Free Republic

It isn’t exactly news that Homer’s “Odyssey” is a very, very good poem. But seeing Christopher Nolan’s screen adaptation drove this home again for me. The hotly anticipated mega-spectacle is, in the end, pretty good. But it isn’t Homer. Mr. Nolan’s shortcomings have made me love Homer more by comparison and sent me running back, agog, to his deathless masterpiece. Mr. Nolan’s “Odyssey” succeeds as well as any adaptation can. It tells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year journey home from the Trojan War with verve and affection for the source material. It isn’t the hostile woke takeover that some high-profile...

Cincinnati — For Avondale resident Christopher Adams, going to the grocery store was a twice a week trip. After the store closed, that task may become a lot harder. The neighborhood of Avondale’s only sizable grocery store, The Country Meat Co. Marketplace, announced that it’s shutting its doors on Facebook in early July. It opened in February 2025, and when it closed the “now open” banner still hung above the door. Before the store opened, Avondale was considered a “food desert.” Many of its residents lived more than a mile away from a grocery store that could provide nutritious, fresh...

JD Vance has served admirably as Donald Trump's vice president and has been a true asset to the administration. Right now, he's favored to be the next Republican nominee for president when 2028 rolls around. But there are many other viable contenders. That's why his latest deep-dive interview on his views on the economy is highly disturbing. In Vance's interview last week with The Daily Wire, he sounded much more like a Mitt Romney, big-government RINO than a Trump or Ronald Reagan. Decide for yourself. Here are some of Vance's misguided views on economics and the future of the GOP:...

According to the latest data from the West Health–Gallup Affordability Index, only 49% of U.S. adults are able to afford quality care and have been able to pay for healthcare visits and prescriptions in recent months, marking a five-year low in healthcare affordability. The number of people able to afford quality healthcare has been on a steady decline since 2022, when affordability was the highest. In 2025, 2.8 million more Americans reported inability to afford healthcare. “Healthcare affordability is moving in the wrong direction,” West Health Institute chief medical officer, Zia Agha, MD, told Healio. “Notably, financial barriers are increasing...

To the Americans: I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States. And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness: You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence. This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns. Success...

HAVANA, July ⁠6 (Reuters) - ⁠Cuba's national ⁠electric grid collapsed ​on Monday at ‌midday, the country's ‌grid ⁠operator ⁠said, leaving around 10 million ​people on the Caribbean island ​nation without power. Cuba has ⁠for months ⁠suffered ⁠from hours-long, ​and more recently, days-long ​power ⁠outages linked in part to an ⁠ailing grid and a U.S. imposed oil ⁠blockade that has cut off the island's fuel supply.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's speech for our nation's 250th birthday has gotten a lot of well-deserved criticism. It was pretty awful on the whole. But there was one particular part on Friday that got a lot of attention, in which he lambasted America, attacked Elon Musk, and demonized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). JUST IN: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani used America’s 250th anniversary to sharply criticize the country, accusing the U.S. of allowing children to go hungry while billionaires and “oligarchs” gain more power.He said America’s wealth was built by working people with “calloused, dirt-streaked hands" while accusing...

Daily Signal’s new documentary, “Sacred Honor: The Declaration That Defines a Nation,” is an in-depth investigation into America’s Declaration of Independence. Join Bradley Devlin, Victor Davis Hanson, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, Dr. Kevin Roberts, and many more, as they tell the story of one of the greatest political dramas in world history. Special Thanks to: The Heritage Foundation | Washington, D.C. Hillsdale College’s Steve and Amy Van Andel Graduate School of Government | Washington, D.C. The Museum of the American Revolution | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania U.S. National Park Service | National Historic Park...

Ford announced a 10 percent decrease in U.S. vehicle sales for the second quarter with the automaker citing ongoing supplier issues affecting its F-Series trucks as a major cause of the shortfall. However, Ford’s EV sales dropped an astonishing 40 percent during the same time period. CNBC reports that Ford suffered a 10.3 percent decline in its second-quarter U.S. new vehicle sales, the automaker reported Thursday. The decline was attributed to two primary factors: persistent supplier problems affecting the company’s crucial F-Series pickup truck line and a substantial drop in all-electric vehicle sales. The Detroit-based automaker sold 549,200 vehicles during...

