Free Republic

School districts are embroiled in a battle over whether to teach children from kindergarten to third grade about being transgender. Advocates recommend teachers read their young students "Introducing Teddy," a book about a boy teddy bear who transitions to be a girl, calling it a heart-warming story "about being true to yourself." Trans advocates make changing genders sound like a cakewalk. It's easier for teddy bears than for people. For honest answers on what belongs in public schools, follow the science and the U.S. Constitution. First, the science: A staggering 99% plus of the population do not have the physical...

Over the weekend an editorial in an Iranian newspaper funded by the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei suggested that Iran close the Strait of Hormuz to South Korean vessels until Seoul releases $7 billion in frozen funds. "We can and must close the Strait of Hormuz to South Korean cargo ships and oil tankers and all ships that carry South Korean commodities … and not allow them to navigate through the Hormuz Strait as long as they have not paid their $7 billion debt to our country," Hossein Shariatmadari, the chief editor of Kayhan, wrote in an editorial entitled “Let’s...

I wrote here about the fact that the umbrella Black Lives Matter organization, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, is a fraud. It collected $90 million, largely from panicked corporations, and no one knows what happened to the money, except that a lot of it was spent on luxury real estate purchases and other perks for the organization’s leaders.But the truth turns out to be even worse than that. BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors has said publicly that the organization did not even attempt to function as a legal entity. First, a little background: every 501(c)(3) organization, of which there...

The PKK terrorist organization has come to the brink of collapse thanks to the Turkish army’s continued military operations, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said on April 19, while vowing that the anti-terror fight will endure determinately. “The collapse of the terrorist organizations PKK/PYD and YPG, which are no different from each other, is accelerating as a result of our determined struggle, with their ringleaders now openly expressing their organization’s disintegration,” Akar said, speaking at a conference in the northwestern province of Bursa. Akar said that they observed this “disintegration” in the walkie-talkie conversations of PKK members during the recent Operation...

As Americans filed their federal tax returns this Monday, resident Joe Biden's White House put out a statement promoting his plan to increase taxes. It adopted Biden's typical class-war rhetoric, claiming to protect the incomes of middle-class Americans, while increasing taxes on corporations and the "rich." "resident Biden's plan would give tax relief to tens of millions of families -- continuing the tax relief families are seeing this Tax Day -- and he'd apply new minimum taxes on billionaires and large corporations to make sure they're paying their fair share," said a statement issued by the White House. The truth:...

On March 9, 2022, the Missouri House voted to eliminate the gun-free zones which had been placed on Missouri public transportation by the legislature. Amtrak is excluded. The vote was 101 to 40. Five House members voted present. From HB 1462 at mo.gov: Notwithstanding any provision of this chapter or chapter 70, 577,or 578 to the contrary, a person carrying a firearm concealed on or about his or her person who is lawfully in possession of a valid concealed carry permit or endorsement shall not be prohibited or impeded from accessing or using any publicly funded transportation system and shall...

"I don't see a single beneficiary of this crazy war! Innocent people and soldiers are dying," Tinkov, who founded Tinkoff Bank, Russia's second-biggest credit card issuer, wrote in an Instagram post Wealthy Russian businessman Oleg Tinkov on Tuesday condemned what he called Moscow's "crazy war" in Ukraine, saying 90% of his countrymen did not support it and calling on the West to offer Vladimir Putin a dignified way to withdraw. ---Snip--- "The (Russian) generals, waking up with a hangover, realized that they had a shit army," Tinkov wrote. "And how could the army be good if everything else in the...

Russia is expanding its military presence on the eastern border of Ukraine, according to the United Kingdom’s Defense Ministry, as Moscow targets the Donbas region. “Russia’s military presence on Ukraine’s eastern border continues to build, while fighting in the Donbas is intensifying as Russian forces seek to break through Ukrainian Defenses,” the U.K. Defense Ministry wrote in an intelligence update on Twitter. The British military intelligence said Russian air activity in northern Ukraine will likely remain at low levels since Moscow shifted its focus away from taking control of Kyiv. Russia tried to seize Kyiv earlier in its invasion...

The Republican National Committee made a bold decision that the media elites treated like an anti-democratic outrage. The RNC pulled out of the allegedly bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. This decision is not an outrage. It's long overdue. The Democrats are allergic to doing any primary debates on Fox News. It's only in the last two cycles, the Trump cycles, that they accepted a Fox News moderator in the fall -- and that was Chris Wallace, who escaped to CNN. Republicans should be very demanding about what constitutes a fair debate. At this point, the RNC should copy the DNC...

During an interview with “Pod Save America” on Wednesday released on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that all the money that the spending in the American Rescue Plan put into the economy played a role in inflation. Warren stated, “We got out there, just about a year ago right now, and passed what was called the American Rescue package. And you may remember, it was a lot of money, but it was money that went into vaccines and the — kind of the community health center way of getting distribution out, it was money that went into getting our...

