Free Republic

Former President Donald Trump is set to speak at the Libertarian Party’s National Convention on Saturday in Washington, D.C. It’s in some sense both a big win and loss for the party. For a former president to address the party is a symbolic victory. But, on the other hand, it is a bizarre thing for the party to do given that Trump is neither the Libertarian Party presidential candidate nor is he in any meaningful sense a libertarian. The only beneficiary of this, at the margins, is Trump, who has made clear he wants the vote of registered Libertarians. “We...

President Biden and former President Donald Trump are locked in a statistical tie as they gear up for the first of two scheduled debates next month, but nearly one-fifth of voters say they could still change their mind about for whom they ultimately pull the lever. In a one-on-one matchup, Biden garnered 48% support to Trump’s 47%, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters released Wednesday. Last month, the survey found Trump and Biden in a flat-footed tie, with each receiving 46% support. Despite the incumbent’s lead, history suggests the margin would be tight enough for Trump...

College students being indoctrinated on campuses to take part in Muslim prayers are also taking part in a thousand-year-old process of Islamic colonialism that made Islam a worldwide religion. College students believe by embracing Islamic rituals, they are opposing colonialism when they’re actually practicing it.The discovery of America and the apogee of European civilization which ushered in the modern world were based on resistance to Islamic colonialism. Since then, European nations withdrew from the Muslim world to avoid colonialism only to be colonized by millions of Muslims from their old colonies. Rather than ending colonialism, Europe went from the colonizers...

On May 13, I wrote here at the FrontPage about Maher Bitar, Old Joe Biden’s new special counsel and director of intelligence and defense programs at the National Security Council. Bitar is important because he is a longtime foe of Israel, an alumnus of the viciously anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, and an indication of how the Biden regime’s betrayal of Israel is not just the result of the regime’s fear of losing Michigan in November, but is also the fruit of personnel decisions that Biden’s handlers made at the beginning of the regime. Bitar is not...

If the past is any guide to the present, we should take heed that what almost never happens in war can certainly still occur. After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.” No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks. But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement—and why...

(CNN) - The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office made a significant tactical error announcing they were resting their case after calling Michael Cohen as their final witness in the Donald Trump hush money trial. But it’s not because Cohen, a convicted felon and disbarred lawyer, was a bad witness. He actually did pretty well in responding to the prosecution’s warm-up when confronted with his prior bad acts, convictions and bias toward the former president, staying steady on the stand and not losing his cool. But Cohen lost his footing during cross-examination Thursday, where it appeared he omitted important information when recounting...

Evil triumphed twice on Monday in a pair of tragi-comedies. First, the International Criminal Court's Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in the war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization. Then, the members of the United Nations Security Council held a moment of silence for Ebrahim Raisi, the late President of Iran who was killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday. The juxtaposition of these two events perfectly encapsulates the moral failings of the...

When AP reports that “Putin says Russia prefers Biden to Trump, calling the US president more experienced and predictable,” how should we interpret this? Vladimir Putin hopes to help Donald Trump by tainting Joe Biden? Or by reminding Americans of his past meddling, Mr. Putin’s actually helping Mr. Biden? Or maybe he really just wants to signal to a Russian audience that he’s not depending on Mr. Trump for a Ukraine resolution? Get ready for the most polluted election in American memory. Here’s CNN: “US intelligence officials are watching closely to see if the United States’ support for Ukraine will...

For the left, to be accused is to be convicted: if someone is charged with transgressing against one of the left’s dogmas, he or she must be destroyed. The charge doesn’t have to be proven. This is because the left’s objective is not, contrary to its arrogant claims, to bring about a society of justice and equity. The left’s objective is to terrify the populace into submission and, above all, to preserve and protect its own counterfactual narrative, which is the basis of its power. Those whose lives are destroyed in the process are just collateral damage. A case in...

I will begin with a couple of paragraphs about Eurovision, the annual international song contest that I wrote about here the other day, but rest assured that this is not going to be another essay about that fatuous event, which, as I strove to point out in that earlier piece, is virtually worthless as a cultural offering but, as a social barometer, can provide fascinating insights. As I noted, the continent’s anti-Semites and Hamas-lovers were outraged at the refusal of Eurovision authorities to ban Israel, a longtime participant, from this year’s competition because of its current actions in Gaza, which...

Last week several Congresswomen went toe-to-toe in an exchange of insults during the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Hearings. The pugnacious Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took on Democrat firebrand Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), with Brooklyn Dem Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an aggressive interlocutor, piling on.This unseemly brawl is a litmus test for how we think about the state of our government and how it should work. Many people see such vulgar exchanges of harsh rhetoric and personal attacks as a failure of our system of partisan faction who sacrifice the good of the public to their parochial ideological interests, instead of “reaching across...

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...