Free Republic

A six-night projection-mapping spectacle will transform the Washington Monument into a luminous canvas beginning on New Year’s Eve, launching the official national celebration of America’s 250th anniversary with a striking visual tribute to the nation’s story. The commemorative event kicks off December 31, 2025, with a midnight countdown illuminating the Monument as a towering 250-foot birthday candle — symbolically marking the start of the United States’ semiquincentennial year. From December 31 through January 5, nightly displays will project a sweeping visual narrative onto the Monument, highlighting key moments in American history — from discovery and independence to unity and future...

Katie Couric spoke out against "bothsidesism" in news coverage and insisted people don't want "just the facts" in the current media environment. (snip) "So what I try to do and what we try to do is help people stay abreast of everything that's happening, which is increasingly difficult given the velocity of things that are thrown at us primarily by this administration," Couric told host Dylan Byers. "But try to understand and give them some perspective and context and help explain in some cases why people need to be aware and concerned about some of the things that are happening...

Thefts of high-value cargoes aren't anything new, in the United States or elsewhere. But this one's a tad unusual in that it was a shipment of lobsters that was stolen, prompting an investigation by some pretty hard-shelled characters from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into the matter - and you'd butter believe they are on a roll. A $400,000 shipment of lobsters headed for Costco locations in Illinois and Minnesota was hijacked before arriving at its delivery points. Dylan Rexing, CEO of Indiana-based logistics business Rexing Companies, said the shipment was picked up in Taunton, Mass., but never...

Thieves have carried out a brazen ATM heist early on Christmas Eve at a Texas 7-Eleven, using a stolen SUV to rip the cash machine out as surveillance cameras captured the carnage. Police say the suspects hit the store in northwest Fort Worth around 3:45am, while it was open and the lights were on. One suspect smashed through the entrance and rushed inside while an accomplice waited outside in an SUV. Moments later, the pair hooked a metal cable from the vehicle to the ATM inside the store and floored it, dragging the machine out through the doorway and leaving...

Clinton won in 1992 by selling a recession that was already over; the lesson for 2026 is simple—ignore real economic gains, and a fake downturn can still decide an election. As the 1992 campaign approached, incumbent president George H.W. Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection. The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular U.S. victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses. For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90 and 70 percent. By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the...

Brian Krassenstein, one of two brothers who rose to viral fame via facile, curt responses to President Donald Trump’s tweets, is under fire after a post suggesting the president needs to be put “to sleep.” In a Christmas Eve missive, Krassenstein aped language Trump used about Stephen Colbert in a Truth Social post — albeit without the context that made Trump’s post passable — to imply that the 47th president needed to go by means one could reasonably speculate on. “Trump is a dead man walking,” Krassenstein wrote on Christmas Eve. “America should ‘put him to sleep,’ NOW. “It is...

You simply cannot hate and/or mock the Left-dominated media enough. Even Christmas is not safe from being targeted by their joyless, ham-fisted propaganda to project their own campaign of cultural subversion onto some straw man they relentlessly label the “far-right.” Politico published an eminently mockable piece, just in time for the most wonderful time of the year, titled – brace yourselves – “How the far right stole Christmas.” By “far right,” of course, the Left means anything to the right of Chairman Mao. It means any political opponent who believes in upholding God, family, and country. It means any political...

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”Attributed to Voltaire, this quote holds great significance, even in our modern times. In the twentieth century, we saw absurd ideologies like communism and Nazism take root in modern states and drive civilized people to commit unfathomable atrocities. The popular notion of race-poisoning propelled the Nazi regime on a militant crusade to purge the European continent of inferior peoples, as the regime defined the term. In the second half of the twentieth century, the equally absurd notion of ubiquitous ecological poisoning took hold in the West, spawning a new...

🇺🇸Pray For The Peace of Jerusalem 🇮🇱(12/26/25)[Prayer]Countdown To The New YearMatthew 1:1-17The Genealogy of Jesus the Messiah 1 This is the genealogy[a] of Jesus the Messiah[b] the son of David, the son of Abraham: 2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, 4 Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother...

