Free Republic

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments this month in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which focuses on whether a local government can make it a crime to live outside when adequate shelter is not available. This case has resulted in an inaccurate and harmful framing of homelessness by suggesting that there are only two potential outcomes: Either arrest those who are unhoused or homelessness will become an inevitable and permanent fixture of the urban landscape. But there is a third path: providing subsidized housing with services to people experiencing homelessness. Too often, policymakers ignore the obvious solution to homelessness —...

A special grand jury recommended last year that Atlanta’s district attorney charge three current and former US senators for allegedly aiding former President Donald Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election loss. The panel urged Fulton County DA Fani Willis to indict Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and former Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and David Perdue R-Ga.), according to its 28-page report, released Friday. Willis, an elected Democrat, did not immediately comment on her decision not to charge the trio when she indicted Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators on Aug. 14 on charges including racketeering, historically used against organized crime.

It is easy to get caught up in the current state of American politics, but it is essential that we also keep an eye on the future, especially as authoritarians on the left are aggressively trying to influence the next generations to buy into their statist ideology.A recent survey conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek revealed that almost half of millennials support the idea of misgendering someone being considered a criminal offense. This means that a huge chunk of Americans in this age group want to use the government to force people to censor themselves, which is a...

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”- Friedrich NietzscheWe’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.Case in point: the FBI.The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are...

Prayer, even silent prayer, could be a prosecutable offense in the United Kingdom, thanks to recent developments. Catholic priest Father Sean Gough from Birmingham, England, finds himself in the midst of a legal battle for allegedly violating a censorship zone banning prayer on public streets around an abortion facility. This marks the latest in a string of thought crime cases rocking fundamental freedoms in the U.K. First came Isabel Vaughan-Spruce. The video of her arrest went viral, showing this pro-life volunteer worker interrogated and searched by Birmingham police in response to the mere act of praying in the privacy of...

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors. In Britain, the gymnast Louis Smith has just been suspended for two months by British Gymnastics. This 27-year old sportsman's career has been put on hold, and potentially ruined, not because of anything to do with athletics but because of something to do with Islam. Last month a video emerged online of the four-time Olympic medal-winner and a friend getting up to drunken antics after a wedding. The video -- taken on Smith's phone in the early hours of the morning -- showed a...

Dinesh D'Souza is accused of giving too much money to a candidate who sought to replace former New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. Producer Gerald Molen tells The Hollywood Reporter the charges are politically motivated. Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, whose documentary 2016: Obama's America took a critical look at President Barack Obama and was a surprise hit in 2012, will be arrested in New York on Friday for allegedly violating campaign-finance laws, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Federal authorities accuse D'Souza of donating more than is legal to the campaign of Wendy Long, who ran in 2012 for the U.S. Senate...

In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. “I’d been a part of the deliberations which established this high-value interrogation unit [HIG],” Blair explained at a...

Making a Federal Case by: Emily Ham, July 24, 2008 In a study documenting the total number of federal crimes within United States law, researchers have found that there has been a major increase in the definition of such offenses since the founding of the nation in 1776. “When the country started, there were basically three crimes: piracy, counterfeiting and treason,” said former Attorney General Edwin Meese, “At the time of our [1998] report, there were some 4,000 crimes.” Meese, who now serves as chairman of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, noted that while two centuries...

Chemical plant technician Steven Lozano really got nailed: speeding, an expired inspection sticker, an expired driver's license and dubious proof of insurance. The cost of his traffic infractions: $675 and a wait in line recently at Houston Municipal Court. What Lozano didn't know — few people do — is that only about half of the hefty fines had anything to do with his traffic conduct. The rest were "surcharges." They included money for a prison-guard training institute at Sam Houston State University and money for a juvenile-crime program at Prairie View A&M, among other things. "A lot of this has...

[CAPITALISMMAGAZINE.COM] The public education monopoly can't stand the thought of "unqualified" parents teaching their own children. That is why they are cracking down on home schooling, even as a new study shows that thousands of public school teachers themselves are shamefully unqualified to educate the nation's students. In California, the state's hostile education department is tightening the screws on enterprising parents who have taken the initiative and turned their family rooms into classrooms. State Deputy Superintendent Joanne Mendoza wrote in a July 16 memo to all school employees that without official teaching credentials, these parents no longer can file...