Free Republic

Americans have run their credit cards to the limit. Now they’ve turned to buy-now-pay-later plans to buy gas and groceries. This is yet more evidence that American consumers are broke, stressed, and buried in debt as inflation steals their purchasing power. Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platforms allow users to purchase items by paying several smaller installments (typically around 4) over time. Block operates the Afterpay BNPL platform. The system was originally set up to provide short-term financing for bigger purchases. But according to company data, usage is expanding into everyday spending categories. The average customer used Afterpay to purchase gas 3.6 times...

My most recent Martin Center column highlighted the irony, considering higher education’s formative influence on America’s prevailing anti-natalist culture, of the industry’s anxiety over declining birthrates. “Where,” I asked, “are large families less welcome, or where do they seem more culturally transgressive, than on American campuses?” I quoted briefly from Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk, who describes the book as “motivated by a single intuition: that if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must also be consequential.” Current birth rates and their own responses to surveys suggest that one-in-three Gen Z...

ALBAWABA- Unconfirmed reports circulating on social media and in several regional media outlets claim that Ahmad Vahidi, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed in recent Israeli airstrikes targeting sites in or around Tehran. On Sunday afternoon, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out an airstrike allegedly on a Hezbollah command centre in the Dahiyeh district of Beirut, following earlier rocket fire launched into northern Israel by Hezbollah. In response, Iran declared that Israel had “crossed all red lines” in Lebanon and launched multiple waves of ballistic missile strikes targeting Israeli territory late on Sunday, June 7...

Karmelo Anthony’s claims that he stabbed a Texas teen in self-defense may be falling apart after a witness called by his own lawyers changed their tune. Collin County prosecutors rested their case against the 19-year-old on Saturday after calling up 21 witnesses to testify about 17-year-old Austin Metcalf’s fatal stabbing at an April 2025 high school track meet, according to multiple reports covering the untelevised trial. Anthony was the aggressor throughout the deadly altercation, entering a school sports team’s tent where Metcalf was, cursing and taunting those who asked him to leave and killing Metcalf with a knife after Metcalf...

Israeli reserve soldiers conducting complex ground maneuvers in southern Lebanon discovered an unexpected handwritten letter left behind by local Christian residents. The note expressed deep gratitude to the troops for clearing their village of Hezbollah terrorists while pleading for the preservation of their homes. Soldiers from the 9260 Reserve Battalion, who are currently engaged in highly complex ground operations across the northern border, discovered a deeply moving personal letter inside a local residence. The note, which was handwritten in English on a small notepad and verified by independent journalists, reveals the highly intricate relationship between portions of the Lebanese civilian...

After years of being asked to leave gratuities everywhere from coffee shops and takeout counters to ride-share apps and self-service kiosks, many consumers say they have had enough - and are now tipping less than they did just a year ago. A new nationwide survey found that 78 percent of Americans believe tipping culture has become 'ridiculous,' while nearly half say they have actively cut back on gratuities in 2026 as household budgets come under increasing pressure. The findings, from restaurant technology company Popmenu, suggest a growing backlash against what many consumers see as relentless requests for extra money on...

"Bass has a real race on her hands, if in fact Raman is the one who advances," he said. "And the Democratic establishment is backing Karen Bass. But versus Spencer Pratt, she was crushing him. She wanted to face Pratt. She wanted nothing to do with Raman. That's why these conspiracy theories simply make no sense, people."

Roseanne Milburn, 61, of Winnipeg, had a routine procedure turn into an amputation — not because the surgery failed, but because Canada’s government-run system couldn’t find her a bed. A surgeon at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre removed dead tissue from her knee, then sent her to Concordia Hospital with the plan to bring her back that same day so a specialist could stitch the wound (CBC News). She was never brought back. There was no bed at HSC. So she sat at Concordia with an 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐝𝐚𝐲𝐬, waiting for the system to make room. As the...

According to Graham Platner, everybody in his life knew he had a Nazi tattoo… except him. And it’s their fault for not telling him. That’s his story. I guess he didn’t have time to come up with a better one. Even for a Democrat, this guy is full of $#!+. He makes Obama look like George Washington. So, yes, when Graham Platner calls Lyndsey Fifield a liar, he’s lying. That’s what Nazis do. Adolf Hitler himself called it the Big Lie. The more brazen and audacious the falsehood, the more likely people are to believe it. Because who would have...

Rosie O’Donnell will not go under the knife again. At Sunday’s Tony Awards 2026, the former talk show host was asked whether she plans to have any more cosmetic work done after fessing up to getting a facelift. “No, I don’t think so,” she told E! News on the red carpet. O’Donnell, 64, told the outlet that she decided to go public with her plastic surgery because she wanted to be genuine. Last month, O’Donnell shared before-and-after photos of her transformation, saying that she felt “shameful” about the surgery because of how much she spent on it.

