Free Republic

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis approved Florida’s $101.5 billion budget, which includes a large chunk of Covid-19 federal relief funds from the American Relief Plan, which DeSantis once described as “Washington at its worst.”Most of the approximately $9 billion federal relief funds will go to police, teachers and first responders, including $1,000 bonus checks for teachers, principals and first responders. Florida was able to increase its budget from last year by more than $9 billion, in large part due to the federal funds, combined with additional revenue the state generated beyond what state economists had predicted. Before the federal funds were...

W hen Andrew Breshears arrived at the Agapé Boarding School in 2018, he was a sandy-haired 12-year-old who weighed less than 100 pounds. He enjoyed watching movies, listening to Elvis, and playing soccer with his friends. “I was sheltered,” Breshears says. But he struggled at home. When he was told he couldn’t live with his mother after her stint in rehab, he threatened to kill himself, and another person from the household. His grandparents sent him to a mental hospital, then to Agapé. At first glance, the facility for “at-risk and unmotivated boys” — a Baptist institution in Stockton, Missouri...

IN THE THIRD installment of the ongoing “Twitter Files,” Substack writer Matt Taibbi detailed the internal Twitter correspondence that led to the ban of then-President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Like the first and second “leak” of documents, which Elon Musk touted as exposés of “free speech suppression,” the third part of the Twitter saga boils down to a lengthy explainer piece about social media’s most historic content-moderation decision: Kicking a sitting president off of their service. “Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?” an unnamed Twitter employee asks early in the...

Anish Adhikari awoke at the Qatari labor camp at 4 a.m. to diarrhea from last night’s rotten fish. His tonsils were swollen from the limited water made available by his employer while working 14 hours a day in 125-degree heat. But he remained hopeful that building air conditioners for 80,000 ticket-holders could provide the equivalent of $8,000 over three years to support his family in Nepal. That he could pay back the loan shark who’d secured Adhikari a job beginning in 2019 with the Hamad Bin Khalid Contracting Co. (HBK), the contracting firm owned by the the highest echelons of...

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman’s campaign on Monday called for Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz to fire two campaign staffers who were at the rally that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “Dr. Oz and his disgustingly radical campaign must fire these insurrectionist staffers immediately,” Fetterman campaign spokesman Joe Calvello said in a statement. “These people are a direct threat to our American democracy, and they embody Republican extremism at it worst.” A report by Rolling Stone revealed that two of Oz’s staffers, Northampton County campaign coordinator Lee Snover and paid political adviser Josh Bashline of Clarion...

After FBI agents raided the home of ABC News producer James Gordon Meek’s home last spring, a report in Rolling Stone floated the possibility that the sweep could have been related to his work as a journalist. However, new information reported by The Daily Beast suggests the raid was unrelated to his journalistic pursuits. Mr Meek’s home was raided by the FBI, but the agency’s reasons for the search were unknown to the public. According to Rolling Stone, "independent observers believe the raid is among the first - and quite posible, the first - to be carried out on a...

After the Nets star on Thursday tweeted a link to “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” a 2018 film that is filled with anti-Semitic disinformation, he began to receive blowback from his employers on Friday. A Rolling Stone story cited the film’s statements, including claims that “many famous high-ranking Jews” have “admitted” to “worship[ing] Satan or Lucife.” The report called the film “venomously anti-Semitic.” “I am an OMNIST and I meant no disrespect to anyone’s religious beliefs,” Irving posted to Twitter on Saturday afternoon. “The ‘Anti-Semitic’ label that is being pushed on me is not justified and does not...

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.” The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their...

A Rolling Stone journalist committed a mortal sin on Saturday morning, daring to tell the truth about Pennsylvania senate candidate John Fetterman. The hits have been piling up against the Democrat after an MSNBC interview revealed that he’s far worse off cognitively than his campaign had previously revealed. The reality that he needs closed captioning, and even then, still can’t always understand what he’s responding to, left many voters feeling misled. For months, the Fetterman campaign had insisted he was generally fine and was on track to recover completely from the massive stroke he suffered back in May. Over the...

Kanye West recently became the object of worldwide opprobrium when he tweeted:“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”The tweet was removed, his account was locked, and he has faced a storm of criticism over his his tweet. JP Morgan Chase even canceled his bank accounts.There is no indication, however, that Louis Farrakhan, whose Jew-hatred is long-standing...

