Free Republic

Four Florida correctional officers were arrested on murder charges for allegedly beating an inmate to death, authorities said. Christopher Rolon, 29, Kirk Walton, 34, and Ronald Connor, 24, were arrested Thursday following a monthslong investigation of the fatal incident at the Dade Correctional Institution in Miami-Dade County, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said. They all face multiple charges, including second-degree murder, conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, aggravated battery on an elderly or disabled person and cruel treatment of a detainee, officials said.

As Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine rages on, and Western nations continue to place sanctions on Putin’s government, Russian oligarchs, and the country’s economy, whistleblowers will play a critical role in exposing attempts by Russia to retaliate against the United States and evade sanctions by infiltrating our national cybersecurity. For many, what comes to mind when they hear the word “whistleblower” is someone, usually an employee, who identifies wrongdoing or mismanagement occurring, and shines a light on it. This is done to expose and put an end to abuse, fraud, and waste. And while this understanding would be correct,...

Traditionally, men have dictated proceedings during a romantic encounter, but a new study suggests this could finally be changing. Researchers in Kansas have analysed data from a survey of more than 20,000 heterosexual college students describing their most recent date. They found that only around a third of dates (36 per cent) now involve the man asking the woman out, paying, and then initiating sex.

Three and a half years ago, in November 2018, the good people of San Francisco enacted by a referendum called Proposition C a new special corporate payroll tax which would raise multiple hundred million dollars per year for the specific purpose of finally and once and for all solving the problem of homelessness. During the run-up to that referendum, in October 2018, I had two posts discussing Proposition C, the nature of the progressive thinking behind it, and its prospects for success. On October 26 it was “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite”; and on October 30 it was “More...

Antitrust law has garnered a lot of attention in Washington, particularly as those on the left try to target big tech companies like Google and Facebook. But regardless of whether an antitrust bill passes, Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are quietly progressing an agenda that punitively punishes businesses. Due to the anti-democratic setup of the agency, these commissioners are able to wield outsized control over our economy. The FTC was established as an independent agency of the government to enforce civil U.S. antitrust law and promote consumer protection. While its commissioners are supposed to be “independent,” they...

News that the Biden administration's Department of Homeland Security had formed a Disinformation Governance Board was met with swift backlash from conservatives and free speech advocates worried about how the board will function and how it comports with the First Amendment. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas mentioned the board Wednesday during a hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, saying his department had just recently constituted the board. But the disinformation entity's name and mission set off red flags over potential free speech violations. "The federal government is supposed to not impede free speech, and that's exactly...

As the worldwide coronavirus pandemic finally starts to subside, Americans may be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief that our country’s significant public health woes are behind us, at least for the time being. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The end of COVID-19 has instead brought the ongoing national health emergency of drug overdose deaths back into clearer focus. As policymakers turn their attention back to addressing this issue, they must be sure to direct resources where they are most needed. Drug overdose deaths – especially those related to opioids – have been an issue our country has...

Republicans hit at the Biden administration’s new Disinformation Governance Board Friday, arguing that it is an “unconstitutional and unamerican” means of crushing dissent. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis led the charge during a press conference Friday, calling the Department of Homeland Security Counter-Disinformation Governance Board a “Ministry of Truth,” and vowing to fight it. “You cannot have a Ministry of Truth in this country. We’re not going to let Biden get away with this one. So we will be fighting back,” he said. The Republican was in Willston, Fla. to talk about his administration’s investment of $22 million for infrastructure in...

Little by little, local police forces are succumbing to leftist indoctrination, funded and advanced by federal taxpayer dollars. Here is what to look out for—and how to push back. Local control of the police is vital to the preservation of American democracy. Police officers and sheriff’s deputies swear an oath not only to serve and protect their communities but also to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Ideally, the police should serve as guardians of public safety and as defenders against government tyranny. Leftist elites detest these safeguards of liberty. The woke oligarchs are the tyrannical faction the American founders had the...

In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed a startling, heretofore secret, initiative within his agency to police the online speech of American citizens. Mayorkas, whose infamous abandonment of border security has rendered his official title an oxymoron, divulged (conveniently on the heels of Elon Musk’s planned liberation of Twitter from censorship and in time for deployment during the November 2022 mid-term elections) that DHS had initiated a “Disinformation Governance Board” to be chaired by left wing activist Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz favors government regulation to rid conservative voices from media and endorses as fact two...