This video from Black Conservative Perspective addresses the negative reactions from critics, including Stephen A. Smith, regarding former President Donald Trump's planned attendance at an NBA Finals game in New York City (1:47 - 2:03). Key takeaways from the video include: Political Polarization: The host argues that the backlash against Trump attending the game is motivated by bias rather than logistics, noting that other presidents have attended major sporting events in the past without such controversy (7:10 - 7:46). The "Jinx" Narrative: The host critiques the narrative that Trump's presence would serve as "bad luck" or a "jinx" for the...

A week ago, former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley arrived for a meeting with his new boss, Nick Bilton, on the CBS News show at which they both work. Pelley took this as an opportunity to lecture and browbeat Bilton. In the meeting, which was recorded and leaked to the press, Pelley publicly accused those whom he works for as lacking credentials as journalists. Singling Bilton out, Pelley said that he had "slender qualifications" for the job of producing 60 Minutes. Necessarily, CBS fired Pelley the next day. In his posture against Bilton, Pelley portrayed himself as possessing the journalistic...

Explanation: What happens to a comet as it leaves our inner Solar System? Now, the arrival of a comet into the inner Solar System is typically heralded with great fanfare and high hopes that the comet will become bright and photogenic. But on the way out, the comet's nucleus is less warmed by the Sun, less gas and dust are expelled, the bright coma around the nucleus shrinks and fades, and the tail length drops off. Many comets will then return to the outer Solar System and only return in hundreds or thousands of years. In contrast, some comets --...

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured a massive infrastructure agreement with Google just days before its planned IPO, with the search giant agreeing to pay $920 million per month for AI computing capacity. CNBC reports that according to a regulatory filing, Google will utilize approximately 110,000 Nvidia graphics processing units along with central processors, memory, and additional components located within SpaceX data center facilities. The contract runs from October 2026 through June 2029 at the full monthly rate of nearly a billion dollars a month, with capacity scaling up through September at a discounted fee. A Google Cloud spokesperson communicated to...

While election night vote counts on Tuesday night showed City Councilwoman Nithya Raman far behind in the race for Los Angeles Mayor, as we go into the 4th day of counting her numbers are picking up and betting odds markets predict she will overtake Spencer Pratt for second place and qualify for the November runoff. Raman attributed her surge to her strong advocacy for bike lanes, saying "the people who mocked me will see that I have the winning formula for bringing the City back from the baleful performance of Mayor Bass and the whimsical delusions of low crime and...

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch on Sunday slammed the exclusion of LGBT cops from walking in uniform with their guns at Manhattan’s Pride March — before participating with a group in Queens’ version. “Once again, they banned NYPD officers from marching in full uniform later this month,” Tisch said of the Manhattan organizers. “That decision is as hypocritical as it is a slap in the face to the New York City Police Department and to the spirit of pride.”

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing a major surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into New York City, escalating a growing confrontation with Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul over President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Trump border czar Tom Homan revealed Monday that the administration has already drawn up an operational plan and warned Hochul before she signed legislation late last month restricting ICE activities and banning masked immigration agents in New York. "You're going to see more ICE than you've ever seen in New York City, and it's coming," Homan said, according to Bloomberg. "I just reviewed an operational plan....

The Republican National Committee and the New Jersey GOP went looking through voter-roll records in one of America’s bluest states. What surfaced should make every legal voter pay attention. Fox News reported Monday that documents obtained through public-records requests showed noncitizens on New Jersey voter rolls for years, including some cases where voting histories also appeared. The NJGOP and RNC requested voter rolls from all 21 New Jersey counties, according to the report. The records reportedly showed multiple noncitizens seeking naturalization asking to be removed from the rolls, saying they had been unknowingly registered to vote. Most of those noncitizens...

If you ever wanted irrefutable evidence of Democrats’ hate for white men, all you’d have to do is point to the rogues’ gallery of weirdos, losers, and mutations they’ve nominated over the last few election cycles. It’s like they don’t actually know any normal white dudes, because the people they pick in a baffling attempt to recapture this large and crucial group of voters—who have almost completely rejected the Democrats—are simply bizarre. How did they ever get the impression that these freakish nominees would somehow make normal white guys go, “Yeah, I identify with him. I’ll vote for him. Now,...

The Trump administration on Monday announced it is seeking to revoke the citizenship of 17 U.S. citizens accused of immigration fraud, expanding its unprecedented denaturalization campaign. CBS News exclusively reported about the plans before they were unveiled by the Justice Department. Officials said the move represents the largest-ever effort by the U.S. government to use its denaturalization powers, which were rarely invoked before President Trump returned to the White House last year with promises to launch a historic deportation blitz. Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of just 11 legal complaints per year seeking to denaturalize...