Free Republic

China’s reluctant deal to curb fentanyl and ease trade tensions signals not surrender, but a strategic pause as America reasserts its strength at home and abroad. China has tentatively agreed to curtail sales of fentanyl to Mexico and other Latin American nations. For three decades, Beijing sent the raw product to Latin American and Mexican cartels. The gangs then processed and disguised the toxic brew as less lethal narcotics and prescription drugs for export. The cartels laundered the profits with additional Chinese help, along with the feigned ignorance of the Mexican government. Since 1999, imported fentanyl-laced drugs have killed approximately...

On Friday at Steyn HQ, we received an inquiry from a reporter seeking a comment on "the agreement between Mann and NRO." Unfortunately, having had no communication from our "co-defendants" National Review (NR), we had to scramble around a bit to figure out what the reporter was talking about. A different publication, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reports: Penn professor Michael Mann has reached an agreement with the National Review that releases him from paying the company's remaining legal fees from his defamation case in exchange for dropping ongoing litigation against the magazine. It turns out, in classic National Review fashion, they...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago was scrambling to close a $369 million deficit in 2013. The inception of ObamaCare offered an enticing target for cost shaving: retiree health coverage. The city expected to spend $194 million that year subsidizing health insurance for its retirees, many of whom were too young to qualify for Medicare. Such costs were projected to increase to $540 million by 2023 at the same time as pension payments were ballooning. While courts in Illinois and other states have held that public employee pensions are legally protected, governments have more latitude to make changes to medical benefits....

There is a hatred in America that still dares to speak its name — loudly, publicly, and without fear of consequence. It doesn’t hide behind euphemisms or coded language. It mocks, it smears and it flourishes in the open. That hatred is Islamophobia. Today, it remains one of the last socially and publicly acceptable forms of bigotry.Muslims are a community that leading political figures can still slander on air, that journalists can frame as suspect by default, and that candidates can use as props in their culture-war campaigns without major consequences or jeopardizing their careers.Recently, Andrew Cuomo, New York City...

The lapse in benefits could be temporary if the Trump administration complies with a recent court order requiring them to use emergency money to fund SNAP. The impact of the food aid lapse will sweep across red and blue states alike: Just over half of all SNAP recipients live in states that backed Trump in last year’s election.More than two dozen Democratic state officials — including those in California, Massachusetts, Kansas and Kentucky — sued the Trump administration over the lapse in benefits in a separate lawsuit that is still pending a formal decision. Republican officials have pointed the blame...

Republicans in Columbus had one job: draw a congressional map that reflects the voters who elected them. When President Trump called on GOP-led states to fight as hard as Democrats do in redistricting, Ohio was supposed to be part of that charge. Instead, it answered his call with surrender, handing Democrats a "compromise" map they didn't even have to ask for.

Snip - Vance said the optimal number of legal immigrants to admit is “far less than what we’ve been accepting,” but he did not offer a firm number when pressed by a woman who questioned his stance. He criticized former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, which he said allowed too many people into the country and threatened the social fabric of the United States.

Those desperate to stop Zohran Mamdani becoming New York mayor want a two-horse race. The Republican candidate has stuck his heels in Curtis Sliwa stands little chance of becoming New York’s next mayor. But when asked what it would take for him to drop out of the race, the red beret-wearing Republican left no room for ambiguity. “A Mack truck hits me and I get turned into a speed bump, and they can’t recover me in the ICU. That’s the only way.” Mr Sliwa has been behind in the polls from the outset and those desperate to keep Zohran...

While the media fixates on Trump’s tweets, the numbers tell a different story—closed borders, lower inflation, revived energy, and restored U.S. strength at home and abroad. The left wing and media rage hysterically from one Trump psychodrama to the next, while Trump trolls both on social media. But all that is verbiage. What matters is the data and facts of Trump’s first nine months since January 20, 2025, in comparison to either Biden’s prior year or the averages of his four years in office. Take the border. No one knows how many illegal aliens entered—or stayed in—the U.S. during Biden’s...

More controllers are now calling in sick and some are working second jobs to make ends meet, according to union officials.As air traffic controllers miss their first full paycheck, more are calling in sick and some are working second jobs to make ends meet, according to union officials. (Scripps News) Air traffic controllers are missing their first full paycheck on Tuesday due to the government shutdown.The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which represents those workers, is sharing the stories of those workers in an effort to push lawmakers to reopen the government.The president of the union says the added stress...

