Free Republic

The Florida supreme court on Thursday upheld Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision last year to suspend progressive state attorney Monique Worrell, who claims she was unjustly fired for political reasons. The court’s justices voted 6-1 to keep the suspended attorney out of a job. Worrell, who is running for office in November to regain her Orlando-area position, argued that the DeSantis’s justification for suspending her was too vague and that the decision infringed on her prosecutorial discretion. Most members of the court, five of whom were appointed by DeSantis, disagreed. DeSantis suspended Worrell last August through an executive order on grounds...

The growth of space and cyber technologies worldwide is raising the likelihood that war — or at least its ripple effects — will crash onto America's doorstep.Why it matters: Centuries of national security strategy, relying on protection provided by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, are being rattled by these weapons that conquer vast distances.America has long had the edge in space and cyberspace, but China and other powers are closing the gap. A global surveillance showdown is underway.Hackers tied to the People's Liberation Army abscond with countless files detailing stateside arsenals. That theft propels its modernization.Other saboteurs stalk critical infrastructure,...

In the days and weeks leading up to January 6, the nation's highest-ranking military officer, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, was moving in lockstep with the political anxieties of top Democratic leaders. These Democrats grew anxious as over 140 House Republicans planned to contest the election results during the electoral college certification that day. Milley was then deeply engaged with a circle of confidants including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among others—all of whom shared a unified disdain...

What makes someone instinctively defend a monster? I don’t mean a legal defense, to which everyone is entitled. Nor do I mean exonerating someone after the facts are known. I’m talking about instinctively defending a monster purely out of some inexplicable affinity with him. That was the spectacle du jour on social media yesterday, when an official Israeli account posted a video of female soldiers as they were taken hostage. The Hamas terrorists taunt and salivate over the women, some of whom are bloodied from the attacks. There was nothing ambiguous about what the fatigue-clad barbarians meant or intended. Nevertheless,...

Rashida Tlaib (D-Khan Younis) was one of only 10 House members who refused to join the rest in condemning the atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7. Instead, apparently unmoved by those reports of child killings, mass rape, torture, mutilation, and murder, Tlaib has continued to associate with Hamas-linked supporters, including six of her main fundraisers who have close ties to Hamas. Tlaib is also part of a hidden Facebook group — the Palestinian-American Congress — that has praised the jihadists who kidnapped and killed hundreds of civilians, including at least 33 Americans, on October 7. The founder of...

Nearly eight years after a Muslim terrorist committed the largest massacre of gay people in American history, LGBTQ Islamic terror supporters blocked the Philadelphia gay pride parade.“Long live the Intifada,” members of Queers4Palestine chanted, referring to the Islamic terrorist campaign against the Jewish State, chanting that the gay pride parade was just like the KKK and the Israeli army. “From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever!”Protesting a gay pride parade in support of Hamas was a fitting prelude to the anniversary of the Islamic massacre at a gay nightclub which had its own Hamas connection.On June 12th,...

It is past time for the media and Democrats to drop the ruse of Biden’s “neutrality and admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November and so are conniving to silence them. The five criminal and civil prosecutions of Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them. But Joe Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Donald Trump. Biden was upset because any delay might...

Russia will work with any US president, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during his conversation with the heads of international news agencies on the sidelines of the 27th Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia will work with any US president elected by the American people. On Wednesday, President Putin holds a conversation with the heads of major international news agencies on the sidelines of the 27th Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), including with representatives of unfriendly countries. "For us, the end result, we believe, does not matter much. Russia will work with any...

Mossab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas co-founder, argues that Palestine’s existence depends on Israel's destruction and criticizes the Palestinian Authority's threat to Israel “Palestine depends on the destruction of Israel. If there is any definition of Palestine, it means the absence of Israel,” Mossab Hassan Yousef, otherwise known as the Green Prince, told Dr. Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs at The Jerusalem Post Annual Conference on Tuesday. Yousef is the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef. A Palestinian ex-terrorist, he defected to Israel in 1997 and worked as a spy for the Shin...

WASHINGTON—When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out. In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy...

