Free Republic

"Amazon fired 16,000 employees last week. At first glance, the terminations appeared standard. Online retail demand fluctuates with the seasons, and orders always decrease following the holidays. Factor in a few extra weeks of busyness due to post-Christmas returns, and late January makes sense as a time for layoffs. The gift-giving rush is over, so warehouses no longer need as many people. That is not a defense of a multi-trillion-dollar company pulling the plug on $15-per-hour workers, but if you’re a shrewd capitalist, the justification checks out. But there’s more to the story. It turns out the 16,000 fired Amazonians,...

President de Gaulle of France initiated the secret operation “Vide-Gousset” and repatriated 3,313 tonnes of gold reserves from the vaults of the Federal Reserve in New York and the Bank of England in London from 1963 until 1966. De Gaulle feared America’s deficit in its balance of payments would rupture Bretton Woods and lead to a devaluation of the dollar against gold. All France’s dollars were converted into gold, and to avoid treachery, the metal was repatriated over the course of three years. It took 44 boat trips and 129 flights to bring home more than three thousand tonnes of...

Democrats, lacking a positive agenda, bet on chaos, Trump hysteria, and media allies to spark a midterm backlash as Trump’s economic rebound gains steam. Recent regional special elections have seen Democratic candidates win a number of special election races. Now energized left-wing politicos remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress. Polls show Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating. So Democrats promise to soon stop all new legislation and end Trump and his counterrevolution itself. But the left will never offer any alternative agenda on...

Republicans should be wise, not allowing conservative justices to linger on, only for them to pass away during a Democrat Presidential administration. Would we want a possible President Newsom or Shapiro to replace Thomas or Alito?

The Democratic Party has come a long way from 1996, when President Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign declared that America “cannot tolerate illegal immigration” and added, “We continue to firmly oppose welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.” When we seek explanations for why today’s Democrats refuse to call those here without permission “illegal,” oppose lawful deportations, and seek government benefits for those who’ve snuck into the country, we probably need to look no further than the population woes of Democratic states. At a time when states are governed increasingly by one party or another, the latest migration trends, released last week, show...

The story on that illegal Chinese biological lab found in Las Vegas keeps getting creepier. Recent news about the discovery of an illegal Chinese biological lab full of contagious disease specimens in Las Vegas is starting to sound a lot worse than the coverage it's getting would suggest: According to news accounts, the lab, which was located inside an airBNB house, which accomodated paying guests, seems to have left at least some of the guests "deathly ill," according to this local television report: [video at link] All that good money for Hunter on the line, perhaps. Hunter used to get...

Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling statistic stands out. Even though nearly all stars are expected to have planets and most stars form in pairs, planets that orbit both stars in a pair are rare. Of the more than 6,000 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, confirmed to date - most of them found by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) - only 14 are observed to orbit binary stars. There should be hundreds. Where are all the planets with two suns, like Tatooine in Star Wars? ... ... Over time,...

Today, I am rejoicing about the Washington Post existential spasms. Here is what I said on Free Republic ("Post Mortem" was the title, over 20 years ago!) about the Washington Post and its relentless imbedded leftist bias. "The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine . . ." ========= "POST MORTEM" (transcript of letter to the WAPO editor; posted 10/29/04) On October 27, 2004 Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. penned an op-ed entitled, “A Strict Separation”. Therein Mr. Downie, the self-described “ultimate gatekeeper” (Post, “Live Online” 10/6/04) for everything printed in the newspaper, reassures readers...

Federal agents carried out a military-style raid on a South Shore apartment complex last fall with the permission of the building’s owner and manager, according to new court filings that appear to confirm residents’ suspicions and corroborate key allegations driving a state investigation. The Trump administration has claimed the squalid building was a magnet for criminals and Venezuelan gang members, but the court records filed Tuesday indicate the harrowing raid was actually based on intelligence that “illegal aliens were unlawfully occupying apartments in the building.” Arrest reports for two of the 37 people detained in the overnight raid at 7500...

When a radical mob that included former CNN anchor Don Lemon broke into Cities Church in St. Paul to protest ICE, were they upholding or violating the First Amendment?According to everyone from Sen. Patty Murray to the International Press Institute, breaking into a church and interrupting a religious service is “First Amendment activity”. But if preventing other people from praying is “First Amendment activity” then what is the church service itself?First Amendment activity entails expressing your opinion, your belief or your religious practice, but the moment your actions interfere with and prevent someone else from engaging in their expression or...

