Free Republic

(CNN) - The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office made a significant tactical error announcing they were resting their case after calling Michael Cohen as their final witness in the Donald Trump hush money trial. But it’s not because Cohen, a convicted felon and disbarred lawyer, was a bad witness. He actually did pretty well in responding to the prosecution’s warm-up when confronted with his prior bad acts, convictions and bias toward the former president, staying steady on the stand and not losing his cool. But Cohen lost his footing during cross-examination Thursday, where it appeared he omitted important information when recounting...

Evil triumphed twice on Monday in a pair of tragi-comedies. First, the International Criminal Court's Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in the war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization. Then, the members of the United Nations Security Council held a moment of silence for Ebrahim Raisi, the late President of Iran who was killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday. The juxtaposition of these two events perfectly encapsulates the moral failings of the...

When AP reports that “Putin says Russia prefers Biden to Trump, calling the US president more experienced and predictable,” how should we interpret this? Vladimir Putin hopes to help Donald Trump by tainting Joe Biden? Or by reminding Americans of his past meddling, Mr. Putin’s actually helping Mr. Biden? Or maybe he really just wants to signal to a Russian audience that he’s not depending on Mr. Trump for a Ukraine resolution? Get ready for the most polluted election in American memory. Here’s CNN: “US intelligence officials are watching closely to see if the United States’ support for Ukraine will...

For the left, to be accused is to be convicted: if someone is charged with transgressing against one of the left’s dogmas, he or she must be destroyed. The charge doesn’t have to be proven. This is because the left’s objective is not, contrary to its arrogant claims, to bring about a society of justice and equity. The left’s objective is to terrify the populace into submission and, above all, to preserve and protect its own counterfactual narrative, which is the basis of its power. Those whose lives are destroyed in the process are just collateral damage. A case in...

I will begin with a couple of paragraphs about Eurovision, the annual international song contest that I wrote about here the other day, but rest assured that this is not going to be another essay about that fatuous event, which, as I strove to point out in that earlier piece, is virtually worthless as a cultural offering but, as a social barometer, can provide fascinating insights. As I noted, the continent’s anti-Semites and Hamas-lovers were outraged at the refusal of Eurovision authorities to ban Israel, a longtime participant, from this year’s competition because of its current actions in Gaza, which...

Last week several Congresswomen went toe-to-toe in an exchange of insults during the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Hearings. The pugnacious Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took on Democrat firebrand Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), with Brooklyn Dem Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an aggressive interlocutor, piling on.This unseemly brawl is a litmus test for how we think about the state of our government and how it should work. Many people see such vulgar exchanges of harsh rhetoric and personal attacks as a failure of our system of partisan faction who sacrifice the good of the public to their parochial ideological interests, instead of “reaching across...

Action movie buffs will recall Olympus Has Fallen, a 2013 film in which the White House is attacked and taken over by Korean terrorists seeking to unify the Korean Peninsula. The sequel London Has Fallen, in which radical Islamic terrorists plagued the UK capital, followed in 2016. While the plots are fantastical, the underlying message behind both films unfortunately resonates more than ever in 2024. The White House has not been physically attacked, but its current occupant has succeeded in undermining and eroding America’s standing on the global stage to a degree that was unimaginable when the Cold War ended,...

The IDF strives always to warn civilians away from places about to be targeted, even when those warnings remove the element of surprise, which often is the critical element in a military attack. We have seen this yet again in the beginning of the Rafah operation. West Point Professor John Spencer says that Israel has “created a new standard for urban warfare”: “Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It? | Opinion,” by John Spencer, Newsweek, March 25, 2024:These measures were effective. Israel was able to evacuate upwards of 85 percent of the...

It’s a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about it in his monumental exploration of the nightmare of totalitarianism, “The Gulag Archipelago”: “The sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door. The insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security operatives.” The left has now adopted this tactic in the United States, not for arrests (yet), but to frighten its foes into submission.The Jerusalem Post recently reported that “anti-Israel masked men arrived at the homes of University of Michigan Board of Regents members before dawn on Wednesday to protest and demand the adoption of...

