Free Republic

In The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll of swing states, 74% of respondents said inflation has moved in the wrong direction in the past year. This assessment, which holds across all seven states, is startling, sobering—and simply not true. I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year. In the 12 months through February, inflation, according to the century-old consumer-price index, was 3.2%, compared with 6% a year earlier. Use a slightly...

KYIV — As Russia steps up airstrikes and once again advances on the battlefield in Ukraine more than two years into its bloody invasion, there is no end to the fighting in sight. And President Volodymyr Zelensky’s options for what to do next — much less how to win the war — range from bad to worse. Zelensky has said Ukraine will accept nothing less than the return of all its territory, including land that Russia has controlled since 2014. But with the battle lines changing little in the last year, militarily retaking the swaths of east and south Ukraine...

<p>Why are those controlling President Biden using him to advance so much of a destructive agenda that it will likely end America as we know it?</p><p>If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day?</p>

The story began March 22, when a group called Behind Enemy Lines organized a protest near Chicago’s City Hall. The group says its purpose is to “stop the U.S.-Israel War Machine” and keep “Genocide Joe” Biden out of Chicago. “People are like, we want to confront some Zionists . . . we want to burn an Israeli flag, we want to take this protest to the next level.” As for the DNC, the group says it aims to “make bruises from Chicago police batons the 2024 back-to-school Fall fashion.” Democrats can’t be eager to have Joe Biden’s moment turn into...

What are we to conclude about these contradictory wars and American attitudes toward them? The more democratic and defensive the power, the more Americans support it—but only up to a point. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Americans overwhelmingly supported Ukraine—as they did with Israel after October 7. No wonder: Ukraine was surprise attacked by Russia, and Israel was by Hamas. It seemed an easy binary of good versus evil: both the attacked Ukraine and Israel are pro-Western. Both their attackers, anti-Western Russia and Hamas, are not. Now everything is bifurcating. And the politics of the wars in America reflect incoherence. Both...

A federal judge admonished a Jan. 6 rioter during his sentencing Wednesday after the man downplayed the severity of the riots and his violent conduct. “This cannot become normal. … We cannot condone the normalization of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot,” Judge Royce Lamberth said during the sentencing of Taylor James Johnatakis, CNN reported. Johnatakis, a self-described “sovereign citizen,” was found guilty of assaulting a police officer and other felony and misdemeanor charges related to the riot, and he was sentenced to seven years in prison. After his conviction last year, he repeatedly downplayed the riots in interviews, calling...

In December, the Biden administration blocked a shipment of M4 rifles to Israel. The rifles were meant to be used by local community self-defense units of the kind that had served as the front line of defense against the Hamas attack on Oct 7. However the Biden administration claimed that it was concerned that the self-defense units might be Jewish “right-wing extremists”.The Islamic terrorists attacking them however had no trouble finding M4 rifles. They just expected theirs to come by a more complicated road from Afghanistan, by way of Iran’s terror operatives, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan via a drug smuggling route,...

The self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell for the sake of Gaza brought to mind a friend who joined the International Solidarity Movement shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.Steve had been returning home from San Jose State with the most astonishing supposedly college-educated facts about Israel that set my understanding of history and the world on its ear. But he invoked names like Noam Chomsky, whom my family had taught me to revere, so I just listened.Eventually, my friend’s passion about “Palestine” led him to join the International Solidarity Movement. Steve used his connections in the international judo community as...

Forget Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is Sonia Sotomayor who is the greatest liberal to sit on the supreme court in my adult lifetime. The first Latina to hold the position of justice, she has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Sunday that he expects to move a package including aid for Ukraine with “some important innovations” when the House returns from recess. In an interview on “Sunday Night in America With Trey Gowdy,” Johnson stressed the difficult position he’s in, with a historically narrow House majority, but said he was working throughout the current work period to come up with a package and plans to put it on the floor when the House gavels back into session.

