Free Republic

Two fundraisers for the hundreds of laid-off Washington Post (WP) journalists have exploded as the far-left newsroom struggles. As of Monday morning, the GoFundMe campaigns have raised over $700,000 after the layoffs were announced on Wednesday, Business Insider reported. Post reporter Rachel Siegel was among those in the newsroom’s union who organized one of the fundraisers. “A separate GoFundMe page for the Post’s international employees has also raised almost $200,000 with about 2,100 donations. The fundraising push for international staff was set up by the Post’s Tokyo bureau chief, Michelle Lee. The funds will be disbursed to laid-off international employees...

Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — appears to have deleted all of his Instagram posts after his Super Bowl halftime show at Sunday’s Super Bowl LX. The “Me Porto Bonito” singer’s Instagram account, boasting 52.6 million followers, shows no profile image, zero posts and zero people that he is following at the time of this writing. While the reason for this remains unclear, Bad Bunny’s removed Instagram content comes after the conclusion of his Super Bowl halftime show which resulted in fans taking to social media to bash the NFL for featuring the “boring”...

Top U.S. intelligence agencies are cooperating with Kurt Olsen, who worked with Trump to undermine the results of the 2020 election. President Donald Trump has directed top U.S. spy agencies to share sensitive intelligence about the 2020 election with his former campaign lawyer, known for pushing debunked theories of electoral fraud, according to four people with knowledge of the effort. The intelligence that top U.S. spy agencies are furnishing to Kurt Olsen — now a temporary government employee in the White House — is meant to support a probe he is leading into whether Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was...

The state can require federal agents to display identification, the judge said. The Trump administration had asked the court to block both laws, which were designed to help identify federal agents. A federal judge on Monday said that California could not prohibit federal law enforcement agents from wearing face masks unless it amended the law to also apply to state agents. But the judge did allow the state to require federal agents to display identification. Judge Christina A. Snyder of the Federal District Court in Los Angeles issued a preliminary injunction against the mask ban, ruling that California’s new law...

On the afternoon of Oct. 4, 1918, American artillery hit a ravine in France's Argonne Forest. The rounds were falling directly on roughly 500 U.S. soldiers that had been trapped behind enemy lines for two days. Maj. Charles Whittlesey, a New York lawyer commanding the surrounded force, had one way left to stop the bombardment. His life and the lives of his men now rested on a lone carrier pigeon. That bird, a black check homing pigeon named Cher Ami, flew 25 miles through gunfire with a message attached to his wounded leg. The flight helped save hundreds of American...

An Irish man has spent five months in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and faces deportation despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record. Seamus Culleton was a “model immigrant” who had become the victim of a capricious and inept system, said his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye. Originally from County Kilkenny, Culleton is married to a US citizen and runs a plastering business in the Boston area. While buying supplies at a hardware store on 9 September 2025 he was arrested in a random immigration sweep, according to Okoye, of BOS Legal Group in Massachusetts. Culleton entered...

Super Bowl viewers were left 'sickened' after social media users began circulating English translations of Spanish lyrics from Bad Bunny's music following his headline-making halftime performance. Following the show, critics branded the content 'pure degeneracy' and questioned why the NFL put the global superstar on its biggest stage. The backlash erupted hours after the show, when conservative commentator Megan Basham posted screenshots of translated lyrics, which she described as 'the most obscene lyrics ever to be performed at a Super Bowl halftime.' In his track, Safaera, Bad Bunny boast about explicit sexual acts, drug use and casual hookups, with repeated...

[Catholic Caucus] Dozens of Catholics hold Rosary rally to protest Fr. James Martin talkDespite arctic wind chills, around 35 Catholics rallied against Fr. James Martin’s talk at Epiphany of Our Lord Church on Friday and denounced his notorious pro-LGBT errors.PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pennsylvania (LifeSiteNews) — Over two dozen Catholics showed up in extremely cold and windy weather to prayerfully protest a talk given by the heterodox Father James Martin, S.J., on Saturday at his native parish, Epiphany of Our Lord Church, on his new book.On February 7, as arctic wind chills made the temperature feel like -20 degrees, about 35 faithful...

In 2021, a unit of healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson announced “a leap forward”: It had added artificial intelligence to a medical device used to treat chronic sinusitis, an inflammation of the sinuses. Acclarent said the software for its TruDi Navigation System would now use a machine-learning algorithm to assist ear, nose and throat specialists in surgeries. The device had already been on the market for about three years. Until then, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had received unconfirmed reports of seven instances in which the device malfunctioned and another report of a patient injury. Since AI was added...

