Free Republic

The American dream now comes with upgrade feesSafe neighborhoods, good schools, space, and reliable services increasingly look less like the baseline and more like premium add-ons.Over the last few decades, many industries discovered they could grow their customer base and profits by selling a cheaper, inferior version of their product while degrading the experience for everyone. Air travel and theme parks are obvious examples. Both learned that the advantages of scale could outweigh the obligation to deliver a high-quality experience.That philosophy did not remain in the realm of economics. It spread slowly but surely into American public life. The United...

Trump Uses Executive Order to Expand Hunting and Fishing OpportunitiesPresident Trump signed an executive order Thursday expanding the amount of federal land available for use by hunters and fishermen and removing years of anti-hunting regulations.The White House noted that the order erases years of regulatory actions that targeted lead ammo and fishing tackle.... Link to the EO itself:https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-reinvigorates-americas-hunting-heritage/"...The Order directs the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of Commerce to propose changes to polices that prevent access of public lands for recreation, infrastructure repair, and wildlife management, as well as to...

Why did the world's most powerful empire almost never use archers in battle? The Romans had access to bows. They trained archers. Yet they refused to make them central to their military strategy -- even as enemies surrounded them with arrows. It wasn't ignorance or cowardice. It was a deliberate choice rooted in Roman military philosophy, engineering, and culture. The Romans built their empire on heavy infantry, disciplined formations, and controlled violence. Archers -- with their unpredictability, distance, and dependence on open terrain -- threatened everything Rome's military system was designed to achieve. In this video, we uncover why the...

OVIEDO, Fla. - An 11-year-old boy in Oviedo will likely have to miss school to attend a mandatory court date after he was arrested, cited, and released to his parents for riding an electric dirt bike on the street without a driver's license. It comes as state and local governments, cities and law enforcement, continue to discuss how to safely regulate the rising use of electric bikes and scooters, micromobility devices, and standard motorcycles or vehicles. Florida 11-year-old arrested, cited for riding e-bike Chris Kirchner, the boy's father, said the sixth grader was riding his bike on the shoulder of...

Every year, the University of Wisconsin participates in the Big Ten Competition We Give Blood. We Give Blood is a program designed to create lifelong blood donors and help blood shortages around the United States. ... Gay men, bisexual men and transgender women who take PrEP or PEP — HIV prevention medications — are recommended to be screened out the moment they mention it on the donor questionnaire, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Although the FDA no longer asks about sexual orientation on the blood donor questionnaire, the underlying discrimination against gay men, bisexual men and transgender women...

Innocent Florida father is under attack by left-wing activists and local agitators after stepping in to defend his son from a violent bully Despite law enforcement confirming that the father acted completely within the law to protect himself and his child, outraged activists, including local branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), are demanding that the father be locked up for assault with a deadly weapon. According to Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek, the dispute began Thursday, September 17, on a Martin County school bus headed toward South Fork High School, WPBF reported. A 16-year-old...

The lone holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is pushing back after Clancy’s defense asked a judge to investigate his conduct and obtain cellphone records from the jury’s deliberations. Edward Paltzik, attorney for juror Michael Desronvil, blasted the motion as “Looney Tunes” and a “full-frontal attack on the U.S. Constitution.” He warned that investigating jurors for standing by their views could threaten the independence of jury deliberations, CT Insider reported. Below is the full statement from Paltzik: "The Looney Tunes motion filed yesterday by Kevin "Shooter McGavin" Reddington to investigate Michael is not just an attack on Michael for...

Reporters for CNN, MS NOW and Politico were blocked from entering the White House complex Thursday morning, hours after a DC federal judge ruled President Trump’s ban on the three media outlets was likely unconstitutional. In an eight-page order, US District Judge Tim Kelly told administration officials to immediately return reporters’ press passes that were confiscated Saturday and blocked enforcement of Trump’s ban for 14 days. However, an unidentified Politico journalist, CNN correspondent Betsy Klein and MS NOW reporter Laura Barrón-López were denied entry after presenting themselves at a Secret Service checkpoint.

Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing sources, that shipping giant UPS was sending a cockpit canopy and weapons bay door to the U.S. from Australia in late May when it was diverted. The F-35 is a fifth-generation stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin, and Washington controls the sale of these aircraft only to its closest partners and allies. A $24 billion sale of F-35s to Saudi Arabia was approved last week, but some lawmakers in Congress have already expressed concerns over the technology finding its way into Chinese hands. SNIP

It’s Commie Week for President Trump. First it was New York’s unlovely Mayor Mamdani Trump did the great honor of visiting at Gracie Mansion on Monday. Then on Wednesday the president rolled out the literal red carpet for another Communist dictator, President Xi Jinping of China. Donald Trump and the first lady warmly greeted Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, when they alighted from their plane at Joint Base Andrews and strolled together companionably down the red carpet as a 21-gun salute sounded, followed by the national anthems of both nations. Trump could not resist sending a US Air Force...

