Free Republic

The Biden administration is stocking up with the same Democrat establishment cast that supported the project of China’s rise to global dominance.The Biden administration and its corporate media cheerleaders are at pains to tell you that career-long China kowtower Joe Biden is “tough on China.” But toughness can only be proven by action. Contra the official narrative, however, President Biden’s initial policies and those tasked with implementing and building upon them do not indicate strength. Rather, to America’s detriment, they signal a reversion to the status quo ante of weakness.The media has trumpeted Biden administration rhetoric on three key China-related...

Norwegian Cruise Line provided an update on February 16 and cancelled its sailings through May 2021. NCL also updated guests and travel agents on the state of the cruise ban in Canada, which has severely affected the cruise industry’s plans to sail in Alaska this summer. No Cancelations, Looking at Alternatives In the statement released on the companies website, the cruise line states it will not be canceling any voyages to Alaska. The cruise line will stop taking any bookings for the 2021 Alaska season as it looks to ‘explore several initiatives that may allow such cruises to continue.’ The...

This week, President Joe Biden marked the third anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, by urging Congress to "enact commonsense gun law reforms." The implication was that the gun controls Biden favors would prevent crimes like the Parkland massacre. There is little reason to think that's true. The bills Biden is eager to sign would instead arbitrarily limit Second Amendment rights and threaten the viability of the industry that makes it possible to exercise them. Biden wants to prohibit the production and sale of "assault weapons" and require that current owners either...

No one has been quite as titularly ubiquitous in the Anglophone world as the Sweet Swan of Avon. There’s Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian fantasy Brave New World (title taken from The Tempest); there’s Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 black comedy To Be or Not to Be (title taken from Hamlet); from 1991, there’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Hamlet again); there’s the 1998 film What Dreams May Come (Hamlet yet again). And, setting titles aside, while we’re on the subject of Hamlet’s shadow one might mention the prominent role played by Ophelia in Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” as she perhaps does...

President Biden dashed progressives' hopes on Tuesday during a CNN town hall event when the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. A community theater marketing director told the president “at least” $50,000 in student loan forgiveness is needed, and asked how he plans to make that happen. Biden flat out told the woman he won’t make it happen, before proceeding to give a long-winded response that included pointing out how much debt his children acquired after their schooling. “But my point is, I understand the impact of the debt. And it can be debilitating. And I think there's a...

Fox Business host Larry Kudlow was eager to rip apart a lie Vice President Kamala Harris told Axios about the vaccine rollout effort of former President Donald Trump’s administration. Kudlow went right for the jugular on his debut show Kudlow by accusing President Joe Biden’s administration of peddling “falsehoods” about his predecessor and being “protected by the media” in the process. Harris had falsely claimed to Axios on video that the Trump administration had “no national strategy or plan for vaccinations.” She continued: “[I]n many ways, we are starting from scratch on something that's been raging for almost an entire...

Francis Schaeffer described how ideas escape the ivory towers of universities and think tanks eventually to shape how ordinary people think, speak, and view their world. In 2020, one idea made that journey in record time. Not that long ago, conversations involving Critical Race Theory were largely relegated to academic papers, classroom discussions, and scholarly journal articles. Today, dialogues about CRT can be found across social media, in corporate boardrooms, and even in the Church. As a theory, CRT descends from European and North American philosophical traditions, particularly Marxism and Postmodernism. Like these worldviews of its intellectual ancestry, CRT sees...

Universal background checks and red flag laws aren’t “middle ground” agenda items. They certainly don’t “honor” the Second Amendment. Instead, these are some of the top priorities of gun control activists, and they are aimed squarely at legal gun owners rather than violent criminals. I’m sure that gun control activists would love to see a third party comprised of former Republicans who are willing to embrace at least a few of the gun control movement’s biggest issues. Not only would it allow Democrats to pick up some additional votes for their anti-gun legislation, but more importantly it would cripple the...

The Minneapolis City Council, which led the nationwide “defund police” movement in cutting funding for cops, voted to increase the police budget by $6.4 million after the department suffered an extraordinary loss in personnel.The Minneapolis Police Department began 2020 with 817 officers but ended the year with 638 officers available to work. Fully 155 officers are on extended leave complaining of PTSD. The city council added $6.4 million to hire more officers after residents complained of slow response times by officers.According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, violent crime increased 21 percent in 2020.NRO:Even so, three council members have written a proposal...

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were ferocious advocates of religious freedom -- when the question revolved around consuming peyote. In the 1980s, as the Supreme Court's summary would later explain in the case of Employment Division v. Smith, a "private drug rehabilitation organization" in Oregon fired two employees "because they ingested peyote." These employees, however, did not ingest the drug for recreational purposes. They did it, the court's summary explained, "for sacramental purposes at a ceremony of their Native American Church." Even so, Oregon denied the two unemployment payments "under a state law disqualifying employees...

