Free Republic

A local LGBTQ+ event was met with protesters Saturday morning in Central Fresno. Fresno's Drag Festival kicked off at 11:30 a.m. at Our Saviors Lutheran Church. The ticketed event features well-known drag performers who do family-friendly numbers, including to Disney songs. There's also a story time portion where the performers read age-appropriate books to the kids. The event had pushback from dozens of people who protested outside of the church. It also drew criticism from Fresno City Councilmember Garry Bredefeld on social media where he called the event "sickening and disgraceful." "I just feel like instead of the love that...

Explanation: The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow. The featured picture, an attempt to show how Io would appear in the "true colors" perceptible to the average human eye, was taken in 1999 July by the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Io's colors derive from sulfur and molten silicate rock. The unusual surface of Io is kept very young by its system of active volcanoes. The intense tidal gravity of Jupiter stretches Io and damps wobbles caused by Jupiter's other Galilean moons. The resulting friction greatly heats Io's interior, causing molten rock to...

The Mystery Of The 9,000 Year Old Village Hidden Under The Sea | The Mystery Of Atlit-YamTimeline | World History Documentaries4.5M subscribers | 16,855 views | December 11, 2022In 1984, off Israel’s Mediterranean coast, marine archaeologist Ehud Galili discovered an ancient settlement that had been submerged for millennia.The site was at first a mystery, but as underwater excavations progressed, the veil was lifted.It turned out to be the biggest and best preserved prehistoric site ever discovered along the Mediterranean shoreline. Atlit Yam – a stone age village dating from at least 9,000 years ago – stretches over more than four...

A full-blown “major war” between Russia and the West could possibly break out over Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned on Friday. Commenting on the state of play ten months since Russia mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said that it is a “fateful time for Europe” and that things could “go horribly wrong” and spill over from a proxy into a direct conflict between Russia and the NATO alliance. Speaking with Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, Stoltenberg said: “I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major...

An Army captain was separated from the service for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine as the GOP attempts to roll back Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s military vaccine mandate. Capt. Stephen Rogerson (a pseudonym) has served in the Army for 17 years, and on Dec. 6, a three-person administrative board voted to separate him from service. On the same day, the House passed an $858 billion defense funding bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the fiscal year 2023, that included a provision to rescind the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. But soldiers like Rogerson are “falling through the...

It is hard to overstate how awful our public schools are. And yet, the very worst schools are private, and expensive. In Chicago, the $42,000 a year Francis W. Parker School is educating its students in ways that most of us didn’t experience when we were growing up:The dean of students at an elite, $42,000-a-year Chicago prep school has been filmed bragging about kids playing with “dildos and butt plugs” in class while getting tips on having “queer sex.”...The Dean of Students who appears in the video was right: the trustees of the Parker School had no problem with kids...

Chad Mason, 36, was arrested on several charges, including sexual activity with an animal A Florida man was arrested after he had sex with a dog in front of families, wrecked a nativity scene at a nearby church and attempted to steal a vehicle. Chad Mason, 36, was arrested Sunday on several charges, including sexual activity with an animal, exposing sexual organs and criminal mischief to a place of worship. Mason knew the owner of the Goldendoodle dog and was taking it out for a walk in an apartment complex in the 2600 block of McMullen Booth Road at around...

The sanctuary city of Chicago is turning zero criminal illegal aliens over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency for arrest and deportation in part thanks to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) protections for gang members and felons. In the third quarter of 2022, city records show that none of the three ICE detainers filed with Chicago police — requesting custody of criminal illegal aliens — were honored. Likely hundreds, potentially thousands, more illegal aliens were arrested in Chicago during the period, but ICE agents have been restricted in issuing detainers by the Biden administration. The refusal to honor any...

“A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones” (Proverbs 12:4).

Tension from a sentencing hearing in a murder case at the Summit County courthouse spilled into the hallway on Tuesday leading to a fight between two families. Several minutes after Judge Christine Croce sentenced Kavon Jackson to 18-years-to-life in prison for killing William Howell on a METRO RTA bus, families from both sides began yelling at each other and throwing punches in the third-floor hallway.

A man in Florida allegedly set a sheriff’s patrol car on fire and told deputies that he was “intoxicated” at the time. The incident happened just before 5 p.m. on Wednesday, according to the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office, which said that Anthony Thomas Tarduno admitted to setting the patrol car on fire. Tarduno told detectives that he was drinking at a bar in Spring Gill, Florida and walked out shortly before 4:30 p.m. When he was walking, the man saw a patrol vehicle “and decided he’d like to set it on fire,” the sheriff’s office said. The man got a...

