Free Republic

Why would any law-abiding American balk at permitting the feds to vacuum up his biometric data at the airport? The Transportation Security Administration is running a pilot program in which travelers stand in photo kiosks that compare their faces with a federal database of photos from passport applications, driver’s licenses, and other sources. TSA promises its new airport regime, which could vastly expand next year, will respect Americans’ privacy. If you believe that, I can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn really cheap. TSA has long been one of the most intrusive and inept federal agencies. For 20 years, every...

Dr. Patrick Chavis, 50, was fatally shot by foiled carjackers as he returned to his auto following a stop for ice cream in Hawthorne, Calif. Chavis was infamous, having been admitted to UC Davis medical school in 1973 under a special program that enrolled five black applicants who had lower scores than Allan Bakke, a white male denied admission. Bakke challenged the admissions program and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bakke's favor; Davis had committed a constitutional no-no. Bakke is now a respected anesthesiologist in Rochester, Minn. Chavis' life was a Shakespearean tragedy because of affirmative action. While Sen....

Independent journalist Bari Weiss revealed on Thursday how Twitter used blacklists to limit the visibility of tweets coming from conservative users in the latest disclosure of the social media giant’s internal operations. Right-wing talk show host Dan Bongino, Stanford University’s anti-COVID lockdown advocate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and conservative activist Charlie Kirk were among the users targeted for suppression by Twitter, according to Weiss. Weiss’s tweets followed Friday’s bombshell revelations by fellow independent journalist Matt Taibbi, whose Twitter posts were promoted by new company owner Elon Musk as “what really happened with the Hunter Biden suppression story by Twitter.”

Two former Twitter employees have filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, accusing it of gender discrimination. The lawsuit - filed in San Francisco Federal Court - alleges that Musk's new policies had a "disproportionate impact" on women. According to data analyzed in the lawsuit, Twitter laid off 57% of the its female employees and only 47% of its male employees. Within that, 63% of women in engineering roles were laid off compared to only 48% of men in similar roles, according to the lawsuit's data analysis. This is one among several lawsuits former employees have filed against Twitter since...

It's a sign of the nation's fraught state of mind that many seriously believe this week's unlikely plotters could have toppled democracy. BERLIN---Germany is on edge. Early Wednesday, thousands of balaclava-clad German police officers fanned out across the country, arresting 25 people and seizing weapons to upend what authorities described as a diabolical plot to overthrow the country's government and reinstate the monarchy. The group's "military arm" was surreptitiously building "a new German army," the lead prosecutor on the case said. A day later, however, the case looks more like the script of a Monty Python episode thant a sequel...

Al Roker is celebrating his return home after being readmitted to the hospital amid ongoing health issues. On Thursday, the Today show weather anchor, 68, shared with supporters via Instagram that he is back home. He posted a photo of himself in his family's kitchen, along with a snap of his wife, Deborah Roberts, 62, embracing him, and an image of the pair smiling with their daughter Leila, 24. Roker captioned the sentimental celebration, "Home! So incredibly grateful to family, friends, medical folks, @todayshow family and all your thoughts and

Democrat President Joe Biden’s “climate czar” has declared that the green agenda isn’t moving “fast enough” and warned global leaders that “everything has to accelerate.” Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Kerry issued the warning Thursday during an event hosted by the Washington Post. Nations around the world need to “accelerate” the transition from fossil fuels to green energy by “vast amounts,” he claimed. Kerry said that countries must ramp up efforts to meet green agenda goals in order to stave off the potential future human and financial impacts of climate change. The top Biden administration official particularly noted renewable sources...

Liberal billionaire George Soros is upping his accolade as the “largest donor” for the 2022 midterm elections to the next level by reportedly signaling that he’s ready to buy the 2024 presidential election. Politico revealed Dec. 7 that Soros pumped a whopping $50 million into his leftist super PAC — Democracy PAC — “building on an already large investment in Democratic groups and candidates for the 2024 election cycle and beyond.” This is on top of the $128 million he spent during the 2022 midterm elections. Politico noted that it’s “the latest sign that Soros will continue to play an...