Joe Biden is tearing America apart, and the media refuses to report on the impact of Biden’s treasonous policies. Join Ben Shapiro on the ground as he explores the real world consequences of one of the most destructive presidencies in American history.( Watch episodes)

PHOENIX, Ariz. — It’s not lost on conservatives that Democrats have mastered the art of modern-day electioneering. Through the use of left-wing voter registration groups bankrolled by wealthy Democrat donors and highly sophisticated ballot chasing operations, Democrats have crafted a state-of-the-art machine designed to accrue their candidates an advantage over Republicans ahead of Election Day. The GOP’s failure to mimic similar operations has contributed to numerous electoral defeats in the years since the 2020 election and the coincident expansion of mail-in voting — but one conservative group is hoping to change that trend. Last week, Turning Point Action (TPA), the...

President Biden has signaled to the world that America is weak. With feckless leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris and cabinet Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas joining him, it is no wonder that Biden’s resolve is being tested by our adversaries. Catherine Herridge, a former senior investigative reporter for CBS News, lit up the interwebs in December with an ominous prediction. Herridge stated, “I just feel a lot of concern that 2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that’s very hard to predict.” She is not alone in her thinking....

If you thought March 31 was Easter Sunday, think again, heretic. And no, I’m not referring to the fact that for, Orthodox Christians, Easter falls this year on May 5. Those who celebrate Easter on March 31 are heretics from the standpoint of the Biden regime’s favored religion, which is worlds away from Old Joe’s ostentatious and hollow Roman Catholicism. March 31, you see, is the Transgender Day of Visibility.As Matt Margolis noted, Biden chose Good Friday to proclaim the big day. Matt asked: “Did he have to issue this proclamation on Good Friday? There’s no established standard that proclamations...

The current president, Joe Biden, and the former president, Donald Trump, demonstrated a sharp contrast in priorities while both men were in New York on March 28th. President Biden, joined by former Presidents Clinton and Obama, hobnobbed with fat cats and celebrities at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan for a fundraiser extravaganza, which hauled in around $26 million dollars for President Biden’s reelection campaign. Former President Trump was attending a wake about forty minutes away in Long Island for a police officer murdered by a repeat felon who should not have been on the streets in the first place.The...

In Obrador’s view any country that would open wide its border, welcome in 10 million foreign nationals, without legal sanction, without audit, without even processing, deserves the contempt he extends. In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—who prefers to be known as AMLO for short—issued to the Biden administration blackmail demands that sounded more like existential threats. AMLO warned the U.S. that the current influx of some 10 million illegal aliens through the southern border will most certainly continue—unless America agrees to his ultimatums. One, Obrador says the U.S. must now send $20 billion in...

Regime corruption, economic collapse and public anger point to trouble ahead On February 5, Mirtza Ocana, an American citizen of Cuban origin, arrived at Tampa International Airport from Havana and was arrested for attempting to smuggle more than $100,000 into the country. When questioned, Ocana confessed to having carried out 45 similar assignments since May 2023. The smuggling operation involved millions of dollars. Because Cuba has slipped beneath the attention horizon of the news media, this incident attracted zero interest. Yet it posed a perplexing riddle. Cuba’s communist regime currently faces the most disastrous economic collapse in its long history...

It is widely accepted that the Ukrainian crisis erupted into a military conflict on February 24, 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the seeds of the hostilities were planted about thirty years earlier by President Clinton and, later, by George W. Bush, both of whom recklessly pushed for NATO’s eastward expansion.

Two years after Russia invaded, Ukrainian forces are outgunned. Russia has a 6-to-1 ammunition advantage along the front lines. If this persists, Vladimir Putin’s ambitions will become a reality. The imbalance in weapons supplies is a major failure of Ukraine’s allies in the West. North Korea delivered as much artillery ammunition to Russia in one month as the European Union has been able to deliver to Ukraine in one year. Russia produces three million shells a year, while the U.S. and Europe combined are able to produce only 1.2 million for Kyiv. Despite the vast economic might of the democratic...

Strikes on Russian oil refineries have a significant impact on Russia’s ability to conduct warfare. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, Commander of U.S. Forces Europe in 2014-17, stated this during the 16th annual Kyiv Security Forum. “Of course, attacks on oil refineries have a significant impact. Russia is less able to pay for this war, and it also deprives it of the necessary fuel to continue hostilities. I would recommend ignoring the calls for an end to such attacks.” The Lieutenant General emphasized that sanctions against Russia need to be strengthened. He also added that 2024 will be the year of...