Free Republic

If you’ve felt the media has heavily emphasized bad news throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, your judgment now has some scholarly corroboration. Dartmouth College and Brown University researchers have analyzed tens of thousands of Covid-19 articles and found major US media outlets have overwhelmingly pushed negative narratives about the virus."The most striking fact is that 87 percent of the U.S. stories are classified as negative, whereas 51 percent of the non-US stories are classified as negative," according to the study by Dartmouth economics professor Bruce Sacerdote, Dartmouth’s Ranjan Sehgal and Brown University’s Molly Cook.Thwarting Public Clarity About Covid-19Though the study doesn’t...

Two 13-year-old boys are charged with two armed carjackings that occurred blocks from each other Friday night in D.C. This comes almost a week after another pair of teens were accused of a fatal carjacking also in the District... D.C. Police said that in both cases, the drivers were inside their cars... ...While exploring what appears to be a troubling trend in D.C., News4’s Shomari Stone reported that at least 19 carjackings in the District this year out of 95 have involved juveniles.

Many of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the past year, but the lawyer Steven Donziger has experienced an extreme, very personal confinement as a pandemic arrived and then raged around him in New York City.On Sunday, Donziger reached his 600th day of an unprecedented house arrest that has resulted from a sprawling, Kafkaesque legal battle with the oil giant Chevron. Donziger spearheaded a lengthy crusade against the company on behalf of tens of thousands of Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest whose homes and health were devastated by oil pollution, only to himself become, as...

Once you see what they declare to be a massive rise of intolerance you will be less hysterical.The shooting in Atlanta had the media in desperate spin mode to declare that the root cause of the shooting was a white male who was perpetrating an advanced hate crime against Asians. This was being pushed by most news outlets, despite an abject lack of any hard evidence. The shooter never indicated prior to harboring an animus towards Asians, and the authorities never heard anything after the shooting to point towards the claim. The fact he attacked multiple massage parlors would also...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, has appeared to claim credit for the decision to quickly develop vaccines against COVID-19, in remarks that are sure to anger Donald Trump. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the comment in an interview with CNN for a special on Sunday, diving into the details of America's pandemic response. 'When I saw what happened in New York City, almost over-running of our healthcare systems, and that's when it became very clear that the decision we made on January 10 to go all out and...

As America grapples with troubling headlines depicting a rise in anti-Asian racism, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has apparently found its latest propaganda fodder.Pointing to the uptick in crimes against Asian Americans, the regime is telling the United States to sort out its own affairs before criticizing Beijing for its severe human rights violations.Propaganda exploiting America’s domestic problems is a well-worn tactic used by the CCP and other authoritarian regimes to deflect criticism of its own malign actions.In recent weeks, state-controlled media have been churning out reports daily framing the violence as a result of heightened Western criticism directed towards...

A federal appeals court on March 26 reversed a lower court decision, ruling that an Ohio professor’s First Amendment rights may have been violated when his university tried forcing him to refer to a biological male student using female pronouns.A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether “has plausibly alleged that Shawnee State violated his First Amendment rights by compelling his speech or silence and casting a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”Shawnee State University, in Ohio, has employed Meriwether for 25 years.The case centers around a 2016 rule change that requires...

Reporters showed up at the Mieraskerk church in the town of Krimpen aan den Ijssel near the city of Rotterdam. The church made headlines after reports that it was going ahead with a service for its entire congregation. The Netherlands is under a strict lockdown and has a rising COVID-19 rate. The journalist Jacco van Giessen shared a video of the incident on Twitter, writing that "the pain has gone but I am still shocked — I was attacked during my work this morning by a churchgoer in Krimpen." ***** Worshippers at the Sion church in the town of Urk,...

Canon lawyer: Belgian bishop who rejects Church teaching on homosexuality should resignFor the good of his soul and of the souls of his flock, I pray he recants. If he refuses and also refuses to resign, he should be removed by Pope Francis as a stumbling block, a true scandal to the faithful.’NEW YORK, March 25, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Well-known canon lawyer Fr. Gerald Murray has called on Bishop Johan Bonny to resign, after the bishop of Antwerp, Belgium, said he was “ashamed” of the Church for the Vatican’s reiteration of the ban on blessings for same-sex couples.In the wake...

The White House is working on a COVID-19 vaccine passport initiative that could be required for travel, sporting events and even eating out, reports The Washington Post. The report comes as major U.S. airlines and nearly 30 travel and labor groups are pushing President Joe Biden to develop a standardized, government-backed credential to "accelerate safe economic activity and recovery." "The U.S. must be a leader in this development," the groups wrote in a letter to COVID-19 Recovery Team Coordinator Jeff Zients on Monday. "The current diverse and fragmented digital health credentials used to implement different countries' air travel testing requirements...

