Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — Several mainstream Republican Senate candidates are drawing on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory once confined to the far-right fringes of U.S. politics to court voters this campaign season, promoting the baseless notion that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people in America. In some cases, the comments have gone largely overlooked given the hard-line immigration rhetoric that has become commonplace among conservatives during the Trump era. But a weekend mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that may have been inspired by the racist theory is drawing new attention to the GOP’s growing...

FORT WORTH, Texas — The advent of DNA test kits has helped millions of people discover intricate details of their heritage. They've also uncovered hundreds of thousands of family secrets that some parents preferred would have stayed hidden. But in Fort Worth, Michael Bennett has uncovered a world -- and a happy ending -- he never fully imagined. "My parents never hid the fact that I was adopted," Bennett, 70, told us from his Fort Worth home, where one room is filled with the memorabilia, commendations and photographs of a rewarding military career. And in one corner, a picture of...

President Joe Biden stumbled over the AANHPI term on Tuesday during a White House event celebrating Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Biden spoke about the AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) community but stumbled over the inclusive term by referring to the “A-A-N-I-N-H-A-P-I community in the United States” even though he was reading from a teleprompter.

The West, Western nations face existential threats. From the outside, America looks more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Mass stupidity called lockdowns has created levels of debt from which quick recovery seems impossible. Some individuals show strength and character that gives me hope. Pat Buchanan. Ron Paul. Donald Trump. Tulsi Gabbard. And in Australia, libertarian Rebekah Spelman is new to politics. She might help drain the swamp here.

MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that Democrats need to make “MAGA maniacs” and Fox News Tucker Carlson the face of the Republican Party for the midterms. Deutsch said, “We’re not going to win the next — between now and the midterms or between now and 2024 solve the social media problem. I want to go back to your question. Do we call people out? You do call out Tucker Carlson. He is heinous. He is vulgar. Make him the face of the Republican Party, the same way I said make replacement theory the brand image, the...

At least half of President Biden’s 22.2 million Twitter followers are bogus, a new audit revealed. The audit, which was done for the social media giant by software firm SparkToro, found that 49.3% of the president’s followers are “fake followers,” according to Newsweek. SparkToro has defined “fake followers” as “accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).” Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently attempting to buy Twitter, has expressed concern over the growing number of fake accounts and proposed a potential...

Explanation: Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the cause of startling sights like NGC 1316. Investigations indicate that NGC 1316 is an enormous elliptical galaxy that started, about 100 million years ago, to devour a smaller spiral galaxy neighbor, NGC 1317, just on the upper right. Supporting evidence includes the dark dust lanes characteristic of a spiral galaxy, and faint swirls and shells of stars and gas visible in this wide and deep image. One thing that >remains unexplained is the unusually small globular star clusters, seen as faint dots on the image. Most elliptical galaxies have more...

Authorities in South Carolina have recovered the long-missing remains of Brittanee Drexel, the 17-year-old New York girl who vanished while on a 2009 spring break trip to Myrtle Beach. Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver announced during a Monday press conference that Drexel's body was found on May 11 — and that police have charged 62-year-old Raymond Moody with murder. Drexel's parents were present for Monday's announcement. "This is truly a mother's worst nightmare," Dawn Drexel told reporters. "I am mourning my beautiful daughter today, as I have for the last 13 years. We are much closer to the peace that...

As Time reported on Saturday, despite the well-known losses and failures suffered by the Russian invaders since the war started, “Ukraine is in far worse shape (militarily) than is commonly believed.” Moscow still has close to 150,000 troops on Ukrainian soil and relentlessly launches missile attacks throughout the country, even as it prosecutes a plodding offensive in the Donbas. The Ukrainian military is fully engaged in an existential fight in the Donbas and smaller (but fierce) fights in Kharkiv and the Kherson/Mykolaiv region. Western supplies of weapons, tanks, and artillery pieces to Kyiv alone don’t translate into offensive capacity. To...

