Free Republic

An unexpected alliance has formed between conservative parents and Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, after a school meeting turned to chaos. The groups have come together to stand up against the public school boards that are supplying their children with 'explicit' LGBTQ reading material. A school board meeting was disrupted this week when hundreds of protestors denouncing books with LGBTQ content poured into the Dearborn Public Schools administration building. Concerned parents from both camps were filmed chanting and holding signs against the decision to keep the books in school libraries. Some of the titles concerned parents are coming together to object...

Tucker Carlson is correct about utopian ideas from the national security blob resulting in flawed and destructive policies.For the first time in history, the leaders of the Quad—the informal alliance of India, Japan, Australia, and the United States—met in a virtual conference, agreeing to jointly form supply chains for crucial rare earth minerals and to supply vaccines to Asian states, diminishing their dependence on Beijing. The vaccine plan is crucial and a continuation of the Trump administration’s approach to China. As the Financial Times reports, the plan uses the competitive advantage of all the powers, from American and Japanese research...

Under no scenario would a unified European Union aligned with China be in the interest of America. Indeed, a united EU might not be a friend but a foe.Joseph Borrell, a former Spanish socialist and current High Representative of the European Union, recently argued the EU needs to be strategically independent. “It is foreseen that in 20 years, we [the EU] will not represent more than 11 percent of world GNP, far behind China, which will represent double it, below 14 percent for the United States and at par with India,” Borrell wrote, adding the next two decades would be...

The near consensus view of President Donald Trump’s decision to remove US special forces from the Syrian border with Turkey is that Trump is enabling a Turkish invasion and double crossing the Syrian Kurds who have fought with the Americans for five years against ISIS. Trump’s move, the thinking goes, harms US credibility and undermines US power in the region and throughout the world. There are several problems with this narrative. The first is that it assumes that until this week, the US had power and influence in Syria when in fact, by design, the US went to great lengths...

The defense ministers of Australia, Japan and the United States affirm their countries’ alignment in strategic interests and universal principles, including a commitment to democracy, human rights, free trade, and the rules-based international order. Together, the three countries recognize the importance of enhancing engagement with our Indo-Pacific partners, in order to foster regional prosperity, resilience and transparency in a time of geostrategic change. The trilateral relationship complements the strong and effective bilateral defense relationships between each of the three countries, and enables us to pool our resources in support of peace, security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. The three...

Readout of Meeting Between Vietnam Minister of National Defense Ngo Xuan Lich and Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan Secretary of Defense Spokesperson LTC Dave Eastburn provided the following readout: Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan met today with Vietnam Minister of National Defense Ngo Xuan Lich on the margins of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. The two leaders reaffirmed the comprehensive partnership between the United States and Vietnam and highlighted historic progress in the bilateral defense relationship. They agreed to continue building practical defense cooperation, particularly in the area of maritime security, and underscored the importance of close...

Readout of Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan's Meeting With Thailand Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Prawit Wongsuwon Secretary of Defense Spokesperson LTC Dave Eastburn provided the following readout: Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan met today with Thailand Minister of Defense Prawit Wongsuwon on the margins of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. The two leaders reaffirmed the enduring alliance between the United States and Thailand. They reviewed the state of bilateral security cooperation, with a focus on shared priority areas of maritime security, defense and military exchanges, and modernization of the Royal Thai Armed Forces. They...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, who made few friends in corporate board rooms early in his first term as he pressed for tighter regulations on banks and remarked on the "fat cats" who helped precipitate the financial crisis, heads into his final year in the White House having built – or rebuilt – alliances with chief executives of the nation's biggest companies. The president and his top advisers have kept an open door for CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, keeping almost 1,000 appointments with them, a Reuters review of White House records shows. Of the hundreds of appointments listed,...

It’s increasingly difficult to navigate the web of transitory enemies and allies in the region. Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East. In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. For a few weeks, he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he was responsible for many of the deaths in the Syrian civil war, with a casualty count that is now close to 200,000. After Obama’s red lines turned pink, we forgot...