Lawmakers of both parties are considering legislation that would grant sweeping new powers to an already heavily politicized Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ). Attempting to exploit conservatives’ anger towards Big Tech’s content moderation practices, progressives are proposing the weaponization of antitrust law. Instead of embracing the politicization of antitrust law, conservatives should be asking themselves: when has expanding government powers helped conservative causes? Republicans only need to look to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to see the perils of an empowered and unaccountable bureaucracy. Less than a decade ago, the IRS was wracked with a scandal...

We must identify and expose woke thinking for what it is: a perverse attack by progressive activists on traditional American values. Another name for "woke" is "warped," or better yet, "perverse." A recent book, Vivek Ramaswamy's Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam (New York and Nashville, 2021), addresses that perverse privileging of special identity groups and of the influence that accrues to these so-called "stakeholders." At the beginning, Ramaswamy declares that he considers wokeness a "social justice scam." By "scam," the author implies a quid pro quo on the part of those radicals who, in return for grants,...

IPray For The Peace of JerusalemRevelation 16The Seven Bowls of God’s Wrath 16 Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, “Go, pour out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on the earth.” 2 The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly, festering sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. 3 The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the...

Ghislaine Maxwell has lost a bid to overturn her sex trafficking conviction, paving the way for her to be sentenced to decades in prison. Lawyers for the British socialite had asked a judge to reject the verdict on multiple grounds, including insufficient evidence. Maxwell was convicted in December of recruiting teenage girls for US financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse from 1994 to 2004. In a written ruling, New York District Judge Alison Nathan said the jury's guilty verdicts were "readily supported" by extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence at the trial. However the judge said she will only sentence...

Posted on April 28, 2022 by Msgr. Charles PopeAn Easter ExhortationDespite the Easter glow, there was also at those gatherings a sober awareness that these are dark days and that the Lord is calling us to be willing to suffer and sacrifice for the truth of the gospel.Recent readings from Scripture have also had this theme. The readings in daily Mass this past week (from the Acts of the Apostles) show the joy of a poor, lame man healed by Peter and John at the Gate called Beautiful. By week’s end Peter and John were arrested for the “dangerous” act...

The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter not only illustrated that the anti-liberty left exploits the term liberal, but it also provided a stark political demarcation line. Have you ever noticed that some people tend to overcomplicate matters when it’s never really justified? People, who insist that things are ‘nuanced’ when they aren’t? Where you don’t have to look at every aspect of a situation and a general evaluation works quite nicely? In the engineering field, we can get good results for the motion of everyday objects, by simply applying the principles of Newtonian physics while leaving out negligible relativistic...

April 30th 2022 Saturday of the 2nd week of Eastertide National Shrine of St. Jude, Chicago Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: White First readingActs 6:1-7 ©They elected seven men full of the Holy SpiritAbout this time, when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenists made a complaint against the Hebrews: in the daily distribution their own widows were being overlooked. So the Twelve called a full meeting of the disciples and addressed them, ‘It would not be right for us to neglect the word of God so as to give out food; you, brothers, must select from among yourselves seven...

In an astonishing interview last week on the Iran Students Correspondents Association (ISCA) news channel, an Iranian state television outlet, the former deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Motahari, spilled the beans on the theocratic regime’s nuclear ambitions. “There is no need to beat around the bush,” he said. “When we began our nuclear activity, our goal was indeed to build a bomb.” The politician and son of an Ayatollah admitted that the goal of constructing a nuclear bomb was to use it as a “means of intimidation and to strike fear in the hearts of the enemies of...

The Justice Department filed a complaint Friday challenging a recently enacted Alabama law that criminalizes certain types of gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Driving the news: The DOJ alleges that the law, one of dozens targeting trans youth across the country, "discriminates both on the basis of sex and on the basis of transgender status, each in violation of the Equal Protection Clause." What they're saying: "The law discriminates against transgender minors by unjustifiably denying them access to certain forms of medically necessary care ... [that are] well recognized within the medical community as medically appropriate and necessary, while...

References to climate change almost guarantee funding, even for research topics of little interest beyond academia and eco-activists. Polls reveal that most people worry most about energy and food prices, crime, living standards, Putin’s war on Ukraine, and increasing efforts to control their lives. A recent Rutgers University scientists sought to determine how much diversity is required among bee species to sustain wild plant populations. They concluded that ecosystems rely on many bee species to flourish – and “biodiversity is key to sustaining life on Earth,” especially with many species “rapidly going extinct due to climate change and human development.”...