Free Republic

The House Judiciary Committee’s recent findings present a simple but unsettling conclusion. American speech is being curtailed in the United States, not because Congress has changed the First Amendment, but because foreign governments have learned how to route around it. Europe’s Digital Services Act, presented as a domestic regulatory framework, has in practice become a lever for global speech control. Its effects now reach deep into the American public square. To see how this happens, begin with a basic fact about the modern internet. Major platforms operate with global content moderation rules. They do so not out of ideology but...

Waymo‘s Chief Safety Officer disclosed Wednesday that some of the remote operators who assist its self-driving vehicles in navigating difficult scenarios are based in the Philippines. Mauricio Peña, the company’s Chief Safety Officer, confirmed under questioning that the Alphabet subsidiary employs human operators abroad to provide guidance to its robotaxis when they encounter challenging driving situations. Ad ends in 5 Peña noted that the vehicles remain in control of all driving tasks at all times. “They provide guidance. They do not remotely drive the vehicles,” Peña told the Senate committee. “The Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic...

Michelle Obama opened up on “Call Her Daddy” about whether she believes the U.S. is ready for a female president. The former first lady discussed a wide range of topics during her interview with Alex Cooper on the Jan. 21 episode of the podcast, including the scrutiny she faced while in the public eye and the media’s focus on her appearance during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Obama also expanded on comments she made last November about whether she would ever consider running for president herself and what that says about the country’s readiness for a woman in the Oval...

The modern US Senate operates under a belief that is nearly universal and almost entirely false. Major legislation, we are told, requires 60 votes to pass. Without those votes, the chamber is paralyzed. Bills stall. Leaders shrug. The minority is said to have spoken. This belief is repeated so often that it has taken on the status of constitutional fact. I assumed it was true. It is nothing of the kind. There is no rule of the Senate, no clause of the Constitution, and no settled historical practice that requires 60 votes for the passage of ordinary legislation. The 60...

An Arizona police helicopter crashed Wednesday night while responding to an active shooting, killing two of its occupants on board. A pilot and trooper-paramedic for the Arizona Department of Public Safety died in the tragedy in Flagstaff, Ariz., police confirmed Thursday, while video shared online captured the helicopter free-falling out of the night sky. ... Video, seen by KPHO, captured a fire raging in a forest, and locals were urged to shelter in place. The shooter was left with non-fatal injuries after exchanging fire with cops. They have since been arrested, cops said. The cause of the helicopter crash has...

President de Gaulle of France initiated the secret operation “Vide-Gousset” and repatriated 3,313 tonnes of gold reserves from the vaults of the Federal Reserve in New York and the Bank of England in London from 1963 until 1966. De Gaulle feared America’s deficit in its balance of payments would rupture Bretton Woods and lead to a devaluation of the dollar against gold. All France’s dollars were converted into gold, and to avoid treachery, the metal was repatriated over the course of three years. It took 44 boat trips and 129 flights to bring home more than three thousand tonnes of...

Democrats, lacking a positive agenda, bet on chaos, Trump hysteria, and media allies to spark a midterm backlash as Trump’s economic rebound gains steam. Recent regional special elections have seen Democratic candidates win a number of special election races. Now energized left-wing politicos remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress. Polls show Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating. So Democrats promise to soon stop all new legislation and end Trump and his counterrevolution itself. But the left will never offer any alternative agenda on...

Republicans should be wise, not allowing conservative justices to linger on, only for them to pass away during a Democrat Presidential administration. Would we want a possible President Newsom or Shapiro to replace Thomas or Alito?

The story on that illegal Chinese biological lab found in Las Vegas keeps getting creepier. Recent news about the discovery of an illegal Chinese biological lab full of contagious disease specimens in Las Vegas is starting to sound a lot worse than the coverage it's getting would suggest: According to news accounts, the lab, which was located inside an airBNB house, which accomodated paying guests, seems to have left at least some of the guests "deathly ill," according to this local television report: [video at link] All that good money for Hunter on the line, perhaps. Hunter used to get...

Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling statistic stands out. Even though nearly all stars are expected to have planets and most stars form in pairs, planets that orbit both stars in a pair are rare. Of the more than 6,000 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, confirmed to date - most of them found by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) - only 14 are observed to orbit binary stars. There should be hundreds. Where are all the planets with two suns, like Tatooine in Star Wars? ... ... Over time,...