The U.S. is reviewing whether to place sanctions on companies involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in Eastern Europe.On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Joe Biden thinks the pipeline, meant to span between Russia and Germany, is a “bad deal for Europe.” She continued, the U.S. is mulling sanctions in an effort to bring the project in line with Europe’s energy goals.

Repeat after me: Vaccines will end the pandemic. This bears repeating, as some elites seem bent on prolonging restrictions for a long time, perhaps indefinitely. If they have their way, we will wear masks for years, continue to socially distance and never get back to our regular lives. The sane among us need to make sure none of this transpires.

It’s like some creepy horror story: Whenever Biden gives a speech, there’s an almost spectral figure standing behind him. It doesn’t take too much imagination to liken that figure to Grim Reaper, waiting for Biden’s appointment with his final destiny. Of course, it’s not the Grim Reaper; it’s merely Kamala Harris, who’s clearly being prepped to take over as president in Biden’s place as soon as possible. As part of this obvious agenda, Harris is already handling some of Joe’s major foreign policy telephone calls. Here are screenshots of multiple Biden appearances during his first three weeks in the White...

The cheap, generic drug Ivermectin, widely used against parasites, doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends in the American medical or journalistic establishments when it comes to treating Coronavirus. It’s been widely used overseas as a treatment for and prophylactic against Coronavirus, and is being prescribed for off-label use by some physicians in the US. But in CDC Guidelines issued last week, the official body noted that: …Ivermectin has been widely used and is generally well tolerated [but] Ivermectin is not approved by the FDA for the treatment of any viral infection.The CDC went on to state:Reports from in...

President Joe Biden is working to "recalibrate" the American relationship with Saudi Arabia, White House press secretary Jenn Psaki said Tuesday, and plans to communicate with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud instead of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. "We've made clear from the beginning that we're going to recalibrate our relationship with Saudi Arabia," Psaki said during a news briefing. "And part of that is going back to engagement, counterpart to counterpart. The President's counterpart is King Salman, and I expect that, in appropriate time, he would have a conversation with him. I don't have a prediction of the...

As markets rally, the pandemic quietly eases ... the declining number of new COVID-19 cases and COVID-related hospitalizations over the last few weeks. On Monday, the number of new COVID cases recorded was the lowest since mid-October while recorded COVID-related deaths were the lowest since Nov. 30. Hospitalizations are down about 45% from their January peak. ... the overall trajectory of the virus in the U.S. has been clear over the last few weeks. ... Daily new COVID infections continue to decline across the country. . ... If we want to argue about what the market was "pricing in" on...

Tuesday on FNC’s “Fox News Primetime,” Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) discussed what have been perceived by some to be divisions within the Republican Party in the wake of the election losses over the past few months. Noem argued the path forward for the GOP was to follow through on its promises, which in some situations had been lacking. She pointed to the pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. “I think what people want is a Republican Party that actually follows through on what they say they’re going to do, that actually puts forward and enacts...

In 1860, Americans elected Honest Abe Lincoln. In 2020, Americans theoretically elected one of the most prodigious and infamous liars in modern American history. Joe Biden has a sterling reputation for routine dishonesty. He’s plagiarized, slandered, and prevaricated his way through 48 years of politics, before which he was a known plagiarist as a student. During a CNN town hall in Wisconsin, Biden went into dishonesty overdrive, spewing two major lies.I wrote here about Biden’s most recent lie. During the debate in Georgia alone, Biden lied to or misled Americans another 33 times. In 2008, McCain’s campaign was able to...

There is no need for me to name names. So many people do it. Secular people as well as religious people; lay historians as well as men and women of the cloth; rabbis as well as ministers and priests; people who believe that Adam and Eve's disobedience resulted in their expulsion from paradise and the estrangement of human beings from God, and people who have never given the Fall and its consequences a moment's thought; left-wingers, right wingers and just about everyone in between. It is one of the few things about which longtime political opponents Senate Minority Leader Mitch...

A TikToker has landed in the hospital after she jumped on the Gorilla Glue bandwagon — saying she “accidentally” applied the heavy-duty adhesive to her hair. “I don’t know what to do. This was an accident. I didn’t mean to put Gorilla Glue in my hair,” Avani Reyes whines in one of several clips posted to the site. “I need to go to the hospital so they can remove this Gorilla Glue. I have no idea what to do. I tried washing it, it doesn’t come off,” she says, adding that her “scalp is burning.” But Reyes’ sticky predicament, which...