Free Republic

Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is moving to make gender confirmation surgery available to transgender veterans through Veterans Affairs health care coverage. McDonough announced the move, plans of which were first reported by CNN, at a Pride event at the Orlando Vet Center in Florida on Saturday. "We are taking the first necessary steps to expand VA's care to include gender confirmation surgery -- thereby allowing transgender vets to go through the full gender confirmation process with VA at their side," McDonough said at the event. The change marks a substantial shift in care for eligible transgender veterans. The National...

Eric Adams ripped his mayoral race rivals Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia for campaigning together on Juneteenth — which he says represented a broadside against him, a black man. On the holiday Saturday, Yang told supporters to rank Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, second on ranked-choice ballots — a maneuver the front-running Brooklyn borough president said was offensive. “That last-minute attempt to derail me on June 19! That is when they did that. While we were celebrating liberation and freedom from enslavement, they sent a message, and I thought it was the wrong message,” Adams said outside St. George’s Episcopal...

Christopher Langan, a man once called the “world’s smartest man” by the media for having a 210 IQ, is urging resistance to the COVID-19 vaccine. Langan made a post in his Facebook group where he addressed his concerns with the COVID-19 vaccine, the mandatory vaccine regime, and its dire implications for mankind. “A mass human die-off would be traumatic and threaten the status quo. If the human population crashes and the economy follows suit, the elite will have nothing, no innate superiority or adaptivity, that might protect them and conduce to their survival. Hence, they prefer mass sterilization and a...

INTRODUCTION: Prior to 1992, few people had ever heard of George Soros. Then the British media made him an instant celebrity, touting him as the greatest investment genius of the age. Is Soros really a genius? Or is he just a front, created by British psywar operators to provide cover for British economic warfare operations? The man chiefly responsible for promoting Soros and creating his legend during the early '90s was Lord William Rees-Mogg, a prominent journalist, friend and confidant of the Royal Family, close friend and business associate of Lord Jacob Rothschild, and the father of British politician Jacob...

Someone surreptitiously gained access to a Bay Area community's water supply and deleted programs that treat drinking water, NBC News reported. The breach happened on January 15 and was noticed the next day by workers at the unnamed facility, who changed passwords and added the programs back in. The individual is being referred to as a hacker, but it doesn't appear it took much hacking to get in. The person got hold of a former plant employee's username and password, and simply logged themselves into the system.

Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry were wealthy landowners in South Carolina’s Colleton District in the 1830s, in what is now Charleston County. The couple owned 84 slaves each for a total of 168, at a time when most of their peers owned a handful. Their slaves worked their plantation and made them rich. Angel and Horry also traded slaves for profit, showing no regard for dissolving slave families. They were no kinder or crueler to their slaves than anyone else. They were considered “slave magnates” because of the number of slaves they owned. They were referred to as the...

A recent Gallup poll showed that most Americans think it’s time to move on from the pandemic. But not the Democrats. Democrats say by a 71-29% margin that we still should not “live normal lives”, but instead should “try to stay at home.” That’s despite the fact that the COVID death rate in America is down nearly 90%, the new cases are down about 65%, over half of Americans have been vaccinated (and over 80% of the vulnerable ones) by vaccines shown to be 95% effective, and even the redoubtable (or perhaps doubtable) Dr. Fauci says we can go out...

A New Jersey city offered a tribute to George Floyd Wednesday by unveiling a 700-pound bronze statue of him outside Newark’s City Hall. Mayor Ras Baraka and other officials attended the ceremony where it was presented, WPIX reported. “Hopefully it inspires those who walk by to be more active, take part in activism,” Baraka commented. Actor and filmmaker Leon Pickney commissioned the statue that was sculpted by artist Stanley Watts. The piece was donated to the city and will be on display for at least one year, the WPIX report said. Pix 11 shared video footage of the unveiling ceremony,...

Joe “you ain’t black” Biden has signed a bill making “Juneteenth” a national holiday. Never missing a chance to play the race card, Democrats have successfully rewritten the history of June 19, 1865, accepted as the official end of slavery, just as they have rewritten the true racial history of the United States. June 19, 1865, is the day that Democrat slaves were freed by Republicans, by Union forces that were under command of President Abraham Lincoln, leader of a Republican Party founded to end Democrat slavery. Our history and our heritage is being shoved by rioters, looters, and anarchists...

