Free Republic

A federal judge sided Tuesday with families who sued over Florida’s ban on gender transition procedures for minors, declaring that “gender identity is real.”A group of families, backed by several LGBT activist groups, sued Florida in March shortly after the rule restricting minors from accessing surgical sex change procedures, puberty blockers and hormone therapy took effect. Northern District of Florida Judge Robert L. Hinkle, a Clinton appointee, granted a preliminary injunction against the law to prohibit it from being enforced against the plaintiffs, arguing that the “great weight of medical authority supports these treatments.”Hinkle repeatedly stressed the reality of “gender...

PHILADELPHIA – A highly unusual weather pattern is bringing critically dangerous wildfire conditions Tuesday to a swath of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, including the Philadelphia and New Jersey area. Meanwhile, wildfire smoke from multiple blazes already burning across Canada has flooded the region’s skies with renewed haze and poor air quality. A deep and dry layer of air moved into the Great Lakes Monday night and is spreading into parts of the Northeast on Tuesday, dropping the humidity to as low as 25% and bringing a swath of breezy, gusty winds. Meanwhile, an upper-level trough of low pressure is expected...

Saying gender identity is real, a federal judge temporarily blocked portions of a new Florida law that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers, ruling Tuesday that the state has no rational basis for denying patients treatment. Judge Robert Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction, saying three transgender children can continue receiving treatment. The lawsuit challenges the law Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed shortly before he announced a run for president. “The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset. Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear,” Hinkle said, adding that even a witness for the state...

For the entirety of his 2020 presidential campaign and the 28 months of his presidency, Joe Biden has been a sick man. During the campaign, he was so feeble that his political handlers kept him locked in the basement.

Dear Life in Plastic, You say that no man wants a woman who has let herself go, but there is a very big difference between aging naturally and taking care of yourself, and opting for plastic surgery. In fact, the vast majority of men infinitely prefer the natural look. Honestly, I’m trying to think of anyone I know who prefers a trout pout, unnaturally filled cheekbones and a brow that is sky-high, and I can’t think of one decent man who would choose that. I’m not anti-plastic surgery, but I am asking you to question your own sense of worth....

Recent polls indicate that House Speaker Dade Phelan’s popularity is plummeting in his district. House District 24, which prior to redistricting was the shape of a horseshoe encompassing Winnie, Port Arthur, Beaumont and Orange in southeast Texas, now includes a sliver of the region stretching north to include Jasper County. Two polls conducted by CWS Research, LLC, a veteran-owned general consulting and data analytics firm hired by Defend Texas Liberty PAC, show Phelan’s favorability has dropped by roughly half after the 88th general legislative session. Both polls surveyed likely 2024 Texas Republican primary voters in Texas House District 21. The...

A sonic boom was heard across the Washington, DC, area Sunday afternoon when military jets raced after an unresponsive private plane that crossed into restricted airspace and later crashed, killing all four people onboard. The deafening boom rang out when two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to investigate the aircraft that was not responding to radio transmissions shortly after 3 p.m., according to the Department of Defense. Residents around the capital and surrounding communities were left bewildered until more information came out. The F-16s were deployed after the private Cessna flew into restricted airspace...

ALBANY – Controversial “Clean Slate” legislation will no longer allow murder convictions and other serious felonies to get sealed after Albany Democrats tweaked bill language on Monday. The proposal would allow convicted people to apply to have their crimes nixed from their records after they serve their sentences, parole, and probation as well as a period of three years for misdemeanors and eight years for felonies. Narrowing the scope of the bill, which also exempts sex crimes, comes as Albany Democrats near a final deal on passing the bill before the scheduled end of the 2023 legislative session on Friday....

ESG scoring is a financial racket, and we're starting to learn how it works. The unfolding saga with huge American corporations like Anheuser-Busch (Bud Light) and Target are showing us a glimpse of what's going on behind the curtain with this cartel scam that's trapping our corporations. One tool of this cartel is the Human Rights Campaign's "Corporate Equality Index," which is concerned with "LGBTQ+" issues and is used as a scoring mechanism for the S, Social (Justice), part of ESG scoring. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay walks through how the ESG racket works,...

General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London January 2, 1944 to command Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and to direct the last five months of planning for D-Day; the most difficult and complicated military operation ever attempted. Eisenhower’s study of leadership skills required he ignore opportunities for fear and doubt, which inevitably arise as strain and tension wear away endurance. He persevered to present confidence and optimism to those around him. For that reason, he brought with him a confident, battle tested team that had led successful landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno, despite experiencing German counterattacks nearly...

