Free Republic

This weekend, we witnessed another assault on a public figure by an increasingly aggressive element of American politics. The book signing event was disrupted and Steve Forbes was assaulted by protesters who did not want others to be able to speak with or hear him. The fact that this was a literary event is particularly fitting given the effort of many to prevent free expression in our society. Ironically, the book is titled “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.” Forbes was present at a book signing for the new book written by authors Bethany Mandel...

No, says Judge Fernando Gaitan's opinion today in Geico Gen. Ins. Co. v. Brauner (W.D. Mo.). The policy covered "bodily injury" "arising out of the ownership, maintenance or use" of an automobile, but the court held that this language didn't cover such a situation: Kansas courts have held that "For an automobile insurer to be liable for an automobile accident, unless the express language of an insurance policy provides otherwise, the automobile must, in some manner, be involved in the accident, and the mere fact that an accident takes place in or near the automobile does not impose responsibility upon...

Dish Network is working to recover from a cyberattack that disrupted its internal servers and customer-service operations — and said the hack may have resulted in the theft of personal information. On Feb. 23, Dish execs announced on the operator’s earnings call that the company had experienced a network outage. After an investigation by cyber-security experts and outside advisers, Dish determined that the outage was due to “a cyber-security incident and notified appropriate law enforcement authorities,” the company disclosed in an SEC filing Tuesday. On Monday, Feb. 27, Dish said, it “became aware that certain data was extracted from the...

Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing.You feel it like a slow moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace. Or maybe it hit when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the Netflix splash page. It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.For many Jews, the first instinct is to look inward: We blame...

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in. “Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam...

They eventually wore Pete Buttigieg down. For weeks, the Transportation secretary had resisted calls to visit the site of the East Palestine, Ohio, train wreck. He thought it best to “stay out of the way” of National Transportation Safety Board investigators, he told CBS News. Buttigieg—whose signature priorities at the Department of Transportation have been the removal of “racist” highways and the rollout of electric vehicles—at first seemed annoyed at having to focus on a simple railroad accident; “there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing,” he told one reporter. His implication was that a Transportation secretary...

In countries where Asians and Jews immigrated in large numbers, they have long followed a common path. Both groups occupy a dual position: discriminated against for standing out, while at the same time held up as models of success. But increasingly, that success has itself become a liability. Jews and Asians outperform the overall population in such critical areas as education and income, not only in the U.S., but in Canada, Australia, and the U.K., and as a result are collectively held a party to supposedly oppressive power structures in those countries. According to progressive ideas being taught by public...

The Texas Supreme Court has handed down a major ruling in defense of free speech this week. The decision Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity v. Dickson by Justice Jane Bland rejected an effort by pro-choose groups to use defamation lawsuits against pro-life advocates. What was particularly chilling is that one appellate court agreed with the absurd argument that characterizing abortion as murder is an actionable basis for defamation as opposed to protected opinion. The underlying cases stem from an intense political fight over an ordinance passed by the city council in Waskom, Texas. Mark Lee Dickson and Right to Life...

The Russia-Ukraine war is unlike other battles. Russia is, without doubt, the perpetrator; Putin invaded Ukraine, a sovereign country. But, make no mistake; the Biden administration was the catalyst that made Russia act. Team Biden botched things up in multiple ways, giving Moscow reasons to feel threatened. First, President Biden needlessly invited Ukraine to sign a security agreement with the West in November 2021 when there was no imminent Russian threat. Border skirmishes between the Russian majority in eastern Ukraine and Ukrainian forces had been going on since Moscow’s Crimea annexation, but these were no reasons for Team Biden to...

Sam Brinton was one of the Biden regime’s showcase appointments. When he became deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the U.S. Department of Energy, Brinton himself told us about how history was being made, as he was “one of if not the very first openly genderfluid individuals in federal government leadership.” He loved to prance around in women’s clothes, and even noted proudly that he “has worn stilettos to Congress to advise legislators about nuclear policy” and even to the White House to talk to Barack and Michelle about the gay life. But...

Last week, there was another bombshell story by the Washington Post on the purported evil that is Elon Musk. Quickly amplified by MSNBC and other media, it was another hit job on Musk and could be viewed as what many in the media love to call “disinformation.” Musk himself noted that the premise of the piece (that his tweets were artificially boosted during a recent period) was demonstrably false. Yet, the countervailing facts found little space in the long Post piece. None of that is particularly surprising. Musk became a hunted man when he sought to restore free speech protections...

