Free Republic

SYDNEY: Australia locked in plans on Tuesday to make Facebook Inc and Google pay its media outlets for news content, a world-first move aimed at protecting independent journalism that has drawn strong opposition from the internet giants. Under laws to be introduced to parliament on Wednesday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the Big Tech firms will have to negotiate how much they pay local publishers and broadcasters for content that appears on their platforms. If they cannot strike a deal, a government-appointed arbitrator will decide how much they will need to pay. "This is a huge reform, this is a world...

[Catholic Caucus] Viganò: Francis Uses Covid-19 "To Humiliate God"Like on Easter, Francis uses Covid-19 again to cancel Christmas and the December 8 veneration of the Immaculate on the Piazza di Spagna, Archbishop Viganò writes in a December 7 statement.For him, the "so-called ‘church’ of Bergoglio" closes churches and arrogates to itself a right to deny God public worship and to deprive the faithful of the Sacraments "through a wretched connivance with civil power.”Therefore - Viganò believes - the Bergoglio church "humiliates the Most Holy Trinity" by lowering it to the level of idols and demons with sacrilegious rituals of a...

Last week, a video was released from Georgia purporting to show partisan observers being told to leave the room, after which the remaining workers took out containers of votes and began to scan them. Gov. Kemp took it seriously enough to call for a signature audit in response. In what was a less than shocking development, those involved then decided to investigate themselves and have assured us that nothing untoward happened. That was enough for the media to start shouting from the roof-tops that the video had been “debunked.”Conservative commentator and Fox News personality Mollie Hemingway isn’t buying it. RedState’s...

A question that I have not yet seen posed directly, nor has there been any suggestion of an answer — obviously — is whether the FBI in Atlanta, working with the US Attorney in the Northern District of Georgia, has taken an interest in the individuals who were in the room where the surveillance video was recorded.My view of what has been happening in Georgia is that the “sound and fury” has all been behind the lawsuits filed by Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, while the Trump Campaign has more quietly pursued an “election contest” lawsuit filed last Friday in...

President Donald Trump told a Fox News reporter that he believes “the case” for election fraud “has been made” before the American people, and now it will be a process of prosecuting this case, apparently in state legislatures, courtrooms, and potentially before the Supreme Court of the United States.The Fox News reporter asked the president, “Are you looking to try to change the outcome of the election, or try to make a case to the American people that it wasn’t a fair election?”“Well I think case has already been made, if you look at the polls,” said the President, interjecting....

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s political alliance claimed a sweeping victory Monday in congressional elections boycotted by the most influential opposition politicians and widely criticized internationally as being fraudulent. The win gives Maduro control of the last major branch of government outside his grasp. It plays out in the waning days of the Trump administration, which leaves office with Maduro firmly entrenched despite its efforts to bring about his departure through diplomacy and sanctions. “We have recovered the National Assembly with the majority vote of the Venezuelan people,” Maduro said in a televised address. “It’s a great victory without a doubt...

More and more, the modern entertainment culture is pushing abortions on women as a normal, acceptable solution to any problems or fears they may be facing. Pregnant to a guy who is irresponsible? Have an abortion. Worried about parenting a baby while finishing school? Have an abortion. Want to travel the world or advance in your career? Have an abortion. Worried about all the uncertainties and difficulties of raising a child with special needs? Have a “compassionate” abortion. Movies, TV shows, women’s magazines, celebrities and politicians are peddling this message, trying to push out of people’s minds the violent final...

Democratic senate candidate Raphael Warnock refused to say during a debate Sunday whether he supports “court packing,” or adding seats to the Supreme Court. “As I move all across the state … people aren’t asking me about the courts and whether we should expand the courts,” Warnock said at the debate against Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican. “I know that’s an interesting question for people inside the beltway to discuss, but they are wondering when in the world they are going to get some COVID-19 relief,” added Warnock, a pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Asked again by a...

It is impossible to have watched the election-related hearings in Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, as well as to have read the signed affidavits in the lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and Sidney Powell in those three states, without concluding that there was massive election fraud last month. Thirty-six members of the House Freedom Caucus want Attorney General William Barr to release the findings of the Justice Department’s investigation into vote fraud (the one in which apparently none of the hundreds of people who signed the aforementioned affidavits were interviewed), as reported by The Daily Signal. Meanwhile, here is the...

Sen. Kelly Loeffler criticized her Democrat opponent for using the Bible to justify the killing of unborn babies in abortions Sunday during a Georgia election debate. The pro-life Republican senator is facing a high-stakes race against Raphael Warnock in January. The two runoff races in Georgia will determine if Republicans maintain their majority in the U.S. Senate. During the debate Sunday hosted by the Atlanta Press Club, Loeffler slammed Warnock, a pastor, as a “radical liberal” who supports abortion on demand, ABC News reports. “I’m not going to stand by and let Georgians not know who my opponent is, how...

