Free Republic

While Donald Trump is not a politician known for his message discipline, he took the world by storm in 2016 with a well-articulated diagnosis of what ailed the nation. “Make America Great Again” managed in four words to assert that America had been great, that it no longer was, and that he would do something about it. His current campaign, by contrast, has devolved into the litigation of personal vendettas, crass promotion of niche issues like cryptocurrency, and pandering to the donor class on tax cuts and temporary labor. The rallying cry to “Make America Great Again” has become the...

I hate to use the Democratic Party’s favorite word against them, but the Harris-Walz tag-team interview on CNN was… well, weird. The two grinning progressives sat side by side and tried their best to handle Dana Bash’s steady stream of softballs. CLICK THIS LINK For Kamala's plans for her first day in office. Unfortunately, the starlets’ most recent experience answering questions is when they are asking them of each other for schmaltzy social media videos, so to say they were rusty is an understatement. Bash first asked Kamala what she would do on day one if elected. Harris, never one...

People in the LGBTQ+ community face health disparities due to prejudice, lack of access to care, and other factors. We all rely on healthcare services at various points in our lives. However, not everyone has the same access to medical advice and treatment. As a result, specific populations suffer poorer health outcomes than others. Health disparities are how disease, injury, and violence affect marginalized groups of people, like those in the LGBTQ+ community, differently than others. Health disparities typically result from a lack of access to adequate healthcare.

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This Is Not CapitalismThe word capitalism has no stable definition and should probably be permanently retired. That won’t happen, however, because too many people are invested in its use and abuse. I’m long over trying to push my definition over someone else’s understanding, generally viewing disputes about vocabulary and dictionary definitions as a distraction against the real debate over concepts and ideals. The point of what follows is not to define precisely what capitalism is (my friend CJ Hopkins is hardly alone in describing it as once emancipatory but now rapacious) but rather to highlight the many ways in...

In a recent essay for Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health, epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and coauthors identified a significant gap in depressive attitudes between liberal and conservative teens. This gap was present in all years observed in the study (2005–18). It grew significantly starting in 2012, however, as depressive affect unilaterally spiked among liberals. Three years later, conservatives also began reporting increases in depression—although that rise tapered off relatively quickly while the increases among liberals continued. Liberal girls tended to be significantly more depressed than boys, particularly after 2011. However, ideological differences swamped gender differences. Indeed, liberal boys were significantly more...

Starting Tuesday, transgender Texans are no longer able to change the sex on their driver’s license, according to a new state Department of Public Safety (DPS) policy. “As of Aug. 20, 2024, DPS has stopped accepting these court orders as a basis to change sex identification in department records – including driver licenses,” a spokesperson with the department wrote to The Hill. ... Before the policy change, Texans could change the sex on their driver’s license if they had a valid court order. However, the DPS spokesperson wrote that state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) “raised concerns regarding the validity...

To hear the mainstream media tell the story, the just-finished Democratic National Convention was not just about “reintroducing” Kamala Harris to the American people, but about reintroducing the Democratic Party as well. While Americans might have been convinced by nefarious MAGAs and other nogoodniks that the Democrats want to control their lives and tell them what to think, what to drive, what to eat, and how to behave in countless other facets of their lives, the truth is that the Democrats are the party of “freedom.” They—and they alone—stand between the nation and the totalitarianism of the Right. NBC News,...

What Is Really Going on at Federal Agencies?Years ago as an intern in D.C., and long before the agencies all locked their doors to visitors, I had the occasion to putter around the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These were obviously not normal workplaces. To my amazement, they were mostly dark, empty, and quiet, and the employees did not seem in the slightest bit busy doing anything at all. It was all kind of spooky. It then occurred to me that these many hundreds of agencies and millions of employees are not really...

I can't even... Yesterday I wrote about how shamelessness is a superpower, and I have to say that it is a wonder to behold. As the Democrats gather in Chicago to experience the religious ecstasy of being surrounded by each other and sniffing their own farts, they are treated to speeches from elite hypocrites who pretend to be perfectly normal people. Last night was the ol' HOPENCHANGE shtick, with Michele and Barack Obama babbling on about things they don't believe while Obama sycophants babble on about how their "spiritual voids" were filled by the Lightbringer. An emotional high point was,...

