Free Republic

More than five years after Jussie Smollett staged a phony hate crime against himself, and nearly three years since his conviction by a Chicago jury, lawyers for the former Empire actor are asking the Illinois supreme court to overturn the guilty verdict. Defense attorney Nenye Uche argued on Tuesday that Smollett’s case should never have gone to trial because the actor had already entered into a binding agreement with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office not to prosecute him in exchange for him voluntarily agreeing to forfeit his $10,000 bond and perform community service, according to a report in the...

A Mississippi teen who sat in her kitchen alongside her two dogs moments after she allegedly killed her mother is accused of texting her friend that she had an “emergency” and trying to lure her stepfather back to the home. Carly Gregg, 15, is accused of murdering her mom, high school teacher Ashley Smylie, inside their Brandon, Miss., home March 19 when Smylie discovered her daughter’s “secret life.” Gregg, wearing a Nirvana band shirt, awkwardly shuffled around the house holding something behind her back, later identified as a .357 Magnum handgun, and facing the camera so it could not detect...

* Chinese-owned British automaker MG plans to build an assembly plant and R&D facility in Mexico. * The facility is being designed to assemble 100,000 units annually in its initial phase. * No other details on the facility—including exactly where it will be located—have yet been released. The Chinese-owned British auto brand MG has announced it will build an assembly plant and a research and development facility in Mexico. Before you spend an hour on its configurator for its new Cyberster EV sports car, be aware that MG has no plans so far to import any new vehicles north of...

Sean “Diddy” Combs spent the night locked up in a notorious Brooklyn federal jail that has long been plagued by tales of “barbaric” and “reprehensible” conditions for inmates — who have included notorious sex abusers R. Kelly and Ghislaine Maxwell. Combs, 54, was hauled away to the infamous Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park late Tuesday after he was ordered held without bail on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges. The embattled hip-hop mogul will be held there ahead of a scheduled Manhattan federal court hearing Wednesday afternoon, when he is expected to appeal the decision to keep him behind bars. The...

No vax, no care. So she had to get 3 vaccines. Within 10 minutes, she was blind in both eyes. She's now fighting for her life. Doctors are baffled as to the cause since it can't be the vaccines. ========================================================================= Executive summary This is one of the most horrific vaccine injury stories I’ve ever heard of. Alexis Lorenze is a 23-year old young woman with a history of Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria (PNH) since January 2024. The hematologist (Zahra Pakbaz) at her hospital (UC Irvine Health) refused to give her further care for her PNH unless she took the Tetanus, Pneumococcal...

@elonmusk Unless Trump is elected, America will fall to tyranny. Trump must win.

"If you’ve been in office for 30 years like Kamala Harris, you can stand up and, without an ounce of shame, look at the American people and say, ‘On day one, I’m going to lower grocery prices.’ [Brief video]

Last week, we gathered with other scholars at Ground Zero for a summit on terrorism and political violence. The mood was somber, not only because of reflections on 9/11 but also because of pained predictions of violence to come. It would have surprised nobody in attendance had they been told another assassination attempt against the former president would occur days later. This was, of course, not merely the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump. There have been many more plots over the past several years — aimed at politicians of all stripes — that never reached the point of gunfire...

Tech union workers at the New York Times have threatened to strike on Election Day over a bizarre list of demands that include pet bereavement leave, a four-day work week — and even a ban on scented products in break rooms, according to a report. The Times Tech Guild’s laundry list of demands during its protracted two-year battle for a contract has also included a call for unlimited sick time, job security for non-citizens who are in the United States on work visas in the event of layoffs and mandatory trigger warnings when discussing news events, Semafor reported. The union...

Democrats have spent much of the 2024 campaign reminding Americans of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. But on Capitol Hill, some are already getting worried about Jan. 6, 2025. They are hoping that Harris will win in November and they’ll flip the House, too — meaning it would likely be HAKEEM JEFFRIES holding the speaker’s gavel as the process of certifying a Harris victory gets underway. But it’s another scenario that is nagging top House Democrats — that Speaker MIKE JOHNSON might keep his majority as Harris wins and find himself in a position where he could obstruct the...

Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, the alleged attempted assassin who authorities apprehended Sunday after trying to kill former President Donald Trump, encouraged Iran to kill Trump in a book about the Ukraine war, according to excerpts circulated on social media. Routh appears aligned with a neocon agenda and often posted about the Ukraine/Russian conflict. He tried to find volunteers to fight Russia. The New York Times interviewed Routh about his efforts to recruit volunteers to travel to Ukraine and fight in the war. Routh appears to have been a Trump supporter in 2016 but turned against him by 2020. “Make Americans...

