Free Republic

Sir Keir Starmer admitted he was “frustrated” by his first year in power as he carried out a reshuffle of his top team in No 10. The Prime Minister accepted voters had a right to be angry with the Labour Government almost 14 months after he entered Downing Street. On Monday, Sir Keir hired a string of experienced economists for senior No 10 positions in a move he said marked the beginning of “phase two” of his premiership. It also threatens to undermine Rachel Reeves ahead of a challenging autumn Budget at which she is expected to have to announce...

America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Light rail. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all. Meanwhile, there’s China. A country that builds much faster — high-speed trains, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones — all churned out at breakneck speed. Why can China do this, and why does it seem like America can’t? There isn’t a single answer to the question about why China can move fast and why we can’t, but Wang offers one I haven’t heard before. He says one of the most important distinctions between the US and...

A Labour MP has said people flying the St George’s Cross outside a migrant hotel in his constituency are “extremists” trying to “mark territory”. Clive Lewis, who represents Norwich South, criticised Norfolk county council for not removing the flags after they were put up on lampposts around the Brook Hotel in Bowthorpe over a week ago. The hotel has been the scene of protests and counter-protests in recent weeks over its use to asylum seekers, with hundreds of people descending on the area. The Eastern Daily Press quoted Mr Lewis as saying that “most people say they fly the St...

The left’s “heroes” are too often liars, criminals, or violent radicals—canonized not for virtue, but for their usefulness to the progressive cause. American left-wing heroes are proving to be a creepy bunch. So what do some of the most renowned “resistance” left-wing heroes have in common other than shared hatred of conservative America? They are either criminals, pathological liars, or self-described performance-art victims. Take Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the current face of progressive resistance to the enforcement of federal immigration law. No one questions that Garcia had previously received deportation orders before he was re-arrested by ICE. No one argues that...

President Trump’s tariffs are one of the broadest claims of executive power in American history, taxing imports from anywhere on his personal whim. The problem is he doesn’t have that power under the law or the Constitution, as the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled late Friday in V.O.S. Selections v. U.S. This is a crucial moment for the Constitution’s separation of powers. A 7-4 majority upheld a lower-court decision striking down the tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). In February he invoked the law to slap taxes on imports...

President Trump has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs from the federal work force, disproportionately affecting Black employees.When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation. She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target. But her 35-career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she...

Heather Colley and her two children moved four times over five years as they fled high rents in eastern Tennessee, which, like much of rural America, hasn’t been spared from soaring housing costs.A family gift in 2021 of a small plot of land offered a shot at homeownership, but building a house was beyond reach for the 45-year-old single mother and manicurist making $18.50 an hour. That changed when she qualified for $272,000 from a nonprofit to build a three-bedroom home because of a grant program that has helped make affordable housing possible in rural areas for decades. She moved...

Less than 1 percent of Democrats say they are satisfied with the direction of the country, according to a new Gallup poll. Why It Matters This is the lowest level of satisfaction among Democrats in at least 25 years, according to Gallup's polling, and it comes at a time when Republican satisfaction is near record high levels. The polling shows that Democrats' satisfaction with the direction of the country quickly dropped after President Donald Trump, a Republican, returned to office in January, while GOP supporters' satisfaction spiked. According to Gallup, 31 percent of Americans currently say they are satisfied with...

President Donald Trump threw his support behind Fox News host Trey Gowdy — hours after he was brutally rebuked by MAGA. Gowdy suggested on air Wednesday that it is time to enact stricter gun laws, after two children were killed and 17 others were injured when a shooter opened fire through the windows of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Nearly 200 children were celebrating Mass during the first week of school. Keep Watching 5 Scenic & Rugged - Riding Eb’s Canyon - ATV Utah AdventureScenic & Rugged - Riding Eb’s Canyon - ATV Utah Adventure "We’re going to have...

The deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops has caused some Black parents to return to the days of “the talk” about policing that they had hoped was no longer needed to keep their children safe.Days after President Trump ordered a surge of federal law enforcement agents in Washington, D.C., Charlene Golphin told her 17-year-old son that his curfew was being cut short by two hours. Ms. Golphin feared that as a Black boy, her son would be caught in the dragnet set up by officers tasked by the president with cracking down on the “roving mobs of wild...

