Free Republic

Here’s one case where no one can deny that corporate DEI was a scam. A former head of DEI programs for Facebook has pleaded guilty to swindling the company out of $4 million, not including whatever money they were spending on her actual salary.Barbara Furlow-Smiles, who served as lead strategist and global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement at Facebook, used the stolen funds to live an extravagant lifestyle that spanned from California to Georgia, prosecutors said.From approximately January 2017 to September 2021, Furlow-Smiles led Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs at Facebook and was responsible for developing...

"FBI agents abused America's surveillance apparatus to open a groundless counter-intelligence campaign against a Republican presidential candidate. Despite the abuses, years of calls for reform, the Senate is presented w/ NDAA that continues the status-quo.""Since the FBI demonstrated a willingness to evade the rules to spy on an aid to a presidential candidate, we should not be surprised that Carter Page was far from the only victim of FISA authorities." "The Senate will sweep this under the rug. We will have no reform. They have known for five years that this is coming up, and they are not going to...

The Biden-Harris regime has announced a new “White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience.” This new council is charged with preventing such problems as we experienced in the famous “supply chain crisis” of 2021 and early 2022 that preceded, and contributed to creating the current economic downturn. Granted, the Biden-Harris regime had already created a “Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force” in the first months of 2021, virtually as soon as they changed the names and dress sizes on the White House letterhead, and that didn’t seem to help. Maybe they’re hoping we forgot about that one. But then again, maybe...

Yours truly plans to write a broader post about the increasingly sorry state of the Ukraine conflict, at least from the Western perspective. Within a very short period of time, the messaging has changed from exhortations about the inevitability of Ukraine success to tight media focuses on itty bitty parts of the conflict to depict Ukraine as gaining ground, to now admissions not only that the great Ukraine counteroffensive failed, but that Ukraine itself will have to go on the defensive. We’ll give a very short recap of the state of events, and then turn to a question that, as...

I turn down most invites to act as an admin for FB groups but this one lets me practice reaing Russian, the group is called Мы из Владивостока (We are from Vladivostok) and is generally a social group for people living in the Russian far East. One lady tonight wants to post the following: Идет срочный набор на работу без квалификации водителей всех категорий , на заводы и фабрики , строителей , сварщиков , поваров , разнорабочие , механики автомобилей и столяры , парикмахеры , медсестры и врачи в дома престарелых , в Америку , Канада страны ЕВРОПЫ Швейцария и...

According to multiple reports, Hamas leaders who have been living in luxury in five-star hotels in Qatar are reportedly on the run, fleeing Qatar, The Jerusalem Post is reporting that several of the leaders fled their locations, "turning off their phones and not accepting calls, KAN's Arabic language channel reported citing sources in Doha on Tuesday evening."KAN News also reported that Saleh al-Arouri, a senior member of Hamas, left his usual residence in Beirut for Turkey.According to the Israeli War Room account, the leaders have fled to Algeria because their "safety can no longer be guaranteed" in Qatar.#BREAKING: Initial reports...

The roller coaster of this year’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP28) has ended with a historic new agreement: For the first time, world governments have said countries should transition away from fossil fuels. The deal comes after days of tense negotiations, especially over the fossil fuel language, which caused the Dubai conference to stretch into overtime. Climate advocates have praised it as a step forward, but also raised concerns about potential loopholes in its language and criticized it for not going further as the climate crisis deepens — and fossil fuel production continues to increase.

Zelensky has once more descended on DC in velvet-toned Hollywood fashion, for a last ditch plea to convince Republicans to unlock his money. He proceeded to break into this unusually…direct speech: Well, okay, maybe that was a joke. Continuing, there are a few interesting side-notes to contextualize his visit. Firstly, there was rumor that Zelensky was already being ‘side-lined’ by virtue of Yermak taking his place in globe-hopping, as he did last time when it was him visiting DC and soaking up all the high profile meetings. Some suspected that Yermak was in fact being presented as the true leader,...

Former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who headed the Republican House majority during former President Trump’s first two years in office, says that Trump is not conservative but instead an authoritarian narcissist whose guiding principle is to aggrandize himself. Ryan defended former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for standing up to Trump and said many Republican lawmakers probably now regret not voting for impeachment charges and missing their chance to remove him from the political stage.

