Free Republic

OCEAN VIEW, OPPOSITE FORTRESS MONROE, Saturday evening, 8 o'clock. NORFOLK and Gosport Navy-yard again belong to the United States! Our troops under Gen. WOOL entered and took possession of the town at 5 o'clock this afternoon, receiving its surrender at the hands of the Mayor and Common Council. All the troops who had been holding it under Gen. HUGER were withdrawn yesterday, -- the public buildings and public property in the Navy-yard were all destroyed, -- the people remained in the city, and our forces entered into peaceable possession, being encamped two miles out of the town, in what is...

The two main drivers of Russia’s initiation of its war in Ukraine are a deep sense of wounded national pride and deeply ingrained paranoia. The undignified collapse of the Soviet Union was a bitter humiliation for the men of Vladimir Putin’s generation. Putin expressed a view common in Russia when he said the fall of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” Recovering the lost glory of the Soviet Union’s superpower status is a national obsession. And paranoia is deeply ingrained in Russian political culture, where conspiracies and plots are suspected around every corner. I...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says it has “documented 200 attacks on hospitals and clinics” in Ukraine, adding that it was gathering evidence for a possible war crimes investigation into the attacks. “Intentional attacks on healthcare facilities are a breach of international humanitarian law and as such – based on investigation and attribution of the attack – represent war crimes in any situation,” WHO Emergencies Director Mike Ryan said on Saturday in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. "We continue to document and bear witness to these attacks … and we trust that the UN system and the International Criminal Court and...

They may or may not have been playing the song "The World Turned Upside Down" when Lord Charles Cornwallis's troops surrendered to Gen. George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, but there's good reason to sing it now. Progressives tell us that it is a violation of "democracy" to allow state legislators and governors elected by voters to decide how to regulate or criminalize abortion. "Democracy," in this view, requires such decisions to be made by nine unelected judges. Progressives tell us that "democracy" requires "content moderation" -- censorship, in plain English -- of all communications over prevalent social media platforms...

On Wednesday, Lawrence Tabak, the acting director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), confirmed during congressional testimony that officials at the NIH deliberately withheld crucial information about early genomic sequences of the COVID-19 virus on the orders of Chinese scientists. As reported by the New York Post, Tabak told the House Appropriations subcommittee that the agency “eliminated from public view” all the data from the location of the virus’s origin, Wuhan, while adding that researchers can still access the information through a “tape drive.” When asked by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) why the NIH would take orders from...

Since the golden days of political satire in the early 2000s, left-leaning journalists and comedy critics have wondered — with a mix of smugness and genuine curiosity — why conservatives aren’t funny. Why, these critics ask, are the comedic bits at CPAC so terrible, and where is the conservative Jon Stewart and why hasn’t there been a right-of-center rejoinder to Saturday Night Live? The various explanations for the right’s comedic deficiencies all circle the same basic thesis: that there is some sort of intrinsic contradiction between conservatism and comedy. As the academic Amber Day put it her book Satire and...

IPray For The Peace of JerusalemRevelation 22Eden Restored 22 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates ⁠— United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan has passed away, state news agencies said Friday...According to Wiki, he was 73 years old.

Something is killing off large numbers of 25-to-54-year-olds in the United States, and the powers that be in government and the media are pretending it is not happening. Something is killing off large numbers of 25-to-54-year-olds in the United States, and the powers that be in government and the media are pretending it is not happening. There is no visible effort to study the alarming statistics gathered by actuaries for the life insurance industry, which keeps track of deaths because they directly impact their bottom line through calins from the insured. Aaron Kheriaty, MD spotted the alarming table below on...

With the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito overturning Roe v. Wade, the media has gone into hyperdrive trying to obscure the real contours of the debate. One of the most obvious ways they do it is by highlighting politically motivated surveys and conducting push polling. Take Politico's recent Morning Consult poll, which informs us that 53% of voters say Roe should not be overturned. Even among Republican voters, only 48% support overturning Roe. First of all, who cares? It's a completely irrelevant query, really. The court exists not to care what polls tells them....

In the storm that erupted over the leaked draft opinion of Justice Samuel Alito, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, a secondary alarm has arisen among our elites. If Roe is overturned, it is said, a whole raft of Supreme Court rulings rooted in the same principles and legal reasoning could be overturned as well. Pillars of our progressive society could come crashing down. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, legal scholars Melissa Murray and Leah Litman wrote that Alito's draft opinion "declares that the Constitution 'makes no reference to abortion' and argues that abortion rights were 'entirely unknown...

