Free Republic

Ben Jones, the actor turned politician best known for playing Cooter Davenport on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” died on Sunday from a heart attack, according to his wife Alma Viator. He was 84. Viator announced her husband’s death in a Facebook post on Sunday afternoon. With a photo of Jones holding his dog, she wrote, “I lost the love of my life today. Ben passed from a massive heart attack. He was home resting in his favorite chair waiting for the Braves to come on and whoop the Yankees. Ben had the most amazing, rich, full life. He loved and...

On Chesterton and Trump: A DialogueQ: How would G.K. Chesterton have viewed President Trump?That's a fascinating question, and it strikes at genuine tensions in Chesterton's thought.On one hand, Chesterton would likely have recognized in Trump something he admired: a contempt for the consensus of educated elites, a challenge to what he saw as the pretensions of the progressive intelligentsia, and a willingness to speak for the interests of ordinary working people against the condescension of cosmopolitan institutions. Chesterton spent much of his career skewering the self-satisfied rationalism of secular intellectuals and the "New Men" who thought themselves fit to remake...

Verizon customers across Southern California were experiencing service outages Sunday after multiple fiber lines were vandalized, the company said. The damage was affecting some wireless and internet customers in Los Angeles and other parts of the region, according to a Verizon spokesperson. The company did not specify exactly where the vandalism occurred or how many customers were impacted. Verizon engineers were working with third-party vendors at the affected sites to make repairs and restore service. The company described the vandalism as a threat to public safety, saying damaged communications infrastructure can leave entire neighborhoods without access to essential services, including...

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed wants Americans to believe that opposition to Sharia in state courts belongs in the same historical indictment as some of the darkest crimes ever committed on American soil. That is not a paraphrase invented by his opponents. It is the unmistakable thrust of his own remarks. Speaking to the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in October 2022, El-Sayed declared: “You can’t understand a Sharia ban without understanding the Trail of Tears.” He then invoked white supremacy and said the “same exact forces” were behind Native American removal, the destruction of Black...

Dem Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed on Sunday refused to break ties to notorious hate streamer Hasan Piker — while hinting he wants to sock the middle class with the bill for his Medicare for All plan. El-Sayed even left the door open to continuing to campaign with Piker in the pol’s general election matchup against Republican Mike Rogers — despite arguing that the notorious Twitch streamer’s 2019 comment, “America deserved 9/11” was dumb. “It was a dumb statement,” El-Sayed told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He disavowed it. So yes. America didn’t deserve 9/11. “But to sit here and play...

Iran released a rare video Sunday of its supreme leader appearing in prime condition amid his long absence from the public eye and swirling reports of deteriorating health. The country’s semi-official Mehr News Agency flaunted video of Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, sitting in a circle and speaking with a group of men, with no context of when or where the scene took place. Khamenei was notably free of any of the horrific injuries he was believed to have suffered in the initial airstrikes of the war that killed his father, suggesting the video was taken before the conflict began. The supreme...

President Trump signaled on Sunday that he's prepared to allow economic pressure on Iran to mount — as opposed to ordering a new military offensive — even as the country continues to defy the U.S. Why it matters: Only a week ago, Trump was on the verge of ordering a return to major combat operations. But in an interview with Axios, he did not make any new military threats. Trump also didn't express any anger or frustration about the fact that Iran has been holding up an announcement on a deal with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On...

New Orleans has become the first city in the US to use artificial intelligence to answer emergency 911 calls — but critics warn it could have deadly consequences. The Orleans Parish Communication District — which gets over a thousand emergency dials a day, in what is among the highest volume of calls in the country — is routing the 911 calls to an AI agent that decides which ones get bumped to human dispatchers and which get handled by the bot itself, according to the Shreveport Times. “I was a 911 dispatcher for 11 years and this is the worst...

Make no mistake about it, communism has breached the shores of America. You thought it was bad when Democrats raided President Trump's home for no reason. You thought it was bad when Democrats rounded up over 1,500 Americans following the fed-surrection on January 6, 2021, and destroyed their lives, resulting in numerous suicides. You thought it was bad when Democrats punished the alternative electors who broke no laws but were ready to vote Trump into office in January 2021 if they were called to do so. You thought it was bad when Democrats and their intel services went after devout...