An Army veteran from Covington, Georgia, who has lived in the U.S. for more than 50 years faces imminent deportation. Godfrey Wade, a Jamaican-born veteran, has been in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody for nearly five months. His attorney says an emergency stay of removal was denied, but an appeal is pending. Loved ones said Wade's years of military service should count for something. He's been missing from the home he shares with fiancée April Watkins, who said, "We've built an amazing life together, and to be separated from that is very challenging, especially since he did not...

The recent decision to expel Mahmoud Khalil from the United States has been treated by much of the media as a narrow immigration matter — a technical ruling about visa status and disclosure failures. That framing misses the larger question his case raises. Khalil’s removal invites a re-examination not just of who he is, but of what followed Hamas’s October 7 massacre — and how quickly the global response was prepared. On October 8, before Israel had mounted any meaningful military response, before troops entered Gaza, before retaliatory operations had even been organized, massive demonstrations erupted across cities, countries, and...

As a historic nurses’ strike enters its fourth week, New York governor Kathy Hochul has protected hospitals from the strike’s impact by making it easier to hire scabs and doing little to stop executives from dragging out a fight over staffing and safety. On Monday morning, with temperatures below freezing, New York City nurses began the fourth week of the largest nursing strike in the city’s history, which has seen some fifteen thousand nurses across multiple Montefiore, Mount Sinai, and NewYork-Presbyterian facilities walk off the job. Hundreds of nurses kicked off the week by gathering near Grand Central Terminal and...

Me, Hillary, and The War on EmpathyA Response to Madam Secretary When I first saw that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had called me “an extremist pastor” in The Atlantic, I immediately thought, “I should probably double my life insurance.” My next thought was “This should be fun to answer.” After all, we have very different worldviews. Probably the only two things we agree on is that 1) Empathy is central to our cultural divide, and 2) Epstein didn’t kill himself.Clinton identifies me and Allie Beth Stuckey as part of a “cadre of hard-right Christian influencers who are...

LYNCH: Financial services firms… BESSENT: Well, the Biden Administration… LYNCH: Sir, please be responsive to my question. BESSENT: I’m trying, sir, and this back-and-forth is just eating your time. The Biden Administration had an extinction policy for crypto… LYNCH: This is when Trump came into office. I’m going to go to the next question…Mr. Chariman, the answers have to be responsive if we are going to have a serious hearing. BESSENT: Well, the questions have to be serious. LYNCH: Those are 100 dismissals of cases the Trump Administration executed in their first weeks in office BESSENT: Well, the questions have...

Illinois will join the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, or GOARN, to counterbalance the federal government’s withdrawal, Gov. JB Pritzker announced Tuesday. (snip) California also joined GOARN in late January.The withdrawal is complicated because there is no official way to leave WHO and the United States is the only country with the ability to do so. Experts say it’s up to WHO members when the departure is finalized, and they expect the matter to come up in meetings in February and May.

The Super Bowl is in California this week, but a football-related jab at Gov. Gavin Newsom has just touched down in none other than New York City. The billboard, paid for by the California Business and Industrial Alliance, criticizes Newsom by comparing him to the sad-sack New York Jets.

The socialist Spanish government’s amnesty scheme will allow illegal migrants to simply declare that they have no criminal record, rather than providing documentation from their native countries, sparking concern over criminals gaming the system. Last month, the left-wing coalition government of Socialist PM Pedro Sánchez agreed to allow upwards of half a million illegals seek amnesty and obtain residence permits to remain in Spain. While the scheme stipulates that amnesty will not apply to migrants with criminal records — other than the crime of entering Spain illegally — the regularisation decree published by the government this week revealed that Madrid...

Currently, Trump is the only one who can make the SAVE Act happen, yet he seems to have no interest in doing so. Recently, I wrote a piece that received some pushback. I wondered if Donald Trump was making the same mistake as George Bush Sr. did when he broke his “Read my lips: No new taxes” pledge. If you read my work regularly, you’ll notice a decidedly clear bias towards warnings of doom. It’s not my default position that life is nothing but doom and gloom. On the contrary. I actually have a website that explicitly talks about how...

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk despaired Thursday his agency is “in survival mode” due to funding shortfalls driven by a lack of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Such is his fear for the future Turk launched a $400 million appeal for cash to help the U.N. Human Rights Office survive 2026, AFP reports. The unelected Austrian’s panicked plea comes after U.N. chief Antonio Guterres warned last Friday the world body is on the brink of financial collapse and could run out of cash by July, as he urged countries to pay their dues, as Breitbart News reported. The U.N.’s largest contributor,...