Free Republic

I forgot that today is FLOTUS Friday, and what with Dr. Jilly hitting the Vogue cover (photography by none other than the legendary Lefty Annie Liebowitz!) my little math story will have to wait another day.I didn’t bother to read the article until the Jerusalem Post took time out of their busy day to mock America’s fawning media coverage of the FLOTUS: Why did ‘Vogue’ call Dr. Jill Biden a ‘goddess in stilettos?’The real reason God created hosieryI would say Dr. Jilly looks more like an aging school marm than a goddess given these feet, legs and hands but what...

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — A star Florida high school quarterback playing for a Georgia university died after more than 50 gunshots were fired into the car he was driving. Ladarius Clardy, 18, was found dead with several gunshot wounds before dawn Thursday after the vehicle he was driving crashed at a Pensacola intersection. Local news outlets report an unnamed 19-year-old passenger underwent surgery for gunshot wounds Thursday at a Pensacola hospital. The passenger’s condition was unknown early Friday. Clardy was attending Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where he had played in several games. Clardy’s father is a longtime youth...

Liz Harris is apparently a volunteer for the Maricopa County audit having previously been a candidate herself. In this interview Ms. Harris, while qualifying her statements with the non-disclosure agreement, gives an overview of what the audit team has likely uncovered so far. Additionally, as CTH has previously highlighted, the canvas is the important aspect to the physical ballot review. Ms. Harris discusses -in broad terms- how the canvassing is being done and how commercials are being deployed throughout the region by “Protect Democracy” the leftist activist group. It appears the DNC affiliate is running ads in an effort to...

The U.S. Supreme Court handed a stunning defeat to the enemies of the First Amendment by invalidating a California law forcing nonprofits to disclose their largest donors — and liberals are losing it. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, Attorney General of California. The syllabus for the opinion reasoned that “California’s disclosure requirement imposes a widespread burden on donors’ associational rights.” It continued: “[T]his burden cannot be justified on the ground that the regime is narrowly tailored to investigating charitable wrongdoing, or that the State’s interest in administrative convenience...

Africa’s last absolute monarchy has for days been rocked by the largest pro-democracy protests in years. liwe Mathunjwa is in mourning. She is also stuck. Her nephew, 35-year-old Sicelo Mathunjwa, was shot in the head on Tuesday evening when police in Eswatini dispersed crowds with gunfire in Matsapha, a small industrial hub about 35km (21 miles) from the capital, Mbabane. “Sicelo is dead, he died on the spot,” Mathunjwa told Al Jazeera, saying she cannot leave her village of Mazombiswe to head to her nephew’s village of Hosea, some 30km (18 miles) away, and pay her finals respects due to...

Ten churches have been vandalised in Alberta, Canada, in attacks that police have linked to anger over historic injustices against indigenous people. Investigators in the province said orange and red paint was daubed on the churches in the city of Calgary. The premier of Alberta said the attacks were "appalling". It comes after unmarked graves were found around former church-run residential schools that indigenous children were once forced to attend.

Nancy Pelosi refused to answer a question Thursday about Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar standing by her comparison of the U.S. and Israel to terrorist groups like Hamas and the Taliban and saying her Jewish colleagues weren't 'equal partners in justice. 'Earlier this week, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was on our –' a reporter started to ask before Pelosi interrupted her and waved off the question. 'Well let's stay with this and I'll answer that afterward,' Pelosi said, but never got back to the question before walking out of the room. The House Speaker appeared to want to keep the press conference...

It’s worse than we thought. It’s bad enough that “peoples of color” are victims of racist math and racist bird names, but now we know they are also made to suffer from “tree inequity.” It’s worse than we thought. It’s bad enough that “peoples of color” are victims of racist math and racist bird names, but now we know they are also made to suffer from “tree inequity.” A research group called American Forests, in conjunction with the United States Forest Service, recently announced that peoples of color, living as many do in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, often have fewer trees...

As we head toward this weekend's 245th anniversary of American independence, critical race theory has emerged as the dominant subject gripping and dividing the nation. The threshold question, itself the subject of rancorous and oftentimes disingenuous debate, is what the term "critical race theory" even refers to. When this semantic debate surfaces, proponents usually attempt two things at once. First, they accuse their CRT-skeptical interlocutors of being bigots, white supremacists or apologists who want to deliberately muddle and whitewash America's complex -- and at times tragic -- history of race relations. This first step involves CRT proponents grilling CRT critics...

Gleichschaltung. Huh? Gleichschaltung is a German word that means (meaning "coordination," "making the same," "bringing into line." It was the Nazi policy enforcing political conformity in all sectors of society. Gleichschaltung comprised: 1. Distorted, manipulative language intended to confuse; think Ministry of Propaganda in 1984. (e.g., infinite genders, or Global Cooling begetting Global Warming begetting Climate Change) 2. Media conformity with totalitarian postures. (e.g., Big Tech, Brownstream Media, i.e., CNN/MSNBC/CBS/NBC/ABC/WaPo/NYT/NPR) 3. Controlled interpersonal communication, e.g., politically controlled jargon. (Politically Correct language, cancel culture) 4. Manipulating the population to the point that it can no longer distinguish truth from lies. (Fake...