Russian has a rather complicated adjective недоговороспособны (nedogovorosposobny) for which there isn’t any good English equivalent. Literally it means something like “not together in speaking to find a way”; the clumsy English word used is not-agreement-capable. The meaning is “you can’t make an agreement with them and, even if you could, they’d break it”.The Minsk agreements were negotiated between Kiev and the breakaway regions of Lugansk and Donetsk with two variants in 2014 and 2015. In essence they agreed to a ceasefire and the start of negotiations on some form of autonomy for Lugansk and Donetsk inside the borders of...

1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.

Here’s the newest video from Project Veritas:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvLVJaKN28kWBEZ, the Chicago affiliate of NPR, is actually reporting on this one. Among other things, the NPR affiliate said: “The video captures the dean talking last week about a visit to Francis W. Parker School by an LGBTQ health organization to discuss queer sexual health with high schoolers.”“The operative recorded himself talking to Joseph Bruno, Parker’s dean of students. In the video, Bruno described an event during the school’s annual Pride Week last May. During an optional lunchtime session for high schoolers, educators from Howard Brown Health presented a lesson on queer sexual health...

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She’s got a bevy of baby daddies and she doesn’t care who knows it. A Tennessee woman has hit back at haters who have criticized her for having 11 children with eight different men, saying she’s not ashamed of her unconventional family. The Memphis mama, known on TikTok as Phi, is frequently fielding questions about her children’s fathers on the social media site, where she has clocked up close to 100,000 followers. In a viral video back in August, Phi said there were even advantages to having so many men around. “Let me explain it,” she said. “If you have...

If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between 2000 and 2019. (See the chart below.) The number of district administrators grew by a whopping 87.6 percent during these years, far outstripping the growth in the number of students (7.6 percent) and teachers (8.7 percent).In illustrating the difference in these rates of growth, the chart also illustrates a fundamental change that has come over our nation as a whole during this period—a change in...

"Now that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him." "For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre; But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate." "Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them...

HORNBROOK, Calif. (AP) — Tribal, state and federal officials on Thursday cheered a plan for the largest dam removal in U.S. history along the Klamath River near the California-Oregon line as a major step toward restoring a once-thriving watershed that tribal communities have long relied on. “Clean water, healthy forests and fertile land made the Klamath River Basin and its surrounding watershed a home to tribal communities, productive agriculture, and a place where abundant populations of migratory birds, suckers, salmon and other fish could thrive,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said. The removal of four dams along the river will...

The U.S. Justice Department has asked a federal judge to hold Donald Trump's office in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a subpoena to return all classified documents in the former president's possession, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell has not yet held a hearing or ruled on the request, the newspaper reported. One of the key areas of disagreement centers on the Trump legal team's repeated refusal to designate a custodian of records to sign a document attesting that all classified materials have been...

I [previously] did a Facebook/YouTube live presentation with my colleagues, Amir Tsarfati and Pastor Barry Stagner. It was titled “Doctrine Matters.” And indeed, it does! We considered a number of theologies that do not allow their followers to understand the times or become watchmen on the wall. I thought I would summarize that discussion in this magazine format. Please understand that not every church in a particular denomination or stream of theology holds to some of this aberrant theology! A good illustration of this is many in the Assemblies of God are pushing back against Kingdom Now/ Dominion Theology, so...

The mom took to Reddit to reveal an airplane passenger confronted her for having her toddler in first class — was she wrong to do that? After an airline passenger allegedly accosted a woman because she had her toddler in the plane's first-class section, the anonymous mom took to Reddit to ask others if it was wrong of her to book first-class plane tickets for her young child — and people chimed in. The Reddit user, One-Criticism5777, turned to the "Am I the A******" subreddit on Saturday, Nov. 26. She said a male passenger accused her of sitting in the...

Elite Chicago Private School’s Dean of Students Brags About Bringing in LGBTQ+ Health Center to Teach ‘Queer Sex’ to Minors … ‘That’s a Really Cool Part of My Job’ … ‘Passing Around Dildos and Butt Plugs’ ... ‘Using Lube Versus Using Spit’ • Joseph Bruno, Dean of Students, Francis W. Parker School: “So, I’ve been the Dean for four years. During Pride -- we do a Pride Week every year -- I had our LGBTQ+ Health Center come in [to the classroom]. They were passing around butt-plugs and dildos to my students -- talking about queer sex, using lube versus...