Murder and shootings plummeted in the Big Apple during the past fiscal year, according to the city’s annual management report, which was released Monday by Mayor Eric Adams. While soaring crime persists in some areas, such as tourist-packed Midtown Manhattan, the city generally fared better overall July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, when compared to the same period last year, the report found. Murder and manslaughter plummeted 15%, dropping from 424 to 359 of the crimes. Shootings fell 18%, from 1,140 to 932, and the report cites a big drop in gang-related violence. Burglaries decreased 13%, from 15,054 to...

Every now and then the question gets asked, "if you had a time machine, where would you go?"Aside from the money-making responses of looking up lottery numbers or the biggest winners in the stock market, one of the top responses always involves Hitler. Most would kill him as a blight on history.Given that Trump has been labeled as someone worse than Hitler, a terrorist, and a threat to democracy itself, is it any wonder that the average Democrat considers killing Trump their civic duty?The Democrats and their propaganda arm, the MSM, know what they are doing. Even after this latest...

Very strange how so much of this second attempt on President Trump's life involves sleazy Ukraine-linked characters. The Secret Service has confirmed that a second assassination attempt happened against President Trump, the second in two months, and quite a failure for the elite protection force. Questions abound as to how the accused killer, Ryan Wesley Routh, got into the Trump golf course in West Palm Beach, how he knew his schedule, and how he managed to get away after the Secret Service shot at him and he ran. Reportedly, he was only caught because an alert bystander saw him get...

Climate activist Greta Thunberg was named “Antisemite of the Week” by a Jewish group following her arrest at a recent anti-Israel rally. Thunberg “has joined the ranks of keffiyeh-clad protesters, brazenly voicing her disdain for the Jewish state,” the watchdog group StopAntisemitism said Friday, days after Thunberg was among those hauled off by Danish police during a demonstration at Copenhagen University. “She has sadly transformed her activism into a platform for vile Jew-hatred,” the organization added. The 21-year-old was arrested on Sept. 4 while protesting with the group Students Against the Occupation, which called on the university to cease all...

The way the American legal system is weighted against the little guy is exemplified by the $20 million defamation action brought Friday night by IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler against Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell. For one thing, a lawsuit like this typically will cost upwards of $1 million. For another, Lowell is one of the most feared lawyers in the country and few of his fellow legal eagles are keen to take him on. The good news is that, after several false starts, whistleblower advocacy group Empower Oversight managed to secure the services of Las Vegas defamation...

This evening, gunshots rang out across the parking lot of one of Trump’s golf courses in what some are calling a second assassination attempt. The President is fine. But Laura Loomer is racing to the scene anyway, as she did the last time—later claiming that it was the President who wanted her there to confort him in the aftermath of Thomas Crooks’ failed shooting. How Loomer expects to protect Trump isn’t clear, given that she is barred from owning a firearm anywhere in the United States. In fundraising emails, Laura Loomer tells her fans that she has been targeted by...

The Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that a congressional candidate currently serving a 20-year prison sentence can remain on the ballot in the election, running for the state's U.S. Representative seat, according to Anchorage Daily News. Eric Hafner, a registered Democrat who has reportedly never resided in Alaska, is in prison in New York after he pleaded guilty to harassing election officials in New Jersey in 2022. In the primary elections in August, Hafner received 467 votes out of approximately 109,000 and had his name placed on the ballot soon after as the third and fourth-place candidates, Republicans, dropped out...

Do you swipe in to your office building to meet your in-person mandate, but leave as soon as possible? There’s a word for your covert strategy: “coffee badging.” It is where you show up to the office long enough for a coffee or a meeting expressly to fulfill in-office mandates — while primarily continuing to work from home whenever you can. This new workplace lingo was popularized by videoconferencing company Owl Labs. The company defined it as “showing face at the office and then leaving.” In its 2023 report of 2,000 full-time U.S. workers, 58% of hybrid employees said they...

@JDVance If you were to ask what caused me to change my tune about President Trump from 2016 to 2020, I could give you a few reasons. But what we're seeing in Springfield really drives it home. Housing costs skyrocketing. Communicable diseases on the rise. Car accidents, crime, and insurance premiums moving up. Citizens complaining for months (or longer) and mostly ignored. But it's not just what's hapening, it's the way our leadership responds to it. Confronted with many of their citizens begging for relief, our broken elites offer only scorn. "It is racist," they tell us, to get angry...