Respect LBGT rights or get out of the EU, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte instructed Hungary’s Viktor Orban at last week’s gathering of the European Union in Brussels. According to Reuters, attendees described it as the “most intense personal clash among the bloc’s leaders in years.” What caused the clash? Hungary just passed a law that bans schools from using materials seen as pro-homosexuality. According to the AP, the new law “prohibits sharing content on homosexuality or sex reassignment to people under 18 in school sex education programs, films or advertisements.” Rutte eagerly related details of his confrontation with Orban:...

Teachers nationwide said K-12 schools are not requiring or pushing them to teach critical race theory, and most said they were opposed to adding the academic approach to their course instruction, according to a survey obtained by NBC News. Despite a roiling culture war that has blown up at school board meetings and led to new legislation in statehouses across the country, the responses from more than 1,100 teachers across the country to a survey conducted by the Association of American Educators, a nonpartisan professional group for educators, appeared to suggest that the panicked dialogue on critical race theory made...

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices dismantled what remains of the Voting Rights Act, all but ensuring that every voter suppression law passed in the wake of the 2020 election will survive judicial scrutiny. Thursday’s 6–3 decision in Brnovich v. DNC feigns moderation. Justice Sam Alito’s opinion for the court purports to leave the VRA’s most crucial remaining provision intact. Don’t believe it. Alito transformed a sweeping, historic law—one intended to bar voting restrictions with a racially discriminatory impact—into an empty promise. In theory, the VRA still stands. In reality, it has...

For a while now, photos of a very unusual AK-style rifle using an AR gas system have been making the rounds on social media sites, and we now know it’s real, courtesy of Polenar Tactical. A prototype design by Tinck Arms, the rifle doesn’t use a true direct impingement gas system, but a hybrid system using a remote short-stroke gas piston. What Tinck Arms achieved with the combined gas systems is a free-floating barrel, to make an AK shoot without the characteristic barrel whip. And because the piston system is separated from the bolt carrier, it also produces noticeably reduced...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced Thursday that a group of 130 nations has agreed to a global minimum tax on corporations, part of a broader agreement to overhaul international tax rules.If widely enacted, the GMT would effectively end the practice of global corporations seeking out low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland and the British Virgin Islands to move their headquarters to, even though their customers, operations and executives are located elsewhere.“For decades, the United States has participated in a self-defeating international tax competition, lowering our corporate tax rates only to watch other nations lower theirs in response. The result was a global...

Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis is as impressive as they come and his record to show for it continues. According to an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times by Scott Gerber, he's now targeting the leftist university monolith. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill to protect against indoctrination in the state’s colleges and universities. The new law, which went into effect on July 1, requires Florida’s public colleges and universities to conduct an annual survey measuring “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on their campuses. The law’s goal is to assess “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives...

CHICAGO - Four people were killed and 28 others were wounded in shootings Thursday in Chicago, including a man who was killed in a drive-by in West Garfield Park. The 25-year-old was standing on the porch about 4:15 p.m. in the 4000 block of West Van Buren Street when a car drove by and someone from inside fired shots, Chicago police said. He was shot in the head and was pronounced dead at the scene. He hasn’t been identified. A man was killed in a shooting in South Shore. He was found unresponsive with a gunshot wound to his forehead...

I suppose it was not entirely his fault. The Distinguished Visitor was only delivering a message, you see. While he was part of the faction that had created the message, he had not actually formulated what he was going to say. That, it became obvious, had been done by someone else. The occasion was a joint Physics–Social Sciences colloquium at one of the campuses of the University of California. Ronald Reagan was president. The president had recently established his Strategic Defense Initiative, also somewhat derisively called his Star Wars Program. The topic of this day was defense against ballistic missiles...

Power corrupts, and absolute power will make you nuts. We've all heard the phrase "power corrupts," by Lord Acton, a 19th-century British historian. The full quote — "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely" — referred to the absolute power of kings. Research from 2012 by Katherine A. DeCelles, a University of Toronto professor, concluded that wealth and power don't affect everyone equally — they just allow existing personality traits to emerge to excess. There are many stories of wealthy people setting up foundations that help millions of people. But there is a dark side as well. People with...

If someone inside the American media elite were tapped to deliver a State of the Media address in front of a distinguished audience, they would not be able to claim that their position is strong, stronger than ever. Sadly, a new survey by the Reuters Institute found the United States ranks last in media trust -- at 29% -- among 92,000 news consumers surveyed in 46 countries. There are several easy answers for why this is true. But the most obvious one is the media's dramatic tilt to one side of the political argument. For many years, the Republicans attempted...