Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Libby Hilsenrath’s eight-year odyssey to protect her son from what she considered unconstitutional religious indoctrination has reached the final chapter. Last week, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, filed a Reply Brief on her behalf — the final written plea to the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse lower court decisions which affirmed Chatham Middle School teaching seventh grade students: “May God help us all find the true faith, Islam.” Libby Hilsenrath, reflecting on the uncertainty of the High Court’s weighty decision, commented: “This is the path God...

WASHINGTON — President Trump hosted the annual turkey pardon at the White House Tuesday — joking that he was also re-pardoning last year’s birds that only got an “autopen” reprieve and saying he considered naming this year’s gobblers “Chuck and Nancy.” Former President Joe Biden “used an autopen for last year’s turkey pardons,” the president joked, calling them “totally invalid,” a contention he’s made of the Democrat’s late-term grants so often that an autopen portrait took the place of Biden’s picture in the White House photo gallery. “The turkeys known as Peach and Blossom last year have been located and...

The secret fear of the loudest die-hard critics of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is not that he will fail as the city’s leader but that he has a very good chance of succeeding. If the new administration demonstrates it can deliver on its promise to lower the cost of living while managing our city efficiently and keeping the streets safe, it will become clear that the fearmongers who have been screaming warnings about a coming municipal apocalypse were peddling nonsense all along.

Ken Burns and PBS want to teach us the history of the American Revolution. That’s objectively laudable, but from the opening seconds of his new six-part, 12-hour-long series on the Revolution, Burns is off to a truly ludicrous start. Why do I say that? Because instead of beginning with the events that led to the break with Britain in 1775, Burns (after an anodyne quote from Thomas Paine) opens with an Indian diatribe about land.That is not surprising. Lest there be any question as to what Burns intends for us to learn about the American Revolution, Burns stated in an...

Reconciling abundance with authority Three decades ago, the visionary social thinker Peter Huber published Orwell’s Revenge, a book that turned one of the twentieth century’s most haunting political parables on its head. Where George Orwell imagined a future of total information control, Huber saw the opposite: a world where digital technology shattered centralized authority. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth could rewrite history because it monopolized the tools of communication. But in the digital age, Huber argued, the networked computer would scatter those tools across society, producing an unruly democracy of voices. The Internet, he predicted, would not empower “Big...

Location, location, location. That’s what matters now on X, because Elon Musk has just rolled out a hugely important new feature, and it’s confirming what some of us have suspected was the case for some time now. It turns out that many of the openly racist and anti-Semitic accounts on X that claim to be America First but are actually giving MAGA a bad name — well, they’re not true America First at all. In fact, they’re largely coming from Muslim countries. And now we have the proof. A week ago, Fox News personality Katie Pavlich, a friend of mine,...

A welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota reveals that large numbers of new arrivals aren't assimilating and are funneling our tax dollars to literal terrorist groups. An innocent woman was set on fire in Chicago as the mayor resists federal law enforcement resources to bring peace to one of our great cities. The Obamacare insurance system is buckling under its own weight. And the country is $38 trillion in debt. Our administration is working hard on addressing all of these problems. But you know what really fires up the beltway GOP? Not any of the above. Instead, the political class is...

After successfully entering orbit, the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft completed its status setup and successfully docked with the forward port of the Tianhe core module of the space station at 15:50 Beijing time on November 25, 2025. Following the docking, the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft will enter the combined docking section and will subsequently serve as the return spacecraft for the Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew.Currently, the Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew is in good condition in orbit and is completing all planned tasks. The Shenzhou-20 spacecraft will continue to remain in orbit to conduct relevant experiments.After the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft's return was delayed on November 5 due to...

“At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid.”- John 19:41 As a literary device, this description of the burial place of Jesus Christ is effective; it offers a contrast between the site of Jesus’s death at the crucifixion site of Calvary (also called Golgotha, both derived from the Latin for “place of the skull”) and a fertile garden, brimming with life. It also provides a cyclical shape to the final chapter of the Christ narrative, which begins with his arrest in the...

