Free Republic

Unicorns are supposed to be rare and mythical. But at Saturday’s No Kings protests I saw the largest outbreak in America outside a Lisa Frank store. They were everywhere, but I was surprised to see almost a dozen of them down in New Braunfels, Texas. As at many of the No Kings protests across the country, attendees embraced the example set by the taunting frog outside Portland’s ICE facility and came in outfits that you could find threatening in only the most silly and specific of contexts: Cookie Monster was there.But you don’t pass up a chance to meet a...

President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court, for the first time, to clear the way for him to use National Guard troops to support the president’s immigration enforcement and mass deportation drive.Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an emergency appeal with the high court Friday, seeking to lift lower-court rulings that are currently preventing Trump from deploying National Guard troops he pressed into federal service to aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel in Illinois.Sauer argued that a temporary restraining order issued by a federal district judge in Illinois “improperly impinges on the President’s authority and needlessly endangers federal personnel...

The Center Square Voters' Voice Poll, conducted by Noble Predictive Insights, surveyed 2,565 registered voters from Oct. 2-6, 2025, via opt-in online panel and text-to-web cell phone messages. The poll found that 15% of registered voters cited price increases and inflation as their top issues, followed by government corruption (13%), the economy/jobs (11%), health care (9%), illegal immigration (8%), and crime/violence (7%). "Name anything that's getting less expensive," pollster Mike Noble told The Center Square. "Literally everything is going up from insurance premiums to you name it. More and more is coming out of pocket." Noble said polls across the...

Critics cringed hard over what was slammed as a “creepy” exchange between President Donald Trump and a self-described recovering “Trump Derangement Syndrome” sufferer during a White House roundtable on Trump’s favorite boogeyman, Antifa, on Wednesday. Brandi Kruse, a conservative content creator from Seattle, told Trump she was “living proof that you can recover” from so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which isn’t an official medical diagnosis but just a partisan insult that Trump fans often derogatorily hurl at critics of the president.

Over the past six months, Greene has made waves in Washington for publicly breaking with Trump and the GOP on a number of high-profile issues and lobbing some pointed attacks at her fellow Republicans in the process. She was critical of the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran, referred to the situation in Gaza as a “genocide,” signed her name to an effort to force a House vote to require the Justice Department to release its files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case and, most recently, sided with Democrats in calling for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies amid the...

Next year, the United States will observe the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. To begin a year of celebration, Donald Trump appeared at the Iowa State Fairground in early July. “We’ve saved our country,” he proclaimed to the crowd of supporters. Trump then announced a “giant patriotic festival” on the National Mall for next summer, and suggested an Ultimate Fighting Championship event could take place on White House grounds. UFC is one of the corporate sponsors of ­America250, the nonprofit organization that will be overseeing the country’s semiquincentennial celebration. Other sponsors represent different parts of Trump’s corporate coalition:...

The president in recent days is leaning even further into using the National Guard as a glorified police force, visiting the troops and allowing them to be armed. He’s suggested he’s eyeing Chicago and New York next for their next deployment. On Sunday, he needled Maryland Gov. Wes Moore for Baltimore’s notorious crime statistics, hinting he could send troops there as well. It's a sign that despite polling showing how unpopular Trump’s moves are in Washington, the president is playing to a national audience — and betting this is a battle he and the GOP can win. If his recent...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s social media account mimicking Donald Trump’s all-caps online posts is getting under the skin of prominent conservatives on the right. The reaction to Newsom’s pitch-perfect parody of Trump — including his wild rants, name-calling, and use of AI-generated images — is shining a light on the absurd behavior of the president of the United States, who has largely gotten a pass from his party for doing the same thing. “You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,” Fox News host Dana Perino said Monday of the potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender. “If I were his...

The Trump administration’s immigration policies are affecting workers and driving, in part, a decline in tourism, including international tourists, to Las Vegas, according to workers and the largest labor union in the state of Nevada. Visitors to Las Vegas overall dropped 11.3% in June 2025, compared to the same month last year. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, international visitors to one of the world’s largest tourist destinations dropped 13% in June. “A lot of departments are having a lot of layoffs,” said ​​Norma Torres, a housekeeper for eight years at Mandalay Bay and a member of...