Up to this point, Ukraine has fought a purely defensive effort. They have done so with more success than any, including myself, expected. British intelligence reported on Sunday that up to one-third of the Russian forces that entered Ukraine have been destroyed. Ukrainian troops thwarted and then repulsed a Russian drive on Kyiv. They have mostly held the line in the Battle of Donbas so far, inflicting egregious losses on the Russian Army. An army on the defensive, however, cannot win back territory. It has to transition to the offense. How to Win the War If Kyiv has hopes of...

ransomnote: I included an excerpt of a Twitter video below - see the link for full video NATO JFC Naples @JFC_Naples The @USSHARRYSTRUMAN is under the command and control of @NATO and will interact with 19 Allies at sea, in the air, and on land, all while utilizing space and cyber capabilities. Neptune Shield 2022 has begun. Read the full story here: http://ow.ly/bvqT50JaqZk12:37 PM · May 17, 2022·Twitter for iPad

Almost half of President Joe Biden's current 22.2 million followers on Twitter are fake accounts, according to an audit tool provided by software company SparkToro. SparkToro's tool found that 49.3 percent of accounts following the official @POTUS Twitter account are "fake followers" based on analysis of a number of factors, including location issues, default profile images and new users. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently trying to buy Twitter, has expressed concerns about the number of fake accounts and a potential crack down could see users such as Biden lose a huge number of followers.

[Catholic Caucus] Cardinal Martini was a ‘Prophet,’ Says Vatican CardinalCardinal Czerny’s remarks were reported by Vatican News, the Holy See’s online news portal, which said that the Canadian Jesuit spoke at the launch of the sixth volume of Cardinal Martini’s complete works.Vatican Cardinal Michael Czerny on Monday described the late Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini as a “prophet.”The prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development said that the controversial Jesuit theologian anticipated recent developments in the Catholic Church.Cardinal Martini, a renowned biblical scholar, was described by the New York Times as one of the Catholic Church’s “most influential...

LITTLE ROCK - A water tower in the town where Johnny Cash was born was shot May 11, leading to an interesting leak on the mural painted on its side. Residents of the small town just south of Little Rock thought the leak was due to routine overflow, but as the sun rose, the vandalism became clear. The vandal had shot the water tower in the groin area of the Jonny Cash mural.

... Ankara has made it clear that it wants to use Sweden and Finland’s applications as a tool to weaken support for Kurdish separatist groups. "We must absolutely stop supporting terrorist organisations (...). I am not saying this as a bargaining chip, but because this is what it means to be allies," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu said Sunday in Berlin. In theory, Turkey has every right to block Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO. As per Article 10 of its founding treaty, the two Scandinavian countries must convince all 30 members of the organisation of the merits of their...

Stephen Colbert returned to “The Late Show” Monday night after a bout of COVID-19 and jumped right back into the fray, suggesting Fox News host Tucker Carlson should probably be concerned that his “browser history matches that of a mass murderer.” First, the comedian expressed his sadness over the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York on Saturday that left 10 people dead, most of them Black. A white, 18-year-old male named Payton Gendron is accused of targeting the predominantly Black neighborhood in what authorities said was a hate crime. In online writings purportedly written by Gendron, he embraced the racist...

Oeiras, Portugal – NATO is conducting vigilance activity NEPTUNE SHIELD 2022 (NESH22), which integrates high-end maritime expeditionary strike capabilities of Sea, Air and Land assets. The activities will take place in the Baltic, Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas, from 17-31 May.In support of Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum and Allied Joint Force Command Naples, NESH 22 is the execution phase of a long series of activities known as Project Neptune, conceptualized in 2020.As a day-to-day activity, NESH 22 will involve the participation of multiple nations. The already planned participating nations are: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania,...

India's export ban is the latest in a domino chain of supply cuts around the world that arguably started with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February. Both countries are major grain and fertilizer exporters, cut off from foreign markets by war in the case of Ukraine and sanctions in the case of Russia. With the loss of these suppliers, the rest of the world's food industry has begun to seize up, as major exporters such as India (wheat) and Indonesia (palm oil) fear for domestic supplies. ... Ukraine fed an estimated 400 million people in 2021, with the bulk...

The University of Maine used the rising tide of outrage and frustration from the #MeToo movement in 2019 to dismiss a professor it simply didn’t like but had no cause to fire, an independent fact-finder determined. The university placed Tony Brinkley, a tenured English professor, on administrative leave twice as it examined students’ claims that the longtime professor sexually harassed them and other allegations of wrongdoing before firing him in May 2019. But UMaine made an “extremely flawed” case for Brinkley’s dismissal and “essentially gamed the system” to get rid of someone fellow English professors and administrators “disliked for a...

John Fetterman, Pennsylvania's Lieutenant Governor and a Democratic candidate for US Senate, is set to undergo a procedure to implant a pacemaker with defibrillator, his campaign said...