The Death of the Authentic LeftThe political left died in stages and then all at once:• It died when communist workers’ parties went nationalist at the start of World War I and thus killed each other rather than saying no to bankers’ wars.• It died during the Moscow Show Trials from 1936 to 1938 that showed the grotesque extremes of Stalin’s Russia.• It died in 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, thus revealing that the “reforms” of Khrushchev and Brezhnev were an illusion. • The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the people in the...

Calls are growing for the arrest of a woman accused of shooting her mother-of-four neighbor after she complained about the victim's children playing outside. The children of Ajike 'AJ' Owens were playing in a field near an apartment complex in Ocala, Florida, on Friday when her neighbor 'began yelling at them to get off her land and calling them racial slurs', renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump said. The children then accidentally left an iPad behind after leaving the field, Crump explained, before going back to fetch it. But the neighbor, a 58-year-old white woman, who was not named, had...

New York City installed a vending machine that dispenses free crack pipes, fentanyl test strips, Narcan (an overdose reversal drug) and condoms. Public health officials unveiled the machine on Monday in Brooklyn at 1676 Broadway, ABC7 New York reported. Less than 24 hours after its installation the machine was empty, according to the New York Post. The machine cost the city $11,000 to install, and it also offers residents free COVID-19 testing, feminine sanitation products, hygiene kits, Vitamin C, and first aid kits. Residents must simply enter their zip code to gain access.

BEVERLY HILLS, CA — A local surgeon specializing in gender reassignment has come under heavy fire recently, as his critics complain he is still stubbornly only offering "male" or "female" as options. "This doctor is so behind the times," said Trixie Sunbreeze, an LGBTQ+ activist who has identified as 38 different genders in the last 6 weeks. "How can you present yourself as a friend to the trans community when you hatefully only allow people to become males or females? As if those are the only two genders! BIGOT!" Dr. Rick Barnhouse, who has practiced medicine for 30 years, doesn't...

Humans are essentially herd animals, finding safety in numbers. Most fear standing out and can easily be bullied into either silence or complicity. I don’t say this as an insult. It’s just a fact. For a long time, Americans have been socially bullied or economically coerced into accepting the “transgender” fiction. However, the tide seems to be shifting and, as brave people make a stand, others are learning to be brave. That’s the case with Paula Scanlan, who has gone from shy anonymity to open-faced, raw courage regarding UPenn’s psychological warfare against women swimmers who didn’t want to compete with...

Over the Memorial Day weekend there were 53 shootings--eleven of them fatal--in the City of Chicago. It was the bloodiest Memorial Day weekend since 2015. Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) blamed this carnage on "the community disinvestment, poverty, and trauma that our city has struggled with far too long." Interim Police Department Superintendent Fred Waller said "it pains me knowing that too many of our residents have seen or experienced this proliferation of gun violence. No one should fear for their own safety in their own neighborhood." The first action of the Chicago City Council following these murders was to approve...

Former KTVU anchor Frank Somerville’s tumultuous couple of years took another turn on Monday night when he was arrested in Berkeley following an alleged physical altercation with his brother. Berkeley Scanner reported that police arrived at the home of Somerville's parents in the Berkeley Hills just after 6:30 p.m. Monday. Police allegedly found Somerville being restrained by his brother, who told the Berkeley Scanner that he and Frank got into a fight after Frank made threats against their father. According to Alameda County jail records, Somerville, 65, was booked on suspicion of battery with serious bodily injury, threatening a crime...

BIDEN’S RFK DILEMMA — After years on the fringes, ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. is suddenly knocking on the door of mainstream relevance — and all it took was mounting a longshot presidential campaign. Just in the last few days, Kennedy won a surprise endorsement from Twitter co-founder JACK DORSEY, was the subject of a deep dive by WaPo’s Michael Scherer into his long history of conspiratorial rhetoric, and spent two hours on Twitter Spaces with ELON MUSK and such ideological fellow-travelers as isolationist former Rep. TULSI GABBARD (D-Hawaii) and pro surfer-slash-vaccine skeptic KELLY SLATER. The NYT wrapped up the Twitter...

Memorial Day customarily kicks off summer and the beer beverage industry generally looks forward to the enhanced sales that come from summer. However, if the recently published reports of Anheuser-Busch sales are accurate, which includes a stunning 60% sales drop during the holiday, the brand position of Bud Light is in freefall.While the impacts do have a regional trend based on consumer boycotts and patterns, when the Daily Mail reports, “numbers are suffering primarily due to a decline in Bud Light sales that reached as high as a 60 percent drop off over the week that ended on Memorial Day,”...