Free Republic

This week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin all but confirmed a blockbuster report in the Financial Times from late March indicating that the Biden administration was prepared to sacrifice Ukraine’s battlefield objectives if they imperiled his own reelection prospects. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Austin scolded Ukraine for executing long-range attacks on Russian oil refineries. “Ukraine is better served in going after tactical and operational targets that can directly influence the current fight,” the Pentagon chief said. But Austin gave away the game when he fretted that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian infrastructure “could have a knock-on effect.

A Salon writer has been roasted on social media for blaming the “male rage fuelling MAGA” for the recent incidents of women being punched in the face in New York City. The leftist website published bizarre and unfounded claims in an article authored by Amanda Marcotte that the same misogyny behind Trump supporters animated the brutal attacks. The article reads: “These stories resonate, as well, because the nation is having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury at women for daring to have lives that are centered around something other than catering to a man’s every whim. Unleashed by Donald...

The National Review is suing Penn State climate celebrity scientist Michael Mann for $1 million. “We cannot recover the time and effort that Mann has wasted, but we can recover more than a million of the dollars that we have lost defending our unalienable right to free speech,” the Review’s editors wrote Wednesday. Mann won a defamation suit against two conservative writers who had criticized his “hockey stick” graph, which other climate scientists have questioned. Mann and his colleagues say the research demonstrates a sharp rise in unprecedented temperatures in the past few decades. In 2012, Rand Simberg posted an...

This might be Nikki Haley’s moment. Not her moment to become the Republican presidential front-runner. (Don’t be silly.) Not even her moment to nip at Donald Trump’s heels. But it could be her chance to consolidate the anti-Trump support in the GOP, and to make a solid play for the silver medal and maybe a good speaking slot at the RNC in Milwaukee next summer. The former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador has risen, slightly, in recent polls, and is now third in RealClearPolitics’ average of national polls, after Trump and Ron DeSantis. She is consistently coming in...

Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday directed the Florida Department of Education to suspend four schools from the state’s school-choice scholarship program because of their alleged “direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.” “Through a thorough investigation, FDOE has determined that Lower and Upper Sagemont Preparatory Schools in Weston, Parke House Academy in Winter Park, and Park Maitland School in Winter Park have direct ties to the CCP and their connections constitute an imminent threat to the health, safety, and welfare of these school’s students and the public,” the DeSantis administration said in a statement. The Florida DOE is working with...

I was not going to write about Oliver Anthony’s brilliant song, Rich Men North of Richmond, because I have nothing worthy to add. The video puts all other commentary to shame. North of Richmond refers to the federal government, which is too large, too powerful and too uncaring. But Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor of the Never Trump National Review, butted in with a Learn-to-Code column attacking Anthony for daring to complain about DC’s treatment of the working class. It lectured Anthony to be more like Woody Guthrie, the Nazi apologist and communist. Anthony’s song says: I’ve been sellin’ my...

John Davidson asks at the Federalist, “Does DeSantis Know What Time It Is? Didn’t Sound Like It In That NBC Interview.” Responding to DeSantis’s assertion that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was in large part responsible for allowing Covid-driven rules changes that helped Democrats collect a lot of mail-in votes, this is Davidson’s thesis: "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020. . . . No issue is more important for DeSantis (and the entire GOP...

I took a pretty liberal girl on a date to see William F. Buckley back in college, which would probably scandalize the current senior staff of his National Review, but I bet it would have made WFB smile. Buckley was also a graduate of the Army's former Ft. Benning School for Boys, but since his death, the Officer Candidate School has become Ft. Moore School for Boys, Girls, and Non-Binary Two-Spirits. This change for the worse is emblematic of how NR's conservatism has failed to conserve much of anything. In Buckley's absence, NR has tried to stand athwart history yelling,...

CNN was the kingmaker in 2016; why shouldn’t it be now? In a shift for his campaign, Ron DeSantis plans to sit down with CNN’s Jake Tapper to discuss the Florida governor’s vision for America. It will no doubt make CNN some cash that the network apparently needs. Like a quickly arranged fight between two spendthrift boxers, both the network and the campaign have a sense of urgency. While I remain unconcerned about DeSantis’s prospects, the early success of DeSantis’s campaign in national and state-level polling has slipped ever since Trump regained the news cycle, in the wake of investigations...

Indian Wells, California — This morning, the Koch Seminar Network – more often referred to as “the Koch network” or “the shadowy Koch brothers” by gravely-voiced attack ad announcers – kick off their three-day winter meeting with the government at least temporarily reopened but the landscape in Washington deeply unsettled. Thursday, Daniel Garza, the president of one of the Koch network’s affiliate groups called the Libre Initiative, met at the White House with officials in the administration to discuss a larger deal on immigration reform. Libre Institute president Daniel Garza told HillTv hosts the meeting, which included leaders of other...