Last year was deadliest year on record for line-of-duty police death, but 2022 may surpass it. A police officer is murdered every five days, and most of them never had a chance to defend themselves against their killer. That was one of the findings in a recent report in Law Enforcement Today. The headline of this article says it all, “Terrifying report shows that there’s a record number of police officers who have been completely ambushed and murdered” The number of police officer deaths is at a record high, primarily because of COVID, so it is easy to dismiss the...

Perhaps you’ve noticed. For the past two nights Fox News and a host of corporate allies have been doing a full-frontal attack against Pennsylvania Senate Candidate Kathy Barnette. The club reaction appears to have been triggered by a GOP Trafalgar poll showing Kathy Barnette in a close second place (23.2%), surging ahead of David McCormick (21.6%) and right on the heels of Mehmet Oz (24.5%). [Bartos 7.2%, Sands 6.5%] In this outline I will explain the easily visible GOPe club moves without trying to support any particular candidate, that’s for Pennsylvania voters to decide. However, once you understand the background...

The Biden administration refuses to take responsibility for inflation. Biden blames everyone but himself. He blames railroads, energy companies, shipping companies, meat producers, business owners and Vladimir Putin. He denies the central role Democrats had in creating this problem: out-of-control wasteful spending, paying people not to work, ending American energy independence, and proposing trillions in new tax increases. The Left is now saying that tax increases are needed to help solve inflation. But Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon taught us that tax hikes make the problem worse. Inflation is running rampant. The consumer price index increased by 8.3 percent in...

Progressive activists have long fallen on the tactic of resorting to violence, destruction, and even bloodshed to get their points across. With the upcoming Supreme Court ruling on abortion, I feel assured they will once more pull this oft-used tool from their belt, and once again resort to carnage and mayhem. Already, they vandalized several Catholic churches last weekend, and firebombed a Right to Life group’s headquarters. A bullet was fired into the office of the Virginia Attorney General this week as well. Violence is already here. These were all pre-game activities as they warm up for what is to...

Last June, the Biden administration unveiled its "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism." Despite its anodyne-sounding name, the "National Strategy" was anything but anodyne. The pamphlet represented the logical culmination of the Left's cynical use of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a means of ginning up large-scale, nationwide anti-Republican/anti-Trump voter sentiment. The result, evinced again by Attorney General Merrick Garland's disgraceful October 2021 memo directing the FBI to intrude on local school board meetings and crack down on anti-critical race theory parental revolts, has been a roiling cold war waged by the ruling class against us "deplorables"...

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s extensive ties to Big Tech firms have raised the specter that the powerful Democrat has put the brakes on much-sought antitrust legislation being pushed by his own party. More than 80 former paid staffers of the longtime New York lawmaker have leveraged their time with Schumer to secure prestigious jobs, working directly with companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple, according to data compiled for The Post. The information was collected from publicly available filings of congressional staffers on LegiStorm — an online repository of data about congressional staffers and their compensation. The analysis reviewed...

Elon Musk has said his $44bn deal to buy Twitter is temporarily on hold pending further details on the number of spam and fake accounts.The billionaire tweeted he was waiting for information "supporting [the] calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users" on the social media site.

The family of a 10-year-old girl who choked herself to death as part of a TikTok challenge is suing the video platform for negligence and having a 'defective design.' Nylah Anderson of Philadelphia was found unconscious in her mom's bedroom closet on December 7. She hung herself from a purse strap after seeing videos related to the 'blackout challenge' on the app's 'For You' page, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Pennsylvania. The challenge encourages users to asphyxiate themselves, pass out and regain consciousness on camera. Nylah's mother Tawainna says the company is to blame for...

Mark Esper, President Donald Trump's last confirmed secretary of defense, has been the toast of all the networks this week for his new memoir, starting with the high-profile debut on "60 Minutes" with CBS anchor Norah O'Donnell. Then came CNN and MSNBC and PBS and NPR and Fox News. That doesn't even count the massive sharing of soundbites from these interviews, mostly dedicated to the unending hunger for "tell us all the crazy crap Trump said next" anecdotes. The last president's failure to accept the certified election results and his failure to call off Jan. 6 rioters may be the...