Free Republic

The slippery-slope is nearing the bottom now. The City of Seattle wants to keep employers, businesses, and private citizens from discriminating against people who like to sleep around and/or identify as an infinite list of genders. .... Notice how "male and female" has now been struck from the municipal code altogether. The law will "recognize genders outside the gender binary, recognize pansexuality and asexuality as orientations, and include consensual relationships with multiple partners as an element of attitudes, preferences, and practices pertaining to sexual orientation." This idea of normalizing multiple partners is a growing movement on the Left. ... It's...

The Iran and Ukraine wars have exposed the world’s reliance on the Middle East and Russia for diesel Persian Gulf states and Russia have invested tens of billions of dollars in refineries over the past decade to grab a bigger share of the global diesel market. Now, war in both regions has sent exports plunging, squeezing supplies of a fuel that powers much of the global economy. Diesel prices are soaring—they eclipsed $6 a gallon in the U.S. for the first time last week and have kept climbing, hitting $6.45 on Friday. The surge has rattled governments and markets around...

Long lines in IRAN!! (September 18th 2026) Very short video where Iranian man explains why there are long lines and how much food costs in Iran.

This is big. Through this executive order President Trump is defining fraud, corruption and abuse within the H1B visa system as a “national security threat.” That designation gives DHS and State Dept officials an elevated power-set to immediately introduce corrective action.

The Beatles told us: "All you need is love." They were right, but along with love must come marriage. But marriage rates have plummeted, especially among young men. A Pulitzer Prize-worthy story by Sean Salai of The Washington Times crunches all the numbers. To say they are worrisome would be a vast understatement. -- In 2025, nearly twice as many men ages 18 to 39 were unmarried as were married. -- There were 30.4 million unmarried men ages 18 to 39 in 2025, up 47% from 20.7 million in 2000. -- In the same period, married men in this age...

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) — The city of Dearborn responded Saturday to a lawsuit accusing it of celebrating Muslim holidays and ignoring religious holidays of other faiths by blaming attacks against it on its diversity and “welcoming nature.” A statement from the Detroit suburb issued by a spokesperson came in response to a lawsuit on Thursday that accused the city and its mayor of spending thousands of dollars to celebrate Muslim holidays while ignoring Christian and Jewish holidays. The lawsuit in federal court revived complaints about city government that arose a year ago after the Dearborn mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, told Ted...

Tusk’s casualty disclosure and Kushner’s challenge to Putin bring an uncomfortable question into the open: do the assumptions sustaining the Ukraine war still add up? Diplomacy becomes more difficult when abstractions acquire numbers. For years, the Ukraine war has been discussed through broad formulations: sufficient support, sustainable defense, battlefield momentum, acceptable terms. They provide governments with considerable room to maneuver because none requires an immediate answer to the harder question of what the war is consuming and whether that consumption can continue. Donald Tusk has now supplied a number. Speaking before the Polish parliament, the prime minister said Ukrainian partners...

A grotesque homeless encampment continues to expand on Manhattan’s West Side and now covers 12 city blocks with theft, drugs and prostitution flourishing in broad daylight Under new rules in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, the NYPD is no longer authorized to clear the encampments. The city Department of Homeless Services is in charge of conducting the sweeps, but it hasn’t done so. One vagrant went so far as to call the mayor “awesome” for allowing the unsanitary encampment to thrive and halting police raids that once cleared out the unsightly settlements. “Most people would agree that leaving people on the...

The end of World War Two didn't mean the end of movies about the war. Far from it – the next decade or so would see what began as propaganda films transform into their own subgenre. First of all, though, American audiences – which included returning veterans – had to find a way to deal with the return to civilian life and peacetime. They had a film like The Best Years of Our Lives to cloak the immediate challenges with the appropriate amount of grit and optimism (along with lesser-known pictures like Edward Dmytryk's Till the End of Time, also...

Washington’s new permit-to-purchase requirement for firearms is moving from the statehouse to implementation, with the Washington State Patrol now building the system that will require firearm buyers to obtain state approval before purchasing a gun.

Even Ohio and Iowa, after trending Republican for years, are battlegrounds in the midterm elections. An old saying suggests that the road to the White House runs through Ohio. For more than 125 years, the Buckeye State has served as the nation’s bellwether. More recently many Midwestern states—not only Ohio, but also Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota—have turned either ruby red or navy blue. That polarization has hit a tipping point. The heartland is set again to become the nation’s pre-eminent battleground, and Democrats need to appreciate what that means for the future. The history is dramatic. Barack Obama won...

