Free Republic

What really lurks behind their façade of concern for the “people” and the “oppressed.” Poet Sylvia Plath’s slur against women, that they “adore a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute,” is more true about progressives, with one big difference: they want to be the ones wear the boot. Behind their façade of therapeutic concern for the “people” and the “oppressed” lies something that Vladimir Lenin was honest enough to express in 1906: the lust for “power, which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.” Thankfully, those impulses so...

"In the United Kingdom, total excess deaths are now causing real alarm among statisticians. The 18,516 deaths recorded in England and Wales in the week to April 10 are the highest weekly total since winter 2000 – and we are not in winter now. There 7996 (or 76%) more deaths than the mean weekly death toll for the time of year."

Former Vice President Joe Biden said he plans to announce the members of a selection committee who will help choose his running mate by May 1 as speculation continues to mount over his vice presidential pick. “We’re going to probably be announcing the setting up of that committee, which we’re doing now, between the people who have agreed to serve on it, and we will be announcing the formation of that I assume by May 1 we’ll have that done,” he said on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” early Wednesday morning. Biden added that the committee will likely...

According to a report, at least seven federal lawsuits have been filed against the Chinese government over the spread of the deadly coronavirus, with some specifically singling out the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as US intelligence is now ‘near certain’ that the virus leaked from the lab there. Fox News reported that “Americans across the nation are really seeking now legal remedies of their own…targeting the Chinese government, seeking reparations of trillions of dollars in damages.” the report notes that “Five of the lawsuits do not seek a specific amount of money or damages. One, however, wants China to fork...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – Dr. Shahinaz Soliman has been a Torrance family physician for 22 years. But in early March, she became a coronavirus patient. She believes she may have been infected by one of her patients during a physical exam. He did not know he was infected at the time but he did tell her he had attended a birthday party in the South Bay where several guests later tested positive. Soon, he tested positive, and so did Dr. Soliman. “I felt helpless, I felt like a patient, and it’s a totally different feeling when you’re not coming into...

“I don’t plan to leave the Democratic Party because somebody’s got to be in there to hold them accountable —hold them accountable to how they are treating black people (and) root out the bigotry,” Jones said on The Rashad Richey Morning Show shortly after announcing his resignation.

President Trump said Wednesday that he’s instructed the U.S. Navy to “shoot down and destroy” any Iranian gunboats harassing American ships, in the wake of a tense encounter in the Persian Gulf. “I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea,” Trump tweeted. The encounter happened last week. Six U.S. Navy warships were conducting drills with US Army Apache attack helicopters in international waters off Iran last Wednesday when they were repeatedly harassed by 11 Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Navy vessels, the U.S. Navy’s 5th...

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington has accused President Trump of supporting “illegal and dangerous acts” during the Covid-19 crisis. As a free society, our country should indeed discuss constitutional abuses of power during times of national emergency.After World War I, for example, the Supreme Court, in Schenck v. United States, argued that restrictions on free speech were justified during wartime. But where should the line be drawn? Has President Donald Trump, by encouraging governors to close much of the American economy, gone too far? Is the Constitution in jeopardy?If we compare President Trump’s actions with those of President Franklin...

I have been informally tracking the mortality rate of Covid-19 by dividing the number of reported deaths by the number of confirmed cases. I see a trend developing that is concerning. I have been seeing the percentage increasing over time. When I started tracking, the rate was down around 2.8%. It has slowling been increasing and now it is around 4.8%.

While the rest of us can’t imagine life without beauty, its absence would certainly make life easier for evolutionists. They will just have to accept their beautiful plight. I don’t often think about evolution, but I recently found myself doing so under the warm, cerulean waters of Sharks Cove on the North Shore of Oahu. I was snorkeling, taking in the tropical fish schooling around me. I thought, how did their diverse and extravagant beauty come to exist? If natural selection is the engine that created the living world, what is the reason behind this opulence? Why does beauty even...

Border Police officer “B,” who was wounded this morning, Wednesday, in a terror attack at the Kiosk checkpoint in the Ma'aleh Adumim area and is now hospitalized, recounted the incident. "During the guard shift, a vehicle drove up and rammed into me. While I was on the ground I saw the terrorist get out of the vehicle. I tried to get away from him and took him to a place where my comrades could open fire and neutralize him," B related. Although the officer was taken by surprise by the terrorist, he was still able to repel the terrorist and...

