Free Republic

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) brought his trademark wit to Fox Business on Tuesday, offering his unique take on how the ongoing government shutdown led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is likely to end. Kennedy, who has a new book out titled How to Test for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will , didn’t hold back when discussing the Schumer Shutdown with host Larry Kudlow. “They want $1.5 trillion to open government back up, Larry,” Kennedy said, referring to Schumer’s demands. “And that’ll happen when donkeys fly backwards. We’re not gonna give in.” Kennedy explained that the shutdown is purely...

Contrary to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim, most of the Obamacare subsidies are not expiring, for good or for ill.Into the debate on extending the Biden administration’s Covid subsidies for health coverage stepped Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. In an X post Monday evening, Greene claimed that “when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district.” She went on to repeat the claim that premiums would “DOUBLE” — with all caps in the original — two other times in...

In addition to calling on Jay Jones to drop out, Democrats should also end the nonsense of a months-long ‘election season.’The scandal whereby Jay Jones, the Democrat nominee in the Virginia attorney general race, sent graphic text messages describing his desire to assassinate a political opponent says much about our current political culture. Beyond how some describe “violent” policies to justify violent actions against their adversaries, it also reflects the practical realities of the way states administer elections.The candidates at the top of Virginia’s Democrat ticket, gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger and lieutenant governor nominee Ghazala Hashmi, have, as of this...

Democrats won't listen to Harvard. Maybe they'll listen to the New York Times?This entire year, Democrats from Los Angeles to Chicago to Portland to Boston have gone all-in against increased immigration enforcement. They have ginned up violent activists to attack ICE agents serving judicial warrants to deport known criminal illegal aliens. The elite cognoscenti have cast Donald Trump as Hitler and federal agents as brownshirts for enforcing the law -- and they have expected to get the American electorate behind them as a result of their hysteria. Nine months into the process, voters refuse to budge. A new poll from...

It was clear early on after news of the Jay Jones texting scandal broke last Friday, that both he and his fellow Democrats at the state and national levels were going to handle this very badly.Not only did he not apologize initially, but candidates like Virginia Democrat gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger have refused to demand he drop out of the Virginia attorney general race. Some of them - incredibly - have even suggested that how Jones has handled revelations that he'd once fantasized about killing a former GOP colleague with "two bullets to the head" makes him a role model...

Independent reporter Nick Shirley shares his ‘very proud moment’ at the White House and recalls how Portland police wouldn’t protect him during riots, on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'

Book publisher HarperCollins UK issued an apology Tuesday after a recent book made claims that first lady Melania Trump was introduced to her husband through convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The publisher worked with Andrew Lownie, author of “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York,” to remove “several passages of the book that made unverified claims” about the first lady, according to a statement posted on social platform X. Trump also shared the statement on her social media. “Copies of the book that include those references are being permanently removed from distribution,” the statement reads. “HarperCollins UK...

Kamala Harris was at the Masonic on Sunday afternoon for a conversation about her new book, “107 days.” So was Doug Emhoff, her husband. Everyone was thrilled to see them. They were in friendly territory. The ovation was deafening. “That election was quite unprecedented in a number of ways,” Harris, former San Francisco District Attorney, said at the beginning of her conversation with comedian D.L. Hughley. She was asked why she spilled the beans about that historic period after Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race — thereby sending her off to run the shortest presidential campaign in...

Eric Trump accused NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo of trying to “play coy” while debating government weaponization on Tuesday, saying President Donald Trump didn’t try to “bankrupt” his opponents in his first term. Cuomo asked Eric Trump if it was fair to say that the Trump administration is “going after its political opponents” ahead of former FBI Director James Comey’s arraignment on Wednesday, doing “exactly what you say you oppose.” The first son said he thought it was “so ironic” that Cuomo was pushing back against the “weaponization of government” since “the very same people that were coming after us” also...

The 2026 California gubernatorial race is afoot, as Golden State Democrats vie to replace Gavin Newsom. (Newsom is technically vacating the position after 2026, but departed in spirit long ago for a presidential campaign.) Back when conventional wisdom held — erroneously, I suspect — that the position was Kamala Harris’s for the taking, former Orange County congresswoman Katie Porter pipped the field by announcing her candidacy in March 2025. That early start paid off for Porter, who currently leads a divided primary field also populated by former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, former Los Angeles Mayor Tony...

