Free Republic

I have never bought the conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was a diabolical political plot to undermine the country. But what is apparent with each passing week is that the virus has been the springboard for the left's agenda to transform America in a way that Sen. Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore or Rachel Maddow could have never imagined.Without COVID-19, President Joe Biden would never have been elected, of course. So, for the left, the virus defeated former President Donald Trump. COVID-19 is now the gateway to the left's utopian agenda of multi-trillion-dollar climate policies, hyper-regulation of the economy, the rebirth of...

If you’re average, congratulations! Most of us are mediocre in most of our endeavors, somewhere in the large dome region of the Bell Curve, a graph of a normal distribution of values for a given variable. We might be relieved by this essential equality since happiness and satisfaction are more elusive towards the narrower, right end of the Bell Curve where the exceptional loiter. At the left-end, government mollycoddles the underachievers, providing an ever-expanding safety net. At various venues I’ve seen giant billboards touting “equality.” Indeed, when it comes to such unalienable rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of...

Naomi Osaka's bid to become the first Japanese player ever to win tennis Olympic gold came to a abrupt halt as she was beaten in straight sets by Marketa Vondrousova in the last-16. The Games was Osaka's first tournament since withdrawing from both the French Open and Wimbledon, citing her struggles with depression and anxiety. She had lit the cauldron in the opening ceremony last week and was Japan's poster girl of their home Olympics. Osaka, the world No 2 and a four-time Grand Slam champion, was considered the tennis tournament favourite once Wimbledon champion and world No 1 Ash...

KALZ LHLZ DTUI FJNLAPBJ EJUEVJ, AYJZ YLBJ L ETUCVJI DUT JBJTZ KUVSAPUF. —LVCJTA JPFKAJPF

America deserves better than its current military leadership. On July 22, Major General Patrick Donahoe, the Commanding General of Fort Benning, reported from his official Twitter account that he was seeing a “surge” in ICU visits among young soldiers due to Covid. He reported that he would mandate the vaccine if he had the power to do so. Snip Treating healthy people like biohazards over an illness that has killed two dozen personnel in a force of millions is insane. Snip My interaction with the General serves as a microcosm of the American military’s cultural rot. Here we have a...

NEW ALEXANDRIA, Pennsylvania -- The scent of funnel cakes, grilled hot dogs and an ever-so-faint whiff of diesel fuel fill the air. The odd combination somehow works, adding to the excitement and anticipation as thousands of families and gearheads fill the stands surrounding the track of the local Lions Club Demolition Derby here in Westmoreland County. From the clothing to the massive, oversized tires that serve as makeshift bumpers to protect the people in the stands from an errant jalopy, nearly everything and everyone is draped in red, white and blue. Before you form a misguided stereotype, there is a...

As a compromise in the debate over Constitutional Carry, the Indiana legislature passed a firearms reform bill that eliminated the fee for an Indiana lifetime carry permit. The fee for the 5-year permit was eliminated in 2019. That law went into effect on 1 July 2020. From the Crime Prevention Research Center, Indiana had 967,061 permits as of July 1, 2020. At that time, 18.73% of the adult population had an Indiana carry permit. On 1 July of 2020, when the five-year permit fee was eliminated, about 8,000 applications for permits were received. From indystar.com:State Police received 2,259 handgun permit...

Is it wrong that I'm rooting for the U.S. Women's National Team to lose, and humiliatingly so, this Olympics? Of course it's not wrong. The USWNT, led by America's favorite histrionic Megan Rapinoe, protested against racism and discrimination by taking the knee before their first Olympic match. Though the stadium was empty (certainly nothing new to the USWNT), the attending "reporters" revived each other with smelling salts to swoon and gape at the unparalleled fortitude exhibited by these privileged virtue-signalers in what was dubbed a "social justice reckoning". I find soccer thoroughly unwatchable and, if forced to choose, I'd rather...

It’s all a strategic Alinsky move once you connect the dots. Earlier today New York City Mayor De Blasio announced mandated vaccinations for all 340,000 city employees. Hours later Joe Biden announced mandatory vaccinations for all 115,000 front-line employees of The Veterans Affairs department. Immediately thereafter, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced all state employees and healthcare providers will be forced to vaccinate. None of these events are disconnected. Keep in mind just a few days ago the Federal CDC announced all U.S. healthcare providers must switch to new rapid response tests for COVID-19. The reasoning? The current PCR test does...

