foreign Policy and Coalition for a New Foreign and...

Apr 8, 2026 @shadihamid · Follow My new @washingtonpost column: Why do Muslims need to be like everyone else? A case against assimilation. DataRepublican (small r)@DataRepublican · Follow Hello Mr. Hasim,You've already reached levels of institutional validation that remain inaccessible to nearly all Americans: a professorship at Georgetown, a position on the Washington Post's editorial board.At that point, saying you still need to prove yourself is like Taylor Swift insisting no one listens to her music. If assimilation feels out of reach, it isn’t because the system has excluded you. By any reasonable measure, it has already brought you into...

Washington Post cartoonist Darrin Bell, who frequently portrayed Donald Trump as a sexual predator has just been charged with possessing child pornography. These are the degenerates who preach to us from on high. Authorities reported finding 134 videos (and later references to more images) with some images involving children under 12. Bell was arrested around January 15, 2025, after a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children led to a search of his home. Authorities reported finding 134 videos (and later references to more images) linked to an account he controlled. He faces two felony counts under...

Vice President JD Vance is projecting loyalty to Donald Trump as the president leads the United States into the type of war the Iraq veteran didn’t want — and as the new conflict complicates Vance’s political future. Vance allies have played down the impact the operation in Iran could have on his presidential ambitions, insisting that a mission involving the U.S. military only for a matter of weeks won’t stay in voters’ memories. People close to the vice president have also conceded to The Washington Post, however, that a months-long conflict will pose a problem for whoever is the next...

For around 15 years, many American leaders — including all three presidents in that period — believed that the country was too deeply entangled in trying to reorder the societies of the Middle East. They felt the more pressing challenges included rebuilding America’s industrial base and confronting the rise of China. Yet here America is, once again, fighting a war to reorder a society in the greater Middle East. And like in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, this war seems unlikely to turn out quite as its proponents may hope. Why does this keep happening? To understand the present, look at...

A classified report by the US National Intelligence Council concluded that the Iranian regime was unlikely to be toppled even by a large-scale assault, the Washington Post reports. Three people familiar with the report tell the newspaper that the assessment, completed around a week before Israel and the US launched their assault on the Islamic Republic, outlined small- and large-scale assaults as scenarios for potential succession. The report concluded that protocols would be followed if supreme leader Ali Khamenei were to be killed to ensure the regime’s survival, with it “unlikely” that Iran’s opposition would take control. The Post says...

President Donald Trump has spent months touting his planned White House ballroom, but this week the public gets its first chance to formally offer him their thoughts. The verdict: They don’t like it. Members of the public sent more than 35,000 comments about the project to the National Capital Planning Commission ahead of its Thursday hearing to review the ballroom, according to a Washington Post analysis of comments posted on the commission’s website. The “vast majority” of comments came from those who oppose the plan, commission staff said. The Post found that more than 97 percent of comments were critical...

In the wake of Iranian Supreme Leader Aylatollah Khamenei coming down with a killer headache after getting a U.S. warhead on his forehead, on Saturday, The Washington Post published one of their infamous glowing remembrances of Islamic terrorists. The paper fondly remembered the brutal Islamic dictator as a “avuncular figure” with an “easy smile” and love for “Persian poetry.” Readers might remember when The Post fluffed up the former leader of ISIS as an “austere religious scholar”; well, they're back at it again with Khamenei in their obituary titled: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86.” The...

For months, critics on the left have accused Jeff Bezos of nudging the Washington Post in a more conservative direction — citing the paper’s decision not to endorse Kamala Harris and Bezos’ remarks about emphasizing free-market principles on the opinion page. If so, someone forgot to tell the advice desk. This week, the Post made the editorial decision to republish a 2024 “Ask Sahaj” column in which a young South Asian woman wrote that she feels hurt not being seen as beautiful by white people, particularly white men. The letter-writer, who notes she wears a hijab, describes feeling invisible in...

The Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray spoke out Wednesday after massive layoffs recently rocked the outlet. "I'd say the reality is that the Post had been facing some decline for quite some time," Murray told Semafor media editor Max Tani at the Restoring Trust in Media Summit in Washington, D.C. "The data really demonstrated that." Murray added that the Post had been on a five-year trajectory of "losing revenues" and seeing subscriptions "wane." He said the outlet invested in editing resources and "some areas of coverage" during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to adjust to the "new level...

Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but grief. No election victories, no sway in Washington, just the hatred of the journalists he subsidizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Media power in the 21st century is about platforms, not publications. Bezos shouldn’t have needed Musk to teach...

Ellie in Space interviews Christian Davenport, author of Rocket Dreams. Moon vs Mars, SpaceX IPO & The China Question w/ Christian Davenport | 45:11 Ellie in Space | 217K subscribers | 4,809 views | February 16, 2026

The Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Will Lewis announced Saturday evening he would depart after just two years at the paper, a tenure marked by controversy and crisis.Lewis called his time "two years of transformation" in his resignation note, but it was defined by turbulence rather than a clear path, and it ended with brutal job cuts. The paper's chief financial officer, Jeff D'Onofrio, will serve as acting CEO. More than a third of the newsroom was laid off Wednesday after Lewis' promises of radical innovations failed to staunch several years of annual losses in the tens of millions...

It is not momentous events that are the most meme-worthy. Rather, it is moments when liberals show their true colors and embarrass themselves, often in relatively trivial ways, that set meme-creators to work. This week, along with the ongoing fiasco in Minnesota, we had severel such events. The Washington Post, hemorrhaging losses, laid off a large portion of its staff, causing its newly-unemployed reporters to demonstrate outside the building. They marched in defense of the moral principle that Jeff Bezos is obliged to support them forever, no matter how much money they lose. I wonder whether some of the newly-laid-off...

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was top of mind for The Washington Post ahead of Super Bowl LX on Sunday. Kaepernick was described in the story as Super Bowl LX’s "most relevant" figure despite the 49ers not making it and the subject of the story being out of football for nearly 10 years. "The game will be played in his former home stadium, in the place where his protest made him a national lightning rod and a global symbol," Adam Kilgore wrote of Kaepernick. "The social issues swirling around America’s largest sporting spectacle carry distinct echoes of what...

One day after the Washington Post laid off roughly a third of its newsroom, former staff and supporters gathered outside the paper’s Downtown D.C. headquarters to protest the cuts.Former transportation reporter Rachel Weiner, who spent 15 years at the Post, told the large crowd she was struggling with the loss of her job and what it meant for the community.“Yeah, I’m sad about it obviously,” she said. “It is really disappointing having worked to cover as much as possible in this region because it’s also important. The Post has just decided it doesn’t matter to them.”Weiner said this round of...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos didn’t really buy the Washington Post to keep democracy out of darkness or whatever, he bought it to build influence and decided that the Resistance branding was poison in the post-woke era of the second Trump administration. His staff doubled down. So he tried bringing in editors and people from conservative British papers and Washington Post staffers worked to sabotage them. The ongoing battle over the Washington Post between its actual owner, Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, who paid $250 million for it, and the staff, show that, at least when it...