Vice Prefect: Muslims can also pray in the Vatican LibraryEven in the most important library in Christendom, Muslims do not have to give up their prayers. "Of course, some Muslim scholars have asked us for a room with a carpet for praying and we have given it to them," said Giacomo Cardinali, Vice-Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, to the newspaper "La Repubblica" (Wednesday). The Vatican's book collection contains "incredibly old Korans", Cardinali continued. "We are a universal library, there are Arabic, Jewish, Ethiopian collections and unique Chinese items."

A dozen Bastiat's Window essays that followed the invasion of October 7, 2023[1] From Hitler to Hamas (and Hezbollah): Nazi Germany was the incubator for what would become Hamas and Hezbollah. You can’t understand Hamas without knowing that it’s a fervent local chapter of an organization whose early funding, rituals, and philosophy came directly from Nazi Germany. This essay offers a downloadable chapter (“Islamic Jihadism: The Legacy of Nazi Antisemitism”) from Professor David Patterson’s book, Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust: Making the Connections (Cambridge University Press, 2022). This chapter is the most compact, comprehensive account I’ve found of the historical, organizational,...

The sentencing of the protest’s organizers only confirms that Canadians with the wrong political views will not receive equal treatment before the lawIn a disgraceful conclusion to a disgraceful trial, Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been sentenced to 12 months of house arrest and 6 months of curfew (with credit for the 49 days Lich has already spent in jail) – plus 100 hours of community service. An ironic addendum. For in the packed courtroom on October 7, there was likely not one person who has served the community with greater generosity than the two defendants....

Did you ever wonder how the Democratic Party got so crazy? For example, how is it that the governor of Illinois is inciting violent mobs against federal immigration authorities and meanwhile, in Virginia, every Democrat is rallying to the defense of Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, who openly fantasized about murdering political opponents? To summarize briefly: Bad causes attract bad people. To understand the symbiotic relationship between toxic political movements and their toxic supporters, my advice is to first read Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic, The True Believer, especially Part 2: “The Potential Converts.” Next, you should read Friedrich Hayek’s The...

Gold is in the middle of what looks like an unstoppable bull run. It has already punched through $4,000 an ounce. At the rate the price is rising, it may well go to $5,000 within a few weeks, and perhaps even $6,000 as the next year unfolds. There have been lots of different explanations for this, from the looming collapse of the dollar, to secret Chinese buying, to the conspiracy theories circulating on the wilder fringes of the internet, such a secret plot to re-establish the gold standard, or attempts to replace all the metal that is meant to be...

According to a Phys.org report, large numbers of megafauna bones discovered at archaeological sites in three South American countries suggest that humans regularly consumed giant sloths and giant armadillos between 13,000 and 11,600 years ago. Luciano Prates of the National University of La Plata and his colleagues examined animal bones recovered from 20 archaeological sites across Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and determined that more than 80 percent of them at 15 of the locations belonged to megafauna. It had been previously thought that Ice Age hunter-gatherers in the region hunted the large animals occasionally, but survived day to day by...

We just had municipal elections here in Fairbanks and the Fairbanks North Star Borough. With one exception we are now run by leftist lunatics. There was a rip roaring 18% turnout. So 82% of voters don't care what happens to them. Fairbanks has joined Anchorage, Seattle, Portland, and Frisco in gong down the toilet. I am here for the natural wonder of the place, but the government here is absolute sewage.

Washington — American farmers are having a tough year, in no small part because of President Donald Trump’s trade war. Now, the White House is gearing up to extend them a multi-billion-dollar bailout, sources tell CNN. Surging costs and foreign retaliation from tariffs have hurt the US agriculture industry — as have immigration-related labor shortages and plummeting commodity prices. Farm production expenses are estimated to reach $467.4 billion in 2025, according to the Agriculture Department, up $12 billion from last year. Farm bankruptcies rose in the first half of the year to the highest level since 2021, according to US...

Mel Fisher spent 17 years searching for the legendary Spanish galleon, Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which sank in 1622 carrying vast treasures of gold, silver, and emeralds. Facing countless setbacks, legal battles, and personal losses, Fisher's persistence finally paid off in 1985 when his team discovered the shipwreck off the coast of Florida. The find was worth over $400 million, making it one of the greatest treasure discoveries in history. The Great 17 Year Hunt For The Lady Of Atocha's $400m Treasure | 50:12 Real History | 452K subscribers | 598,232 views | February 26, 2025

Since 1976, a nearly 30-foot-tall statue depicting Saint Junipero Serra overlooked Highway 280 in Hillsborough, but not any more. Many were recently surprised to find the statue was no longer in its usual spot, including the Archbishop of San Francisco. Here one day, seemingly gone the next.