I thought I had missed something major in my reporting. Turns out I had stumbled into an AI-fueled feedback loop that involved a real LLC’s fictional website and a search engine that’s thrusting unreliable answers on users. Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo. At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John...

“You have to have gone to college to say something that stupid." Dennis Prager would often respond to callers on his national radio show with that line when they said something so bereft of common sense that the only explanation for it had to be four or more years of brainwashing from radical professors. During his years as a graduate student in international affairs at Columbia University, where his professors believed such inane things as the belief that there is no difference between men and women and that the Soviet Union and the United States were morally equivalent during the...

Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) congressional candidate Melat Kiros believes there must be an “immediate pathway” to citizenship for “every single” illegal alien. Kiros unseated 15-term Democrat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s First Congressional District primary on Tuesday, signaling that the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party spans far beyond the borders of New York. She holds a range of radical views and is of the thinking that there must be an “immediate pathway” to citizenship for illegal aliens residing in the country. “Abolishing ICE is just one step, right?” she said during an interview. “Democrats have been in power...

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to protect women's and girls' sports is making waves across the pond, too. Author J.K. Rowling, a staunch defender of women's rights in the face of radical trans activism, even took the BBC to task for its shameful coverage of the ruling.

Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger's efforts to enact a sweeping gun-control agenda have been placed on hold by courts in June, while the state Legislature pushed back the effective date of another law. Since Thursday, judges in Lancaster County and Washington County issued preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement of a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms, while Spanberger had to request that the state Legislature delay the effective date of a ban on carrying such firearms. The National Rifle Association trumpeted their legal success in a Monday evening post on X. "The NRA's world-class legal team delivered a clear, powerful argument demonstrating...

1776, Not 1608: What the Supreme Court Got Wrong on Birthright CitizenshipChief Justice Roberts forgot the Declaration of Independence.Chief Justice John Roberts begins the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship opinion in Westminster in 1608 with Calvin’s Case and the English law of royal subjectship.I would begin in Philadelphia in 1776.Between those two places—and those two moments—lies the American Revolution. And the Revolution changed more than who governed America. It changed the very foundation of political membership.That is the central problem with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara. The Court’s opinion is learned, careful, and historically rich. Chief Justice Roberts...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was the target of an anonymous report that police determined was false and that he says forced him to spend a night away from his four-year-old twins.

What would C. S. Lewis have thought of artificial intelligence? I doubt he would have begun with the machine. Indeed, Lewis always began with man. He would not have asked first whether AI can write a poem, draft a law, tutor a child, or write a sermon. He would have asked, “What sort of people want a machine to do these things for them?” He would have asked, “What have we already lost when we greet such a tool not with care, but with wonder?” That is why reading The Abolition of Man in 2026 makes the work feel more...

After 250 Years, Our American Republic Is Coming ApartThe crisis we face today is existential. Too many Americans, both native-born and naturalized, have been taught to despise their country.If it sometimes seems like the American cultural mainstream is ignorant of the role of Christianity in the founding of the United States, or even hostile towards it, that’s because it is.The story told about America’s founding by the corporate media, book publishers, libraries and other institutions is one in which the Christian faith, so central to our history and founding, is almost wholly absent.I don’t mean that anecdotally. A recent report...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three fellow socialists in the New York City Democratic Congressional primaries and all three won last night. Democratic incumbent Dan Goldman lost to Brad Lander, who was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America until 2023. DSA Member Claire Valdez won nomination for a Brooklyn House seat. But the eyepopper is the victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DSA member and PhD graduate student, in East Harlem and the Bronx. She defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and will easily become the most radical House member since Vito Marcantonio of...

SUGAR GROVE, N.C. — Year after year, Ross and Rebecca Tobiassen saw their healthcare costs rise, having relied on the Affordable Care Act for federally subsidized health insurance since its start in 2014. Year after year, the couple in western North Carolina kept their coverage, believing the peace of mind was worth the cost. But in December, that changed. The Tobiassens decided to cancel their insurance when Rebecca saw the cost of their monthly premiums would jump from $130 to more than $550. ... The Tobiassens are among the Americans who canceled their ACA coverage after Congress allowed enhanced tax...