“This has gone too far,” wrote Elon Musk on his X platform on Saturday. Musk was reacting to a post by Seth Dillon of the satire site, the Babylon Bee. Dillon wrote this about actor Siaka Massaquoi, a North Hollywood resident who was arrested by an FBI SWAT team at Burbank Airport when he and his pregnant wife Charlotte returned to Los Angeles after a trip to Nashville:… As Siaka was returning home from a trip to Nashville for the Daily Wire’s latest premiere, the FBI was waiting to arrest him and charge him with crimes related to his presence...

News broke Wednesday that the Supreme Court will hear arguments about a lower court decision that curtailed the use of mifepristone, an abortion pill that accounts for more than half of all abortions carried out in the United States. Mifepristone is administered at abortion facilities and is also available via mail order. SCOTUS will be reviewing an appeals court decision from August that put limits on the availability of mifepristone, ruling that the Food and Drug Administration failed to adequately address safety concerns about the drug when it loosened regulations on it in 2016. Here's a bit more about how...

If there's anything that indicates a politician or group of politicians isn't taking something seriously, it's when they apply a Band-Aid over a problem when it's noticeable, and then let things go back to the way they were. That's what happened in San Francisco when the city cleaned up their homeless encampments and open-air drug bazaars during the visit of the Chinese dictator Xi. Now, according to one San Francisco business owner, it's once more business as usual in the city by the Bay.Less than a month after Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit,...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that he has seen “no evidence” that President Biden was involved in his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. “I’m going to take the same position that I’ve taken since 2019 that all I can say is there’s some indication, maybe some compromise with China particularly, but I have no evidence of it,” Grassley told CNN’s Manu Raju on Wednesday. He continued, saying the facts “haven’t taken me to that point where I can say that the president’s guilty of anything.”

Russia’s foreign minister on Wednesday said Moscow cannot recognize Israel’s methods against the Palestinian group Hamas as "acceptable." -snip- “Neighborhoods are being razed to the ground, more than 18,000 civilians have already died, this figure is increasing every day, two-thirds of them are women and children. The situation is terrible," Lavrov said. His remarks come days after a conversation between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Vladimir Putin, in which the former criticized the cooperation between Russia and Iran, and expressed his dissatisfaction with the positions taken “against Israel by Russian representatives at the UN and in other forums.”

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said that the Biden White House’s criticism of her calling for a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas in response to the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel “is going to increase hate towards Palestinians or people that support a ceasefire.” But no one should define what chanting “From the river to the sea” means to her “as a Palestinian.” Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) stated, “We reached out to the White House, and there were other members of Congress who reached out to the White House...

Shahid Bolsen (we've talked about him before, and he loves Hamas [Link to Twitchy article]) is probably mad the United States voted against a ceasefire in Israel (Link to Twitchy article). So he thinks the United Nations should use Article 6 and, well, take a gander: Invoke Article 6 of the UN Charter against the United States. Move to expel America from the United Nations. — Shahid Bolsen (@ShahidkBolsen) December 12, 2023 What is Article 6? A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by...

WASHINGTON, Dec 13 (Reuters)-The Biden Administration is delaying the sale of more than 20,000 U.S.-made rifles to Israel over concerns about attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, two sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. The State Department sent an informal notification of the sale to Congress several weeks ago. But the sale has not gone ahead...

There seems to be no end in sight for the media gaslighting on President Joe Biden’s abysmal economy. One economist has had it. Business Insider had the audacity to publish an asinine piece of economic propaganda Dec. 3 that reeked of a public relations stunt by Biden’s press team: “After 3 years of pain, America has finally achieved economic nirvana.” The author, Renaissance Macro Research Head of Economics Neil Dutta, celebrated how supposedly “[t]he signs of a well-balanced economy are everywhere.” He continued: “Current economic data is consistent with a soft landing for the economy — a situation in which...

A horrified colleague has called out a leading NAACP activist for hate speech after she denounced migrants as raping, burgling savages who do not speak English. Teresa Haley was complaining to branch presidents of the Illinois NAACP about support that Chicago authorities were offering to the 26,000 migrants who have arrived in the city since August last year. Haley who heads the NAACP state conference also used the N-word and sneered at transgender people during the video call which was recorded by former Du Bois County branch president Patrick Watson. 'These immigrants who come over here, they've been raping people,...