Free Republic

No Free Thinkers Need ApplyEquity advocates have captured the field of public health.Utah and Minnesota have abandoned their controversial guidelines that made race a factor in deciding who receives Covid treatment, but it’s worth asking how such policies could have been passed in the first place. Part of the answer lies in the standards that inform public-health education and practice. Today, for anyone working in public health, embracing “health equity” has become a professional requirement.In 2016, the Council on Education for Public Health—the agency that accredits schools of public health—updated its requirements to emphasize the importance of “health equity.” According...

Title 42 will no longer be used to expel migrants starting on May 23, 2022 Policy allowed for instant expulsion of asylum-seekers during the pandemic It was enacted March 2020 by then-President Donald Trump at the onset of the pandemic as the spread of coronavirus ran rampant at crowded border facilities Immigration groups have pushed for an end to Title 42 as COVID-related restrictions loosen in the U.S.

The great Copper Country Strike of 1913 and the Italian Hall disaster. About an hour long.

After calling out crew members for violating COVID safety protocols, Cruise became a hero to others who 'tried to persuade people flouting coronavirus precautions to protect themselves and others'A new report raises questions about Tom Cruise’s presentation of himself as the safety-conscious star of “Mission: Impossible 7,” who was so vehement about protecting the production from COVID-19 that he notoriously yelled expletives at crew members who purportedly violated COVID safety protocols. Indeed, the investigative report by the Hollywood Reporter said it is believed that Cruise didn’t get the COVID-19 vaccine, at least as of June 2021. That means he...

Democrat gubernatorial hopeful Rep. Charlie Crist (D) said this week that it is a “grim day” in Florida because Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed legislation barring age-inappropriate classroom discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten classrooms. “It’s a grim day for Florida. Today especially, I want our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters in Florida and across the country to know that they are loved and will always be welcomed in the Sunshine State,” the Democrat and former Florida governor said on the day DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education act, essentially mourning for LGBT Americans and repeating the...

CNN's John Harwood could be the biggest pro-Biden hack in the liberal media. Appearing on New Day, Harwood dismissed the significance of the Justice Department's investigation of Hunter Biden: "Until you make...a nexus between what Hunter Biden has done, and official activities of Vice President Biden or President Biden, it's a not pretty picture, but it's really not of much public import...But so far, there is zero evidence that Vice President Biden or President Biden has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden's done." Harwood also tried to invoke sympathy for Hunter, saying he's had a "difficult life."...

By every single metric, the Democratic Party is going to have a brutal year. At this rate, it wouldn’t shock me if the Republicans clinch a veto-proof majority in the House. It’s that bad. Joe Biden is that bad. Yet, the fight continues. The progressive Left is gearing up for battle for the 2022 midterms and they’ve secretly cultivated social media communities to help combat GOP messaging. Will it work with the high inflation, high gas prices, the supply chain crisis, the border crisis, the Ukraine war, and Joe Biden’s approvals being overall hot garbage? Probably not. None of what...

Police in New York City are hunting for a woman with bright orange hair who smashed the window of a yellow taxi with a cinder block to steal an iPhone and $40 in cash. The brazen broad-daylight theft happened on Thursday, in midtown Manhattan. The driver of the yellow taxi had parked his car on West 37th Street, between Ninth and 10th avenues, and left it to use the restroom. Security camera footage showed the woman approach the car carrying the cinder block. She hurled it at the drivers' side window, and then clambered through the broken window to steal...

Players on the National Women's Soccer League's Florida club — the Orlando Pride — protested the state's "Don't Say Gay" legislation ahead of their home game against the North Carolina Courage. Stars on the roster were filmed wearing black T-shirts with "GAY" written in white across the chest while getting off the team's coach bus ahead of Saturday's Challenge Cup match. The professional athletes made the collective gesture just two days before Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill — which bars Florida public-school teachers through third grade from including discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in their lesson planning...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday slammed a Disney executive for her opposition to his Parental Rights in Education law - while docking their ships in the Dominican Republic - a country that bans same-sex marriage and condones discrimination against gay people. 'You've got to wonder why is the hill to die on to have transgenderism injected into kindergarten classrooms, or woke gender ideology injected into second grade classrooms. Why is that the hill to die on?' he asked in a Tuesday night interview with FOX News' Tucker Carlson. 'Meanwhile if we've done a bill that prohibited talking about the...

Two Russian planes that violated Swedish airspace earlier this month were equipped with nuclear weapons, it has emerged. The flyover near the island of Gotland on March 2 was a deliberate act designed to intimidate Sweden, according to Swedish news channel TV4 Nyheterna. A total of four planes had taken off from the Russian air base of Kaliningrad.

