Free Republic

As more information trickles out about how President Joe Biden agreed to swap Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for WNBA player Brittney Griner, former President Donald Trump revealed that Russia had tried to get him to release Bout in a proposed prisoner exchange that Trump rejected over his objections to freeing the "Merchant of Death." In a post on Truth Social, Trump said "I turned down a deal with Russia for a one on one swap of the so-called Merchant of Death for Paul Whelan," the former U.S. Marine who was arrested by Russian authorities in 2018 and charged with...

In no particular order, here are the top 10 elitists who deserve to get coal in their stockings this Christmas.After a long and draining 2022, the Christmas season has finally arrived! With bells ringing, Michael Bublé on the radio, and the smell of pine in the air, it is indeed the “Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Although Christmas offers a chance to unwind and spend quality time with our closest friends and family, it’s also a time to laugh. And what better way to put smiles on faces than to run through a list of some of the political...

Car thefts in Colorado are on track to outpace every other state in the country for a second straight year, and public safety experts say the crimes are also growing more violent. Driving the news: Just over a week ago, a Denver officer was shot in the back of the neck after apprehending a suspect who allegedly stole a car. A Denver man accused of stealing a Jeep on Sunday in Lakewood crashed the vehicle into an ambulance, injuring four people — including two firefighters. The man later told police he was forced by a female passenger to drive the...

Inspired by the recent actions of new Twitter owner and chief executive Elon Musk, more business leaders in California’s Silicon Valley are dismissing surplus employees. The startup and venture capital industries appeared to take note as Musk acquired the social media company and dismissed two-thirds of employees with no apparent impact on the platform’s operations. According to the billionaire entrepreneur, the number of new Twitter users and the amount of time users spend on the site have increased under his leadership. “The fact that Twitter is running well with headcount down significantly really matters,” Atreides Management Chief Investment Officer Gavin...

Old Joe Biden is 80 now, and even after the Democrats’ triumphant (albeit highly suspicious) showing in the midterms, some on the Left still believe that the foggy-minded old liar is well past his sell-by date. The putative president himself has not made any official announcement that he is running again, but last week, at a state dinner with the callow, wet-behind-the-ears 44-year-old French President Emmanuel Macron, Biden joined in a toast to a 2024 run. Nevertheless, the 2024 campaign is still a long way off, and if the alleged president is ultimately judged to be too old to continue...

Two ISIS officials were killed in a US military operation in eastern Syria, US officials confirmed Sunday. The “successful helicopter raid” executed by US military forces followed “extensive planning” and resulted in no civilian deaths or injuries, according to US Central Command (CENTCOM) press release. Officials confirmed the identity of one of the two terrorists as Anas, an ISIS Syrian province official with involvement “in the group’s deadly plotting and facilitation operations in eastern Syria.” “The death of these ISIS officials will disrupt the terrorist organization’s ability to further plot and carry out destabilizing attacks in the Middle East,” said...

Chelsia Blackmon’s attorney filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on November 16, saying that her client was wrongfully terminated, Business Insider reported. According to the complaint obtained by Fox Business, Blackmon was hired after she passed all the training and compliance protocols, including being able to buckle the seat belt in the jump seat. The suit noted that she had worked for several flights, including multiple Spirit Airlines Airbus 319 flights beforehand. On September 3, 2021, Blackmon was assigned to work on an Airbus 319 flight; however, she could not buckle herself...

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has revealed plans to start a new business venture just weeks after his cryptocurrency exchange spectacularly collapsed. In an interview with the BBC published on Saturday, the 30-year-old—who is facing a number of civil lawsuits brought against both him and his failed company—said he would “give anything” to be able to set up a new business in an effort to pay back investors. “I would give anything to be able to do that. And I’m going to try if I can,” Bankman-Fried said when asked if he planned to launch a new company to recoup the...

The controversy over the one-sided prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia, with notorious "Merchant of Death" and "Lord of War"Viktor Bout traded for a wokester celebrity basketball player caught with personal stash of CBD oil, is now dying down. The remaining question is what's next? We can safely assume that Brittney Griner will either return to professional basketball, or more likely enter the lucrative lecture circuit with book deals and television appearances. That's a very big 'who cares'? But arms trafficker Viktor Bout is another story. What is he going to do now that he is out and about...

During the last three years, the Canadian government has been printing lots of money and hiring lots of employees. The number of government hires has been more than those in the private sector. We also now have illegal Chinese police stations in our major cities and the hint (God forbid!) that the Chinese Communist Party was interfering in our last national election. I am shocked! Canada also had a week of martial law against truckers’ COVID protests. Then, during drawn-out hearings, it would appear that, from the Prime Minister down, no one in the higher echelons of government knew what...

