Free Republic

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...

Not long ago, President Biden promised to transform the American auto industry — “first with carrots, now with sticks” is the analogy The Washington Post used. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I’d trust the president to drive my car, much less dictate the future of industrial policy. Yet Biden implemented draconian emissions limits for all vehicles, ensuring that within nine years 67% of all new passenger cars and trucks will be electric. In the old days, a centralized state controlling manufacturing and commerce, production, prices, wages and conditions in our biggest sectors would be called...

On the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, my Administration stands in support and solidarity with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) people around the world as they seek to live full lives, free from violence and discrimination. This is a matter of human rights, plain and simple. ... {skipping to the end} ... Today marks the 30th anniversary of when the World Health Organization made the wise and overdue decision to declassify ‘homosexuality’ as a mental disorder. That was a victory for LGBTQI+ people and human rights defenders everywhere. 30 years later, the work of equality...

Special Counsel Jack Smith was supposed to be basking in glory right now. In his ideal world, Smith would be hot off a quick conviction of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. for the former president’s alleged role in the events of January 6 and attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election. The special counsel then would have immediately moved his victorious prosecutors to Palm Beach for the summer to prepare for Trump’s second federal trial related to allegedly stealing national defense information and impeding the Department of Justice’s investigation. That, at least, was the plan. Instead, Smith is ingloriously hiding from...

I hate to say “I told you so” — well, no, actually I don’t mind saying it at all. On May 8, I wrote:“Yes, we’re on Hamas’s side now. It’s as official as it can get without Old Joe Biden asking Congress for a declaration of war against Israel: the Biden regime has thrown the weight of the United States government behind the effort to save Hamas.”If you thought that was hyperbole or hysteria, consider the fact that on Sunday, senior Biden regime apparatchik Antony Blinken made it unmistakable, issuing a demand to Israel that could have been spoken by...

During the last few years, while the American left and its media minions have been presenting clueless consumers with a narrative that’s well-nigh unprecedented in the degree to which it deviates from the truth, David Horowitz, in a series of model books, has been busy setting the record straight. Was Donald Trump’s presidency an exercise in authoritarianism and a threat to our democracy? No, it was an attempt – foiled by his enemies in the deep state – to return the country to its constitutional roots. Was George Floyd a martyr in a nation founded on white supremacism? No, he...

The two-state solution has been proposed for decades – with the application of the titular adjective, “moderate.” Attempts to bring it about have been unsuccessful. In multiple ways, the Arab side rejects or undermines it. It is not politically correct to ask whether rejectionism is the political and diplomatic tactic of those who imagine themselves as the Palestinian people. In today’s climate, it is unacceptable even to inquire whether it is an ideological position, a culturally inculcated pattern, or a natural outgrowth of Islamist religious construct. Nevertheless, a short historical overview can suggest that those possibilities need be investigated. Time...