Free Republic

The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.” He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies. “I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening...

Helen Andrew’s article in Compact Magazine about The Great Feminization has caused a stir, particularly her observation about the rule of law. We covered it in “Wokeness is Feminization”: ================================================================================== The Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses…. Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social...

Baby Dylan, under one year old, suddenly and unexpectedly began having seizures...for hours. He's in the hospital being kept under heavy sedation. When they try to bring him out, he begins seizing again. They say he has something called "Perry flu". I'm not familiar with that, Have to look it up. In the meantime, his family is very upset. He i@afamily member. Thankyou. I will post atthe end of this thread, the results, even if this thread goes quiet. We could all use a miracle.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been pressuring states to redistrict their maps to give the Democrats more seats. Maryland and Illinois won’t comply. Illinois Out of all the states, Jeffries targeted Illinois? Really? The Democrats outnumber the Republicans 14 to 3. The new map would make it 15-2. I guess one is better than nothing for these people. Also, Illinois is beyond corrupt, so it’s probably the party’s best bet. Jeffries met with the representatives “whose districts could be redrawn.” Blacks hold those four districts. Yes, it’s all about race. God forbid we make it about population size. Oh,...

3:11 VIDEO AT LINK. He gets it. Democrats have abandoned the Black & Hispanic Community. He says Black people in NYC are not voting for Mamdani, they are voting for Cuomo. ...........

Woman in Chicago thought having kids in her car would shield her from arrest while she impeded ICE operations. She thought wrong.“I got kids in my car!”“We warned you.”

Both leaders complimentary to each other at the start of their meeting.

Below is a comprehensive, no-BS checklist for a solo, unguided, no-O2 climb of Mt. Everest from the Nepal South Col route (the only realistic solo option today). Reality check first: Solo Everest is illegal without a permit (you still need the $11,000 Nepal permit + liaison officer). No commercial operator will support a true solo climb; you’ll be self-sufficient from BC upward. 99.9% of “solo” claims used fixed ropes, camps, or O2 left by teams. Death rate for solo attempts is >50%. If you’re asking this question, you’re not ready.

(DCNF)—CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’ tenure began with significant layoffs announced by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison in a memo Wednesday, according to The Guardian. The cuts, planned before she was named to the post, affect roughly 100 staffers at CBS News, including virtually all of the outlet’s “race and culture” section, The Guardian reported, citing Puck News reporter Dylan Byers. One staffer told The Guardian the cuts, which involved about 1,000 total employees across Paramount, were a “bloodbath.” Scoop @PuckNews: CBS NEWS leadership will announce layoffs tomorrow... Nearly 100 jobs will be affected across the division, as I've long...

Yoni Appelbaum’s grandfather was a mailman. Appelbaum shared this fact with me in Charlottesville last week, onstage at a “Democracy360” event hosted by the University of Virginia and cosponsored by The Atlantic, where he is an editor. We were there to talk about “building the American dream” and, by Appelbaum’s account, being a mailman was once a way to do that. “He was proud of that job. And it was enough, together with my grandmother’s job, that they could buy a row house in Canarsie and raise a family.”That was not, however, the point of the story. Rather, Appelbaum wanted...

Biden preemptively protected a variety of people on Trump’s enemies list with pardons. Republicans want to strip them of those protections. As Republicans renew their offensive against Joe Biden, it’s not unreasonable to wonder about the underlying point of their partisan crusade. The former Democratic president won’t seek elected office again; he can’t be impeached; and even if GOP officials were eventually to concoct something damaging, he can’t be criminally charged. So why bother investing so much time, energy and resources into smearing him? What does the Republican Party hope to gain?The answer is increasingly obvious.During a recent appearance on...

In one of America’s most popular novels, seven-year-old Scout has been reading “ever since she was born.” She and her father read the newspapers together every evening. Late in the summer, she realized she would be starting school in a week. “I never looked forward more to anything in my life. Hours of wintertime had found me in the treehouse, looking over at the schoolyard, spying on the children there. ... I longed to join them.” But everything changed by lunchtime! Scout’s older brother Jem asked how she was getting along on her first day of school. “I told him....

emember that "wave of intense support" for Kamala Harris in the summer of 2024, stemming from her social media campaign using terms like "brat" and "coconut?" Me neither. But Audie Cornish does! On Wednesday's edition of CNN This Morning that she hosts, Cornish brought on Katie Drummond of the leftist magazine Wired to explain why Zohran Mamdani's social media campaign has been so successful, while Kamala's flopped: When I look at Kamala Harris, and we think about Brat/Coconut Summer, there was this sense of like a wave of intense support, right? And attention. Why do you think that that didn't...

Chandra Hooper-Barnett, an award winning black principal, lost her job after her controversial statements about the academic performance of black students. Will her departure help, or hurt, these black students? I asked Grok: “Fact check recent claims by a school principal named Chandra Hooper-Barnett. Also fact check the claims of her critics. Talk about her past awards as a teacher. Will the students be better off, or worse off, now that she is no longer working at the school?”This is Grok’s response:Here’s a news article about this:https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dallas-principal-removed-calling-meeting-181828135.htmlDallas principal removed after calling meeting with only Black students about their grades: ‘You...

Police were taking down narcotics smuggling at the airport. The cartels fought back hard. There's outright open warfare in the streets of Rio. The drug cartels are using drones to fight.

Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat is a deceptively simple image of a real-life murder. But a closer look at David's iconic painting reveals the political messages contained within.Great art makes us do a double take. It makes us look, then look again. Take The Death of Marat, 1793, perhaps the most famous crime scene depiction of the past 250 years. At first glance, the portrayal of the murdered body of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed to death in his bath on 13 July 1793, could hardly be simpler. The slain journalist, who had agitated for the execution of...

While a U.S.-China nuclear war is not inevitable due to mutual deterrence, the risk of “accidental” escalation is rising. China’s rapid nuclear expansion—adding 100 warheads annually since 2023—erodes stability. A future conventional war, fought at “blinding speed” with cyber and space weapons, could lead to a tragic miscalculation. A U.S. conventional strike on a “dual-use” Chinese target might be misinterpreted as a disarming first strike, prompting a nuclear “use or lose” response.

Those of us who came of age during the Cold War remember such movies as 'Testament' and 'On The Beach', which depicted the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and USSR. We also remember real-world events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the downing of Flight 007 over Korea in 1983.Are we naive enough to believe that just because the USSR no longer exists, today's Russia no longer possesses a stockpile of 6500+ nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them anywhere on the planet?

Oh, this is funny…. [SOURCE]Think big picture. Think strategically, like Donald Trump. He’s trying to push Canada into a desperation play where they strike trade deals with China, knowing he’s holding a USA deal with Chairman Xi in his back pocket that will undercut Canada completely. Watch.The Free Trade Agreements being made for the USA all over Southeast and Central Asia are stunning. After over $500 billion in deals made in Japan, President Trump and team now head to South Korea.

What I want everyone at COP30 to know. Climate change is serious, but we’ve made great progress. We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions. But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it. It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries. There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change...