Free Republic

No one can predict the future, of course, or if there will even be one. But all of us crystal ball gaze—if we live, it will be in today’s future. So, we make plans and contingencies based on our best guesses of what the short-term and long-term will bring. We do that individually, and we need to do it as a country. The re-election of Joe Biden in November, as improbable and horrifying as the thought is to right-thinking Americans, is far from impossible. All the polls tell us that, currently, Mr. Trump has the edge, but that the election...

The first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is just over a month away, and Donald Trump has agreed to all of Biden’s conditions, including no live audience, timed microphones, and only pro-Biden outlets and moderators. But now Trump has a condition of his own. And it's a justifiable one. “I’m gonna demand a drug test too, by the way,” Trump said Friday evening, during the Minnesota Republican Party’s Lincoln Reagan Dinner. “I am, no I really am. I don’t want him coming in like the State of the Union, he was high as a kite.”It has long been...

We've been covering Joe Biden's polling problems for months now. Aside from matchup polling, there have been multiple polls that have shown him losing support from key Democratic constituencies: young voters, Hispanic voters, and, of course, black voters. In fact, things have gotten so bad for Joe Biden with black voters that CNN is having a hard time wrapping their leftist brains around it. CNN data analyst Harry Enten, for example, couldn't hide his surprise at Trump's impressive gains among black voters compared to Biden. In what can only be described as the understatement of the year, Enten called the...

Earlier this month, the Biden administration floated a trial balloon, suggesting "senior officials across several federal U.S. agencies have discussed the practicality of different options to resettle Palestinians from Gaza who have immediate family members who are American citizens or permanent residents." No other Middle Eastern country is crazy enough to want large numbers of Gazans to enter their country. The history of Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria suggests that the refugees would look to overthrow the government or launch terrorist attacks against Israel from within their borders. This apparently isn't deterring Joe Biden. Perhaps it should. Pinhas Inbari,...

A Michigan sheriff is sounding the alarm on "burglary tourism" — a recent trend where international organized crime groups enter the U.S. to skillfully rob wealthy suburban homes. "We believe that there has to be some kind of training camp because they come so well-trained, so equipped, and so knowledgeable about how to move and how to attack a home," Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard on Wednesday told "FOX & Friends." "They do a lot of pre-op surveillance. They determine as best they can when someone won't be in a home. They go very quickly to the home, they break...

Germany's self-inflicted economic problems have been much in the news in the last couple of years. Having eschewed cheap fossil fuels for 'green' energy sources, the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe has fallen into recession, seen a slowdown in growth, a decline in exports, and a widening trade deficit. Of course, the country's move away from fossil fuels is not the only reason for its economic problems. Other factors include a global economic slowdown affecting its exports, the Ukraine war cutting off supplies of cheap gas, trade tensions, and domestic challenges such as a decline in investment and a shortage of...

... A man in his 60s is alleged to have thrown burning rags into the women’s shared bedroom of a boarding house in Buenos Aires early on 6 May. Neighbors say they were woken by the women’s screams as an inferno ripped through the building. The suspect, Justo Fernando Barrientos, is alleged to have fought with the women in an attempt to stop them escaping the flames, before fleeing to the roof where he attempted suicide, and was later arrested. Pamela Fabiana Cobas, 52, died almost immediately. Her partner, Mercedes Roxana Figueroa, also 52, suffered burns on more than 90%...

The Israeli government has been thrown into chaos as politicians in Benjamin Netanyahu's war cabinet threaten to resign. Pressure has continued to mount on the Israeli leader to find a postwar plan for Gaza even as the war shows no sign of ending. In the months following the devastating October 7 terrorist attack, Israeli politics has remained remarkably unified but that united front looks as though it is about to be shattered. On Saturday evening Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Netanyahu's war cabinet and his main rival for the top job, threatened to leave the government on June 8...

‘APRIL is the cruelest month,” poet T. S. Eliot famously declared. Joe Biden might beg to differ. June is shaping up as a potential nightmare for the 81-year-old president. His re-election, his legacy and son Hunter Biden’s freedom are all on the line over the course of a month-long gantlet. And he has only himself to blame. Biden’s surprising demand last week that Donald Trump debate him twice, with the first face-off in June, underscores his desperation to get his campaign back on track. His insistence on a televised showdown in a month already crammed with high-stakes events reveals that...