It was, by any measure, a lot of red ink. When Volkswagen announced its third-quarter profits at the end of October, the German auto giant said it anticipated heavy losses for this year. The reason? It is taking a 5 billion euro hit from tariffs imposed in the American market. Likewise, the German sportswear manufacturer Adidas warned of a 120 million euro hit to its earnings, in part because the levies its trainers now face in the United States, while Toyota warned of a $9 billion hit from tariffs. For anyone following the corporate earnings season over the last month,...

The view that the stock market is in a massive bubble and bound to crash is incorrect over the medium term Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/3af620bb-6d5e-4281-879d-c3193e225803?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9 After the so-called “liberation day” tariffs announcement, the conventional wisdom about the US economy became very pessimistic....

Governor Bradford of Massachusetts made this first Thanksgiving Proclamation three years after the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth: "Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as He has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. . In everything give thanks; for this is the...

Explanation: It's only 50 light-years to 51 Pegasi. That star's position is indicated in this snapshot from August 2025, taken on a night with mostly brighter stars visible above the dome at Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France. Thirty years ago, in October of 1995, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced a profound discovery made at the observatory. Using a precise spectrograph, they had detected a planet orbiting 51 Peg, the first known exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. Mayor and Queloz had used the spectrograph to measure changes in the star's radial velocity, a regular wobble caused by the gravitational...

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to "recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:" Now, therefore, I do...

There is “a very good chance” that President Trump names a replacement for Fed Chair Jerome Powell by Christmas, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday. Bessent, who has been leading search efforts for a new Fed leader, told CNBC he still has one interview left and is not ready to speculate on who might succeed Powell, whom Trump has said he’d “love” to fire. “I think there’s a very good chance that the president will make an announcement before Christmas,” said the Treasury secretary. “But it’s [Trump’s] prerogative, whether it’s before the Christmas holidays or in the new year. But...

A confidential memorandum from Justice Secretary David Lammy has exposed the Government's intention to eliminate jury trials for the majority of criminal cases, restricting them solely to murder, rape, manslaughter and matters of public interest. The dramatic overhaul of the criminal justice system has been revealed through documents marked "sensitive and official", which outline the most significant changes to trial procedures in decades. Under the proposed reforms, all remaining criminal offences would be determined by judges sitting without juries, fundamentally altering how crime and punishment is administered in England and Wales. The radical restructuring represents Labour's response to the overwhelming...

A drug-resistant 'super fungus' that targets the groin and bum is spreading rapidly across Britain. Cases of trichophyton indotineae - which triggers unsightly, stubborn skin lesions all over the body - are now rocketing in the UK, despite being virtually unknown just a few years ago. Cases have surged by 500% in the past three years, with one fungus expert describing it as "a really big problem". The infection is triggered by a highly contagious fungus and is typically caught through direct skin contact with somebody who's infected. However it can also be transmitted via contaminated surfaces, household objects or...

Jonathan Alpert, a licensed psychotherapist in New York City says "75% of my patients have Trump Derangement Syndrome. They are obsessed with Trump. They're hyperfixated on Trump. They say they can't sleep. They feel traumatized by Mr. Trump. They feel restless." "Our country has strayed so far away from where we once were," Alpert lamented. "If you look at the '80s when President Reagan was shot, people were united. He famously said, 'I hope you're all Republicans' to the surgeons. The response was, 'Today, Mr. President, we're all Republicans.' But our country has lost that." Emma Nutz, a former patient...

A co-founder of Nike has spent a staggering $3 million in a bid to boost Republican victories in Oregon. Phil Knight, worth an estimated $34.4 billion, donated a sliver of his wealth last month into the Bring Balance to Salem PAC, which aims to curb Democratic dominance in state politics, according to the Willamette Week. The political action committee, founded in 2021, spent nearly $5 million in 2022 - and slightly more again in 2024 - to support Republican candidates. Democrats now dominate both legislative chambers, holding an 18–12 majority in the Oregon state Senate and a 37–23 majority in...

The left-wing smear machine fired up again last week, this time to go after Riley Gaines for her outspoken defense of women’s sports and criticism of transgenderism. But all the critics succeeded in proving is that the woke mob no longer has the cultural influence it once did, and that sensationalist headlines can’t hide an utter lack of substance in bad-faith personal attacks. As a quick refresher, Riley Gaines was the University of Kentucky swimmer who became a national story after she tied with the University of Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas in the 200-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA swimming championships....