Free Republic

Drain the swamp, baby, and Make America Great Again and Keep America Great Always!! Prayers up for continuing progress and success. FR is funded solely by contributions made by the liberty loving patriots who love and use it. We are beholden to no political party. No advertisers, no outsiders, no sugar daddies, no corporate string pullers. Definitely no government subsidies or tax breaks. No 501c or other IRS non-profit status. This means no commercial ads. No annoying pop-ups. No ad tracking. No mail campaigns. No spam. No third-parties -- not even the IRS -- trying to control what we do...

SPARTANBURG, South Carolina — You go to a Bernie Sanders rally and expect to find the most fervent supporters of any Democratic candidate by far. I mean devotees—“Berners”—so committed they stage protests outside public officials’ homes in the middle of the night shouting warnings through bullhorns like they did last week in Nevada.But not in upstate South Carolina. At a rally in Spartanburg on the campus of Wofford College Thursday night, a surprising number of attendees weren’t yet sure who they’d vote for in Saturday’s primary election.There was the mixed-race couple and their six-year-old daughter who came to check...

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is ready to get her voice to the masses again, and in the most 2020 way of doing so, she’s looking to podcasts. Her still-untitled show will be co-produced by iHeartMedia, a radio station conglomerate that has leaned heavily into podcasts, and it will be released this spring. Details on the show format weren’t readily available, but Politico suggests it’ll be interviews with “newsmakers.” Apparently both Conan O’Brien, who also makes a podcast with iHeart, and radio legend Howard Stern inspired her decision. Of course, Clinton isn’t the first politician to turn to...

China’s cybersecurity agency is believed to be the latest place in Beijing to be hit by an outbreak of the deadly coronavirus . . . While [the authorities] did not name the work unit, she did give its location – at the same address as the National Computer Network and Information Security Management Centre, China’s top cybersecurity agency . . . [they] said 178 people from the affected work unit had been isolated for medical observation, including 11 who had tested positive for the coronavirus.

For the second consecutive year, a former Notre Dame receiver made the right impressions at the NFL combine. Chase Claypool did not run the fastest of all the receivers in Indianapolis on Thursday, but his 4.42-second 40-yard dash wowed, nonetheless. While six receivers ran faster, highlighted by former Alabama receiver Henry Ruggs’ 4.27-second showing, just one of them was taller than 6-feet and only two weighed more than 200 pounds. Claypool, meanwhile, measured in at 6-foot-4 and 238 pounds.

Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg has approached former Democratic candidate Andrew Yang about a potential political endorsement, going so far as to raise the possibility of Andrew Yang joining the ticket as vice president, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.  (Via The Wall Street Journal) Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has made overtures to Democrat Andrew Yang, courting the former candidate’s endorsement and floating the possibility of Mr. Yang becoming his running mate, according to two people familiar with the discussions.Aides to the former New York City mayor reached out to discuss ways the two entrepreneurs-turned-politicians could work together as Mr....

"In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H club -- the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history." – Vice-President Spiro Agnew I’ve had it with the nattering nabobs of negativism, and no amount of covfefe will help.Honestly, wishing a pandemic on the country in order to kill our own economy in order to take down a President they don’t like? Who does that? Deranged ideologues, that’s who.While then Vice-President Spiro Agnew gave a series of speeches in 1969 criticizing the media for their negative coverage, the...

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who admires what a single-party autocracy such as China's can accomplish when it is "led by a reasonably enlightened group of people," praised that country's "one child" policy in a 2008 book, saying it "probably saved China from a population calamity." In the Amazon Prime Video documentary One Child Nation, the Chinese-American filmmaker Nanfu Wang lays bare the brutal reality of the oppressive regime that was so glibly endorsed by rich Westerners who take their own reproductive freedom for granted. She shows that the one-child policy, in force from 1979 to 2015, routinely relied...

Is Christianity a white man’s religion? This may sound absurd, but some individuals lay claim to this belief. Some hold such a position due to the practice of slavery by early antebellum Christians. Slaveholders would often persuade their slaves that being submissive is the Christian thing to do and that their blessings would come in the afterlife. Professor Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah contends that the entire Bible is a colonial work used to subdue natives under the conquest of Christians.However, a simple glimpse at church history quickly portrays a very different tale. African theologians have influenced the church remarkably throughout the...