A Marine truck mechanic received a medal typically awarded to more senior service members for saving the Defense Department more than $140 million through work he began as a teenage lance corporal. Cpl. Gage Barbieri, now 21, received the Meritorious Service Medal on Friday from Col. Damon Burrows, commanding officer of 2nd Marine Division’s Headquarters Battalion. Barbieri is only the second Marine corporal to receive the Meritorious Service Medal since at least 2008, Burrows wrote on LinkedIn

Alice Stewart, a CNN political commentator who worked on several GOP presidential campaigns, died Saturday at age 58. The frequent “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” guest was found dead outdoors in the Bellevue neighborhood in northern Virginia, law enforcement officials told the news organization. They believe she suffered a medical emergency and no foul play is suspected.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump accepted the endorsement of the National Rifle Association at the NRA Leadership Forum in Dallas on Saturday afternoon. "It's a true honor to be here today to receive the endorsement of the proud American patriots at the NRA," Trump told the forum in a speech that aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax and the Newsmax2 streaming platform. "These are great patriots. These are great people, and we're going to do things like nobody can believe. "We're going to win this election at levels that nobody's ever seen before. Thank you very much...

Anti-Israel protesters clashed with NYPD officers at a raucous demonstration in Brooklyn on Saturday, leading to at least a dozen arrests. Video showed part of the angry mob, some 250 strong, pushing back as police tried to move them towards the sidewalk in Bay Ridge. Cops eventually tackled and arrested several protesters, video shows.

While the majority of new recruits report having someone in the family who served, military families are becoming increasingly reluctant to recommend service to their loved ones. Blue Star Families has been tracking active-duty families’ likelihood of recommending service to a young family member or someone in their network since 2016. Only 32% of families said they would recommend their sons and daughters to go into the military, down from 55% in 2016. On the other end of the spectrum, only 15% of families said they would not recommend service to their loved ones in 2016. That number more than...

Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) decision to appear this week at former President Trump’s hush money trial in Manhattan is sparking new blowback from some House Republicans, who are questioning why he would inject himself so prominently in a case involving an alleged affair with a porn star. These Republicans, who requested to speak anonymously to discuss the sensitive topic, are accusing Johnson — a devout Southern Baptist who built a career around the fight for Christian values and moral conservatism — of undermining the party’s family values image simply to ingratiate himself with Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump gathered together in the Bronx on Saturday to show their support for the former president ahead of his upcoming visit to the city. Trump’s campaign announced on Friday that the former president would be holding an event at Crotona Park in the South Bronx on May 23. In one video posted to X, Trump supporters could be seen walking through the streets holding a banner with the words, “The South Bronx for Donald Trump” as the people chanted, “Trump, Trump, Trump.

These figures are a rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad. Africa Thomas Sowell [Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, BasicBooks, 1994, p. 188] estimates that 11 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic and 14 million were sent to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. For every slave captured many others died. Estimates of this collateral damage vary. The renowned missionary David Livingstone estimated that for every slave who reached a plantation, five others were killed in the initial raid or died of illness and privation on the forced march.[Woman’s...

Data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) on birth statistics has revealed an alarming decline in the country’s total fertility rate from 2001 to 2023, raising concerns about maintaining the country’s population at the desired level. According to the Turkstat data, the fertility rate, which stood at 2.38 children per woman in 2001, had decreased to 1.51 children per woman by 2023, showing that Turkey’s fertility rate remained below the population’s replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The population replacement has remained below 2.1 since 2016 and has never recorded an increase since 2001. The crude birth rate, which...

Presidential candidate Donald Trump jokingly predicted that his opponent, President Joe Biden, would be so “jacked up” before their anticipated debate that he might request a drug test. Biden announced that he would participate in two debates against Trump hosted by CNN and ABC News. Trump offered some predictions surrounding the debate during the Minnesota Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner.“He’s going to be so jacked up for those, you watch,” Trump said of the debates. Later, he suggested he would “demand a drug test” before the two got on the debate stage. Speaking to attendees of the National Rifle...

President Trump’s election lawyer John Eastman on Friday was arrested in Phoenix on conspiracy, fraud, forgery and other felony charges related to the 2020 Trump alternate electors plan even though he had ZERO communication with the Arizona electors! Last month Trump 2020 alternate electors, GOP state legislators, former Arizona GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward and others were indicted by a state grand jury in Arizona. A total of 18 people involved in the Arizona alternate electors plan were indicted by the Arizona grand jury last month.