Europe faces a breaking point as illegal migration, welfare strain, energy crises, and defense demands collide with shrinking populations and stagnant economies. Almost weekly in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, a sensational assault committed by an illegal migrant—often enjoying some sort of state support or with prior arrests for the same crime—surfaces. Until recently, European politicians and the media sought to either ignore such news or accuse those who clamored for tighter borders, more police protection, and stiffer penalties of being “racists” or “xenophobes.” Until recently, that is. Mass protests are now common in Britain against the...

Mr. Trump has resisted his itch to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell on the savvy advice that he could rattle markets and trigger an extended court battle. But Ms. Cook said Tuesday she’ll challenge her removal, so Mr. Trump will still get his legal fight in what could be a landmark case. The Cook firing is a calculated putsch. Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte teed up the dismissal last week when he posted a criminal referral for Ms. Cook on social media. He said she may have committed mortgage fraud by claiming two different homes as primary residences...

Last year I cited Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford and youngest son of the chap generally regarded as Britain's first prime minister: No country was ever saved by good men because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary. To which I added: The length is lengthening, and is very necessary. To be sure, Lord Orford's characterisation of "good men" does not really apply in our own time. There is nothing "good" about turning a blind eye to rape gangs, or stringing along with the idea that child rape is a mere "cultural difference", or,...

The Democrat Party abandoned the middle class for elites and identity politics—trading broad appeal for globalism, DEI dogma, and political self-destruction. The answer was not Trump alone. Indeed, irony abounds when Democrats resonate with the claims of the vestigial Never Trumpers that the MAGA movement “hijacked” the Republican Party. In characteristic projectionist fashion, the left is simply falsely attributing to their opposition the very hijacking that hit the Democratic Party. The Republicans are still the party of conservatism and traditionalism. But in the last decade, it adopted an expansionary middle-class agenda that has led to record party registration, its first...

Hey Republicans, it’s time to get out the shovels and dig a very deep hole. Then bury forever the stench and false innuendo coming from the Jeffrey Epstein case. Especially now that the dead monster’s cohort, Ghislaine Maxwell, has told the Justice Department that she never once saw President Trump “acting inappropriately in any way” and that he “was never inappropriate with anybody” despite a long association with Epstein. Those should be the final words of the sordid saga and give the GOP the confidence to stop runnin’ scared on the subject and drop its foolish obsession with the case....

President Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.During President Trump’s first turn in the White House, right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys were on the streets, weekend after weekend, raising their voices — and oftentimes their fists — about issues such as immigration, the squelching of conservative speech and the removal of Confederate-era statues. But in the first seven months of Mr. Trump’s second term, there has been a conspicuous absence of far-right demonstrations. And that, some leaders of the movement say,...

Editorial Gerrymandering is an idea that should be terminated the independent redistricting movement here, has vowed to fight Newsom with the same vigor that his character as a Thank goodness for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not only did he utter one of the top lines in movie history—“I’ll be back”—but he’s also bringing muscle to the fight against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s scheme to take Ventura County and the rest of the state back to the days when shady politicians decided who spoke for us in Sacramento and Washington. Newsom’s “Election Rigging Response Act” is a constitutional amendment that, if passed by California...

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) on Friday pushed back on President Trump’s threat to target Chicago next in the Trump administration’s crackdown on crime following a sweeping takeover in the nation’s capital. “As Donald Trump attempts to create chaos that distracts from his problems, we’ll call it out for what it is,” Pritzker wrote in a lengthy thread on social platform X “Trump and Republicans are trying to distract from the pain they’re causing — from tariffs raising the prices of goods to stripping away healthcare and food from millions.”

President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term. His revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Mr. Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone...

The Pavlovian Left goes berserk at the mere prospect of each new Trump initiative. Its escalating reactive venom and hysteria are calibrated to the success of Trump's latest policy. Yet the new hard-left Democratic Party offers no counter-agenda to explain its furor. Still less do Democrats attempt bipartisan efforts to craft shared legislation. Take foreign policy. Democratic senators trashed the recent Trump-Putin Alaskan summit as a failure. Then they became depressed when, just days later, an entourage of European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suddenly flew to the White House. The Euros praised Trump for offering some sort of...