Free Republic

Just months before the eighth anniversary of the Battle of Mogadishu and the release of the soon-to-be-classic feature film immortalizing it, survivor and war hero Norm Hooten retired from the Army as a master sergeant. It was August 2001, and his wife Bonnie, a pharmacist, ‘was not down for another 10 years in the Army,’ Hooten said in a podcast interview earlier this month. ‘It had a lot to do with my family,’ Hooten told Ryan Manion on The Resilient Life. ‘I had young kids at the time, and … a lot of times, what the families go through is...

Alex Soros, the heir to multibillionaire Democratic megadonor George Soros, in an interview mocked the founders of Facebook and Uber for having "really believed their own bullshit" and groaned at the mention of a climate group that his family has bankrolled for years.Facebook and Uber founders are "a bunch of nice Jewish boys who kind of gamed the system and, 'Oh, let's not become doctors, lawyers; I'm helping the world by putting taxis out of business,'" Alex Soros, who is Jewish, told New York magazine as he sat in an Uber en route to a museum exhibition in New YorkUnlike...

Nyweide’s family announced her passing in a since-deleted obituary, writing at the time that the actress “self medicated to deal with all the trauma and shame she held inside, and it resulted in her death." They added that Nyweide repeatedly claimed that she would navigate her health issues “on her own" and "was compelled to reject the treatment that might possibly have saved her life.” In lieu of flowers, her family asked instead that individuals to make a donation to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, in her name. A Vermont native, Nyweide knew that she wanted to...

CARLISLE, Pennsylvania — Minutes after giving a policy-rich address to senior-level military students, faculty, and staff at the Army War College here in rural Cumberland County, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that he relished the occasion to detail the Pentagon’s focus going forward. ... “They knew that from the minute he chose me and through my entire confirmation process, from the minute I walked into the building to the first initiatives we took, that is DEI is dead at DOD,” he said of his February order to nuke all digital DEI content at...

Phys.org reports that a pair of rare copper-alloy Bronze Age cymbals were uncovered at a site in Oman. The instrument has highlighted a shared musical connection between ancient cultures on both sides of the Arabian Gulf. “These cymbals are the first of their kind to have been found in good archaeological contexts in Oman and are from a particularly early context that questions some of the assumptions on their origin and development," said archaeologist Khaled Douglas. When the objects were first recovered from a third-millennium b.c. Umm an-Nar culture site in Dahwa, experts recognized their similarity to examples that had...

VIDEOThe lamestream media won't reveal the true MS-13 background of Kilmar Garcia aka "Maryland Man." However, watch this REAL journalist who investigated his background and found out that before he became "Maryland Man" he was in effect Houston Man due to hanging around the gang affiliated Eclipse nightclub in Houston, Texas. Since the Eclipse nightclub besides being a hub for drug distribution also supplied forged IDs for MS-13 members such as Kilmar Garcia whose full name is Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and his MS-13 gang tag was "El Fuego." This journalist also discusses El Fuego's tattoos and demonstrates that MS-13...

A State Department list of 898 approved government grants and contracts authorized by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) includes over $2.5 billion of authorized funding to organizations that have previously supported the charitable infrastructure of designated terrorist organizations. In March, the State Department provided a document to Congress listing some 5,341 awards terminated as part of the administration’s decimation of USAID, alongside 898 surviving grants. Surviving beneficiaries that have supported terrorist charitable infrastructure are set to receive, the Middle East Forum has found, a total of $2.5 billion across 103 awards [see Appendix], for projects that the USAID...

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has ordered state agencies to review and potentially boycott business with El Salvador due to its role in detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia. A statement from the Democrat indicates he believes this is a strong stance in support of due process for an alleged MS-13 member and suspected human trafficker. “The United States Constitution guarantees due process. We are witnessing Donald Trump erode our fundamental Constitutional rights in real time, and we must fight to restore the balance of power,” Pritzker said. “The State of Illinois will stand up for the Rule of Law and do everything...

A task force formed by Mayor Brandon Johnson nearly a year ago to determine whether and how the city should pay reparations to Chicagoans who are the descendants of enslaved African Americans will start meeting this summer to craft a plan to tackle the thorny issue. The 40-member task force will be charged with developing “Chicago’s first comprehensive reparations study, a critical step forward in acknowledging, addressing and repairing generations of harm experienced by Black communities,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office. Task force members will be paid to serve for a year, with the study of recommendations...