Fox News star reporter Bill Melugin showed disturbing videos Monday evening of thousands of illegal aliens flooding the Southern U.S. border, crossing into El Paso, Texas. Melugin reports that over 2,600 illegal border crossings occurred in just 24 hours, Friday and Saturday: MULTIPLE VIDEOS AT LINK.............. Bill Melugin @BillFOXLA · Follow BREAKING: An enormous mass of hundreds of migrants have just crossed illegally into El Paso, TX. There is now a massive line of migrants waiting to be taken into custody by Border Patrol, and more are coming. El Paso sector had over 2,600 crossings in 24 hrs Fri-Sat. @FoxNews...

Oklahoma will not carry out an execution scheduled for Thursday morning because convicted murderer John Fitzgerald Hanson remains in a federal prison in Louisiana. "His transfer to state authorities for state execution is not in the public interest," a regional director for the Federal Bureau of Prisons told Oklahoma Attorney General John O'Connor in an Oct. 17 letter. The state is now suing in federal court in Texas for his return.

Elon Musk gave us several assurances when he took over Twitter. One of them was transparency. He sought to this initially through Matt Taibbi on Twitter Files #1. It turned out that he was being hampered by James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI who endeavored greatly to undermine President Donald Trump while at the FBI and then at Twitter. At Twitter Baker was part of the cabal to block stories of the Hunter Biden laptop and suspend those who dared even speak of it. Another of Musk's assurances was to purge it of child sexual exploitation (CSE),...

At just two minutes before 6 AM Eastern Time on Sunday morning, Elon Musk drove the left and their media allies nuts with a short tweet: "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci."This quickly resulted in a wall of fury to the extent that even media outlets that have been engaged in Censorship Denialism such as CBS News were forced into mentioning the Twitter Files.Here is the Musk tweet heard around the media world that set off all the Defcon 1 alarm bells among the left:

Trudeau may just take the “Merchant of Death” title from Viktor Bout. Last year, Canada’s euthanization program took the lives of more than 10,000 people. As we all know, communism is a philosophy of “despotic inroads”, and its adherents (Justin Trudeau and his government comrades) have an insatiable appetite for death and murder; they’re only just getting started. According to Daily Mail report published last week: Canada, a country that prides itself on its open-mindedness and tolerance, has the most permissive rules on euthanasia in the world – and the results have been frankly terrifying.Last year, more than 10,000 people...

KYIV, Ukraine — The seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Ronald Reagan bursting through the Berlin Wall was supposed to be here by now, standing in one of the Ukrainian capital’s prominent public squares. The monument was the brainchild of Maryan Zablotskyy, who grew up venerating Reagan in Lviv in western Ukraine — as many did in the post-Soviet years. Zablotskyy founded the Ayn Rand Center Ukraine to promote the libertarian author and covered his office walls with posters of Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, with their quotes translated into Ukrainian. Now a member of his country’s parliament, Zablotskyy, 37, faces...

Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has shown a willingness, and sometimes a relish, to pick public fights with an array of targets, including advertisers, tech giants, employees and more. But over the weekend, Musk publicly attacked two figures, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, in ways that may resonate with far-right audiences and gin up user engagement — but are likely to deter wary advertisers from flocking back to the social network anytime soon. “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk tweeted on Sunday, scoring points with both critics of the use of nonbinary...

The Gibsons have collected the over $36 million owed them. Sadly, David Gibson and “Grandpa” Allyn Gibson did not live to see this day. By stretching out the appeals Oberlin College waited them out, but the rest of the family survives. We wish the Gibson family well.

The legal battle over a Florida law that restricts classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation is pitting red states against blue states. Republican attorneys general of 14 states last week sought approval to file a brief supporting Florida in a fight about the new law. That came after Democratic attorneys general from 15 states and the District of Columbia this summer filed a brief supporting the bill’s challengers...

This list only includes destroyed vehicles and equipment of which photo or videographic evidence is available. Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than recorded here. Small arms, ATGMs, MANPADS, loitering munitions, drones used as unmanned bait, civilian vehicles, trailers and derelict equipment are not included in this list. All possible effort has gone into avoiding duplicate entries and discerning the status of equipment between captured or abandoned. Many of the entries listed as 'abandoned' will likely end up captured or destroyed. Similarly, some of the captured equipment might be destroyed if it can't be recovered. When the...