Free Republic

When California legislators enacted the country's first ban on military-style rifles in 1989, they gave no weight to the fundamental right of armed self-defense guaranteed by the Second Amendment: a right the U.S. Supreme Court did not explicitly acknowledge until nearly two decades later. But as U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez observed in his ruling against California's "assault weapon" ban last Friday, it should now be clear that the outright prohibition of such firearms cannot pass constitutional muster. California's Assault Weapons Control Act, which is similar to laws enforced by a handful of other states, originally applied to a list...

Alyssa Milano might be putting Hollywood in her rearview mirror and heading to Washington DC. The actress and leftwing activist is considering running for Congress. Highlighting her name recognition and “deep pockets,” the “Who’s The Boss?” star said she is possibly taking aim at California’s 4th Congressional District. This is a strong Republican district that is currently being represented by Tom McClintock. It’s such a conservative-leaning district that even Donald Trump won this slice of liberal California by nine points.

On June 9, 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division hanged 99 habitants of the French town Tulle as revenge upon the French Resistance. On June 7, the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) guerrillas launched a pre-planned attack on German and milice positions in Tulle. By the 8th, the FTP had liberated the town* … temporarily. Come the evening of the 8th, the 2nd SS Panzer Division — which had been stationed in southern France but was rumbling north to fortify the German position in the wake of the Allied landing at Normandy — arrived at Tulle and re-occupied the city....

Welcome to Insanity Wrap, your daily dose of the best of the worst. Biden’s Russian collusion is today’s big crazy. ... Russian Collusion: Another Damn Thing We Have to Be Concerned AboutUkraine’s President Says Biden Handed Putin a ‘Weapon’ By Caving On PipelineNot since then-President Barack Obama whispered a message to Vladimir Putin that Obama would enjoy “more flexibility” to negotiate away our missile defenses “after my [re-]election” have we seen such catering to Moscow’s needs.Before we get to that, quick word about Russia.Insanity Wrap would like nothing better than a strong Russia, once again fully part of this amazing...

I had idiosyncratic tastes as a child. For whatever reason, I preferred Burger King fries to McDonald’s fries, and always preferred BK over its more iconic rival. In recent years, I’ve gravitated toward Popeye’s and Chick-fil-A. I haven’t darkened the doorstep of a Burger King in years, and thanks to the company’s newest marketing campaign, I’m likely to avoid BK for the foreseeable future.Last Thursday, Burger King announced that part of every chicken sandwich order will go to support the LGBT activist group Human Rights Campaign (HRC).“The ChKing says LGBTQ+ rights! During [pride] month (even on Sundays) your chicken sandwich...

For too long, conservatives have blindly supported corporations. While trying to support “free markets” we might inadvertently be supporting corporatism, a form of economic totalitarianism where government and corporations collude to destroy individual rights. When I moved to Washington DC in 2002 to accept a position in the Bush Administration, I thought that corporations might be allies of conservatives who were promoting free markets. I was wrong. Over many years working in public policy, I have been disgusted by corporate attempts to utilize the government to destroy fair competition by any means necessary. Am I a conservative Pollyanna? No. I...

President Biden departed for his first foreign trip abroad on Wednesday morning, telling reporters that his goal will be to demonstrate to Russia and China that the alliance between the U.S. and Europe is strong. “Strengthening the alliance, making clear to Putin and to China that Europe and the United States are tight,” Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before departing for the United Kingdom when asked about the goal of the trip. Biden also said he would lay out a coronavirus vaccine strategy for the world and that cyberattacks would be a subject of his discussion with Russian...

On Tuesday, a judge ordered the Loudoun County, Va., school district to reinstate a physical education teacher who dared to speak out against a policy that would require teachers to endorse transgender identity by using female pronouns to refer to male students and vice versa. Roughly 24 hours later, the district suspended the teacher and barred him from setting foot on school property. The judge ruled that this suspension likely violated the teacher’s First Amendment right to free speech. “The Court finds that the Plaintiff’s speech and religious content are central to the determination made by the Defendants to suspend...

[EXCERPT: HEREBY ORDERED] Cleary, what has been ordered by the Governor’s emergency decrees constitute legislation. Dr. Stack’s testimony demonstrates that he and others engage in a process of collaboration and review of CDC guidelines and other documents, the purpose of which is to impose rules on persons and businesses in Kentucky, and that in formulating these rules they tailor them to apply uniformly across the Commonwealth.95 This is formulating policy. He further testified that they have repeatedly amended and revised their orders, thus showing they deem to have the power to make laws and alter them at discretion. Indeed, he...

