Free Republic

Russia’s top security agency arrested an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal on espionage charges, the first time a U.S. correspondent was put behind bars on spying accusations since the Cold War. The newspaper denied the allegations against Evan Gershkovich. The Federal Security Service said Thursday that Gershkovich was detained in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg while allegedly trying to obtain classified information. The FSB, which is the top successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, alleged that Gershkovich “was acting on the U.S. orders to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian...

Seventy-eight percent of Americans doubt their children will be better off in President Joe Biden’s America, according to a WSJ-NORC poll released Friday. Seventy-eight percent represents the highest share of Americans who are pessimistic since the survey began asking the question in the 1990s. According to the pollster, the doubt about Biden’s America is a result of a couple of factors, including the interchange between education and the employment market: One reason Americans worry the next generation will fall behind is that they are losing faith in the power of a college education to move them up the economic ladder....

Ron DeSantis Is Definitely Running He presents himself as a serious, forward-leaning, pro-business, antiwoke conservative Republican. By Peggy Noonan The first GOP presidential debate is five months away, in August. Primaries begin about six months after. This thing is on. Some observations on Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor is definitely running. Every sign is there: donors, a growing and increasingly professional organization, a book that is part memoir, part platform and debuted this week at No. 1 on the New York Times list. A few days ago he gave a big, packed-house speech at the Reagan Library. He’s come off...

The oldest living former U.S. senator turns 100 Thursday. James L. Buckley is among the few in American history who have served in the upper echelons of all three branches of our government. Jim Buckley served as a lieutenant in the Navy during the final years of the Pacific war. After the war, he attended Yale Law School and became an attorney. In 1970 Mr. Buckley won a historic third-party victory as the Conservative Party’s Senate nominee in New York. Serving as a U.S. senator until 1977, Mr. Buckley was an articulate and cordial agent of change and an advocate...

While moderate, abortion-friendly Larry Hogan has decided to sacrifice his pretend presidential ambitions to try and defeat Donald Trump, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a quasi-clone of Hogan, isn’t ready to stand down. In a splashy Wall Street Journal article out on Sunday, the newly re-elected governor of the Granite State lays out his case for why a moderate, pro-choice candidate would be the best chance Republicans have at taking back the White House in 2024. After I clean up the coffee I spit on the keyboard, it’s worth a discussion for discussion’s sake. You don’t need to go much...

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dug in this weekend for what is expected to be a bitter and personal race between the two for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Mr. Trump revved up supporters Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington—an event Mr. DeSantis skipped—while the governor appeared before Republican groups in Texas and gave a speech Sunday afternoon at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. The two will then descend on Iowa, which holds the first GOP nominating contest. Mr. Trump has already launched his campaign; Mr. DeSantis, the front-runner among the...

This week is the Ukraine war’s first anniversary, but it feels like 10 years, not one. Ukraine “fatigue” is understandable. But let’s try to put the sensation of war fatigue in context. Vietnam came to be known in the 1960s as the television war, shown on the TV news every night. News programs then lasted a half-hour, with Vietnam usually just a segment. Still, the unsettling daily footage eroded public support for the war. Today, with all media on all the time, we are saturated with Ukraine’s war, as we are with mass murders, weather disasters or a train derailment....

Israel was behind Sunday morning's drone strike on an Iranian munitions facility according to the Wall Street Journal. The Jerusalem Post on Monday reported the attack was a 'phenomenal success.' The attack follows an unannounced visit by CIA Director William Burns to Israel last week. Israel was behind Sunday morning's drone strike on an Iranian munitions facility; the Wall Street Journal has reported, citing American officials. The strike, which Iran says it thwarted, came after the US and Israel held a series of meetings and military exercises. One explosives-laden drone was shot down by an Iranian air defense system while...

He’s a bad example to the young, an embarrassment to the old, an insult to the institution and America. By Peggy Noonan

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) leads former President Trump by 14 points in a hypothetical 2024 GOP primary match-up, according to a new poll. The Wall Street Journal survey released on Wednesday found that DeSantis leads Trump among likely Republican voters, 52 percent to 38 percent. DeSantis also has an advantage in his approval rating, with 84 percent of Republicans surveyed having a favorable view of him. By comparison, 71 percent said they have a favorable view of Trump. DeSantis’s name recognition also appears strong, as only about 10 percent of likely GOP primary voters said they did not know...

