Free Republic

The Supreme Court has just now started oral arguments in the transgender case.Little v Hecox.Issue: Whether laws that seek to protect women's and girls' sports by limiting participation to women and girls based on sex violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. You can listen to the arguments here:Supreme Court audioSCOTUSblog is livestreaming it at their website. SCOTUS oral argument scotusblog.com

Texas is now the first state in the U.S. to eliminate American Bar Association oversight of its law schools, ending the state's 42-year-long reliance on the national organization. The Texas Supreme Court issued an order Tuesday finalizing a tentative September opinion, asserting the ABA should "no longer have the final say" on which law school graduates can take the bar exam — a requirement to becoming a licensed lawyer in each state. … The change means law school graduates who want to practice in Texas are no longer required to attend an ABA-accredited school. The power to approve those law...

The Strategic Necessity of Taking Out MaduroWhat looked like another endless war was instead a clean Monroe Doctrine strike—neutralizing Maduro, securing U.S. interests, and leaving without a quagmire.I’ll be honest. When I woke up in the early hours of January 3, 2026, and briefly checked my news feed, I was alarmed when I saw that America had its elite military forces on the ground in Venezuela. You see, as a veteran of America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one of the primary reasons I supported Donald Trump in 2024 was that he would end our entanglement in what I call...

Pablo Escobar was elected alternate representative to the Congress of the Republic of Colombia in 1982. Upon receiving the news of his victory, he told his wife: “Get ready to be the First Lady . . . the doors of the presidential palace will open for us.” The most notorious drug trafficker in history dreamed of becoming president of his country. To realize that dream, Escobar oversaw a reign of terror that included bombings, assassinations of judges, police, and presidential candidates, and mass kidnappings. The exact number of victims is unknown but estimated to be around 50,000. The Colombian drug...

The Trump administration is freezing child care funding to the state of Minnesota in response to a viral video that purports to expose extensive fraud by federally funded day care centers. Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old self-described "independent YouTube journalist," posted the 42-minute video on X and YouTube the day after Christmas. In it, he and an older man — identified only as "David" — visit various seemingly empty day care centers, bombarding Somali employees with questions and accusing them of not providing services to any children despite receiving public funds. The pair claim to have exposed over $110 million in...

Ben Shapiro’s war on Tucker Carlson risks turning conservatism inward—smearing populist concerns as extremism instead of confronting the economic failures driving millions to revolt.Just as a “country without borders is not a country,” so it is that “the conservative movement also requires borders.” This was the general message delivered by conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro in a December 17 speech at the Heritage Foundation and again the next day in a speech at Turning Point USA’s Amerifest conference.Shapiro’s other main point was more specific: Conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson is no conservative and must forthwith be expelled from the conservative...

Joseph Goebbels said that if you tell a lie that's big enough often enough, people will believe it. Liberal lies are soothing. They create an alternate reality and play into popular prejudices, including hatred of the rich, oil companies and Jews. The big lies of 2025 included:

Pop superstar Nicki Minaj on Sunday gave an ominous warning against allowing people filled with the spirit of anti-Christ to be hold power in America. Appearing with Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, Minaj said it's not just Nigeria that is facing vicious persecution of those who follow the teachings of Jesus. "Christians have been being persecuted right here in our country in different ways," Minaj said. "So when we talk about Nigeria and other countries, know that prior administrations saw nothing wrong with that, and that's what was wrong with them." "I truly feel that...

A disembodied notion of American identity means that America is really nothing at all, and no one is really an American.You might have noticed there is a heated debate underway on the American right over the question of American identity. What makes someone an American? Is it based on lineage or is it propositional? Is America a nation and a people, or is it an idea based on universal principles?After World War Two, these questions were largely swept under the rug. The dominant narrative, pushed by nearly every mainstream institution and both political parties, was that America was a credal,...

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career. I was thirty-one, I’d been in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. There had been minor successes, a couple of small projects optioned, and I’d recently started writing with my best friend. We were writing constantly, making each other better, building momentum. Success felt close. Back then it always did. We’d written a pilot script that a veteran showrunner had agreed, in a very theoretical, very Hollywood sort of way, to “come on” to. That project had fizzled, so...