Most campuses in the United States are sitting empty. Courses are online, students are at home. And administrators are trying to figure out how to make the finances of that work. "The math is not pretty," says Robert Kelchen, who studies higher ed finance at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. "Colleges are stressed both on the revenue side and on the expenditure side." On one end of the equation, colleges are spending money to take classes online, in some situations purchasing software, training professors or outsourcing to online-only institutions. That's on top of refunds for room and board and...

Yesterday we looked at the President’s recent announcement about suspending all legal immigration to the United States and how that might impact both our long-term immigration strategy and our efforts to combat the pandemic. Well, as too often happens, interpreting United States policy based on a single tweet from the President’s Twitter feed is a risky proposition at best. President Trump’s first announcement didn’t contain much in the way of details, but now that it’s being more fully fleshed out, we’re learning that we’re really not ending legal immigration entirely. In fact, we’re probably not going to be changing...

Around 25,000 accounts from the National Institute of Health (NIH), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Gates Foundation and other organisations working towards containing the coronavirus pandemic were hacked. The database also seems to carry several IDs from a virology lab in Wuhan, giving rise to fresh speculations and conspiracy theories. The Washington Post reported that unknown activists posted 25,000 email addresses and passwords online. This was found out by the SITE Intelligence Group, which looks after online extremism and terrorist organisations. According to the SITE report, 9,938 IDs from NIH, 5,120 IDs from World Bank and 2,732 IDs from...

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited two major abortion-related decisions in a concurring opinion spelling out when "erroneous precedents" ought to be overturned. Monday's majority opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, overturned a prior decision about unanimous jury verdicts, striking down state laws in Louisiana and Oregon which allowed people to be convicted of serious crimes with non-unanimous jury votes. The now-reversed 1972 ruling upheld nonunanimous verdicts in state courts. The final vote was 6-3, with a mixture of the court's conservative and liberal justices on both sides, agreeing mostly or in part with the decision. In his concurrence, the...

There could hardly have been a more terrifying place to fight a fire than in the belly of the Losharik, a mysterious deep-diving Russian submarine. Something, it appears, had gone terribly wrong in the battery compartment as the sub made its way through Russian waters 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the First of July. A fire on any submarine may be a mariner’s worst nightmare, but a fire on the Losharik was a threat of another order altogether. The vessel is able to dive far deeper than almost any other sub, but the feats of engineering that...

An Idaho woman was arrested Tuesday after police say she was violating city orders by trespassing on a city playground that was closed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. CBS affiliate KBOI-TV reports that 40-year-old Sara Brady, of Meridian, was arrested and charged with one count of misdemeanor trespassing. Following Brady's arrest, which was captured on social media, there were protests held at Meridian City Hall, KBOI reported. Station KTVB reported that roughly 100 people protested.

According to The New York Times coronavirus report, as of Sunday, April 19, 2:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 18,690 were in the New York metropolitan area. (The New York metropolitan area is generally regarded as consisting of the five boroughs of New York City, the five New York State counties surrounding New York City -- Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Orange -- and the populous parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.) That means that more than half (52%) of all deaths in America have occurred in the New...

The director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, is warning that while we're now reaching the apex of infections by the coronavirus, the outbreak could be even worse next winter.Redfield told the Washington Post that we actually lucked out this year. If the virus had hit us a few weeks earlier, medical facilities and resources would also have been needed for other seasonal diseases like the flu, pneumonia, and bronchitis. But there will be no escaping this problem next winter.Science Alert: The coronavirus is  both more contagious and more deadly than seasonal influenza, and...

"The View" hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Meghan McCain have been sounding off regularly on President Trump's response to the coronavirus outbreak and the race between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Yet none of them have weighed in on a disturbing sexual assault allegation facing Biden leveled by his former staffer Tara Reade, who went public with her 1993 claim four weeks ago. "The View" isn't alone in the blackout. ABC News, which the daytime talk show is a part of, has not covered the controversy on-air and only acknowledged Reade's claim in the republishing...