Why do so many Americans resist being vaccinated against COVID? Or is that what they are actually resisting? When I was a child, I was vaccinated against a number of deadly diseases. As an adult, I had my own child vaccinated. On the whole, vaccinations have saved countless lives and prevented epidemics that would otherwise have ravaged our nation and others. Yet today, with a pandemic that has gripped the entire world with fears of a plague of (what they call) biblical proportions, there is more resistance to vaccination than ever before. In reaction, there are calls for "vaccine mandates,"...

This past weekend, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd added another column to the myriad irrational and hysterical pieces about the "existential threat" climate change allegedly poses to human life. As I do after almost every piece I read on the internet, I read comments submitted by readers. One provided me with an epiphany. It was a comment submitted by New York Times reader "Sophia" of Bangor, Maine: "I have one child, a daughter, who told me age 8 that she would never have a child because of global warming. She's now 34 and has never changed her mind. So...

The pandemic we suffer from is not COVID. It is Marxist Democrat Leftism. Last week Nikole Hannah-Jones, a leader of the Marxist Democrat Left and the architect of the poisonous lies of the NY Times "1619 Project" said “The most equal multiracial country in our hemisphere is Cuba. This is largely due to socialism- something most do not want to hear.” This highly paid American woman who has been blessed with the luck to be born in America and reached the highest level of prestige in journalism with all the gifts it has provided her, goes on to trash her...

In the West, totalitarianism always paints itself as a beneficial and streamlined way to govern, so it’s important to understand what’s really going on. Wouldn’t it be nice and fair and simple if all the voting systems across the country were the same? Wouldn’t it be nice and fair and simple if every school in the nation were equally as good? Wouldn’t it be nice and fair and simple if everyone had access to robust and identical health care programs? Whether or not one agrees with these statements, it must be said that they have a certain visceral appeal –...

Last week, big media was salivating over the COVID Delta variant and recommendations for indoor masking, even for the vaccinated, masking young children, and the possibility of a return to last year, with social distancing, capacity limits, and business closures. There were also news stories that the media dutifully ignored, like ongoing election audits, Hunter Biden’s laptop, his father’s growing inability to think and speak coherently, and growing inflation and unemployment. Also somehow missed by the investigative sleuths at CNN and MSNBC was the recall of a COVID rapid antigen test last month. This wasn’t just any recall but according...

An elderly German man is facing a suspended prison sentence for storing a WWII tank, anti-aircraft gun and torpedo in his basement. The case is moving through a German court, after Germany's army was called in to remove the tank and other weaponry from the 84-year-old's home in 2015. According to man's lawyer, a US museum is keen to buy the 1943 Panther tank, which weighs 50,000 kilograms and measures 6.7 metres long. Authorities were alerted to the remarkable collection after the home in the wealthy town of Heikendorf, a suburb of Kiel, was searched during an investigation into stolen...

The Left seeks to ride to power on the backs of people who are supposed to see their own lives as amounting to little more than belonging to a group the Left claims to champion. The predatory, tyrannical Left typically seeks to establish its moral authority by portraying its quest for power as a defense of disadvantaged constituencies. Unfortunately for the leftist, the constituencies they claim to defend often include members who resist and disavow the Left's claim to represent them, thus deflating the Left's irrationally aggrandized sense of political entitlement. Like any intolerant bigot, the moralizing leftist demands unstinting...

Senator Rand Paul Jul 24 I joined Ingraham to discuss the latest on NIH funding Gain of Function research. At the 3:15 mark until the end is an interesting conversation regarding the Delta variant. Rand Paul states: the delta variant is real, but the good news is it is much less deadly. Maybe about a tenth as deadly from the last year...

I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Olympics. Sure, there are some events I do enjoy – a lot of the track and field events, gymnastics, swimming – but just about the only thing I’m less interested in than the summer Olympics is the winter Olympics (with the exception of hockey). Still, I paid attention and watched…in the past. This year holds no interest for me. It’s not because I’ve lost interest in the events I used to enjoy, nor is it that I’m disinterested in the weird events late night Olympics coverage offers. And it’s not that I...

Those tuning into the Tokyo Olympics may have noticed that Russian athletes are competing under the flag of the ROC, or Russian Olympic Committee, rather than their native country. That’s because the 335 Russian athletes participating in this year’s Summer Games are considered “neutrals” due to the fact that Russia is currently banned from the Olympics. In 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency banned Russia from all international sporting competitions, including the Olympics, for four years over a doping scandal. The punishment was cut in half to two years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport following a 2020 appeal and...

Click on link