African countries have done well during the pandemic without high rates of vaccination. The Biden regime won’t stand for that. The White House on Monday announced a second global COVID-19 summit to discuss how to bolster vaccination rates internationally, despite data from around the world showing the mRNA and adenovirus-vector vaccines do not stop the spread of the virus, and appear to be associated with a higher rate of non-COVID deaths. In a joint statement with Belize, Germany, Indonesia, and Senegal, the White House said the purpose of the summit, which is scheduled to be held virtually on May 12,...

Pretend president Joe Biden who is 79, started to answer Afghan reporter Nazira Karimi’s question and was heard saying: ‘Pakistan should not and Afghanistan should be — people should be free…’ But Meghan Hays, a White House press official and director of message planning who was dressed as the Easter Bunny, then quickly interrupted him and ushered him away in a desperate bid to avoid another gaffe. President Joe Biden was in for a surprise when his comments to people at the White House’s Easter egg roll were interrupted on Monday by none other than the Easter Bunny itself. When...

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary race was a bidding war in which the various candidates advocated spending trillions of dollars to enact sweeping progressive agendas. Some agendas were a bit more sweeping than others, but they all amounted to unprecedented increases in federal spending. Take the issue of student loans. Bernie Sanders, the most progressive of the contenders, wanted to cancel all $1.6 trillion in student debt -- just throw out all student loans for 40-plus million Americans and somehow make Wall Street pay for it. Elizabeth Warren pledged to forgive everyone's student loans up to $50,000. And Joe Biden,...

More than 61,000 Millennials and record numbers of Gen-Xers died in 2021 alone, after the Covid vaccines hailed as miracles were rolled out, leaving an unprecedented wake of mortality in the last quarter of the year. The Millennial generation, aged about 25 to 40, experienced a staggering 84% increase in excess mortality in the fall of 2021, former Blackrock portfolio manager Edward Dowd told Breitbart’s Steve Bannon in an episode of his War Room in March. Dowd described it as the “worst-ever excess mortality, I think, in history.” These deaths, which amounted to more than the number of deaths from...

VLADIMIR PUTIN is fighting a "second front" as wildfires ravage Russia distracting resources from the Ukraine invasion as the damage spreads. Thousands of acres of Siberian forest are currently experiencing the flames causing massive destruction to the region. Areas affected include Omsk, Tyumen and Krasnoyarsk, all in Siberia, and all seeing towers of black smoke in the skies. …snip According to local official Aleksey Yaroshenko, some of the forest fires are now out of control, and are more widespread than initially reported...

There is one song that sums up the mortgage banking industry with proposed tightening of Fed monetary stimulypto: T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Mortgage applications decreased 5.0 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending April 15, 2022. The Refinance Index decreased 8 percent from the previous week and was 68 percent lower than the same week one year ago. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 3 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 2 percent compared with the previous week and was 14 percent lower than...

As the debate over parental involvement in education continues, a new UN report suggests more regulation needs to be placed on those opting to homeschool their children.In the United Nations’ latest “Global education monitoring report” for “2021/2” titled “non-state actors in education: who chooses? who loses?” the global organization suggests that a stricter regulatory system needs to be implemented to ensure that there is uniformity in what children are taught, regardless of where or by whom they are educated.According to the UN report, the presence of “non-state actors” in education, which refers primarily to educators in the private schooling sector...

Twitter and Facebook worked in lockstep to restrict the flow of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election. These platforms stifled the spread of that story at the same time that Big Media did, as MRC research found. Facebook’s suppression broke the platform’s own fact-checking policy, and Twitter’s attempt to cancel the story so outrageously violated content moderation norms that it drew criticism from the likes of leftist Poynter Institute fact-checkers. Even then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey criticized his platform after the fact. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone announced the platform had preempted third-party fact-checks on the Hunter...

20 April 2022Easter Wednesday Church of Sant'Agnese, Montepulciano, Toscana Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: White.First readingActs 3:1-10 ©I will give you what I have: in the name of Jesus, walk!Once, when Peter and John were going up to the Temple for the prayers at the ninth hour, it happened that there was a man being carried past. He was a cripple from birth; and they used to put him down every day near the Temple entrance called the Beautiful Gate so that he could beg from the people going in. When this man saw Peter and John on their way into...

VLADIMIR PUTIN'S grip on power is under pressure after a huge number of Russian Orthodox churches - one of his strongest bases of support - have turned on the Kremlin and the ongoing war in Ukraine. A growing conflict inside the Russian Orthodox Church over the war in Ukraine could plunge Vladimir Putin into crisis. President Putin counts the Russian Orthodox faith as one of his country's greatest soft powers and has developed a strong personal alliance with the head of the Church, Patriarch Kirill. At the start of the war, Patriarch Kirill even blessed the invasion, turning a...