Radical Marxist groups, including some with ties to China, are planning on protests at the Chicago Democratic Convention this year. What is so surprising is that there are many Democrats so surprised. They question why groups they have supported with resources and fiery speeches would turn against them. Those Democrats have coddled and loved on the Marxists with glowing praise while condemning their opponents with the harshest of rhetoric and most disparaging of words. These naïve souls are still in need of history lessons that the federal Department of Education does not mandate nor provide.Many have at least noted that...

~This month marks The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday, and I thank profoundly all those First Fortnight Founding Members who've opted to sign on for an eighth year. We hope, as the days proceed, that our First Month Founding Members will want to do the same. ~I don't have anything to say about the death of the President of Iran, except that I was struck by the curious detail that he and his Azerbaijani counterpart had been opening two new dams. American presidents don't do that: Instead, the US demolishes dams at the rate of over fifty a year. If...

If voters had their way, Donald Trump would pick one of his former 2024 primary rivals to be his running mate. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) are the top two choices among people who gave their preference for whom the 77-year-old Trump should pick to join the GOP ticket this year, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll out Monday. DeSantis, who ruled himself out of being Trump’s No. 2 in February, was the pick of 12% of all voters surveyed and 23% of self-described Republicans. The 45-year-old Sunshine Stater was followed in the preference list...

US President Joe Biden has told his story about his conversation with Golda Meir five weeks ahead of the 1973 Yom Kippur War countless times. Meir told the young senator from Delaware not to cast doubt on Israel’s future, even in times of great peril for the Jewish state. “Don’t worry, senator,” she said. “We Jews have a secret weapon in our fight: We have no place else to go.” But a different conversation with an Israeli prime minister has become more relevant since Biden’s shockingly disturbing announcement to CNN last week that he would halt shipments of American weapons...

There are 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza. We already know, thanks to the relentless investigations conducted by Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, that some of those UNRWA members joined Hamas operatives on October 7, taking part in the atrocities inflicted that day, joining in the fun of rape, torture, and murder of Israeli men, women, and children. Other UNRWA members in Gaza have subsequently expressed support for Hamas’ actions. UNRWA schools still use textbooks full of antisemitic passages. UNRWA’s European and American donors have repeatedly demanded that such material be excised from the schoolbooks; UNRWA solemnly promises that it will...

Just as 9/11 and the space shuttle disasters showed failures at the relevant agencies, the 10/7 pogrom has exposed a failure of leadership at all levels of government and society.Derek Hunter often writes to the effect that when one thinks that Democrats could not go any lower, they whip out their shovels and keep digging deeper and deeper. I was reminded of his insight when I saw a headline this morning. It’s not enough that the US chose not to send ammunition to Israel during a hot war. It was still not enough to threaten not to send certain critical...

Since the October 7 Hamas massacre, rape and kidnapping of nearly 2,000 Israelis, Western democracies have been engulfed in what are commonly called “pro-Palestinian protests.” Aided and abetted by a leftist legacy media, naïve and ignorant university students, and spineless politicians at all levels, our city streets and university campuses have become battlegrounds. But battlegrounds for what? Is this really about Israel and Gaza, or is something more insidious going on?An answer to this question lies in events that took place in Hamburg, Germany at the end of April, where more than 1,000 Muslims marched through the streets demanding that...

These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming. Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations. Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality. The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide...

While all eyes were focused on a Manhattan courthouse for Donald Trump’s trial, a curious thing happened in Washington. President Joe Biden invoked executive privilege in defiance of Congress. It is not the invocation that is particularly unusual. What is curious is that Biden is withholding the audiotape of his own interrogation by Special Counsel Robert Hur, even though the transcript has been released as unprivileged. It appears that Joe Biden is “he who must not be heard.”

The marijuana industry has become a substantial financial contributor to various political groups, including Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). This libertarian group, often mistaken for a conservative Republican entity, supports far-right GOP insurgent legislators to promote marijuana legalization in the states where they work to influence elections. This short story is about how a political machine conceals its true agenda through culture war fights and confrontational tactics to earn the support of a well-funded out-of-state organization. They don’t care if you support marijuana legalization or not; so long as they convince you to vote for their squad, your voice does...

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...