"Joyously giving thanks to the Father" (Col. 1:11-12). Joyous thanksgiving acknowledges God as the giver of every good gift. The inseparable link between joy and thanksgiving was a common theme for Paul. In Philippians 4:4-6 he says, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! . . . Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." He told the Thessalonians to "rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thess. 5:16- 18). As...

Tara Westover and her family lived off the grid on Buck’s Peak, a mountainside in Idaho so remote that life there was anchored in “circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant that nothing had changed at all.” Tara’s father, a Mormon fundamentalist whose family had been living on the Peak for a half-century, ruled it as his kingdom, where he prepared for Jesus Christ’s second coming. He “lived in fear of time,” as Tara wrote in her memoir, Educated—but time still transpired in his world, even if it was ending. Educated details Tara’s escape from that world, the creation...

Rush Limbaugh stated during his radio show Monday that he believes the deadly coronavirus wreaking havoc around the world is part of an effort to “bring down” President Trump. The conservative commentator and recent Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient made the claim as the stock market slumped over concerns about the coronavirus continuing to spread. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Mr. Limbaugh said during his syndicated radio show. It seems that Rush is not far from the truth but the hoax will be over soon. From the Galilee...

As a country that finds itself in the eye of the global coronavirus storm, the prosperous island city-state of Singapore might provide some useful tips on how British officials can best contain the outbreak without plunging the entire country into complete paralysis. Singapore, with its large population of ethnic Chinese people, was one of the first Asian countries to be affected by the virus, and is dealing with almost 90 confirmed cases. Moreover, there were significant concerns that it might follow China in being identified as one of the main sources of the outbreak after a British businessman who had...

The Coronavirus presents itself as a health challenge as well as an economic challenge to present day America. Certainly, preventing the wide scale spread of this virus is a top priority to our health agencies as well as government. Addressing the effect on the nation's economy that this virus has already had as well as the actual shortages of vital medical supplies which originate in China as well as other economic supply chain issues are also hurdle's to cross. One would think that companies currently having manufacturing done in China would love to have another location present itself to them...

Federal health officials met with state and city public health labs on Wednesday to fix a crippling lack of options to diagnose the novel coronavirus, a shortfall driven by botched CDC testing kits. As a result, New York state and New York City are moving forward with developing their own test to detect the virus. The lack of adequate testing capabilities was spotlighted on Wednesday evening, when the CDC announced delayed results of the first potential case of a person contracting COVID-19 from “community spread,” meaning they got sick without traveling to China or being exposed to anyone known to...

Democratic Party leaders are sweating over the prospect of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders - and also a fractured party. The New York Times reported Thursday that former President Bill Clinton has been calling old friends and venting about Sanders, fearing his nomination could wipe out the party in the general election. Sanders was Hillary Clinton's primary opponent in 2016. Former President Barack Obama, on the other hand, signed on to a party fundraising email Thursday afternoon that's central theme was all about unity.

When climate alarmists first presented their poster-child advocate, then-15-year-old Greta Thunberg, she was taken by realists with the appropriate grain of salt.  While the MSM rushed to gush all over this "brave" little girl who had somehow mustered the temerity and selflessness to skip school in the service of humanity, many dismissed her "how dare you?" message as yet another banal alarmist slogan. So when news hit of 19-year-old Naomi Seibt, the so-called "anti-Greta," I must admit to being more than a bit skeptical.  After all, is the proper response to an opponent's deployment of a preposterous puppet (she really is...

We can all agree that the recent trend of teen vaping is cause for concern. As a trained Pediatric nurse practitioner, I understand the harm nicotine can have on a developing adolescent brain, but attempts to ban vaping products runs an even greater risk of exposing individuals to higher risk alternatives in an unregulated black market. The recent congressional vaping hearing appears to be a part of a larger campaign to chip away at the rights of legal adult citizens to use nicotine products. Even if those nicotine vaping products are a critical part of harm reduction by transitioning traditional...

For people who are neither leftists nor caught in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Vice President Mike Pence is an intelligent, principled, competent man. When President Trump announced on Wednesday that he was putting Pence in charge of coordinating the federal government’s response to the coronavirus, it seemed like an eminently sensible decision. For Democrats, though, Pence is the man who caused an HIV outbreak in Indiana. This, of course, is a lie. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a woman so desperate to drive Trump from the White House that she seemed unconcerned that Mike Pence would become president, summed up...