Free Republic

John 20:19-31 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Thomas says that he will not believe in the Lord’s Resurrection unless he puts his finger in Jesus’ nailmarks and his hand in Jesus’ side. Thomas is a saint especially suitable for our time. Modernity has been marked by two great qualities: skepticism and empiricism, the very qualities we can discern in Thomas.And when the risen Jesus reappears, he invites the doubter to look, see, and touch. But then that devastating line: “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”If we stubbornly...

The lawmaker warned a blockade would be damaging for the US. and world economy, noting some of America’s largest tech firms rely on Taiwan for 90% of their semiconductor chips — and that China would control the supply. “We would be in a world of hurt and China would be the most dominant economic and military force on the planet,” he said. US relations with Beijing went into a big chill after China flew spy balloons in American airspace. Classified documents allegedly leaked by Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira further reveal US intelligence officials were aware of as many...

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is sounding the alarm bell over the Biden family's "revealing" bank records, arguing that the media "completely ignored" his 2020 report on the "grifting" family. SEN. RON JOHNSON: Let's face it, Senator Grassley and I pretty well laid out the case against the grifting Biden family back in September of 2020 before the election. Our report was completely ignored by the media, just as they ignored the Hunter Biden laptop because their advocates for the left themselves. And so what we're finding out now is just new pieces of evidence of the grifts that the Biden...

U.S. climate czar John Kerry claimed in an interview on Sunday that “so much has been invested in clean energy that there can be no rolling back of moves to end carbon emissions,” according to an interview with the Associated Press. Kerry claimed that if countries phase out petroleum-based fuels, the world can purportedly limit average global warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). “We’re in a very different place than where we were a year ago, let alone two and three years ago,” Kerry said. “But we’re not doing everything we said we’d do,” he said, after attending...

President Joe Biden’s $886.3 billion Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) defense budget request includes $145 billion for research and development into emerging technologies to create new weapons systems using Artificial Intelligence (AI), hypersonic munitions, and electromagnetic swarms.The U.S. Department of Defense launches a sounding rocket from NASA's launch range at Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., on Oct. 26, 2022. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)The Department of Defense (DOD) and its subsidiary military branch technology laboratories, working in tandem with universities and high-tech contractors that increasingly include small businesses, have produced such big-ticket splashes as newly deployed directed-energy weapons systems and hypersonic/ballistic sensors.Among...

Four Connecticut carjacking suspects flee scene after woman yells they were calling the police A man in Connecticut traded blows with multiple people who were attempting a brazen broad-daylight carjacking on April 10. Police are searching for the four suspects captured on camera attempting to steal a car parked in a residential driveway in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. The homeowner's Ring video surveillance system captured the entire incident, and police released the video as they seek to identify the suspects.

Former President Donald Trump has filed a personal financial disclosure report, which shows the former president’s vast business empire—valued at around $1.2 billion—expanding since his return to private life.The 101-page report (pdf) was filed with the Federal Election Commission as he campaigns to secure the Republican nomination for president in 2024.Trump’s business acumen, which he campaigned on ahead of the 2016 election and has repeatedly highlighted since then, appears in sharp focus in the filings.Since leaving office in January 2021, Trump has approximately doubled his number of business holdings, with a total estimated value of at least $1.2 billion.In terms...

Description: Often we think of war and peace as binary states - one is either at war or at peace. But history is full of examples of the line between those two states being blurred, and in a modern world of nuclear weapons and globalised economic and military competition, that competitive state between war and peace has grown particularly prominent. When Russia overtook Crimea in 2014 with its "little green men" the world got a high visibility view of what a hybrid war, combining information warfare, unconventional methods and conventional military force might look like. Today, I want to give...

We hear the horrifying statistics daily – over 106,000 drug overdose deaths in America in 2021, with nearly 30% deaths in people 15-34. These young people have their whole lives ahead of them, promising lives tragically cut short. And it's getting worse. In Colorado, overdose drug deaths rose 38% from 2019 to 2020. You or someone you know could soon be one of those desperately grieving parents of a dead child. At the heart of the problem is the tendency for parents to be their kids' "best friend" rather than the strong authority figure imposing necessary limits to guide their...