Moral relativism is enticing. It enables me to establish the moral value of everything I do by reference to the behavior of others. It allows me to avoid censure by judging my intentions, choices and actions not on the basis of whether they are intrinsically right or wrong, but by the lesser standard of whether someone in a similar position might have done something similar. It is deeply corrosive of personal mores and social trust. Over time it dulls the conscience to any moral hierarchy. It is never a legal defense and shouldn’t be a moral one. Moral relativism is...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday ordered the Israeli military to carry out “immediate, powerful” strikes in Gaza. Earlier today, Netanyahu’s office said that Hamas is in “clear violation” of the Gaza ceasefire agreement after returning remains to Israel that did not belong to any of the 13 hostages still unaccounted for in the enclave. The armed wing of Hamas, the Al-Qassam Brigades, subsequently announced it would postpone the handover of a hostage’s body that was recovered in southern Gaza on Tuesday due to Israel’s “violations.”

Three years before a leftist transgender-linked gunman murdered Charlie Kirk, a transgender assassin tried to carry out his plan to kill three Supreme Court justices to wipe out humanity. At one in the morning, Nicholas Roske allegedly showed up outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home carrying a gun, zip ties and tools for breaking and entering. Roske was angry about the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion because he believed that abortion should be “mandatory for pregnant women” so that “no new people would be born” and “humanity will end”. Roske wanted to kill three Supreme Court justices so that “there are...

Photo of "rabbi" Abby Stein omitted, to minimize reader nausea. An ad campaign from the “Jews for Zohran” caught our attention yesterday. We tracked down the “rabbis” in the ad. You won’t believe it, but one of them, “Rabbi” Abby Stein, is a transgender rabbi who was booted from a Biden White House shindig for disrupting the event with demands to end U.S. aid to Israel. This is my shocked face. Stein, a biological man, is the type of committed Jew who sat down for an interfaith dialogue with Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian just days before he launched nearly 200...

To have any hope of stopping the looming Zohran Mamdani catastrophe, New Yorkers need to get to the voting booth and cast their ballots against him. The situation couldn’t be more dire: Mamdani’s promises — free buses and child care, no rent hikes, etc. — and charm have won him a commanding lead in the polls. Fortunately, that edge is narrowing dramatically in final days: A Suffolk University survey finds he’s now just 10 points ahead of second-place contender Andrew Cuomo, down from a 20-point lead last month. Plus, the over-54 crowd — which polls suggest favors Cuomo — turned...

Senator Rand Paul is tired of being the only Republican senator willing to stand up to President Trump. The libertarian spoke with Politico’s Dasha Burns just days after being deliberately left out of Trump’s gathering of GOP senators in the Rose Garden. “We have everybody but one person here,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re just missing one person. You’ll never guess who that is. Let me give you—he automatically votes no on everything. He thinks it’s good politics. It’s really not good politics.”

America’s Founders made the presidential pardon power absolute, and they did so as a protection against injustice. But Hamilton and Madison might be having second thoughts as they watch President Trump dole out pardons as a form of political legal tender. In the latest example, Mr. Trump on Wednesday pardoned crypto kingpin Changpeng Zhao, who happens to be a Trump family business partner. “I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people,” Mr. Trump said. “A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything.” One of those people wasn’t Mr. Zhao, unless...

Democrats’ meltdown over “Islamophobic” comments allegedly chuckled over by Andrew Cuomo is a foretaste of a future Mamdani mayoralty: Expect all criticism of the devoutly anti-Zionist socialist to be denounced as attacks on his religion. Let’s be clear: Calling Zohran Mamdani an anti-American supporter of terrorism has nothing to do with his religion and everything to do with his record of statements, actions and associations. It was Mamdani who wrote and sang a rap song giving his “love” to the Holy Land Five, American Hamas financers convicted and sent to prison for up to 65 years. It is also Mamdani...

President Donald Trump late Friday blasted the Ontario provincial government in Canada for waiting until after the first two games of the World Series to pause a television ad featuring former President Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs. "They could have pulled it tonight," Trump told reporters at the White House as he headed to fly to Asia. "Well, that's dirty play," he said. "But I can play dirtier than they can, you know." Trump had cited the ad in his decision on Thursday night to trade negotiations with Canada. Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday afternoon said he would pause the...

The president says the sound of bulldozers at the East Wing is “music to my ears.”“You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back,” Donald Trump told reporters Tuesday from a podium overlooking his newly paved “Rose Garden Club” terrace, alongside the new “Presidential Walk of Fame” featuring gold-framed portraits of his predecessors (and an “autopen” for Joe Biden).“You hear that sound?” he said, raising his hand to his ear as if to ­savor the clamor from construction of the new $300 million White House ballroom that began Monday.“Ahhh, that’s music to my ears. I love that sound....