An “intersexual” suspect from Arkansas, who identifies as a woman, was arrested after allegedly making bomb threats against a college town in neighboring Mississippi. Officers with the Oxford Police Department in Mississippi received reports on Jan. 31 that Lily Mestemacher, 29, allegedly threatened to bomb an area in the town, according to a press release from the department that used feminine pronouns. Officers searched the relevant area with a K-9 unit and declared it secure, the department said. Investigators later identified the suspect as Mestemacher, of Conway, Arkansas, nearly four hours away. The Conway Police Department issued an arrest warrant...

Last week, President Joe Biden took a victory lap following news that our southern border had “only” 156,274 illegal encounters in January. Not only does his spin ignore the fact that last month was the worst January on record in over 20 years for illegal encounters at our southern border; it ignores the worsening cost at our northern border. My district in upstate New York includes six counties in the Swanton Sector, the most active sector of our northern border. In just the first three months of this fiscal year, Biden’s failure to secure the southern border has increased illegal...

In the days since the Air Force shot down three unidentified objects out of the sky, questions linger about just what these objects actually were. On Thursday, a report by Aviation Week offered an hypothesis about what one of those three objects could be: a "missing in action" globe-trotting balloon belonging to an Illinois-based hobbyist club. In this photo provided by Chad Fish, a large balloon drifts above the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of South Carolina, with a fighter jet and its contrail seen below it, on Saturday, Feb. 4. In this photo provided by Chad Fish, a...

President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is in trouble. He likely won’t be the Democratic nominee, but he’s likely determined to put the Democratic Party through quite a roller-coaster ride before he and the party reach that conclusion. Most voters believe Biden should step aside and let someone new run — an AP-NORC poll out Tuesday found just 12% of Democrats want Biden to lead their party. Until now, Biden has been allowed to avoid any serious media questioning. He did almost no interviews, answered questions sporadically and survived on the basis of the country’s close partisan split that held fast...

The Boston office of the FBI finally got something right, and I salute them for doing so. The above is a sentence I never dreamed I would be writing, but there’s a first time for everything, and this is it. This unanticipated turn of events unfolded this week during a Congressional hearing under the new Republican majority. A former FBI intelligence analyst from Boston testified that after the Jan. 6 disturbances, the Boston office adamantly refused to conduct improper investigations on American citizens whose only crime was (or might have been) being a supporter of Donald Trump. George Hill is...

MILFORD, N.H. — A debate over the Milford School District's bathroom policies is continuing after a temporary fix is not sitting well with students or parents. Monday night, the school board voted to limit the number of students who use restrooms and locker rooms to the number of private stalls that exist in the restroom. With trash bags now covering urinals, students and parents said the new policy isn't a good fix, and school leaders said it's affecting students' work in the classroom. "None of us actually asked for any sort of change," said high school student Marelyn Bergin. "The...

Weather balloon? Spy balloon? Nope, and nope. I guess that the Chinese balloon sighted over Montana and Missouri this week – and just shot down off the coast of South Carolina by an F-22 Raptor – was a trial balloon. Sure, it may have gathered intelligence about military doings on the surface below, but that was a mere bonus. If I’m right, Beijing’s chief reason for floating a balloon over North America was to see whether it would elicit a response from the U.S. government and military, as well as from the American people. And so it did, judging from...

You might have seen this video from a Finnish figure skating event over the weekend when it went viral. If not, it’s 46 of the most painful seconds you’ll ever witness because it’s all real. I’m not usually the kind of person to jump all over someone who’s publicly humiliated themselves (politicians excluded, of course), and that’s not what I’m going to do today to poor Markku-Pekka Antikainen. Antikainen is a 59-year-old man who at age 50 decided he was trans and wanted to train as a figure skater. Figure skaters usually begin somewhat younger, more than 40 years younger....

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has repeatedly assured the public that President Biden is committed in the classified document scandal to move forward in “a very transparent way.” Putting aside the refusal to share any information beyond a desire to be transparent, Biden has one major test awaiting him on his pledge: his senatorial records. There has been much discussion of a classified document being found in his personal library in Wilmington, but there is a huge library of Biden documents sitting in the University of Delaware. The university is sitting on Biden documents due to a cynical 2012...