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame co-founder Jann Wenner said Foreigner and Styx have never even been considered for induction. Wenner, who founded Rolling Stone magazine, added that bands from the same era, including REO Speedwagon and Boston, have also never been discussed by those tasked with choosing inductees. In a new episode of the WTF podcast, host Marc Maron asked, “Are there bands – and I know you’ve been accused of this before – are there bands you will not, you know, indulge at all? ... There’s been talk of you maybe stifling some people’s membership into the Rock...

“This is not a true story,” former Mandalorian actress Gina Carano says in her MAGA star turn as a Secret Service agent in My Son Hunter, the new film dramatizing — with plenty of liberties, to say the least — the life of President Biden’s most controversial son. It’s also, unsurprisingly, not a good movie. I was secretly a little hyped for My Son Hunter, which was released Wednesday on Breitbart News. How hard is it to fuck up a movie about drugs, sex, and allegations of international racketeering — especially when you have a heavy docket of salacious “source...

IN HIS FINAL days in the White House, Donald Trump told top advisers he needed to preserve certain Russia-related documents to keep his enemies from destroying them. The documents related to the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged collusion with Trump’s campaign. At the end of his presidency, Trump and his team pushed to declassify these so-called “Russiagate” documents, believing they would expose a “Deep State” plot against him. According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation and another source briefed on the matter, Trump told several people working in and outside the White House that...

You can take the man off of Twitter, but you can't take the urge to post out of the man FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD Trump spent Tuesday morning feverishly sharing content from supporters on his social media platform Truth Social, posting or re-posting more than 60 times since early Tuesday morning, including content from QAnon accounts and the far-right message board 4chan. tweet In the face of a DOJ probe over his post-presidency handling of classified documents, Trump has sought reassurance from his most loyal followers, including accounts like “Patriotic American Alpha Sauce” and “ULTRA-MAGA 4LIFE” who post memes lauding the...

“I’ve covered politics a long time,” Bret Baier said on the air. “I don’t think there has been testimony like this — that is kind of jaw-dropping, in a way — on the inside workings of a White House in crisis after, you know, at this moment, Jan. 6, that we have seen since Watergate.” < snip > Baier continued to comment on Hutchinson’s testimony. “Bottom line though, this testimony is stunning … I think this — it does move the ball in this hearing,” he said.

The case stems from an incident on the set of the 2015 film 'Straight Outta Compton.'A civil trial in the wrongful death lawsuit filed against Suge Knight stemming from a 2015 incident ended in a mistrial on Wednesday (June 22). The jurors were deadlocked seven to five in favor of the plaintiffs, the Los Angeles Times reports. Their inability to come to a conclusion led to the mistrial decision. The case stems from an incident on the set of the 2015 film Straight Outta Compton involving Knight and two men, Terry Carter and Cle “Bone” Sloan. The men reportedly got...

That’s embarrassing! Rolling Stone, already famous for its politically motivated lying, has just been caught faking it again, this time for trashing a conservative movie its reviewer didn’t even watch. The movie in question is What Is a Woman, a deep dive by conservative commentator Matt Walsh into the definition of “woman” in the age of transgender mania. I haven’t gotten a chance to watch it yet, but here’s the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42ivIRd9N8EThe Daily Wire, Walsh’s employer and the film’s producer, sent free streams of the documentary to various media outlets to help promote it in an effort to garner reviews...

Donald Trump in recent months has been telling confidants that he may launch his 2024 presidential campaign early — and that he’s considering launching it in Florida to stick it to Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump has kicked around staging a large, flashy launch rally (with fireworks, of course) that would announce his White House bid before the 2022 midterm elections, according to three sources familiar with the matter. People who’ve spoken to Trump say that one reason he’s eying the Sunshine State is to assert his dominance over an ascendant DeSantis, who — if they both run in 2024 —...

A big part of the problem in defending this part of Donbas, Ostap believes, is that the people who have stayed behind — the people who haven’t fled — don’t really believe they are part of Ukraine. In his view, the civilians who remain are all separatist sympathizers. He says they help the Russians navigate backcountry roads that aren’t on the maps. He asserts there have been instances of local collaborators getting caught providing information about Ukrainian troop movements or locations. Indeed, Slovyansk fell to Russian separatists in 2014: The retaking of the city by the Ukrainian military later that...

What a mess. That’s all I can say. We all know the hunter Biden corruption allegations are legitimate and grounded in fact. We have an entire trove of emails from his laptop that was authenticated recently. The New York Times and Washington Post literally wrote the exact same story The New York Post wrote in 2020, but the former didn’t get censored by Facebook or Twitter. Months after President Forget Me Not was sworn in—the liberal media now realizes that we conservatives were right all along. That’s often the case; the liberal media is wrong about everything. For months, we...