In the lead up to the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) operation to destroy Hamas and secure the release of over 100 hostages – including 8 Americas – believed to be in and around Rafah, leaders around the world from Joe Biden to the collective leftist leaders of the European Union to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi panicked and ordered Israel to forestall its necessary means to end the war.Why did world leaders clamor for Israel to do nothing?What are they hiding?It turns out they are hiding a lot.Over one million Gazans were said to be sheltering in humanitarian safe areas...

The United States of America, a few years short of its 250th birthday, is at war. This is not a war with Russia or China. It is not an amorphous war on terror or a war on drugs. This is a war from within. It is an unconventional war. It is a systems-level attack on the foundations of this nation. It is an insidious, sophisticated attack built on decades of a sustained, strategic decay of our nation’s infrastructure: our legal system, our election system, our culture, our commonality, our civic intelligence, and our institutions. This is not an insurrection, a...

A Wall Street Journal poll in April found that approximately 30% of black men were either considering or planning to vote for Donald Trump in November, an eyebrow-raising jump from the 19% of the black male vote he garnered in the 2020 presidential election (up from 12% in 2016). The WSJ poll also reflected a rise in support for Trump among black women: 12% said they were considering or planning to vote for Trump in 2024, quadrupling the percentage who voted for him in 2016.This is disconcerting news for Democrats, who have long smugly felt that they held an unbreakable...

Last Thursday, in a courtroom in Manhattan that voted against him 88-12% in 2020, a jury, heavily persuaded by a judge, who contributed to Joe Biden in 2020, convicted President Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsification of business records.The case concerns payments that were made to former Trump attorney Michael Cohen in 2017. Cohen claimed the payments were reimbursement for a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with President Trump.Trump contended that he never had a sexual liaison with Daniels and that there was nothing illegal about his...

Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows, but there is nothing really strange about this at all: two jihad terrorist groups, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, have declared how pleased they are that students all over the United States are protesting, with so much youthful energy and arrogance, against Israel. And why not? If Israel fails to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, it will be a major victory for the forces of jihad worldwide. Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah will be the beneficiaries as much as Hamas and all the other jihad groups everywhere.Al-Qaeda started out by praising Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 jihad massacre...

Complex and critically important systems, ranging from the financial sector to elections, need to be able to have outcomes validated through audits. Holding accurate elections is a core principle under our Constitution and the law, as is auditability, though you might not have thought about it. The unique right of all Americans is to collectively exercise sovereignty over our government. The founders believed this was a divine right granted by our Creator. Since 1803, after the peculiar case of political skullduggery in Marbury v. Madison, it has been established law that a right without a remedy is not a right....

Former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict on all 34 counts in his hush-money trial appears to have a majority of independents and "double haters," those who have an unfavorable view of both Trump and President Joe Biden, feeling that the former president should end his bid for the White House, according to a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll -- a number that could have a ripple effect on the election in November. Among independents, 52% said they believed Trump should end his 2024 presidential campaign and within the even more specified group of "double haters," 67% said they felt the same...

NATO is flirting with war and extinction. France is now “officially” sending troops to Ukraine (they have been there for some time) and NATO countries are demanding strikes deep inside Russia. Meanwhile, the US has secretly made a “policy shift” that somewhat falls short of what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted but opens the door to deep strikes by the US on Russian territory.

It turns out House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had a quiet mentor who helped pull off the biggest accomplishment of his rocky seven months with the gavel — defying his right wing to pass a vital aid package for Israel and Ukraine. John Boehner — an establishment Republican who was speaker a decade ago chronologically, but an eon ago in the GOP's radical evolution — has become a surprising tutor to the novice, full-MAGA speaker.

The war with Hamas may take at least two more years to reach a satisfactory conclusion, Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli said on Sunday. During the gala event of The Jerusalem Post Annual Conference in New York, he spoke about the challenges faced by Israel in reducing Hamas’s military capabilities and the need for sustained efforts similar to those following Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. The security situation in Gaza Chikli told Post Editor-in-Chief Zvika Klein that the IDF’s progress weakened Hamas’s capabilities but more work is needed. “Military personnel, terrorists, many of their leaders, I don’t...