Free Republic

BBC World News has been banned from airing in China in an apparent act of retaliation after the UK withdrew the licence of the country’s state broadcaster. China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) today said it was pulling the service off air due to “serious content violations”, CGTN reported. The regulator claimed the BBC had “seriously violated” the requirement for news reporting to be true and impartial, adding that its China-related coverage had “undermined China’s national interests and ethnic solidarity”. “As the channel fails to meet the requirements to broadcast in China as an overseas channel, BBC World News...

Dan McLaughlin Reminder: in most systems of government in world history, January 7 would have dawned with the heads of Donald Trump and the rioters mounted on pikes around the Capitol as a warning to others for all time. A purely legislative process of accountability is a pretty mild response. And you know, there are principled reasons not to want Georgia to bring a criminal investigation against Trump for the Raffensperger call. But that ground gets harder to defend if there is no legislative forum for accountability.

While many kids would probably say they loved not going to school for a year during the coronavirus pandemic, their parents see a bigger problem with 2020’s quarantine. A new survey finds seven in 10 parents believe spending a year in lockdown will have a lasting impact on their child’s growth and development. The OnePoll survey of 2,000 parents with children between two and 18 years-old looked at what parents are saying about their kids after spending the majority of 2020 cooped up inside. Of the 69 percent who say they’re worried about their children in lockdown, the top concern...

If you've wondered just how Elon Musk, a guy who had no training in rocket engines and his work experience had consisted solely of founding companies like Zip2, PayPal etc which had nothing whatsoever to do with rockets, you can watch this video about SpaceX employee number one, Tom Mueller, a small town boy from a lower middle class, tree logging family from St Maries Idaho. (only 13 minutes)The young Tom Mueller as a logger. He worked as a tree logger for 4 years to save money to pay for his engineering degree at the University of Idaho, then went...

The oldest bank in America will now be storing Bitcoin on behalf of its asset-management clients, according to the Wall Street Journal.“Digital assets are becoming part of the mainstream,” said Roman Regelman, chief executive of BNY Mellon’s asset-servicing and digital businesses.BNY Mellon’s announcement marks the first time one of the big custody banks has unveiled a road map for treating digital currencies as any other asset.Decrypt reports that the bank plans to enable cryptocurrencies to flow through the same systems that it uses for its traditional currencies and stocks.It has created a prototype for doing this and is engaging with...

A parable... Not long after they got married, two newlyweds got into an argument. In the heat of the moment the husband slapped the wife. Horrified over what he had done, he dropped to his knees and begged forgiveness. His wife accepted his apology, they kissed and made up. He never raised a hand against her again. Over the years they had a happy, if not perfect marriage. They raised children, went on trips, bought a home. The husband worked hard to provide for his wife and family. Occasionally the wife would request something and, if the husband hesitated, she...

Current events have many people dredging up George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Perhaps. But the current state of America—and much of the world, it seems—is closer to the (in retrospect) great 1993 movie Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone as the wrongly-accused Lieutenant John Spartan, condemned to frozen hybernation for collateral damage to civilians, and his nemesis Simon Phoenix (a blond-haired Wesley Snipes). A terrific supporting cast included Benjamin Bratt, Nigel Hawthorne, Bob Gunton, Dennis Leary, and Rob Schneider not to mention a smokin’ Sandra Bullock. Spartan, who captured Simon Phoenix in 1996, is thawed out when...

Controversy has erupted over a Hollywood double-standard, after two stars of Disney+'s The Mandalorian made Nazi and Holocaust analogies, for which Lucasfilm fired the conservative one.In the first instance, Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal made a now-deleted Instagram post in November likening Trump supporters losing the 2020 election to the Confederacy and Nazi Germany losing in 1865 and 1945.In June of 2018, Pascal compared Jews in a Nazi concentration camp to 'children in cages' (built by Obama).Yet, this week Mandalorian actress Gina Carano - who played former Rebel Alliance soldierCara Dune - was fired from the show and dropped by her...

Up to two tonnes of cheese is at risk of being thrown away by a company struggling to sell off its stock during lockdown. Cornish Blue cheese takes about 10 weeks to mature and then has to be sold within six weeks. It is made by the Cornish Cheese Company which sells 80% of its product to the hospitality sector which has been closed since early January. The company said the cheese would go off within two to three weeks. Ben Stansfield said: "We were making this cheese back in October and September, and we didn't expect a lockdown in...

White House press secretary Jen Psaki expressed support for Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s decision to remove the national anthem from the team’s home games because they “feel [the anthem] doesn’t represent them.”During the Wednesday press briefing, Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Psaki about the Biden administration’s stance on Cuban’s decision. While the press secretary acknowledged that President Joe Biden is “proud to be an American and has great respect for the anthem,” she also said he would support the Mavericks for calling out the frequent times when “we as a country haven’t lived up to our highest ideals.”“He’d also...