Well, then it must be true ... apparently, we are told, Trump has no defense. He should hang it up. Accept over 100+ years in prison-time, and get it over with. Unbelievable. I wonder what Rush would say about such "insight" and "wisdom."https://t.co/O5RKeFivbR— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) June 15, 2023https://www.mediaite.com/trump/andy-mccarthy-shoots-down-trumps-top-argument-against-indictment-i-dont-think-he-has-a-defense/

People in their right minds who care about the country could never defend the factual details of Donald Trump’s conduct, as alleged in the federal indictment unsealed last week. No one is going to say, “It makes total sense to me that he was storing the crown jewels of national defense — such as how other countries could go about attacking American military vulnerabilities — next to the toilet at a beach club.” No one is going to say, “I can certainly see why Trump would refuse to return such top-secret intelligence to government officials, who pleaded with him for...

On the menu today: No, the news isn’t in reruns; Donald Trump has been indicted again, this time over the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Interestingly, federal prosecutors are pursuing the case in south Florida, which is likely to be much friendlier territory for the former president than Manhattan or Washington, D.C. Are federal prosecutors way too overconfident about their ability to persuade a south Florida jury? Or do they have so much evidence and such a slam-dunk case that they’re confident they can win a conviction, even in the jurisdiction most likely to be sympathetic to Trump? [cut] The most...

On Friday’s broadcast of Fox News Radio’s “Guy Benson Show,” author, National Review Contributing Editor, Fox News Contributor, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy stated that while former President Donald Trump does have ample reason to say he’s been singled out, the indictment against him is “a devastating document. If they can prove half of it, he’s toast.” And he believes more than half of what’s in the indictment can be proven. McCarthy stated, [relevant remarks begin around 35:35] “It’s a devastating document. If they can prove half of it, he’s toast. And I sense that they can probably...

Donald Trump hasn’t been known for his scrupulously correct use of language, but he now wants to police the use of “woke.” “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘woke, woke, woke,’” he said the other day. “It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.” Of course, Trump wasn’t randomly volunteering his equivalent of an elementary rule of usage from Strunk & White. His newfound disdain for the term “woke” has everything to do with his contest with Ron DeSantis for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. ***...

Elections are supposed to be about the future, but Donald Trump is stuck in the past. He is dead set on running for president in 2024 by campaigning on the very worst part of his record. In his much-hyped return to the mainstream media, a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump doubled down on his claims that millions of fraudulent votes were the cause of his defeat in 2020. He said he had no regrets about his behavior before and during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and that he does not owe Mike Pence an apology for...

A great irony that I believe went unobserved and unmentioned, in the recent controversy surrounding Disney, and its fight with Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Republicans in general . . . In the 2020 cycle, America First Action committee was a super PAC dedicated to supporting federal candidates who back the policy agenda of President Donald Trump. When you add up all of the PAC’s donations received in the cycle, and sort the donations by donor employer, the single biggest employer is . . . the Walt Disney Company, at $10.5 million.

… Lewandowski has talked with American Exceptionalism PAC, an outside group that has been set up to bolster the candidacy of Ramaswamy, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The longtime GOP operative, who for a time led Trump’s 2016 campaign and has remained an ally of the ex-president, approached Trump within the last several weeks to tell him about the prospect of him joining the organization. Trump did not raise any objections, according to those people familiar with the talks. Lewandowski was previously at the head of a pro-Trump Super PAC until allegations of sexual misconduct toward a...

As Ronald Reagan might say — there they go again. The “they” this time around is the Never Trump chorus insisting that not only can’t former President Donald Trump win the 2024 election, but he shouldn’t even be trying. Whether it’s Bush-cheerleader Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, or, in the same place, Ruth R. Wisse, a professor emerita at Harvard University, or the esteemed Andrew C. McCarthy over at National Review, or more scattered over the political landscape, the Trump naysayers are out in force, predicting, of course, that the former president’s reelection bid is dead in the...

Perhaps the most moderate candidate in the field as of this moment is Donald Trump. If you want a Republican who won’t cut spending or start foreign wars, Trump is still your man. Added to this now is clearly a discomfort with the fight over abortion in the post-Roe environment. Trump’s main line of attack against Ron DeSantis is from the left. He’s hitting the Florida governor hard for his past support for reining in Social Security and Medicare. He’s also called the governor’s culture-war clash with Disney “so unnecessary” and “a political stunt,” while not entering the fray in...