One of my consistent themes is that in the post-Christian West, sexual pleasure and hedonism have been elevated to the highest human good. Human beings are driven to ask, "What is the meaning of life," and when God exits stage left, what usually replaces Him is "pleasure." That's natural, of course, since pleasure by its nature is self-reinforcing. "If it feels good, do it" is hardly revolutionary, despite what the hippies said. Without religion, human beings struggle to come up with reasons to deny our darkest desires without appealing to moral standards that are generally rooted in religion, or at...

As the artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing industries explode, trained STEM professionals are in high demand. Mathematics is foundational to these fields.But mathematics is missing an important ingredient: people who are female or gender-diverse. In New South Wales, for example, only one-third of high school graduates who complete mathematics at the highest level are female or gender-diverse. And when students choose university courses in December, a large proportion of these highly qualified people will step away from mathematics and STEM.

One of the big fights coming this January is how to reform the failing Obamacare program, aka, the Unaffordable Care Act. Without massive COVID-era subsidies, users will pay a lot more in 2026. The program itself has so many problems, beginning with the fact that many well-off people qualify, and so much money goes to directly fund insurance companies, no questions asked. It is more than past time to just let this whole mess disappear. But many working people who don’t qualify for Medicaid need some options. Sen. Rand Paul has perhaps the simplest and most effective answer, one that...

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s ban on military service by individuals who identify as transgender or have gender dysphoria, staying a lower-court order that blocked War Secretary Pete Hegseth from enforcing the policy. The 2–1 decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sharply rebuked U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, concluding that her ruling in March overrode military judgment and applied a standard of review the courts are not entitled to use when second-guessing force-readiness decisions.

Trump is right to warn against mass immigration and the Islamification of EuropeLast week the Trump administration expressed its fear that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” Its concern was articulated in a 33-page National Security Strategy that outlined Donald Trump’s world view and how America will respond economically and militarily.The sentence that caused the most reaction on the other side of the pond was the assertion that, if current trends continue, Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” Those trends are mass immigration and what conservative French commentators call the “Islamification” of Europe. If Europe doesn’t address these trends,...

Legal conservatives find themselves in an unusual position: originalism has reached unprecedented acceptance within the judiciary and the bar. A majority of Supreme Court justices—including at least one appointed by a Democratic president—identify as originalists, or at least strive toward originalism. Guided by the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments, the High Court has overruled Roe v. Wade, ended the use of race in higher education, and recognized the individual right to own firearms. But some find these successes disorienting. Originalism’s victories have triggered an important debate among conservatives. Some wonder if originalism is...

My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine...

Today the NY Times has published the story of a trans woman named Jennifer Capasso. Capasso, who lives in New York, was diagnosed with multiple tumors which had spread throughout to various organs. Capasso was still getting medical treatment, including surgeries to remove the tumors, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. In March 2022, Capasso set her phone to record what the doctors were saying during the operation.“I wanted to know what’s going on,” she recounted. She turned on the audio recorder on her phone before the anesthesia hit. “Knowledge is power.”The surgeon removed part of her lung....

“I’m thankful for my health” is a common refrain heard around the Thanksgiving table. But for Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, the feeling is a bit more complicated. David J. Garrow reviews the senator’s frank memoir, Unfettered. “An October 25 debate against Oz was a disaster. ‘My nerves beat me down. I had wilted. I’d choked,’ and in its wake ‘I had mentally collapsed.’ Now ‘I never thought I would win’ the race to become a senator, which felt all well and good since ‘I didn’t deserve to be one.’ But win Fetterman did, by a margin of more than 250,000 votes,...

The U.S. Supreme Court could soon extend its administrative stay in the Texas redistricting case that has generated nationwide controversy and headlines for months. If so, a legal analyst told CBS News Texas that it will become a clear signal that the Justices will keep the 2025 congressional maps in place for next year's all-important midterm elections.