This afternoon, the prominent newspaper published an article making a surprising claim about exobiology: that watermelons had been discovered on Mars. The article disappeared after about an hour, replaced by a message saying it had been “published in error.” Needless to say, there is no currently-available evidence of watermelons, or any other life, on the Red Planet. However, several NASA missions and a rover sent by China are all investigating the possibility of ancient life on our planetary neighbor, and scientists say it is possible that microbial life still lives there, likely deep under the surface. If there’s any evidence...

Listening to all the rhetoric in the popular media, you would think America is the most unfair, racist nation in the world. You would think that Black Americans are uniformly living in oppression and poverty, with no hope for the future, save the federal government arriving on the scene to their rescue. Sorry, liberals, to trouble you with facts. But indeed there are facts. And the facts tell a far different story than what we are hearing. Let's start with the most recent annual report of the Census Bureau: Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019. According to this...

It would appear that to accept statistics at face value is a fool’s bargain. People are obviously swayed by the media hype, which assures them that the casualty numbers of the virus are statistically significant and that adverse reactions to the vaccines are statistically negligible. But are they? Sucharit Bhakdi, formerly of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, currently chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz and co-author of Corona False Alarm? shows how Germany’s federal government and research agency for disease control, the RKI—the country’s counterpart of the CDC in the U.S.—had juggled the numbers....

Shockwaves continue to roll through the Capitol Police as Assistant U.S. Capitol Police Chief Chad Thomas resigned Monday, The Hill reported.“For your awareness, USCP Assistant Chief Chad Thomas is no longer serving as Commander of Uniformed Operations and will be separating from the department,” the U.S. Capitol Police said in a notification to lawmakers obtained by The Hill.Thomas is the latest to go in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol where hundreds of former President Donald Trump supporters stormed the governmental building as Congress officially tabulated Electoral College results and declared President Joe Biden the winner.-snip-The...

Physical Education, Spiritual FortitudeTo stay free, you must learn to be courageous.In his 1978 Harvard Address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed a dramatic “decline in courage” in the West. “The Western world has lost its civil courage,” a loss “particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.”This decline, especially among the political class charged with leading and securing the interests of ordinary Americans, was on full display throughout the annus horribilis of 2020—from the 1619 Riots to the Great COVID Class War. Solzhenitsyn mused: “Should one point out that from...

The anticipated release of a government report about UFOs (or UAPs) later this month has created a lot of public discussion about what might be included in that report, and perhaps more importantly, what might be excluded. But in the end, the government does not know, nor can it, what the UAPs really are, or are not, because they are a paradox. Briefly stated, a paradox occurs when two statements of supposed facts are perceived to contradict each other. The UAP paradox is that the UAPs behave as if they wished to avoid detection, yet they get detected anyway. Why...

Naked Philadelphia bikers need only bring their masks. Participants in the annual Philly Naked Bike Ride can ditch their clothes to ride as long as they follow the Aug. 28 event’s mask guidance, which was put in place before the city this week lifted most of its coronavirus restrictions. Organizers said they haven’t met since the city updated its guidance, so for now, they’re “going to stick with our initial mask guidance.” The 10-mile ride, which was canceled last year due to the pandemic, has been promoted this year as the “mask edition.”

WHEN 21-year-old Madison Sarah uploaded a new lifestyle vlog to YouTube from her bedroom in Manchester, she was hoping for comments about how pretty she looked. Instead she was branded "a disgusting f**king w***e” and threatened. Her crime? Dating musician boyfriend Paddy, who is black. And she's not the only British woman to face such vile trolling. In fact a Sun Online investigation has found an alarming rise in racist abuse, aimed at relationships between white women and black men. These disgusting trolls have dubbed themselves the coal patrol because they are trying to stamp out "coal burners" - their...

A day after the Justice Department said it would continue to try to defend former President (Donald Trump) in a defamation case filed by writer E. Jean Carroll, Democrats of the House judiciary committee called on Attorney General ( Merrick Garland) to reverse the decision.On Monday, the department filed a brief stating it would continue the department's legal effort that began under the Trump administration to try and defend the former president against allegations of defamation. [snip]In the briefing filed Monday, the Justice Department admitted Trump's comments were "crude and disrespectful" but argued the case does not hinge on whether...

NO ONE EXPECTED the first Covid-19 vaccine to be as good as it was. “We were hoping for around 70 per cent, that’s a success,” says Dr Ann Falsey, a professor of medicine at the University of Rochester, New York, who ran a 150-person trial site for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in 2020. Even Uğur Şahin, the co-founder and CEO of BioNTech, who had shepherded the drug from its earliest stages, had some doubts. All the preliminary laboratory tests looked good; since he saw them in June, he would routinely tell people that “immunologically, this is a near-perfect vaccine.” But that...

A gunman accused of killing a Queens boy at a family barbecue was arrested and charged Tuesday with the murder of young Justin Wallace on the day he would have celebrated his 11th birthday.