Free Republic

Conservative media giants are no better than Big Tech. The people you thought were fighting for you have been putting quick profits and the appeasement of their tech overlords ahead of any real conservative values. I can't continue if this does

The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is raising eyebrows after a city women’s civil rights commission announced a sports event for girls aged 5 to 11 that will include little boys who “identify” as girls. The Cambridge Commission on the Status of Women (CCSW) is pushing its new “Girlx” sports program it is offering to girls from kindergarten to fifth grades that will also include boys who “identify as a girl or with girlhood.” The CCSW is a city department established in 1977 supposedly to “promote equity for all women and girls and advocates on their behalf.” The “girlx” event is...

A mother of five children has been killed in San Antonio, Texas, after being struck by a driver outside her home while defending her daughter who "was being bullied from kids from school," reports say. Pennie Gomez, 36, is now facing charges of murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon following the death of Ashley Lopez on Jan. 11, Bexar County court records show. ...The report said one witness began banging on the car window to tell Gomez that she had hit someone and that person was still trapped underneath the vehicle -- but when that person tried to...

"It is increasingly painful to watch Karine Jean-Pierre," legal commentator Jonathan Turley tweeted Friday, "as she argues that they have been 'transparent' by being transparently unwilling to answer any questions." Beginning with revelations regarding President Joe Biden's handling, and housing, of classified documents — which soon resulted in the appointment of a special counsel to investigate — the communications arm of the White House has either been in conflict with the truth, late to share key details, or stonewalling in an attempt at damage control. Political pundits, lawmakers, legal experts and media outlets alike have weighed in with posts, headlines...

[Catholic Caucus] German Bishop: Hardly Any Resistance in Rome to the German SynodThe German state bishops experienced "resistance" only from a part of the Roman Curia during their November 2022 Ad Limina visit according to Aachen State Bishop Helmut Dieser (Domradio.de, 12 January).The Roman interlocutors were mostly "rather silent" in conflict talks where the bishops stressed that all the topics of the German Synod are also contained in Francis' Synod.Dieser mystified that the opponents of a "change" [= decadence] are "vocal," "well connected," and "highly aggressive" - a classic case of psychological mirroring of somebody who knows the highly aggressive...

One of the signatories of the open letter more than two years ago attempting to discredit the findings from the content of Hunter Biden's laptop computer admitted in an interview with The Australian that most of what was discovered in the emails had to be based in reality. Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director and former senior CIA operations officer, said that "all of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible." Wise added in the interview published on Sunday that he had no regrets signing...

[H/T Numberonepal]See this post on Truth SocialHave you seen President Trump's powerful 4 minute video message? Don't miss it!A NATION IN DECLINEQ is the result of the sacrifices and commitment of countless patriots to win back our captured country from the Deep State and achieve the transformation President Trump promised in this campaign video. President Trump has said the awakening of the public is key to this transformation.Q describes this awakening as follows: "The Great Awakening ('Freedom of Thought’), was designed and created not only as a backchannel to the public (away from the longstanding 'mind’ control of the corrupt...

At a meeting of the heads of Canada, the United States, and Mexico in Mexico City this week, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed his gratitude to President Biden for keeping his promise to discontinue the border wall construction started by his predecessor. "An estimated 40 million Mexicans now live north of where the border used to be," Obrador said. "In a few more decades Mexicans will constitute a majority of the citizens living in the territories violently stolen from us by their President Polk in 1848. They will vote to be peacefully reunited with their ancestral home. The...

Neighbors of an Oak Brook home targeted for a home invasion Friday said it's one of several houses in the neighborhood hit by burglars in the last few months. But on Friday, when the robbers broke in through the home's back door, a teenage girl was inside and hiding as they ransacked the place and stole valuables. "It was a scary situation for a 16 year old girl to be home and have that home violated. A scary situation," said Oak Brook Police Chief Brian Stockis. Authorities said Miller-Valencia is allegedly the getaway driver. The state's attorney said he arrived...

Democrat Josh Shapiro, 49, was sworn in early Tuesday afternoon at the state Capitol in Harrisburg as Pa.’s 48th governor. Joining him was Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, who was sworn in Tuesday morning. Here is Shapiro’s inaugural speech, as prepared for delivery: I am humbled to stand before you today as Pennsylvania’s 48th governor. Along the winding road that led to this moment, I’ve been grounded in my faith and family. And so I begin by saying to my high school sweetheart and Pennsylvania’s first lady – I love you, babe. Lori and I are blessed with four amazing children...