Eighty-two years ago, on November 1, 1942, America's distilleries were faced with a second prohibition, this time coming from the War Production Board. No more liquor would be produced by the nation's distilleries, as the entire efforts of their industry was needed to produce war alcohol. It is one of the many ways that America's booze was affected by the World War. Bullets and Booze: How WWII Changed America's Drinks | 16:30 The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered 1.64M subscribers | 150,246 views | November 1, 2024

A parody artificial intelligence chatbot launched by a candidate trying to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress was taken down Friday after the former House speaker attacked the bot for being “sexist.” California state Sen. Scott Wiener launched the chatbot this week to mock fellow Democrat and city supervisor Connie Chan, who earned Pelosi’s endorsement. Wiener and Chan will face against each other in November for Pelosi’s seat. The website ConnieChan.ai bills itself as “the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask,” a knock on Chan’s reputation among critics as a progressive NIMBY who has opposed numerous...

An American transgender refugee is back in the United States after spending a period inside a dangerous Islamic asylum center in the Netherlands, but she's still not happy with the US. Jane-Michelle Arc, 48, fled to Ter Apel, the Netherlands' largest refugee camp, after Trump was re-elected in 2024 - saying that she feared for her safety as a trans woman living in America. She claimed asylum in the European country - and while she endured tough conditions in the sqaulid camp where stabbings and attacks are commonplace, she came to the realization that she actually wanted to return to...

Explanation: Have you contemplated your home star recently? Featured here, a Sun partially eclipsed on the top left by the Moon is also seen eclipsed by earthlings contemplating the eclipse below. This spectacular menagerie of silhouettes was taken in 2012 from the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area near Page, Arizona, USA, where park rangers and astronomers expounded on the unusual event to interested gatherers. Also, faintly visible on the Sun's disk, just to the lower right of the dark Moon's disk, is a group of sunspots. A new solar eclipse will occur this week and give many people in northern...

Short video, Marco Rubio speaking about communism.

They’re struggling to foot the Z bill. Gen Z can no longer afford to revel in the footloose and fancy-free freedom of youth, as nearly half of twenty-somethings are financially supporting both a child and a parent simultaneously, forcing most to tap into their retirement savings just to stay afloat, per alarming 2026 data. It’s a tough break for the youngsters amid the surging cost of living crisis, a squeeze leaving roughly 70% of Americans in danger of healthcare, food and housing insecurity. And these newcomers to adulthood are left holding the bag. Oft-maligned as “lazy,” skittish brats with zero...

BRADENTON, Fla. - Bradenton police arrested 34-year-old Lindsey Gore on Sunday morning following a Saturday night hit-and-run crash that left a man critically injured. Bradenton police arrested 34-year-old Lindsey Gore on Sunday morning after a serious crash along 14th St W. Investigators said Gore was driving a Toyota 4Runner around 10:50 p.m. on Saturday when she struck a man walking his bicycle across the road. Police said Gore drove away from the scene in the SUV, which had noticeable damage to its front headlight. The victim was taken to the hospital where he remains with life-threatening injuries. Gore was charged...

Veteran actor Jeff Bridges has seen enough of Hollywood’s enthusiastic embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) to know it’s hastening the demise of people like him in an industry that has delivered so much to so many through pure human endeavor. But all is not lost for the son of Lloyd and brother of Beau. He used an interview to outline that if you can’t beat it, enjoy it, as he charted AI’s development since he first came across it as a video game character in the classic Tron back in 2010. If all else fails he can simply monetize his...

Albin Rhomberg, the man who photographed the bodies of more than 16,000 preborn babies in a shipping container as a grad student in 1982, spoke with Live Action's Simeon Harris for an interview about the discovery. Key Takeaways: * In 1982, Rhomberg photographed the contents of a repossessed shipping container: the bodies of more than 16,000 preborn babies. * Melvin Weisberg, the owner of a medical lab, had received the bodies of the aborted babies from abortionists in several states for storage, but had stopped making payments. * The men who came to repossess the storage container were told it...

A female detective in Britain has been fired and reportedly placed on a blacklist that includes rapists and murderers after she criticised her force’s LGBT policies as appeasing people with “cocks in frocks”. Detective Constable Rachel Fletcher has been fired for “gross misconduct” after she openly denounced guidelines from her former Northumbria Police force, in which supposedly transgender offenders could request to be strip-searched by a female officer. According to the Daily Mail, Fletcher was reported to a disciplinary panel by multiple male colleagues over her use of the phrase “cocks in frocks” when criticising the transgender policy of the...

I bought a package of boneless chicken breasts from Kroger with a label weight of 4.94lb at $2.28/lb, or $11.26 total. When I got home, I weight the package, which includes the packaging and diaper, and it weight 3.84lb, more than a pound under weight including the packaging. I took it back for a refund and this is where it gets interesting. The service manager, who was very nice to me, said that she couldn't take the package back because it left the store and asked what I was willing to take to keep the package. She then offered to...