Free Republic

NATIONAL HARBOR – "Pawn Stars” host Rick Harrison injected some humor into his CPAC speech on Thursday afternoon. Harrison, the star of the History channel show and an outspoken conservative, delivered his speech on ‘the stupidity of socialism’ at one of the largest annual gatherings of conservatives just outside Washington, D.C. “The majority [of] people in this room know that socialism is just stupid,” he said. “It’s literally like heroin. The first shot is great. For a little bit it’s wonderful, but then the rest of your life is a living hell. And that’s literally what the socialists are doing.”...

A Russian cargo ship captain may have been slightly drunk when he veered off course and crashed into a busy South Korean bridge this afternoon. The 6,000 ton Seagrand collided with the side of the Gwangan Bridge in Busan, in the southeast of the country, at around 4.20pm local time. The ship then attempted to turn and vacate the area before it was detained by the Korea Coast Guard (KCG).

Thursday on CNN’s “New Day,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) defended her use of the term “prop” to describe her colleague Rep. Mark Meadows’ (R-NC) guest and Trump administration official Lynne Patton. Co-host Alisyn Camerota asked Tlaib why she felt compelled initially to apologize to Meadows for the remark, to which the Michigan Democrat said she thought it was important to speak out about how she felt. “You know, I just want folks to know — this is probably the most diverse class — this is the largest incoming class since Watergate,” Tlaib said. “And yeah, we look differently, and many...

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and an allied political committee were fined by the city Board of Ethics for violating the local campaign finance laws. A settlement agreement released by the board outlines an arrangement in which Krasner’s campaign enjoyed the services of three full-time staffers whose salaries were paid by the Real Justice PAC during the 2017 race for district attorney. The super PAC was formed that same year with the help of activist Shaun King to support DA candidates around the country that wanted to push criminal justice reform policies.

Net migration to the UK from countries outside the European Union has hit its highest level for 15 years, the Office for National Statistics says. Figures show 261,000 more non-EU citizens came to the UK than left in the year ending September 2018 - the highest since 2004. In contrast, net migration from EU countries has continued to fall to a level last seen in 2009.

Jacob Wohl is a 21-year-old Trump supporter from California who laughs at how much he’s hated by liberals: “Of course they hate me. I’m destroying everything they love.” Wohl is a political prodigy. Having started his first business while still in high school, he was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission when he was only 18 years old, an investigation he believes was a “Deep State” reprisal for his outspoken support of Trump during the 2016 campaign. When we met in the lobby bar of the Gaylord Hotel on the first day of the 46th annual Conservative Political Action...

If you haven’t heard of Joshua Clover before now, allow me to introduce him. Clover is a tenured professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of nearly a dozen books. He’s also a big fan of social media, or at least he used to be. Before taking his Twitter account private, it seems that the professor really enjoyed mixing it up with other users, including a number of charming tweets where he wished that more police officers would be murdered. Even in California, that was a bridge too far for some, but Clover remains on the...

Karen Templer’s Fringe Association Co. is kind of like Goop for knitting. There are tips and how-tos for navigating knitting’s trickier maneuvers. There are knit-alongs for chunky cowls and cute fingerless gloves. There’s an online store that sells the Fringe bag, which has come to be known in some circles as the Birkin of knitting bags. And there’s the blog where Templer puts her personal thoughts. On January 7, she blogged excitedly about her upcoming trip to India. She wrote that 2019 would be her “year of color.” She said that as a child, India had fascinated her, and that...

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., has been deployed to the southern border as a member of the Air National Guard four times now, and says he's never seen more drug smuggling and human trafficking than he did on his most recent deployment this month. “There were a lot more drugs. You’d see people drop bundles,” the Illinois Republican told the Washington Examiner. He was referring to large bags of narcotics that had been carried from Mexico and dropped from planes flying over Arizona or by groups on foot for the next smuggler to move further north. Kinzinger, a lieutenant colonel with...

New York state is failing to ensure that children and teenagers who come from families who don't speak English as the first language don't fall behind, according to a coalition that advocates for educational opportunities for people of color. A newly released report from the LEAD coalition, a group of 30 organizations, points out that the state has the nation's second lowest graduation rate among multilingual learners (MLLs) and English Language Learner (ELLs), as well as higher dropout rates and lower rates of proficiency in math and English as compared to the rest of the student population. In just the...