It seems that every day brings new claims and counter-claims about who’s spying on whom. Governments are trying to limit the damage, but that damage is not limited to governments, expert Jeremie Zimmermann told DW.… It’s something of historical amplitude and we still need to take some distance to be able to understand what is exactly going on. What we see is the unraveling of the very infrastructure for a total surveillance society that we are realizing, day by day, is already deployed all around the world under our feet. The infrastructure for surveilling everything about everybody all the time....

The Obama administration has revealed - for the first time ever - the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in detail. This information was a closely guarded secret for more than 60 years. By unloading such sensitive information, President Obama is responsible for deliberately exposing a chink in America's defensive armor. The Land of the Free is less secure for it. On orders from the White House, the Pentagon on Monday released the exact number of nuclear warheads as the 189-nation nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference got under way in New York. The U.S. nuclear stockpile now stands at 5,113...

Of all the most dangerous aspects of the constitutionally ineligible Obama usurping the office of the Presidency, the prospect of blackmail is one of the most frightening. When a person owes his job to a cover-up and election fraud, he will do anything to keep it. And remember, if it wasn’t for the fraud, he would not have been on the ballot, and we would not be facing this prospect of treason from within. In my view, Obama has now crossed that line definitively.... Under this scenario, the United States is dragged into one conflict after another, or the resources...

Sorry this is a long vanity, but you might find some useful ammunition in it. Troubling In politics, as in most other things, the truth is important. However, in political campaigns, the truth is often a very elusive object. This is because political campaigns are, essentially, little more than the construction of an image which, most importantly, is an image of what the campaign thinks is what the people want to see. For this reason, political rhetoric and campaign promises are, at best, unreliable indicators of who a candidate is. Talk is cheap. Image is illusory and you cannot measure...

Winds Of War By Jenni Vinson Trejo July 14, 2006 The world woke up this morning to the reality that the winds of war are swirling all about us. The aggressions occurring between Israel and Lebanon and the saber rattling of North Korea have certainly broken the lull the American mentality had fallen into. Not even the most Liberal and political among us can continue to ignore the state of war America is in. The fact of the matter is that we have been engaged in World War III since Al Queda attacked America on September 11, 2001. The events...

BRUSSELS, Belgium, June 8, 2006 – Discussions on the expansion of NATO's mission in Afghanistan and the continued development of the NATO Response Force topped the agenda at a defense ministers meeting here today. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld (right) and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer (seated across table) engage in discussions during defense ministerial meetings in Brussels, Belgium, June 7. Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, USN  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The defense leaders also discussed NATO support to training Iraqi forces and the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan. NATO forces in...

South Korea is planning to bolster military ties with its long-time Cold War rivals China and Russia in an effort to play a balancing role in Northeast Asia and help stabilize the Korean peninsula, Seoul's defense chief said. The move is consistent with the stated intention of President Roh Moo-Hyun to adopt a more "independent" foreign policy from the United States.    

NEW DELHI - India and China, the world's two most populous countries, agreed on Monday to create a "strategic partnership" in an effort to end their longstanding border dispute and boost trade and economic cooperation. The agreement signaled a significant shift in relations between the two Asian giants after decades of mutual distrust and suspicion. "India and China can together reshape the world order," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said after a welcome ceremony for his Chinese counterpart, Premier Wen Jiabao, at India's presidential palace. Together the two nations account for one-third the world's population. The statement announcing the partnership...

PARIS (by columnist Angela Charlton for RIA Novosti) - Just as President Vladimir Putin risked becoming an international outcast, he launched two diplomatic sorties that stroked Russia's ego and offered him respite from a Ukraine-obsessed season. Over the weekend, Putin bolstered Russia's alliance with democratic, dynamic India, the number one buyer of Russian arms. Then Putin forayed into Turkey, rigorously trying to persuade Russia's longtime foe that cooperation would make both countries richer and safer. Last month he was in Brazil; in October he toured China. Putin is scoring points with the next generation's global heavyweights. Yet his revived rhetoric...

One of the most significant moments in John Kerry's concession speech came when he spoke of the "desperate need" to heal the country's political wounds. The tone of his speech was in stark contrast to the presidential campaign itself, one of the most ferocious and rancorous in recent US history. The tight race, which ended with 51 per cent of the popular vote going to Bush versus 48 per cent to Kerry, polarised the American people into two almost equal camps and left deep scars on the national psyche. This will have lasting effects not only in America itself but...