The corporate press is awash in articles speculating about the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump. Will it purge pro-Trump elements and return to some semblance of its pre-2016 form, or double down on Trumpism and Trump, defending him even in the face of a major electoral loss and a Senate impeachment trial?Most such articles entirely misunderstand what’s going on with the GOP and how to think about Trump’s takeover of the party. One of the worst was just published in The Atlantic, written by Chris Hayes of MSNBC under the absurd headline, “The Republican Party Is Radicalizing...

Rush Limbaugh

Just 27% of those survey said women's sports should not remain a single-sex environment. Asolid majority of voters think males who identify as females should nevertheless be barred from participating in women's sports leagues, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen. Fifty-six percent said women's sports teams should remain single-sex environments, regardless of the professed identity of a participant. Just 27% disagreed, while 17% were unsure. Just the News Daily Poll Just the News The issue of transgender athletes participating in women's sports leagues has increasing become a matter of debate across the country. President...

Georgia's newly minted Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock is under investigation for voter registration fraud which allegedly took place during his work with far-left activist Stacey Abrams. Forbes has the story: The Georgia State Election Board voted unanimously Wednesday to move forward with an investigation of U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) for his role serving as board chairman of a voter registration organization founded by Stacey Abrams that election officials say failed to follow deadlines, in what appears to be the latest legal step in the ongoing feud between the progressive Abrams and the state's Republican election officials.Warnock served as chairman...

Threats to free speech on public college campuses are increasingly being driven more by students than administrators, a panel of experts who spoke at a virtual Baylor University event said Wednesday. The world's largest Baptist university hosted a webinar titled “Free Speech on Campus: Is it in Danger?” featuring conservative evangelical writer and former attorney David French, openly gay scholar and author Jonathan Rauch and other advocates for free speech. The event was held in coordination with the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the Initiative on Faith & Public Life at the American Enterprise Institute.Notable conservative...

Florida Senator Lauren Book (D) reintroduced legislation that would eliminate Florida’s recognition of Confederate holidays. It would repeal provisions penalizing the destruction and damage done to the Confederate flag. The Sunshine State is one of five states that have Confederate Memorial Day as a national holiday. In a statement, the Florida lawmaker commented that Florida “must underscore diversity and undercut tributes to the Confederacy, which upheld the institution of slavery.” She added that “with the hate and divisiveness we’re seeing today, it is more important than ever to condemn racism and reaffirm that we are indeed ‘one nation, indivisible, with...

On Wednesday, as the second day of former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial began, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) noted that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the Democrats’ lead impeachment manager in the Senate trial, himself fought against the certification of the Electoral College vote in the 2016 election. Democrats have impeached Trump for “incitement of insurrection” in part because Trump encouraged Republicans to contest the electoral certification on January 6 before the Capitol riot. Raskin himself has argued that Trump’s “Big Lie” of 2020 election fraud incited the violence. “So, it’s ok for Dem Jamie Raskin to try to ‘overturn’...

Religions shouldn’t be considered responsible for the misdeeds of their followers, right? That has been the consistent establishment media line on Islam since 9/11, and before that, and it has been enshrined in public policy on both sides of the Atlantic and become axiomatic in the West’s approach to terrorism. But wait. Issac Bailey is a columnist and a professor of Public Policy at Davidson College in North Carolina. He writes in Newsweek: “If Christianity can convince so many to follow a man like Trump almost worshipfully—or couldn’t at least help millions discern the unique threat Trump represented—what good is...

Disney reportedly cut ties this week with conservative actress Gina Carano, one of the stars of Lucasfilm’s hit TV series “The Mandalorian,” on Wednesday. The alleged cause of the firing was a series of posts Carano made on social media that critics claimed were offensive. As The Daily Wire reported, “The post that generated the most controversy was a screenshot of another person’s post that she then posted onto her own Instagram account. The post compared the current politically divisive culture in the U.S. to Nazi Germany.” The screenshot stated: Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers...

Anderson Cooper took to CNN on Tuesday to compare Trump and his supporters to the perpetrators of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. "The idea of 'otherizing' people is something I think we've seen a lot of over the last four years," Cooper said. "It's so easy to otherize people, to make them other than, other than American, other than patriotic, other than human." "We've seen it in Bosnia, we've seen it in Rwanda... where Hutus were telling radio listeners that Tutsi were cockroaches, you know, getting them ginned up for genocide, and you see it in these videos where...