Free Republic

He’s the Sunshine State swindler. A Florida man is expected to plead guilty Thursday to bilking more than 20 women out of roughly $750,000 by posing as an accomplished surgeon on dating sites, according to the Miami Herald. Brian Brainard Wedgeworth, 46, of Jacksonville, now faces up to 20 years behind bars for a slew of fraud and money laundering charges in federal court due to his fake dating app scheme. Wedgeworth, who used more than a dozen aliases during his swindling spree, lured lovelorn women into his grip by claiming to be a single surgeon ready to settle down....

Democrats created a heavily gerrymandered congressional map in New York which was designed to help them pick up a few seats and thereby help preserve their majority in the House. But last month the NY Court of Appeals ruled the heavily gerrymandered map violated the state constitution in part because it was clearly drawn with partisan intent. Democrats argued that there wasn’t time to do anything about the maps so, even though they were unconstitutional, they would have to be used anyway. The court disagreed and handed the creation of new maps over to a special master, an elections expert...

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a press conference at the Retro Fitness gym in West Palm Beach on May 20, 2022 to announce the largest budget surplus in the state’s history. The state has access to $20 billion USD for the 2022 fiscal year. He also announced that Florida is registering almost 45 percent of the market share of overseas traveling, the highest rate in the country and the highest ever recorded, beating out New York which previously had the highest numbers. DeSantis went on to announce the jobs report for April, with the unemployment rate in the state...

The political demise of flawed incumbent North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn was tough to watch. The guy has had a rough life and many challenges, yet ruined his career in Congress with some self-inflicted wounds. There are other candidates portraying themselves as MAGA who can’t use the cover of being pro-Trump to mask serious problems with their candidacy. The U.S. House of Representatives is on the cusp of a Republican takeover. History is on the side of Republicans with both President’s Donald J. Trump and Obama suffering massive losses in the first midterms. The polling for President Biden is in...

Editor's note: This piece was co-authored by James Hop and Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI)Honoring Mothers and Motherhood goes back thousands of years to ancient Greece. Most believe our modern Mother’s Day was formalized here in the United States in 1907 in Grafton, West Virginia, by Anna Jarvis, who organized the first Mother’s Day as part of a worship service in celebration of mothers at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton (also home to the International Mother’s Day Shrine). Although some believe a case can be made that Mother’s Day was formalized by Julia Ward Howe, a poet and author who...

I've heard things in recent days about the pro-life movement that are not true. I've read how we're against abortion because we want more white babies for white couples to adopt. This doesn't make any sense to anyone who has ever spent time at an abortion clinic, where the vast majority of abortion patients are nonwhite. If you can clear away all the rancor and hysteria on both sides of the abortion debate, there are things we can agree on, I am certain. We just need to be willing to talk with one another, to listen and to share honestly....

In March 2021, NTI partnered with the Munich Security Conference to conduct a tabletop exercise on reducing high-consequence biological threats. The exercise examined gaps in national and international biosecurity and pandemic preparedness architectures—exploring opportunities to improve prevention and response capabilities for high-consequence biological events. Participants included 19 senior leaders and experts from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe with decades of combined experience in public health, biotechnology industry, international security, and philanthropy. This report, Strengthening Global Systems to Prevent and Respond to High-Consequence Biological Threats: Results from the 2021 Tabletop Exercise Conducted in Partnership with the Munich Security Conference,...

“This week, White House officials announced steps to move away from the “maximum pressure” approach of sanctions and diplomatic isolation toward Cuba and Venezuela that was a centerpiece of former President Donald Trump’s Latin America strategy,” (italics mine) reports Foreign Policy ….”The new policies include allowing increased U.S. remittance flows and select U.S. travel to the island.” "I think we've seen this song before… This is going to increase the amount of money that's going to the dictatorship." Said DeSantis during an appearance at the University of Miami Health System’s Don Soffer Clinical Research Center….“I think people, particularly down in...

For undying enmity toward Mother Russia, Ukrainians have good cause. It can be traced to a single Ukrainian word -- “Holodomor” (derived from “holod, meaning hunger, and “mor,” meaning extermination). The word refers to a single event, the famine of 1932-3. This “famine,” however,” did not come from an act of nature, but from government policies -- the government at that time being not exactly Russia, but rather the Union of Soviet Socialists Republic, which was close to the same thing. In keeping their socialist, “equitable,” agenda, the Soviets, under Joseph Stalin, took over private farms and formed collectives. The...