Democrats are obsessed with former President Trump, so much so they are attacking him from every corner to take him down. The most recent political witch hunt against him was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's persecution of the 45th president. However, Republicans are pulling out all the stops to stop them from meddling in the 2024 election. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) introduced legislation that would halt federal funds from Bragg's office. The ALVIN Act, or the Accountability for Lawless Violence In Our Neighborhoods Act, would require the woke DA to repay any funds received after January 1, 2022. "District Attorney...

Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.... ... law enforcement and trade groups have blamed a proliferation of organized shoplifting crews, repeat offenders and the new state bail law that they argue has enabled such offenders to avoid jail time. Over the past five years,...

Thanks to a shipping label on the barrel of the main gun of a Russian T-90A tank that wound up at a Louisiana truck stop, we now have an idea where it came from and where it may have been headed before the truck hauling it broke down Tuesday night, leaving it sitting at Peto's Travel Center and Casino. You can read our original story on the mysterious tank in question here. The shipping label, photographs of which were shared with us by Louisiana resident John Phelps, shows it was sent from an organization called the “multinational assessment field team”...

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that American need to make “serious change” in our gun laws because “we have some of the highest levels of gun violence.” Anchor Margaret Brennan asked, “I want to start on this issue. Our viewers remember, of course, that your wife, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was critically wounded in a shooting. You’ve made gun safety a primary issue. Your colleague said to me recently that someone is dying within the soul of this nation. Do you think America is numb to gun violence?”

Calvary Chapel in San Jose, Calif., is a large evangelical church that defied state and local orders to mask up during services and maintain “social distancing.” Of course, we now know that mask-wearing was about as effective against spreading COVID-19 as wearing a necklace of newt entrails and “social distancing” was a bad joke. But it’s not the science. It’s that the church defied authorities. So now Calvary must pay the state of California $1.2 million in fines because they got bureaucrats mad at them. So there. Is there anyone who doesn’t think $1.2 million for not wearing masks is...

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki” that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should be investigated by the Department of Justice. Psaki said, “There were new revelations this week, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his financial relationship with a billionaire Harlan Crow. Just this morning there’s even new reporting about some inaccuracies on his financial disclosure forms. Your colleague Sheldon Whitehouse is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate on Clarence Thomas for potential ethic violation. Do you back Senator Whitehouse’s call?”

Planned Parenthood, now a major provider of cross-sex hormones, collaborated with Rachel Levine and several LGBT groups and gender clinics while establishing programs to administer hormones, according to emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Levine’s assistant connected the local Planned Parenthood affiliate with a transgender clinic to set up an observation and learn about operations and the referral process, and other members of Levine’s Transgender Health Working Group celebrated the clinic’s eventual administration of hormones. “Trans-identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings,...

The state of California is implementing full Marxism before our very eyes under the guise of “equity.” And so now there can be no possible doubt if there ever was for anyone: instituting Communism has been what “equity” initiatives have been about all along. Now three of its most powerful utility companies are saying that they’re going to charge based not on how much of their product was used, but on how much money the user makes. In simpler times, if you bought something, you paid for it. Rich or poor, tall or short, black or white, female or male,...

Those claiming they are subject to unconstitutional agency proceedings need not suffer through agency proceedings before bringing their claims to federal court. Yesterday a unanimous Supreme Court held that those subject to federal agency adjudicaiton can challenge the constitutionality of such adjudication in federal court before such adjudication concludes. What some had billed as an attack on the viability of the adminstrative state was not viewed that way by the justices, who all agreed the agencies' attempts to insulate themselves from federal judicial review lacked legal basis. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for the Court in Axon v. Federal...

VIDEOBy asking White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre why Joe Biden will not answer questions at formal press conferences, it reduces her to a state of sputtering incoherence as sometimes happened with Ralph Kramden.

For decades, environmentalists have been bemoaning the fact that Lake Tahoe’s waters were losing their clarity and blaming humans. The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection:Between 1968 and 2000, approximately one-third of Lake Tahoe’s unique clarity was lost.The presumption was that humans must fix the problem that we must have caused: To address this issue, NDEP collaborated with the California Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board (Lahontan Water Board) to develop the Lake Tahoe Total Maximum Daily Load. the Lake Tahoe TMDL was a robust science-based effort to: better understand the causes of the loss in lake clarity, determine how much...