Candace Owens is accusing TPUSA of inflating their view counts for the halftime show.

A senior Hamas leader declared that surrendering weapons would “criminalize the resistance” and vowed Gaza would never accept “foreign rule,” openly defying President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace framework as Phase Two of the U.S.-brokered plan moves toward implementation. Speaking Sunday at the 17th Al Jazeera Forum in Doha, Khaled Mashaal — the terror group’s former chief and current head of its diaspora office — flatly rejected the core requirement of Trump’s Gaza plan: disarmament tied to reconstruction and international oversight. Mashaal praised the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, arguing that the attack had thrust what he called...

Today on TAP: What will it take to preserve a great newspaper in the nation’s capital, and to sustain independent daily journalism generally? The Washington Post, one of America’s three national newspapers, has just laid off some 30 percent of its staff, following two previous rounds of layoffs and buyouts. The stripped-down Post will have a staff of under 600, compared to 2,800 people at The New York Times. The firings are on orders of the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men.The Post lost about $77 million in 2023, another $100 million in 2024, and...

Rinse, repeatIt was obvious, at least to me, why Bad Bunny, Lady Gaga, and Green Day were headlining the Super Bowl halftime show. Each of them had loud anti-ICE messages heading into the Super Bowl weekend. All of their clips went viral. Lady Gaga and her usual blithering nonsense virtue signaled over in Japan.Green Day, a band that is no longer relevant and is sponsored by Spotify, had its usual anti-Trump screeching that then went viral, telling ICE to quit their job and calling out Kristi Noem, JD Vance, etc. I don’t believe this clip is from the Super Bowl,...

Walk the streets of any major metropolitan area and pay attention to what is communicated in the public sphere. Look especially at advertising, signage, and other messages that bombard you in public spaces. You can learn a good deal about the mindset of the people who run that society by observing such things. More specifically, a culture that is insane, or in the process of going insane, will give it away in what it features in privileged public spaces. These are its most essential values. On a recent visit to New York City, I did a little research in this...

William Holmes McGuffey (September 23, 1800 – May 4, 1873) was an American professor and college president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, one of the nation's first and most widely used series of textbooks. It is estimated that at least 122 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.

Elon Musk on Sunday offered to pay the legal fees of any Epstein survivor sued for speaking the “truth” in regards to naming who was responsible for their abuse. “I will pay for the defense of anyone who speaks the truth about this and is sued for doing so,” Musk wrote in a post on the social platform X, which he owns.

California’s already sky-high gas prices are expected to surge after Valero abruptly shuttered its Benicia refinery amid a spiraling “oil crisis,” a new report claims. The Benicia refinery began shutting down on Saturday, four months earlier than planned, a former Valero manager told the California Globe Tuesday. US gas prices: national average of $2.883 with California's average at $4.368, and a legend for retail prices ranging from $2.370 to $4.404. The closure will cause the state’s already sky-high gas prices to soar, a new report said. Thermal imaging showed the facility went cold as the Crimson Pipeline – which transports...

Wikimedia CommonsPresident Trump’s opponents, most of whom have never seen a local problem they didn’t think a national effort could solve, are suddenly proclaiming their devotion to the cause of federalism. This is in response to Trump’s recent suggestions that he would like to “nationalize the voting” in future elections, which prompted the usual tiresome comparisons of Trump to a banana republic dictator dedicated to stealing elections.The president has brought attention to an important issue: the need for voter ID. The fact thathis Democratic critics are so vociferously against it is telling. As the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act...

A 30-second ad from Ring stood out among Sunday’s glut of Super Bowl commercials shilling myriad forms of artificial intelligence, serving as a frightening reminder of how ubiquitous surveillance cameras have become amid our diminishing privacy. After all, if the “Search Party” function built into the doorbell camera’s app can be used to find a lost dog, as Sunday night’s ad emphasized, there’s little to stop it from being used to track people. The doorbell camera’s feature is especially worrisome now as the government encroaches on our civil liberties. Pointing out the potential of the Amazon-owned Ring being used to...

It's astonishing to witness the improvement in public education--reading, math, attendance, grad rates--in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. But we're busy fighting culture wars rather than scaling up what these three states have done. Please do read: https://nytimes.com/2026/02/09/opinion/red-states-good-schools.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K1A.hGAi.QpbdtKzj51Ke&smid=url-share