The Democrats and the mainstream media have successfully branded the January 6th melee as an “armed insurrection” even though nobody was armed. In reality, the only people who had loaded guns were the Capitol Police. And as a result, one unarmed Trump supporter by the name of Ashli Babbit was shot and killed – and sadly, nearly four months later, her death still remains a mystery. The January 6th event was a mixed bag of goodies. Many different types of people showed up for a lot of different reasons. Fed-up Americans who believed their votes were stolen were there to...

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), whose congressional district lies along the southern border, shared another batch of photos that were sourced from Border Patrol facilities. Cuellar aired the photos during a CBS News segment on Sunday morning. The photos showed numerous unaccompanied minors being held in overcrowded conditions, sitting on the floor with foil blankets, and more. “Border Patrol does not want to keep people there longer than 72 hours,” Cuellar told the network. “But there’s two issues, two factors coming into play. One, there are so many—there’s a large number of people coming across every single day, groups of over...

The Pope had talked to Juan Carlos Cruz already in 2018, allegedly saying, ‘God made you gay.’VATICAN CITY, March 25, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis appointed Juan Carlos Cruz, an openly homosexual man, to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors on Wednesday. Cruz is himself a victim of clerical sexual abuse. According to the 2004 John Jay Report on the nature and scope of clerical sexual abuse of minors, “The results of our study indicated that of all victims whose gender was reported, … 81% were male and 19% were female.” In other words, it seems that sexual...

Bishops criticize lack of consultation, say churches in Philippine capital 'will be open but restricted to 10 percent capacity Manila Archdiocese has issued a pastoral letter saying it will defy a government ban on religious services in churches in the Philippine capital and nearby provinces following a recent surge in coronavirus cases. However, it said it would tighten limits on the number of people allowed in a church for Mass and other services. “We will not conduct any religious activities outside of our churches … but within our churches starting March 24, we will have our religious worship within 10%...

Unrepentant Homosexuals Are Ecclesiastical CancerAnd they need to be excised, not welcomedHomosexual Catholics don't get to have their cake and eat it too. They don't get to keep obstinately persisting in their vile lifestyle but nominally professing the Faith and presuming to be numbered among the flock of Christ. And it's nothing short of sheer schizophrenia to pretend that they may. But in the reliable bastions of heretical sepsis in the Church, this delusion lives on, and we need to put a stop to it — now.Fr. James Martin and Jamie Manson Because of Western culture's degradation into a relativistic...

The Government has now insisted that it is an offence punishable by the law for a priest to celebrate public Mass, despite months of assurances that there is no penalty attached. This stance appears to be at odds with a statement to the Dáil by Health Minister Stephen Donnelly in October dismissing concerns around the criminalising of priests and Mass-goers under the Covid-19 regulations. The Irish Catholic understands that as part of a response to Declan Ganley’s High Court challenging the ban on public worship, the Government has confirmed that the restrictions are penal. The Government insists that it is...

The Biden administration is set to launch a COVID passport that would track Americans that took the vaccine, despite warnings by civil rights advocates. With breakneck speed, the left has finished their transformation of America from a land of Civil Rights to a land of dictator’s demands, & there is no opposition to the Democrats and RINOS in DC in sight. “The Biden administration & private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as ‘vaccine passports’ — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as...

OK, before I blow a blood pressure cuff on this issue, please keep in mind the warnings provided on these pages about DHS now starting to assemble lists of dissident citizens under the guise of domestic extremists. {Go Deep} Also remind yourself the same DHS and FBI are now using private contractors embedded in Big Tech to scour public information on social media and provide feedback to help DHS assemble those lists. {Go Deep} Now, we take that foundation and build it one step further…. This well-written report about the recent Senate Armed Services Committee discussion with the National Security...

“Thanks for being here and thanks for nothing,” Fox News host says Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro ended an interview with immigration attorney David Leopold faster than you can say “Make America Great Again” when he went a little too heavy into praise for President Joe Biden. The interview quickly turned hostile on Sunday.. Leopold accused the GOP of trying to use the migrant crisis to deflect public attention away from the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan passed by Democrats... ...“President Biden kept his promise,” Leopold said. “He’s putting COVID relief out there. He’s making America better.” He added, “He’s making...

Maya Rudolph is brilliant, but the general “SNL” audience considers her part of the family and not a guest host. Jack Harlow is unknown to just about everyone as a white rapper, and isn’t a draw. These are the lessons learned from last night’s show as “SNL” had the lowest recorded ratings in over a decade. Going back to 2009 you can’t find a 3.6 million rating. But that’s what happened as Rudolph — albeit wonderful– hosted, and Harlow performed. The show lost 500,000 viewers from its last airing on February 27th. Post-election, “SNL” has been averaging around 4.1 million....