Having apparently solved all other problems, California’s state legislature is now considering new legislation that would ban all dissections in high school science classes. What they hope to accomplish by doing this is a mystery, but for any budding young scientists out there, it represents the loss of a chance to learn about anatomy in a hands-on environment. But hey… this is California we’re talking about, so it probably doesn’t have to make much sense. The proposed bill was introduced by state assembly member Ash Kalra. Students in any California public or private school, grades one through 12, could...

David Drucker calls this a “GOP nightmare” in the making. I don’t see it. A new Moore run could be quite useful to establishment Republicans. Moore, 72, a former state judge, made the rounds at last Friday’s Alabama Republican Party dinner gala. A few days later, a new political action committee run by Moore’s son, Caleb Moore, issued an email fundraising appeal…If Moore runs, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate GOP campaign arm, would take action to block him from the nomination. Otherwise, the NRSC plans to stay out of the Alabama primary.“The NRSC’s official stance is ABRM:...

While President Trump was away on a diplomatic mission to Hanoi to negotiate a nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un, the media breathlessly turned its eye to Capitol Hill to hear from a sleazy disbarred lawyer. The dueling news stories summed up the country’s two political movements. Republicans were trying to dismantle weapons of mass destruction, while Democrats were deploying weapons of mass distraction. In Vietnam, President Trump was dealing with serious problems. In Washington D.C., Democrats and their media arm can’t imagine any problem more serious than Trump. Forget North Korean nukes, the true threat to Democrats and the...

House Democrats are leading an effort to vote in the dead of the night to take away the Second Amendment rights of millions of Americans. According to Breitbart, Democrats are planning to advance legislation that would criminalize private gun sales between owners. The disturbing and vastly overreaching legislation is expected to be put to a floor vote in the House this week — and there’s hardly any media attention on this issue. Most Americans have no idea about this measure and what the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives is about to vote on. Democrats introduced H.R. 8, which is in...

Two of President Trump’s strongest House allies on Thursday urged the Department of Justice to investigate Michael Cohen for perjury, accusing the president’s former attorney of intentionally lying to Congress during his Wednesday appearance before the House Oversight Committee. GOP Reps. Jim Jordan, Ohio, and Mark Meadows, North Carolina, sent the letter to Attorney General William P. Barr. “In sum, Mr. Cohen’s testimony….was a spectacular and brazen attempt to knowing and willfully testify falsely and fictitiously to numerous material facts,” they wrote. “His testimony included intentionally false statements designed to make himself look better before a national stage,” they wrote.

Vietnam’s Bamboo Airways and VietJet Aviation JSC signed deals to buy 110 aircraft from Boeing Co. during President Donald Trump’s visit to Hanoi for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

Federal officials and energy experts offered their most blunt assessment to date regarding the ongoing vulnerability of the U.S. power grid, telling a Senate committee that solar-generated attacks alone cost $10 billion a year. In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Operations Committee, the officials noted that the attacks are growing and pose a substantial, long-term risk to a vulnerable power grid. They warned that a catastrophic failure would cut off electricity to millions of Americans, probably for months at a time, causing untold damage and social chaos, adding that the grid is an easy target for solar,...

The Eclipse of Ethics Perhaps no area of philosophy has seen a greater effort at appropriation by advocates of scientism than ethics. Many of them tend toward a position of moral relativism. According to this position, science deals with the objective and the factual, whereas statements of ethics merely represent people’s subjective feelings; there can be no universal right or wrong. Not surprisingly, there are philosophers who have codified this opinion. The positivist tradition made much of a “fact-value distinction,” in which science was said to deal with facts, leaving fields like ethics (and aesthetics) to deal with the more...

Notice is hereby given that Citizens United Foundation is offering a $50,000 reward in exchange for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person who perpetrated an assault and battery on Hayden Williams, during the afternoon of February 19, 2019. This reward has been made possible through the generosity of an anonymous donor. Any person having information related to this crime is requested to contact Citizens United Foundation at the following email address: BerkeleyThugReward@citizensunited.org. In the email, please provide contact information and details of the information in your possession, including relevant facts. Any information provided will be promptly...

The Vatican’s four-day summit on protecting minors ended Sunday with a whimper. There were no new “concrete, effective measures” to hold Catholic bishops accountable for ignoring and covering up sexual abuse, as Pope Francis had called for before the summit began. There were likewise no discussions of the link between sexual abuse and homosexuality among the clergy, the rampant abuse of adult seminarians by their superiors, or the case of disgraced former Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. Instead, the summit concluded with a 3,000-word speech by Francis that contained little of substance but was heavy on defensiveness and bureaucratese. Francis rattled off...