Were there ‘right-wing’ riots when Tucker Carlson called for a colorblind meritocracy? Why didn’t those take place -- if the pro-freedom right is supposedly based on ‘white supremacy’? Was there any pushback from the pro-freedom right when Tucker Carlson said we should treat people as human beings created by God no matter what we look like? We must confess that we’ve been busy trying to cut back vines to keep the forest at bay and catching up on some tractor maintenance. So, we might have missed all the news stories of conservatives, libertarians, and anarchists of the pro-freedom ‘far-right’ threatening...

Yesterday, I met a man from Mumbai. He happened to mention that he was new to Idaho, so I asked how new, and it turned out he'd been here for only a month and a half. He spoke good English, and I learned he'd gone to an English-speaking school, which made his getting a job here in Idaho possible. I asked him what he thought about Boise, and he said he loved it here better than Mumbai. People don't care about you in a big city, he said. Whether you live or die makes no difference to them. But here...

Our mini-documentary on Nicolle Wallace's extraordinary record is now available for viewing on our Substack: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-.... This trailer, by Matt Orfalea, is here, and he also produced the full video. From her days as a professional liar for the Bush/Cheney White House and 2004 campaign, now as a beloved-by-liberals MSNBC host, Nicolle Wallace has for two decades been the Typhoid Mary of Disinformation. Nobody spreads official campaigns of deceit and lies more casually, frequently, aggressively or destructively than she.

“The way of man is froward and strange: but as for the pure, his work is right. It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house. The soul of the wicked desireth evil: his neighbour findeth no favour in his eyes” (Proverbs 21:8-10).

California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) responded to a report of a mountain lion attack in Trinity County on May 16, 2022. The incident occurred approximately 3:00 p.m. along State Route 299 near Big Bar. A woman was driving on State Route 299 when she stopped beside the road near a picnic area and exited the vehicle with her dog. She began walking down a path with the dog slightly ahead of her. She noticed movement beside her as a mountain lion swiped her across her left shoulder, causing injury. She screamed and her dog, a Belgian Malinois, immediately...

White Death. The very mention of those two words was enough to strike fear into the hearts of Red Army soldiers who crossed the Soviet Union’s border with Finland during the Winter War of 1939, a brief but brutal conflict that stained the frosted pine forests with the blood of 200,000 Russians. For this was the alias of Simo Hayha, one of the most prolific marksmen in military history. Shrouded in the white, hooded snowsuit that gave him his sinister soubriquet, this ace Finnish sniper, who had honed his craft by hunting animals in the woods where he was raised,...

A Russian political science professor has claimed the war in Ukraine could simply be a 'rehearsal' for a bigger conflict, allowing Russia's military to test and compare its firepower with that of NATO. Alexei Fenenko, an associate professor at Moscow State University's school of world politics and a research fellow at the Institute of International Security Studies, made the incredible claim yesterday during a talk show on Kremlin-controlled TV channel Russia One. 'I think the war in Ukraine... is a rehearsal for a possible larger conflict in the future. We are testing our weapons against those of NATO, we will...

Commentator Bill Maher dedicated the end of his 'New Rules' segment on Friday's edition of HBO's Real Time to the rising numbers of LGBTQ Americans, which he went as far as to suggest was 'trendy.' Maher, 66, who often draws the ire of both conservatives and liberals on his long-running show, largely went after the transgender part of that acronym in his editorial. He began by noting the polls show the number of Americans identifying as LGBTQ has doubled with each passing generation, joking that 'if we follow this trajectory, we will all be gay in 2054.'

Disgraced California lawyer Michael Avenatti wants leniency at his sentencing for defrauding former client Stormy Daniels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, his lawyers say, citing a groveling letter in which he told Daniels: 'I am truly sorry.' The emailed letter, dated May 13, was included in a submission his lawyers made late Thursday in Manhattan federal court in advance of a June 2 sentencing. Avenatti, 51, should face no more than three years in prison for his latest conviction, or 4 1/2 years in all, because two convictions have destroyed his life, the lawyers said.

May 20, 2022 Fox News legal analyst George Jarrett and Trump attorney Alina Habba weigh in on new Durham probe developments on 'Hannity.' Hillary Clinton approved dissemination of Alfa Bank hoax to media, campaign manager testifies. See video at link.

Lyme disease, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burdogferi which is transferred through bites from hard ticks, has gone from being practically unheard of in Spain to a worrying endemic problem in just a few short years. A study conducted between 2005 and 2019 shows not only an increase of 191.80% in hospitalisations, but also a widening of the geographical distribution of the disease. In the 14 years covered, a total of 1,865 people were diagnosed with Lyme disease in Spain, the majority of whom were men (58.71%) and people aged over 65 years (34.48%). Rosa Estévez, one of the authors...