Today, I am rejoicing about the Washington Post existential spasms. Here is what I said on Free Republic ("Post Mortem" was the title, over 20 years ago!) about the Washington Post and its relentless imbedded leftist bias. "The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine . . ." ========= "POST MORTEM" (transcript of letter to the WAPO editor; posted 10/29/04) On October 27, 2004 Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. penned an op-ed entitled, “A Strict Separation”. Therein Mr. Downie, the self-described “ultimate gatekeeper” (Post, “Live Online” 10/6/04) for everything printed in the newspaper, reassures readers...

When a radical mob that included former CNN anchor Don Lemon broke into Cities Church in St. Paul to protest ICE, were they upholding or violating the First Amendment?According to everyone from Sen. Patty Murray to the International Press Institute, breaking into a church and interrupting a religious service is “First Amendment activity”. But if preventing other people from praying is “First Amendment activity” then what is the church service itself?First Amendment activity entails expressing your opinion, your belief or your religious practice, but the moment your actions interfere with and prevent someone else from engaging in their expression or...

The recent decision to expel Mahmoud Khalil from the United States has been treated by much of the media as a narrow immigration matter — a technical ruling about visa status and disclosure failures. That framing misses the larger question his case raises. Khalil’s removal invites a re-examination not just of who he is, but of what followed Hamas’s October 7 massacre — and how quickly the global response was prepared. On October 8, before Israel had mounted any meaningful military response, before troops entered Gaza, before retaliatory operations had even been organized, massive demonstrations erupted across cities, countries, and...

Me, Hillary, and The War on EmpathyA Response to Madam Secretary When I first saw that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had called me “an extremist pastor” in The Atlantic, I immediately thought, “I should probably double my life insurance.” My next thought was “This should be fun to answer.” After all, we have very different worldviews. Probably the only two things we agree on is that 1) Empathy is central to our cultural divide, and 2) Epstein didn’t kill himself.Clinton identifies me and Allie Beth Stuckey as part of a “cadre of hard-right Christian influencers who are...

LYNCH: Financial services firms… BESSENT: Well, the Biden Administration… LYNCH: Sir, please be responsive to my question. BESSENT: I’m trying, sir, and this back-and-forth is just eating your time. The Biden Administration had an extinction policy for crypto… LYNCH: This is when Trump came into office. I’m going to go to the next question…Mr. Chariman, the answers have to be responsive if we are going to have a serious hearing. BESSENT: Well, the questions have to be serious. LYNCH: Those are 100 dismissals of cases the Trump Administration executed in their first weeks in office BESSENT: Well, the questions have...

Illinois will join the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, or GOARN, to counterbalance the federal government’s withdrawal, Gov. JB Pritzker announced Tuesday. (snip) California also joined GOARN in late January.The withdrawal is complicated because there is no official way to leave WHO and the United States is the only country with the ability to do so. Experts say it’s up to WHO members when the departure is finalized, and they expect the matter to come up in meetings in February and May.

Currently, Trump is the only one who can make the SAVE Act happen, yet he seems to have no interest in doing so. Recently, I wrote a piece that received some pushback. I wondered if Donald Trump was making the same mistake as George Bush Sr. did when he broke his “Read my lips: No new taxes” pledge. If you read my work regularly, you’ll notice a decidedly clear bias towards warnings of doom. It’s not my default position that life is nothing but doom and gloom. On the contrary. I actually have a website that explicitly talks about how...

📉 The Grammys audience declines by ONE MILLION viewers this 2026. It's the second consecutive year that the awards ceremony attracted a smaller audience. According to experts the @RecordingAcad is slowly losing respect among the general public due to their controversial picks.

I caught my reflection in a spoon while I was eating my cereal, and I remember thinking "wow, you're ridiculously good looking, maybe you could do that for a career." ---Derek ZoolanderDid the Gavin Newsom campaign think it was a good idea to turn to Vogue magazine for a glowing profile piece as perhaps a desperate attempt to counter the disastrous Atlantic magazine story that recently blasted the California governor who has 2028 presidential aspirations?Whoever that campaign person was could be finding his (or her) job currently at risk due to the hilarious blowback that resulted from the glam paean...

“The world sees you now: not as compassionate warriors, but as spoiled, entitled, reality-denying tyrants in yoga pants, wielding guilt and hysteria like switchblades.” —LHGrey on "X". The political grandstanding started way back in 1973 when the irascible Marlon Brando stayed home from the Academy Awards but sent an Apache princess, one Sacheen Littlefeather, to the podium to decline his award (Best Actor for The Godfather) on account of the 71-day standoff at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota between federal agents and Oglala Lakota activists who had seized the little town of Wounded Knee. After that, political...