NOW: President Trump posts that federal employment has fallen off a CLIFF under his 2nd term The federal government has lost hundreds of THOUSANDS of jobs Trump: “Big news for the USA!” 🇺🇸🔥

Argentina’s President Javier Milei is on track to make economic history in a country shedding the trauma of socialism after decades of stagnation. Ironically, the paths of Argentina and Germany may soon intersect. Javier Milei has now been in office for two years. It is an economically fascinating experiment. The man from Buenos Aires, internationally notorious for his dramatic chainsaw imagery, is conducting a libertarian experiment on a living country. Milei is implementing what he long advocated during his campaign: the oversized state sector, with its vampiric bureaucracy, extracts the lifeblood of the private economy; socialism is, for him, a...

Supplies, including infant formula, discovered by Gaza opposition to Hamas.

🇩🇰 TODDLER THROWN FROM 7TH FLOOR BALCONY BY CONVICTED KILLER A 32-year-old Somali man admitted to throwing a 2-year-old boy to his death from a Copenhagen apartment balcony Sunday morning. The child died at 9:40am after being thrown from the seventh floor. The man was convicted in 2014 for stabbing his own mother to death. He was sentenced to psychiatric care, then released back into society. Within that window of freedom, he murdered a toddler. Denmark now faces two uncomfortable reckonings. First, the obvious one: a man who killed his mother with "great violence" was deemed safe for release. That...

President Donald Trump early in his second term renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. This was the original name given to our federal military in 1789 and it had been in effect until it was eliminated by legislation in 1947 and actively became the Department of Defense in 1949. In William Shakespeare’s great play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet utters the immortal line, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This name change by Trump is not to change the department’s smell, but to signify a change in tone, focus, and...

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett (above) has faced criticism for saying the Bondi Beach terrorist attack was “not motivated by religion”. Commissioner Barrett had stated in the aftermath of the December 14 attack that the alleged terrorists were “inspired by Islamic State”.

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Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life” genre, I was compelled to see what all the fuss is about. Suffice it to say that I was not impressed. But I could not quite put my finger on the source of my disdain until, several days ago, it hit me: Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator walks away learning absolutely nothing. The fault of this particular novel might be with Moshfegh’s nihilistic outlook on life, but the problem cuts even...

Two of the nearly 100 Minnesota mayors demanding answers about the state’s unfolding fraud crisis described a climate of relentless uncertainty that has left some constituents "scared" about what lies ahead. "My community is reaching out to me because they're not getting answers from DHS, from other legislators, and they're scared. There's so much unknown… and, as a mayor, we are the front line. We try to help them," South St. Paul Mayor Jimmy Francis said on "Fox & Friends" Wednesday. So far, that help has involved putting concerned constituents in contact with county officials to find the answers they...

TAE Technologies wants to start building a commercial hydrogen boron fusion reactor in 2026. Trump Media announces merger with fusion firm TAE Technologies “Friday, 19 December 2025 Trump Media & Technology Group… and US private fusion energy company TAE Technologies have announced an agreement to merge in a transaction valued at more than USD6 billion…. … TAE’s approach to fusion combines advanced accelerator and plasma physics, and uses abundant, non-radioactive hydrogen-boron (p-B11) as a fuel source. The proprietary magnetic beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC) technology injects high-energy hydrogen atoms into the plasma to make the system more stable and better confined....

The California DMV is facing a lawsuit brought on behalf of nearly 20,000 immigrant truckers over the state’s plans to revoke their commercial drivers’ licenses (CDLs). The Asian Law Caucus and the Sikh Coalition, along with the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in an effort to stop the California DMV from canceling the CDLs, which the complaint says would “result in mass work stoppages” starting Jan 5, 2026. “This class-action lawsuit is brought on behalf of the Jakara Movement and five commercial drivers who have been deprived of their rights and livelihoods,” a...