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) is weighing a push to end or repeal a grandfathering clause in a gun control bill in order to force residents to hand over any AR-15s. The CT Mirror noted that Connecticut’s General Assembly has passed two “assault weapons” bans, and each time, the bans had a grandfather clause, allowing those who already owned the banned firearms to keep them.

On December 11, 2020, the United States Supreme Court, in one horrific act, symbolically threw the Great Seal of the United States into the Potomac River and abdicated its solemn responsibilities to judge whether our country was following its own laws as clearly expressed in the United States Constitution. December 11, 2020, followed the 79th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by just four days. And like President Roosevelt’s declaration regarding December 7, 1941, the date of December 11, 2020, will go down in American history as a day of infamy. As Jewish families across the world were lighting...

There are 132,188 public employees and retirees in Illinois who earned $100,000 or more last year.Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found almost 500 educators in Illinois public schools had salaries between $200,000 and $439,000. Small-towns city managers made up to $341,300, and three doctors at the University of Illinois at Chicago earned between $1 million and $2.1 million.This is as crime increases, test scores drop among public school students, and inflation decimates private-sector paychecks. This doesn’t stop the Illinois public employee class from living the good life.Well-paid barbers working for State Corrections trimmed off $104,000, janitors at the Chicago Transit Authority cleaned...

We just recently looked at the published academic works of Yoel Roth, Ph.D., Twitter’s former Head of Trust & Safety. Christopher Rufo called them “wild,” and they certainly were Grindr-intensive … not that there’s anything wrong with that. We just kind of find it hard to believe you can earn a doctorate in communications writing about a gay hook-up app. An old tweet from Roth is making the rounds today, but first, we want to highlight a complaint from California State Senator Scott Wiener: Yes we’re aware of the grift you’re running with Weiss & company to justify letting Nazis...

Despite months of enormous and widespread protests from Dutch farmers, the Dutch government will be confiscating 3,000 farms and closing them down in the interests of complying with EU environmental rules to decrease nitrogen emissions by 50% by 2030.Of course, this means 3,000 farms' worth of food production will be eliminated. The Netherlands is the world's second-largest exporter of agricultural products and provides vegetables for much of Western Europe. Over half of Dutch land is used for agriculture, and that doesn't count 24,000 acres' worth of crops growing in greenhouses. What does the Dutch government think will happen to the...

On this date in 1831, one of the great Spanish liberal officers was shot along with dozens of comrades attempting to spark a revolution. It was a dark time for Spanish liberals under the autocratic rule of Ferdinand VII. Jose Maria Torrijos y Uriarte (Spanish Wikipedia page) was one of the heroes of that downtrodden cause from way back, a noble-born officer who had been made a captain at the precocious age of 13 and been around for all of Spanish liberalism’s greatest early 19th century tragedies. He was in Madrid for the ill-fated uprising against its French occupiers in...

Former President Trump on Sunday said he turned down a deal to release former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who’s been detained by Moscow since 2018, in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout during his time in the White House. “I turned down a deal with Russia for a one on one swap of the so-called Merchant of Death for Paul Whelan. I wouldn’t have made the deal for a hundred people in exchange for someone that has killed untold numbers of people with his arms deals,” Trump said on Truth Social.

“Joe Biden’s world-class hypocrisy is on full display, and it has taken a dangerous turn, in his trade of a notorious Russian arms dealer for Brittany Griner,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today. Biden’s swap of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout—known as the “Merchant of Death”—for Griner this week has brought expressions of outrage and astonishment. The jailed basketball gold medalist is one of two Americans who have been held by the Russians. The other is Paul Whelan, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was imprisoned four years ago on espionage charges, and...

The RGA filled DeSantis' coffers while hanging conservative candidates in competitive states out to dry.The anti-Trump Republican Governor’s Association spent the 2022 election cycle helping Florida’s Ron DeSantis build a massive war chest for use in future campaigns, while hanging conservatives like Doug Mastriano, in Pennsylvania, out to dry and surrendering governorships to Democrats.The Republican Governors Association (RGA) donated almost $21 million to the Friends of Ron DeSantis PAC, a massive war chest that politicos believe the Florida Governor will use to take on Trump in 2024, with the backing of the GOP establishment.Over the year and a half that...