Today we have a new audio book release, this time from Edward Bernays with his 1928 work "Propaganda". Download the audio here. There is a lot to learn about progressivism in this book. Among other things (prior post on this) Bernays believed the following items which were captions on a newer reprint cover: As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented(Page 39)Nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no...

In a Thursday morning social media post, Trump wrote, “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!” Trump had pledged to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine within 24 hours of being elected, but he and his diplomatic team have thus far found it difficult to broker a peace agreement with Russia and Ukraine, going so far as to suggest they will give up any efforts recently.

Parts of Toronto Pearson International Airport have been put on lockdown after a man was shot, with police and paramedics swarming the area. Terminal 1 Departures at the major airport has been closed due to a 'police-involved shooting', the province's Special Investigations Unit confirmed. They later confirmed that an adult male had been shot, adding that it was an isolated incident and there are no known threats to the public. Images taken at the scene show a body on the ground behind a blacked out SUV outside of the terminal. Police said that the officer involved in the shooting was...

In a shot at ActBlue, the left’s major online donation platform, President Donald Trump plans to sign a presidential memorandum on Thursday cracking down on foreign contributions in American elections, according to a person familiar with the policy and granted anonymity to discuss not-yet-public details. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office is expected to be involved in the crackdown, the person said, though further details about the mechanism she will use were not immediately available. The order is expected to specifically target ActBlue, which Republicans have long claimed could be exploited by foreign actors. Democrats had been bracing in recent days...

Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber. Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he’s “not considering any concessions” and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead. This isn’t Eisgruber’s first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd...

Scientists could be on the verge of a medical breakthrough in understanding what's driving a rise in blood cancers among older adults. Research has long suggested that the colony of trillions of bacteria living in our digestive systems – known as the gut microbiome – could be the key to our overall health. The more diverse those microscopic colonies are, the better our immunity to a host of diseases from heart disease to dementia. But US researchers have now discovered that patients with leukemia — an aggressive form of blood cancer — have higher levels of one specific bacteria in...

A 19-year-old man has been charged with arson for allegedly sparking the massive wildfire in the New Jersey Pine Barrens that has torched 15,000 acres, prosecutors said. Joseph Kling, of Ocean Township, allegedly started a bonfire in the vast Forked River Mountains Wilderness Area with wooden pallets that exploded out of control when he did not properly put it out, according to the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office. Kling was taken into custody at Ocean Township police headquarters and taken to the Ocean County Jail, where he is awaiting his detention hearing.

President Donald Trump on Thursday offered rare criticism of Vladimir Putin, urging the Russian leader to “STOP!” after a deadly barrage of attacks on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”

Music has always been political, so I wasn’t at all surprised by the, shall we say, expressiveness at this weekend’s Coachella festival. Nor was I surprised that the political sloganeering was aimed at denouncing the Jewish state—if you’re a band nobody’s ever heard of, and you don’t have the talent to change that with your music alone, you’ll be tempted to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon and hope it can pull you farther than you were able to go on your own. The band itself is obviously not important, but I couldn’t help but think of how strange it is...

After years of ominous headlines about the world's shrinking birth rates, there's a bright spot. The US birth rate increased slightly in 2024, according to preliminary data from the CDC. The 1% rise in births was largely driven by moms in their early 40s, who gave birth to 2% more children in 2024 than in 2023. Moms in their 30s and late 20s also experienced slight increases in births. Brady Hamilton, the lead author of the report, told Business Insider that the stats are a continuation of the trends of the last three decades. Women in their late 20s to...

[OFFICIAL] WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, April 22. To Maj.-Gen. Dix, New-York: In a dispatch, dated Mobile, 5 P.M., April 14, Maj.-Gen. CANBY reports as follows: We find in Mobile and its defences, on the west side of the bay, over 150 guns and a very large amount of ammunition and supplies of all kinds, and about one thousand prisoners. Inventories are now being taken, and a detailed report will be forwarded as soon as they are complete. The quantity of cotton will probably reach 3,000 bales, and there is a large amount of provisions and forage. EDWIN M. STANTON, Secretary of...