When Covid-19 first erupted in 2020, the U.S. struggled to balance the trade-off between lives and livelihoods. Infections and deaths soared while lockdowns devastated economic output and sparked demonstrations across the country. China, by contrast, was a model of authoritarian efficiency. Mass testing, lockdowns and closed borders suppressed outbreaks. This allowed most Chinese to live normal lives without fear of infection, sustaining broad support for “zero Covid” (as best as outsiders could tell). The ruling Chinese Communist Party held out these divergent responses as proof of its superior governance model. The U.S. had lost its historical “capacity for self-rectification,” one...

We’re still waiting for the final results of the 2022 election. But it’s clear that Democrats decisively beat both expectations and the elections’s “fundamentals”—the incumbent party’s usual midterm losses, President Biden’s low approval rating, high inflation, voter negativity on the economy and the state of the country. Republicans look set to take back the House but only by a modest margin. And the Senate will remain in Democratic hands, albeit narrowly. The Democrats’ relatively good night is attributable, above all, to their secret weapon: Donald Trump. Mr. Trump’s ability to push Republican voters into picking bad, frequently incompetent candidates with...

After Tuesday’s elections, entities owned and managed by Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have lined up against President Donald J. Trump. There is now a “coordinated effort” across the New York Post, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal against Trump. The Post is running columns by longtime Trump hater John Podhoretz and gun grabber Piers Morgan bashing the 45th President. Podhoretz’s piece also lashes out at Blake Masters as an “election-denier,” and ludicrously asserts that we shouldn’t support candidates Mitch McConnell doesn’t like. Morgan, meanwhile, is urging Republicans to “dump Trump.” Unfortunately for him, Americans conservatives don’t tend...

With Conservatives point finger at Trump after GOP’s underwhelming election results: 'He's never been weaker' Many conservatives say Tuesday's election results show it's 'time to move on' from Trump. (Fox News'', November 9, 2022), as well as the Wall Street Journal - what do Freepers think?

A number of election fraud deniers, including the Editors of The Wall Street Journal, have been committing serial cognitive dissonance. In a series of editorials, the Journal's Editors have, on the one hand, claimed there is "no evidence" of massive voter fraud and that everyone questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election should be quiet and stop indulging in the "big lie". On the other hand, however, they have admitted that there were numerous irregularities that need to be addressed, in particular the fact that in State after State, including all the crucial swing States, the rules were changed at...

...Mr. Mueller resolutely set about to change the “culture” of the FBI. That’s the word he used. He was going to make the bureau into an intelligence agency, or in his repeated terminology, an “intelligence driven” organization. Unintended consequences followed. The organization I had served for 33 years would undergo a cultural change in subsequent years, culminating in the ugly disaster of Crossfire Hurricane, the fruitless but disruptive investigation of the Trump campaign and Russia. Mr. Mueller had worked with FBI special agents in Boston and San Francisco, but he didn’t know the FBI’s culture or how it functioned. He...

The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong. Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They...

Democrats are entering the homestretch before November’s election in better shape than earlier this year, boosted by gains among independent voters, improved views of President Biden and higher voting enthusiasm among abortion-rights supporters, a Wall Street Journal poll shows.

Stocks took their worst beating in months Friday, with the Dow industrials shedding more than 1,000 points and notching their worst day since May. The S&P 500 closed 3.4% lower The Dow industrials dropped about 1,008 points, or 3% The Nasdaq Composite dropped 3.9% All 11 of the S&P 500's sectors finished in negative territory. Only 5 components in the benchmark index closed higher. The major averages each posted roughly 4% losses for the week.

As many as 80,000 Russian troops have been wounded or killed in less than six months of fighting in Ukraine, the Pentagon said Monday, the first time the U.S. military announced its estimates of the toll of the invasion on Russia. According to U.S. estimates, Russia has suffered 70,000 to 80,000 casualties, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters at a press briefing Monday. In the days leading up to Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, Western officials estimated that Russia had staged roughly 150,000 troops near Ukraine’s border.