Since 2016, when Jordan Peterson criticized amendments to Canada’s Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to include “gender identity and expression” as prohibited grounds for discrimination, he has been in the public eye. He argued that mandating the use preferred pronouns was a form of compelled speech and identity politics run amok.Peterson’s latest ordeal of having to undergo mandatory training by his regulatory college in order to keep his psychologist’s licence after the country’s highest court refused to hear his appeal, marking another pivotal moment for the free-speech advocate, has once again brought him into the national spotlight.The college...

Filmmaker David Rolfe was a self-professed atheist when he set out to make a documentary about one of the most revered religious artifacts in history - the Shroud of Turin. With the 1978 movie, the photography expert set out to find a prosaic explanation as to how a blood-soaked imprint of a man matching Jesus Christ's description manifested onto the cloth relic. Instead, he was so convinced of its authenticity he converted to Christianity

In an interview with a Chicago radio station, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates claimed that her students’ awful reading and math scores should be ignored because testing is “junk science” rooted in “white supremacy.” “The way in which we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Gates said in the interview, the Wall Street Journal reported.“If you have another hour, I can get into why standardized tests are born out of the eugenics movement,” she added. “And the eugenics movement has...

An emergency blood shortage has been declared in the US, with people urged to donate in order to boost supplies. The American Red Cross said their stock of blood plummeted 25 percent in July, as extreme heat in much of the country led to fewer people turning up at donation centers. At the same time, however, the organization said demand from hospitals has remained constant — putting a significant strain on their stockpile.

A judicial court of the United Methodist Church will take up the issue of clarifying how Alabama churches that want to leave may still be allowed to depart the denomination. The United Methodist Judicial Council has released its docket of 10 items for its fall meeting. Among them are requests from the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, where a group of more than 40 churches that wanted to leave the denomination claim the bishop “ran out the clock” on them, delaying their exit until a rule allowing them to leave and take property with them expired.

To combat HIV transmission and improve access to care in Georgia, telemedicine provider MISTR has partnered with Walmart to offer free at-home HIV testing kits in seven Walmart stores, according to a MISTR news release. In 2022, the South accounted for 49% of new HIV cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Georgia has some of the worst HIV rates in the nation. By the end of 2022, there were 63,984 people living with HIV in Georgia, with 2,575 new diagnoses. In 2021, the Atlanta metro area had the third highest rate...

The numbers: Construction of new homes fell 6.8% in July compared with the previous month, as builders scaled back new projects. Housing starts fell to a 1.24 million annual pace from 1.33 million in June, the government said Friday. That’s how many houses would be built over an entire year if construction were to continue at the same rate each month as in July. The data fell short of Wall Street’s expectations of a 1.34 million pace. All numbers are seasonally adjusted. Housing starts fell to the lowest level since May 2020. Outside of the pandemic, new-home construction was at...

Republicans Must Make a Laser-Focused, Issues-Based Case to the People If Republicans can successfully frame the 2024 election as boiling down to the actual issues—the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime—then they stand a strong chance of prevailing.One of my favorite bits of ancient wisdom, which I have quoted many times over the years, is the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu’s adage that a battle is won before it is fought because it is won by choosing the terrain on which it is fought. Accordingly, as I noted in a column a few months ago: “If former President Donald Trump...

America Criminalizes Too Much and Punishes Too MuchWhen those on parole or probation are included, one out of every 47 adults is under “some form of correctional supervision.”Not only have we adopted more criminal laws at an astonishing clip, but the punishments our criminal laws carry have also grown markedly. Beginning in earnest in the second half of the 20th century, legislatures began to adopt laws that had, as Judge Jed Rakoff has noted, "two common characteristics: they imposed higher penalties, and they removed much of judicial dis-cretion in sentencing." Notable among these laws were statutes imposing mandatory minimum terms...

Eighteen people living with HIV in Indiana were arrested between 2001 and 2019 for donating plasma, though, thanks to effective screening methods, none of them posed a risk of transmitting the virus, found a new report by the Williams Institute. The Williams Institute is a research center focusing on law and public policy as they pertain to sexual orientation and gender identity; it is part of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. HIV criminalization refers to the use of unfair laws to target people with HIV—notably African-American, Latinos, LGBTQ people, and women—and punish them because of their...