The Communist Party of Vietnam has forced President Nguyen Xuan Phuc to resign to take responsibility for COVID-19 bribery scandals that took place during his term, state media reported Tuesday. The party’s Central Committee decided to relieve him of all duties, including membership of the Politburo and Party Central Committee, and chairmanship of the National Defense and Security Council for the 2021-2026 term, VietNamNews said. The Central Committee commended Phuc for leading Vietnam’s efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic in the final years of his 2016-2021 term as prime minister, according to state media. However, members said he needed to...

… To inspire people, we need to tell a story not of sacrifice and deprivation but of opportunity and improvement in our lives, our health and our well-being—a story of humans flourishing in a post-fossil-fuel age. The language we use for climate solutions can exacerbate the cultural divide. Terms such as “regulate,” “restrict,” “cut,” “control” and “tax” are unpopular, especially among conservatives. Perhaps people would be more likely to support solutions described with words such as “innovation,” “entrepreneurship,” “ingenuity,” “market-based” and “competing in the global clean energy race.” The fact that the first significant U.S. climate policy is called the...

Vietnam is striving to become an advanced country by 2045. To this end, it plans to invest in transportation, energy, information and communications technology (ICT), and infrastructure. The scale of the infrastructure industry is also expected to grow at an average annual rate of 9.8% from $5.2 billion last year to $11 billion in 2030. Currently, construction companies that stand out in Vietnam such as GS E&C, Daewoo E&C, and Lotte E&C are strengthening their local presence by conducting large-scale development projects in Ho Chi Minh in the south and in Hanoi in the north, the newspaper wrote. In addition...

On the website Infinite Conversation, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek are having a public chat about anything and everything. Their discussion is compelling, in part, because these intellectuals have distinctive accents when speaking English, not to mention a tendency toward eccentric word choices. But they have something else in common: both voices are deepfakes, and the text they speak in those distinctive accents is being generated by artificial intelligence. I built this conversation as a warning. Improvements in what’s called machine learning have made deepfakes—incredibly realistic but fake images, videos or speech—too easy to...

Those who know Wall Street lore sometimes recall that Fed chairman William Miller—Paul Volcker’s immediate predecessor—joked that most Americans believed the Federal Reserve was either an Indian reservation, a wildlife preserve, or a brand of whiskey. The Fed, of course, is none of those things, but there’s also one other thing the Federal Reserve is not: an actual bank. It is simply a government agency that does bank-like things.It’s easy to see why many people might think it is a bank. “Bank” is right there in the name of the twelve regional banks that make up the system: for example,...

Eating one freshwater fish caught in a river or lake in the United States is the equivalent of drinking a month's worth of water contaminated with toxic "forever chemicals," new research said on Tuesday. The invisible chemicals, called PFAS, were first developed in the 1940s to resist water and heat and are now used in items such as non-stick pans, textiles, fire suppression foams and food packaging. But the indestructibility of PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, means the pollutants have built up over time in the air, soil, lakes, rivers, food, drinking water and even our bodies. David Andrews, a...

The size of China’s debt problem is truly staggering. At last measure, debt of all sorts – public and private and in all sectors of the economy — amounted to the equivalent of $51.9 trillion, almost three times the size of China’s economy as measured by the country’s gross domestic product. This is the highest level recorded in the 27 years since Beijing first began to track such statistics. Matters seem set only to get worse.

Hunter Biden’s monthly rent of $49,910 matches a rental deposit at the House of Sweden related to the Biden family business venture with the infamous CEFC China Energy Co. Hunter’s $49,910 deposit also matches the amount of money he logged on a 2018 background check document unearthed by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine. In an email on October 13, 2017, Cecilia Browning, the general manager of House of Sweden, an office complex in Washington, DC, emailed Hunter about a lease that Hunter and his Chinese business partners were trying to terminate, according to emails unearthed from Hunter’s “Laptop from...

Behind the refusal of the House Republican Party’s so-called freedom caucus to vote for Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is the caucus’s skepticism that he will actually “rein in government spending.” I’ve never quite understood why all Republicans do not belong to the Freedom Caucus. If the Republican Party supports low taxes, light regulations and strong national security, why is a Freedom Caucus even necessary? Here’s the problem. In 1900, government at all three levels — local, state and federal — taxed Americans at about 9% of their earnings. Now, it is over 32%. As former President Ronald Reagan said: “Government’s...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given the new commander of the Russian military forces in Ukraine a March deadline to seize control of the Donbas region, according to a Ukrainian intelligence spokesman. Andriy Yusov, a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, told Ukraine's Freedom TV on Monday that General Valery Gerasimov was ordered to capture the eastern region in Ukraine by March. The news outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported that Yusov also said during the interview that Putin has set similar deadlines in the past without success. "This is not the first timeframe. It...