CAVE CREEK, Ariz. - Matthew Ammel, the former bodyguard to ex-Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, is accused of entering her Cave Creek home while she was out of town and causing more than $200,000 in damage, according to a probable cause statement. What we know: According to court documents, the incident occurred Aug. 30, but Sinema did not report it to deputies until Sept. 3. Sinema told deputies Ammel demanded she post a video to her X account and threatened to damage her paintings every 10 minutes if she did not. The probable cause statement says Sinema did not post the...

Fauci was kind enough (and stupid enough) to write his most intimate thoughts and feelings in a diary. He wrote this on a government-owned computer, making Fauci's inner musings the public's business. And the release of those more than 1,100 pages of his spectacularly narcissistic, self-congratulatory braggadocio will almost certainly have future historians asking one simple question: Why wasn't this guy in jail? It's been less than two months since that diary was made public, and researchers are still pulling astonishing nuggets of damning information out of it. Reason.com's Zach Weissmueller has taken a very deep dive into the diary's...

The US has warned southern states of a possible Moscow attack that would see Russia fire 600 km-range drones from commercial ships at Spain, France and Italy. We examine what is known and how the threat is mounting. US intelligence services have shared a report with several European countries pointing to a possible Russian operation using drones against targets in Spain, France or Italy, according to Spanish media. The information was first revealed by journalist Xavier Colás — a former Russia correspondent — in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. It traces the origin of the alert to CIA director John...

After posting an explicit warning that MAGA supporters, conservatives and apolitical applicants need not apply, a New York City kitten rescue is defending its screening process against mounting criticism, including from PETA, which called on the group to scrap the ideological ban. "Homeless animals don’t care which side of abortion you are on or whether you believe in global warming or support Palestine or Israel or if you don’t vote at all, ever. They care if you love them and will give them a good home," PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk told Fox News Digital. "We hope this policy, which is...

The 50th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong has just passed. (He died on September 9, 1976.). I did not see large amounts of commentary about Mao on the occasion of the anniversary, but everything that I did see was either neutral or positive, with the majority being praise. And as I looked around for any commentary I could find from around the date of the anniversary, most of what I found is again praise. How could that be? This man was a monster. Certainly, the death toll for which Mao was responsible was a large multiple of anything...

President Donald Trump's ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico suffered a setback Thursday after a federal judge ordered the administration to restore White House access to the outlets. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order Thursday blocking the ban and ordering White House officials to "immediately return, reinstate, and restore" the outlets' hard-pass press credentials while their legal battle continues. The order will be in effect for 14 days. Kelly wrote that the outlets had shown they were likely to succeed on their claim that their White House "hard passes were revoked without constitutionally adequate due...

You open FoodNeverComes, pick from 22 cuisines and start scrolling. Butter chicken looks good. So does bibimbap. You add a few dishes, watch the total climb and hit checkout. A tracker says a rider is on the way. Then you get a dummy AI-generated call from inside the site. He is outside your building, he says, but cannot find your street or door. Except there was never any food in the first place. The order exists only on the screen. "Order the food. Skip the bill," says the site. Its slogan is blunter: "The food never comes - but the...

What happens when Western liberals stop distinguishing between religious tolerance and political surrender? There was a time when “Never Forget” truly meant something in mainstream circles. Twenty-five years after September 11, in some corners of America and Western Europe, it has become worth asking exactly what we were supposed to remember. The obvious answer was the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered by Islamist terrorists in a brazen attack on the American way of life. But there has been another critical lesson buried in the rubble: Western civilization will not survive if it becomes so afraid of offending people that...

Minnesota Lt. Gov. and Democratic Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan is set to attend a fundraiser hosted by an individual who has served as the state’s Medicaid medical director during a time period where Medicaid fraud exploded onto the national scene. Dr. Nathan Chomilo has served as Minnesota’s Medicaid medical director since January 2020 and is listed as one of the hosts of an October 1 fundraiser supporting Flanagan, first reported by Townhall’s Dustin Grage. Much of Minnesota’s broader fraud scandal has centered on Medicaid-funded programs, including autism services and Housing Stabilization Services, and although Chomilo was not the official responsible...

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed Wednesday his country has “been the victim of terrorism” and blamed the US and Israel for instability in the Middle East during a wild address to the United Nations General Assembly. Pezeshkian, whose nation is the leading funder of terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah— reiterated claims that an American attack was behind the deadly Feb. 28 Minab school strike that killed an estimated 120 children. “The United States president described us as terrorists,” the 71-year-old told world leaders gathered in New York, referring to President Trump’s remarks to the same body one day earlier....