Israel's military said it killed Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al Sharif in a strike on Gaza City on Sunday, accusing him of heading a Hamas cell. "Anas Al Sharif served as the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organization and was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops," the military said in a statement.

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to bow to a sanctions ultimatum expiring this Friday from U.S. President Donald Trump, and retains the goal of capturing four regions of Ukraine in their entirety, sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters.Trump has threatened to hit Russia with new sanctions and impose 100% tariffs on countries that buy its oil - of which the biggest are China and India - unless Putin agrees to a ceasefire in Russia's war in Ukraine.Putin's determination to keep going is prompted by his belief that Russia is winning and by scepticism that yet more...

Jimmy Kimmel took a break from taking a break for something he normally does at work: trolling President Donald Trump. Kimmel, who is on vacation from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” through Labor Day, posted a photo on Instagram showing himself and his family holding signs while attending a protest against the president. “Summer family vacation! #goodtrouble,” he wrote. “May every day be another wonderful secret.” That’s a reference to a birthday message Trump allegedly wrote in 2003 to his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein, who would later be convicted of sex crimes

The quintessential ice cream flavour is under threat, and many other dessert staples along with it, according to climate change researchers at the University of Costa Rica and Belgium's KU Leuven university. Increasing climate extremes are changing the habitats of wild vanilla species — primarily found in the tropical regions of Central America — and their mainly animal pollinators, the researchers say. This, in turn, is putting global production of vanilla at risk. In some regions, the plants may find more favourable conditions, but the insects that pollinate them may no longer find suitable habitats, according to the study published...

"I think President Trump was wrong. He went against the Constitution." Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, joined Chris Jansing on MSNBC Reports to discuss the legality of President Trump’s move to launch military strikes on Iran.

“No president should be allowed to unilaterally march this nation into something as consequential as war with erratic threats and no strategy,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a longtime Iran hawk, said in a statement.

An Iranian military leader on Tuesday vowed that Israel would soon see more attacks, warning of an imminent "punitive operation" and telling Tel Aviv and Jaffa residents to evacuate.

US stock futures fell Thursday as an Israeli attack on Iran shook global markets, leading oil prices to spike as the Israeli defense minister declared a state of emergency. Futures attached to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (YM=F) dropped 1.5%. S&P 500 futures (ES=F) plunged 1.6%, and those attached to the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 (NQ=F) sank 1.7%. On Thursday night, Israel conducted what it called a "preemptive strike" against Iran, citing fears over development of nuclear weapons in Tehran. Explosions erupted across the Iranian capital, reports said. Crude oil (CL=F) soared 8% as the strikes hit the third largest producer...

In June 2025, rumors abounded that Isra Hirsi, daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, had posted "death to the colonial empire" from Los Angeles to Rafah in Gaza on an Instagram story. Instagram stories are posts that disappear after 24 hours unless the accounts that post them highlight them on their profile page. For example, X user End Wokeness shared a screen capture of the supposed Instagram story alongside a photograph of Hirsi with her mother Omar (archived): As of this writing, the End Wokeness post had gained 10,000 and 660,000 views. The screen capture appeared...

The bromance between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump seems to be over. And now Musk is flirting with the idea of new party that could represent "the 80% in the middle," he posted on X. But who would join Musk-led party? And, can a third party actually succeed? Republicans, Democrats and Independents like Musk as much — or as little — as they like Trump. In April, before the feud between the president and the world’s richest person began, approval ratings for Trump and Musk were very similar, according to multiple polls. For instance, an April poll by the...

Space junk in Earth's orbit may increase because of the effects of the same heat-trapping gases that are polluting the air and warming the planet, according to a recent study. What's happening? A team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers determined that, with Earth's warming, space debris could accumulate enough to reduce the low Earth orbit area available for satellites by between a third and 82% by the year 2100, as the Associated Press detailed. The reason for this, per the study published in Nature Sustainability in March, is that climatic changes high above ground could reduce the effectiveness...