Irish priests revive “Mass Rocks” from days of anti-Catholic persecutionThese altars made of boulders were once the secret worship places of Catholics, when the practice of their faith was prohibited.As part of a campaign organized by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Catholic priests are celebrating Mass at a “Mass Rock,” where the Irish faithful once secretly practiced their faith when it was illegal to do so.Mass Rocks, the clandestine churches of an age of persecutionIn the 16th-18th centuries, during the period of the “Penal Laws” enforced by England, any public expression of the Catholic faith in Ireland was...

The remains of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife Mary Ann Montgomery have been dug up as part of the lefts efforts to remove all markers and monuments to the historic cancelled.The bodies are now being held in an undisclosed location until they can be brought to their new resting place at the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ National Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee.

On this date in 1979, the American Broadcasting Company journalist Bill Stewart was executed at a somocista checkpoint during Nicaragua’s bloody civil war. And what is more, the deed was caught on film — pre-emptively balking the crumbling Nicaraguan dictatorship of the ability to, say, blame the killing on the Sandinista rebels. Stewart was stopped in a marked press vehicle in Managua, ordered to lie down, and then kicked and shot through the head while colleagues looked on. Though his summary execution by national guardsmen was taped by fellow journos in the convoy, the reasons for it are well into...

...And the Chinese government was laughing all the way to the CCP banquets. I have to wonder if China knows just how incompetent government is from experience, and knew American government at every level would be catastrophically unprepared for a manufactured contagion. There’s a horrible parallel to 9/11 here. Those terrorists took advantage of the flaws at every level in our system, from lax private airport security to accessible cockpits and most important, of Americans' natural inclination to trust and obey authority. The Muslim terrorists told passengers to stay seated or they would detonate (fake) bombs. Americans did what they...

Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline judge who is under U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses, secured victory as expected on Saturday in Iran’s presidential election after a contest marked by voter apathy over economic hardships and political restrictions... Turnout in Friday's four-man race was a record low of around 48.8% and there were 3.7 million invalid ballots that were likely to have been mostly blank or protest votes. Appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the high-profile job of judiciary chief in 2019, Raisi was placed under U.S. sanctions a few months later over human rights violations. Those included the...

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time Mark 4:35–41 Friends, the story at the heart of our Gospel for today is the storm at sea. Karl Barth said that the stormy waters in all of these cases stands for das Nichtige, "the nothing," that which stands opposed to God’s creative intentions, difficulties both interior and exterior, difficulties physical, psychological, and spiritual. The disciples in the boat are, as I’ve often said, evocative of the Church, making its way through time and space. And those waters are symbolic of everything that besets the members of the Church. To stay within the emotional space...

A suit brought by 18 states challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare was dismissed in the US Supreme Court by a vote of 7-2. The decision was written by Justice Stephen Breyer who decreed that “these states lack standing to challenge this law.” Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Clarence Thomas concurred. Justices Samuel Alito and Paul Gorsuch dissented. The states had argued that since the tax penalty for not purchasing Obamacare was repealed during the Trump Administration the basis for the prior Supreme Court decision upholding the law was eliminated. Breyer rejected this...

It has been quite the week here in the UK. On Monday, Boris Johnson canceled ‘Freedom Day’. On Wednesday, he started the forced vaccination of Care Home staff. And the week isn’t over yet. First, Boris and his G7 chums stopped milling about on a private beach in Cornwall having BBQs and taking pretend-socially-distanced photographs while leg humping each other in private. Then, Boris posed like a stranded beluga whale on the Cornish shoreline for the press, before returning to Number Ten. Next, replete with tan and sea salt in his hair from his morning swimming adventures, Boris crushed the...

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” that he was “beat on every day” by former President Donald Trump and his allies to try to change the rules in the Senate.

(President Trump's Operation Warp Speed Update) (Cases, Hospitalizations and Deaths seem to have levelled off around a new, low and slightly declining plateau, over the last 2-3 weeks - vaccination inching along slowly - vaccine exports increasing) Total Vaccine Doses Delivered: 379,003,410 (21,434,300 J&J) Administered: 317,966,408 (11,986,595 J&J) People Vaccinated, At Least One Dose: 177,088,290 Fully Vaccinated: 149,667,646

The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has been listed as one of the candidates for the 2021 Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize of CAS for its achievement in identifying the COVID-19 pathogeny. China's "bat woman" Shi Zhengli, and Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV's Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory were selected as the outstanding contributors of the WIV group candidates. CAS published the candidate list on its official website on Friday. The award is mainly given to individuals or research groups who have made or demonstrated significant achievements in the past five years....