Independent trucker Michael Whitaker is getting ready for his next haul of equipment from South Carolina to Arizona. Whitaker has been an owner-operator trucker since 1998. His specialty is hauling industrial machinery like construction and farming equipment. "The diesel prices. That’s every truck driver's main expense, it's diesel," says Whitaker of the recent rise in diesel prices. Whitaker says at the beginning of the year it cost $600 or $700 to fill up his truck tank. Now, he's paying about $1,000. "You notice it into your pocket, oh yes," says the Iowa-based trucker. The price of diesel has skyrocketed since...

Facebook's corporate parent sought to cast its rival as harmful to teenagers and a danger to society. In an increasingly desperate bid to reduce the appeal of TikTok, Facebook’s parent company Meta quietly paid a Republican consulting firm to smear the social media rival as a danger to society. Internal emails obtained by The Washington Post show how Targeted Victory, a GOP strategy group, seeded anti-TikTok stories in local media across the country at the behest of Meta as Meta’s family of apps failed to attract young users. One email from a Targeted Victory director in February, for instance, instructed...

Three major U.S. fossil fuel companies rejected an invitation from House Democrats to testify at an April hearing on whether the industry has done enough to lower prices. The three companies — EOG Resources, Devon Energy Corporation and Occidental Petroleum — informed Natural Resources Committee leadership that they would skip the hearing that was planned for April 5, the panel’s chairman, Arizona Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, announced Tuesday evening. Grijalva sent letters to the energy producers on March 18, asking their CEOs to appear at the hearing to discuss why gasoline prices were so high. “As rising gas prices started...

SNIP “As a younger member of Congress, the first vote I ever cast was for Barack Obama, who was called a socialist and all of this stuff. All of this rhetoric that we see today has been the political reality my entire life. And so I never felt a nostalgia for something that never existed in my lifetime,” she told me. “I feel like our politics has fundamentally changed — whether it’s for better or for worse is for people’s determination — but I was never under the illusion that we can bring Manchin along.” SNIP But those days, she...

PSA: Will Smith the actor (not Will Smith the politician or Will Smith the video game creator) slapped Chris Rock on Sunday night. Will Smith famously slapped comedian Chris Rock on stage at Sunday's Oscars ceremony, and a Maryland state senator is one of the other Will Smiths of the world taking heat for the action. Maryland State Senator Will Smith is not married to Jada Pinkett Smith. Will Smith "Why you hit Chris Rock bitch," reads one tweet directed at the Democrat, a member of the state senate since 2016 who chairs its Judicial Proceedings Committee. Reads another, "I...

A Washington Post report published Wednesday shed new light on Hunter Biden's dealings with a Chinese energy firm and confirmed several details found on the hard drive of a laptop he allegedly abandoned in a Delaware repair shop. According to The Washington Post, CEFC China Energy, which has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and People's Liberation Army, paid entities controlled by the then-cash-strapped Hunter Biden or his uncle James Biden $4.8 million over the course of 14 months beginning in 2017. Hunter Biden remains under federal investigation by a grand jury. According to The Washington Post, the investigation...

The government of Shanghai, China, has imposed “the city’s most stringent antivirus measures ever” on the financial hub’s population of roughly 26 million, China’s state-run Global Times reported on Monday. “Shanghai is now under the city’s most stringent antivirus measures ever in a bid to stamp out the surging number of COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] infections,” the newspaper observed on March 28. In addition to “sealing off,” or locking down, one half of the city at a time over the next week to prevent unwanted movement and conduct mass testing for the Chinese coronavirus, Shanghai’s government on March 27 ordered all...

"I had a patient I was doing a blood draw on see my pronoun pin and loudly laugh to the staff 'She/Her?... I missed his vein so he had to get stuck twice." A fourth-year medical student at Wake Forest boasted on social media Tuesday about apparently sticking a patient unnecessarily with a needle — all because he mocked her "pronoun pin." K. Del, or Kychelle Del Rosario, a fourth year medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine, posted to Twitter that a patient was so disrespecting of her pronouns that she intentionally injured the patient during a medical...

In practically every old cartoon from the 1940s and 50s, you can find the trope where one of the characters faces a comic moral dilemma. At that moment, two tiny versions of the character poof into being at either shoulder—one in angelic garb advising the more difficult selfless action, the other in a red suit with pitchfork urging the wicked, selfish alternative. But just as these cartoons are considered hopelessly quaint and old-fashioned today, so are the notions of morality which undergird them. Consider that we have now moved from the youthful innocence of Disney in the mid-20th century...