Free Republic

As everybody but the New Guinea tribesmen who ate Joe Biden's uncle knows by now, Donald J Trump has been found "guilty on all counts" - a quintessentially American expression because, of course, the multiple-counts racket is one of the many perversions of judicial norms that have long disgraced the US courthouse. Just twenty-four hours ago, my friend John Hinderaker was writing: Experience has given me a lot of faith in the basic fairness of juries. Late yesterday, he remembered - oh, yeah, I've been here before: It is very much like the lawsuit that Michael Mann brought against Mark...

An Israeli soldier walks next to items found inside a workshop which they claim was used for weapon production and located on the lower floors of a residential building in the northern Gaza Strip, November 8, 2023. (photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS) As Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza are cut off from their weapons supply due to the IDF’s operations on the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, the terrorist groups will go to ground and use their remaining weapons. Hamas has been stockpiling weapons for decades in Gaza. Almost every building has either weapons or other types of...

According to US media reports, the Biden administration had offered Israel help in finding the hiding places of the leaders of the Hamas terror group. The offer was conditional on the Netanyahu government abandoning its plans to storm the city of Rafah. The sources claimed that the Biden administration, working urgently to prevent a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, had promised Israel valuable support if it backed down. This included sharing sensitive intelligence information to help the Israeli army locate Hamas leaders and uncover the movement’s hidden tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Therefore, one can conclude that the US already...

On May 22, the nations of Norway, Spain, and Ireland announced their intentions to recognize a Palestinian state. As reported in the Epoch Times, the announcement prompted “Israel to immediately recall its ambassadors to the three nations. How should we respond?As described by the leaders of these three countries, they are calling for, “Two states, living side by side, in peace and security” (Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store), “with mutual security guarantees” (Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez), and with “Ireland’s dream” being “that the Israeli and Palestinian children of May 28th 2024 will grow up to be neighbors at...

Hamas has been stealing for its own members at least half of the aid sent to Gaza since October 7. This is not surprising. Hamas has been stealing aid money meant for the people of Gaza ever since it took control of the Strip in 2007. Just three Hamas leaders, Khaled Meshaal, Mousa abu Marzouk, and Ismail Haniyeh, have among themselves managed to steal the colossal sum of $11 billion in aid. And while Hamas has been complaining about Israel preventing aid from reaching the Strip, it is actually Hamas that has been harming Gazans, by diverting half of the...

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies. Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization. Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so. But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed...

One juror who sat for six weeks listening to the evidence presented in a Manhattan courtroom against former President Donald Trump reportedly appears sympathetic towards him. The jury on Wednesday will begin to consider whether or not Trump, beyond a reasonable doubt, committed a crime of falsifying records to conceal a second crime. Many legal experts believe there is no good case against Trump. Some legal experts, such as constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, expect the jury will either render a guilty verdict or produce a hung jury that results in a mistrial.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently warned Israel against cutting off Palestinian banks and spoke about the need to increase aid to Gaza, that is, Hamas, even further. Yellen’s words gained little attention, as the Biden regime’s betrayal of Israel is now old news. It is now widely known that the regime, deeply afraid that it could lose Michigan in November, has brought a seventy-year-old alliance perilously close to rupture to gain the Arab vote. Yet the betrayal of Israel didn’t begin when the polls started looking bad for Old Joe. The seeds of it were planted long before Hamas massacred...

Fifty-six years ago in August 1968, Richard Nixon achieved what The New York Times called “the greatest reversal of fortune in American political history.” Times columnist James Reston went further, calling it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” This from a newspaper, along with The Washington Post, that hated Nixon, as they now hate Donald Trump. How did he do it and could presumptive Republican presidential nominee and former president Trump learn anything from Nixon’s seeming transformation? First, the parallels between Nixon and Trump are striking. Nixon, like Trump, believed America was in bad shape. In 1968, crime, the war in...

After the announcement last week that Spain, Norway and Ireland would recognize the state of Palestine, a visibly-delighted Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations came to talk to the press. “We need somebody to take pictures,” Riyad Mansour said, ushering the Irish, Spanish and Norwegian envoys into an impromptu photoshoot just outside the UN Security Council. “A glorious day today,” Mr. Mansour declared as the four ambassadors stood shoulder-to-shoulder. […] All this, the supporters of Palestinian statehood hope, is gathering momentum towards the implementation of a two-state solution. That is not how Israel, nor its closest ally, the US, see...