House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are moving forward with plans to end the Hyde Amendment and force taxpayers to pay for the killing of unborn babies in elective abortions. The decades-old amendment prohibits federal tax dollars from being used for abortions in Medicaid. Since the late 1970s, the Hyde Amendment has had strong bipartisan support from Congress and the American people. Pro-life leaders estimate it has saved about 2.4 million babies’ lives. Four years ago, however, Democrat Party leaders abandoned Americans’ priorities in favor of those of the abortion industry and adopted a platform calling for taxpayer-funded abortion...

Pollster Patrick Basham explained during an interview with Fox News’s Mark Levin why he believes Joe Biden’s supposed election victory, while “not statistically impossible,” is “statistically implausible.” Basham said during the interview that aired Sunday that he looked at numerous “non-polling metrics,” which have a “100 percent accuracy rate in terms of predicting the winner of the presidential election,” to come to his conclusion. “Something very strange has happened because the numbers just don’t add up,” he said referring to the election results. Some of the “dozen or more” metrics include “party registration trends, how the candidates did in their...

On this date in 1683 the English politician and philosopher Algernon Sidney (or Sydney) was beheaded to uphold (so he conceived it) “the common rights of mankind, the laws of this land, and the true Protestant religion, against corrupt principles, arbitrary power, and Popery.” He was one of the 17th century’s great philosophers of republicanism, and his Discourses Concerning Government was more influential in his lifetime than the work of his contemporary (and fellow-Whig*) John Locke. Although the pen might be mightier than the sword, Sydney himself did not eschew the more literal form of combat and entered a triumphant...

State police raided the home of a former Department of Health data scientist who is accusing Florida officials of wrongfully firing her for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 statistics. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement served the search warrant at Rebekah Jones’ Tallahassee home Monday morning in connection with an investigation into who hacked the state’s internal notification system with a message urging state employees to come forward with information about Florida’s handling of the pandemic. The alert read: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a...

Many families took one look at their school district’s remote or hybrid learning offerings this fall and said “no, thank you.” That’s the message gleaned from national and state-specific data on the surging number of homeschooled students this academic year. Prior to the pandemic and related school closures last spring, there were just under two million homeschoolers in the U.S., representing about 3.4 percent of the total K-12 school-age population. According to recent polling by Education Week, that percentage has more than doubled to nine percent this fall, or nearly five million homeschoolers. This estimate mirrors related polling from...

Joe Biden says he will name radical abortion activist Xavier Becerra as his Health and Human Services Secretary should he defeat President Donald Trump in the presidential election. Becerra is more than just an ardent supporter of abortion — he is actively trying to put David Daldein and Sandra Merritt in prison for exposing the Planned Parenthood abortion businesses sale of body parts from aborted babies. Though Becerra, like Biden, claims to be Catholic, his record involving the lives of unborn babies and those who work to protect them is terrible. Currently, Becerra is prosecuting David Daleiden, the Center for...

WASHINGTON — From tackling climate change in "Laudato Si'" to inclusively building a more just and peaceful world without war and "globalized indifference" in "Fratelli Tutti," "Pope Francis is the prophet we've been waiting for on all these issues," R. Scott Appleby said Dec. 3 in an online program. Appleby is a history professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and founding dean of the university's Keough School of Global Affairs. "Here's a body of thought that he represents, and It's all about solidarity, really," he said during the program sponsored by Georgetown University's Berkeley Center for Religion,...

97 years old. "The Right Stuff" immortalized him.

In Japan, the number of electric vehicles on the road is expected to rise to 55 percent by 2030 The world is gradually embracing green energy for hybrid electric vehicles, with the active support of Pope Francis and inspired by his path-breaking encyclical Laudato si’. Japan, a leader in the electric car market, is mulling a ban on sales of new gasoline-engine cars by the mid-2030s, public broadcaster NHK announced on Dec. 3. A significant decision for one of the world’s largest carmaking economies, aligning the East Asian island nation with other governments distancing themselves from fossil fuel vehicles. It...

President Trump delivered what he called possibly “the most important speech” he had ever made last week. If you don’t know that, you can be forgiven. It’s not your fault. You see, the speech was an update on voter fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election, and the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover that. They certainly didn’t air the 46-minute speech in full, and if you went back after the fact to read about it, you would find out that it was “filled with lies” (New York Times), “baseless” (USA Today and The Washington Post), and “falsehood-filled” (FactCheck.org). That’s...