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Friday that some European leaders are openly preparing for war with Russia, accusing them of escalating tensions while ignoring their own citizens. Speaking during a meeting of Russia’s Military-Industrial Commission, Putin claimed that NATO continues to expand and that European governments are using the alleged Russian threat to justify increased military spending and cover up failures in economic and social policy. “Some European leaders openly say they are preparing for war with Russia,” Putin said, according to Interfax. Putin also insisted that Moscow has “no aggressive intentions” toward European countries and said Russia remains prepared...

In late July, the White House and National Science Foundation announced in the right-leaning tech publication, Pirate Wires, that, beginning this fall, they would be establishing a $47 million program to fund around 250 four-year Industry-Integrated PhD (I-PhD) Scholars in technical fields. The NSF will be funding three of those four years, and 31 universities and 20 companies will be funding the rest—those who have submitted letters of interest include companies like Dow Chemical Company and Lockheed Martin, as well as colleges like Columbia University, North Carolina State University, and the Ohio State University. Students in the pilot program will...

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted lefty leaders from across the globe on Saturday to kick off a three-day summit pushing progressive agenda items like dealing with climate change. Mamdani delivered opening remarks at the Urban 20 Summit in New York City, where he and other mayors discussed “practical solutions” to address “rising housing costs, the climate crisis and migration,” according to a propaganda press statement released by the socialist mayor’s media team. Details of the summit were scarce and released Soviet-style. Most of Saturday’s activities were closed to the press. Only select media – which did not include The Post...

Iran has conveyed seven conditions to Washington for the start of any negotiations, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei said Saturday, as President Donald Trump weighs whether to resume major attacks on Iran.“The United States, if it wants to extricate itself from the predicament it has created, must accept Iran’s rights and conditions,” Rezaei wrote on X, saying the seven demands had been communicated to Washington.He did not spell out all seven in the post. Earlier Saturday, however, Rezaei told Al Jazeera that Tehran was demanding an end to the war “on all fronts,” the release of frozen Iranian...

Explanation: Also known as the false dawn, a luminous band of zodiacal light is captured in this dark night skyscape. The serene view was recorded just before the beginning of astronomical twilight during September's star party at the remote Hanle Dark Sky Reserve, Ladakh, India, planet Earth. At about 4,500 meters altitude, the dark sky reserve presents a haven for hardy stargazing and astrophotography enthusiasts. While meteors streak through the night, bright planet Jupiter appears immersed in the faint zodiacal glow near the eastern horizon. Follow the zodiacal band toward the zenith to find open star cluster M44 and a...

While Virginia Democrats are pushing to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution, thousands of Catholics have organized a massive opposition. In January, Democratic Virginia state lawmakers advanced a constitutional amendment on abortion rights to appear on the November ballot, Virginia Mercury reported. While abortion is presently legal in Virginia up to 26 weeks and six days of pregnancy, the state’s constitution does not at present explicitly protect a right to abortion, 13NewsNow reported. The proposed amendment asks voters: “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to (i) protect the freedom to make personal decisions about prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum...

President Trump announced he was creating a new “AI Force” and designating a new AI “czar” Saturday to keep the industry from engaging in bad practices – after doubling down that fears of AI superintelligence are just another “hoax.” Trump compared a brewing panic over AI to a series of other events he has branded hoaxes. “Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country,” he posted on Truth Social. “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, Global Warming, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, Men in Women’s Sports,...

The EU instructs: "If you’re one of the millions of people every year entering EU borders from a third country, you need to be aware of an important rule under the EU Plant Health Law. You cannot introduce any plant or plant material into the EU unless it is accompanied by an official certificate from the Plant Health Authority in its country of origin. This simple rule has been put in place to protect European agriculture and forestry from the entry and spread of new dangerous plant pests and diseases which could be present on imported plant, fruit, vegetable, seed...

ransomnote: Click the image of von der Leyen's post below to access her 24 minute public address (English).Paul Walsh@Paul__WalshUrsula von der Leyen announced this week that everyone in the EU must use the official EU age verification app to verify their age before they can log into or post on social media and other digital services.As an expert in online child safety, I'm here to expose the disinformation in each von der Leyen's statements. See below.The EU Kids Act is a pretext designed to enforce mandatory digital identity verification on everyone in Europe. The proposed legislation applies to any digital...