Once again, our Illinois politicians believe they have the magic that will cure the crime that riddles our city of Chicago. I recently learned that our state’s Democratic lawmakers plan to introduce House Bill 4409 to amend the Illinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009 in order to rename "offenders" as "justice-impacted individuals." That is right — with the magic of rewording, we will no longer have "offenders" or "criminals." Instead, we will have "justice-impacted individuals" and the implication could not be clearer: rather than being seen as criminals who victimized society they will be seen as victims of the system....

The manufactured “border crisis” is a real-life experiment to test a theory put forth by two sociology professors at Columbia University in 1966. It is a “crisis” brought about solely by the refusal of the Biden administration to enforce existing immigration law which is a primary duty of our chief executive in the White House. Former President Barack Obama has orchestrated the “border crisis” from behind the scenes because of his blind adherence to the Cloward-Piven strategy he learned while at Columbia University. Leftist sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were professors there while he was an undergraduate from...

As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducts another assault in the north of Gaza, they face significant criticism from Western officials and analysts who are asking why the IDF is repeatedly going into areas they have already cleared and conducting further operations. Critics claim this behavior reflects a flaw in operational design, or is even proof that Israel’s campaign against Hamas has failed. The flaw, however, lies in their own assumptions. These critics are looking at IDF tactics through the lens of Western counterinsurgency (COIN), the doctrine that U.S. and European militaries applied in the failed campaigns in Afghanistan and...

Right before Election Day, Biden finally released the names of his ‘bundlers’: the big money fundraisers who backed his 2020 campaign. The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s investigative arm did some last minute sleuthing and found some interesting names on that list.One of them was ‘Muhammad’ Tahir Javed: a Biden surrogate, Democratic National Committee deputy finance chair, and future Pakistani cabinet member.Javed bragged that he had “raised over $2M for the Biden Harris transition team” and “recruited 30+ donors to the transition team and general campaign, four of whom were recognized along with myself… to have raised over $100,000 personally.” These...

Pressure is building between Israel and Egypt over Palestinian refugees as Israel prepares its offensive on Rafah, where Hamas is hiding out and using human shields. According to an Atlantic Council report:Relations between Egypt and Israel have soured in recent weeks as Israel prepares to launch a full-scale ground offensive into Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip—a move that Cairo has warned would put its peace treaty with Israel at risk and destabilize the region.Egypt fears a sweeping assault on Rafah—where more than one million displaced Palestinians have sought refuge from Israel’s incessant bombardment of the northern and central Gaza...

Islamic pro-terror groups reacted to the Hamas terror attacks of Oct 7 not only with riots and public pressure campaigns aimed at politicians, but also by privately meeting with top federal and state law enforcement officials to demand that they lock up Jewish political opponents.The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s investigative arm exclusively reported last month that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist group whose leader had celebrated Oct 7, had been meeting with attorney generals around the country trying to convince them to arrest journalists and activists who had been investigating and exposing Hamas supporters.Based on our past...

With the closing arguments set for Tuesday in the trial of former president Donald Trump, defense counsel are in a rather curious position. There is still debate among legal experts as to the specific crime that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is alleging. Trump’s lawyers are defending a former president who is charged under a state misdemeanor which died years ago under the statute of limitations. It was then zapped back into life in the form of roughly three dozen felonies by claiming that bookkeeping violations — allegedly hiding payments to Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence about a supposed affair...

You have surely heard that your search results on Google (with 92 percent share of the search market) reflect not your curiosities and needs but someone or something else’s views on what you need to know. That’s hardly a secret. And on Facebook, you are likely inundated by links to official sources to correct any errors you might carry in your head, as well as links to corrections to posts as made by any number of fact-checking organizations. You have likely also heard of YouTube videos being taken down, apps deleted from stores, and accounts being canceled across a variety...

Who is Your Enemy? One of the most fundamental differences between the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and the proposed Georgian foreign agents law is the historical context in which the two laws originated, and who they were directed against. The US Congress adopted FARA in 1938 specifically to target lobbying and consulting firms acting on behalf of the Nazi German government. Concern about Soviet Communist agents also motivated the law. Of course, by 1938, the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt was already well aware that Nazi Germany presented a direct military and security threat to the country....

Trumpophobia (fright over Trump) is cresting with his polls. As Trump continues to show leads in critical swing states, as various lawfare-inspired cases against him seem to the public to be more persecutions than prosecutions, and as Joe Biden appears daily more incoherent and lost, the left on spec has resorted to warning the nation about all the supposedly catastrophic consequences of a future Trump presidency. Ironically, the left seems oblivious to the reality that one reason Trump leads Biden in the polls is precisely because voters can compare the four-year record of the prior Trump presidency to Biden’s last...