Free Republic

A child under the age of 12 has died through euthanasia for the first time since the law was changed two years ago. Health minister Sophie Hermans said the case had been reported to the committee that reviews all late-term abortions and medically assisted deaths of children. Hermans revealed the child had died at the end of last year when she presented the committee’s annual report to parliament on Monday. No details about the child’s circumstances, such as their age, gender or their medical condition, were given. The death has also been referred to the public prosecution service, as happens...

President Donald Trump on Friday ordered his administration to install signs outside the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History directing visitors to what the White House describes as "accurate" information about the nation's past. The executive order instructs the National Park Service, which maintains the sidewalks outside the museum, to place signs informing visitors about a White House report released July 4 that criticized the Smithsonian's portrayal of American history. Trump also directed the creation of a temporary exhibit intended to correct what his administration considers inaccurate historical information. The move follows a report from Trump's Domestic Policy Council that...

Matthew Taylor, a conceptual artist and political strategist, made influential ads and documentaries produced by Steve Bannon. Now he’s assisting the White House.Matthew Taylor officially holds one role in the Trump administration as a senior adviser at the National Endowment for the Humanities, but he has quietly become a key player behind many of the president’s bold initiatives to transform Washington and its cultural legacy.This year, Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Taylor to the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal agency that reviews government construction in Washington, to rubber-stamp approvals for projects such as the White House ballroom and the world’s...

George Santayana famously said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. The same is true for judicial overreach. Those judges who yield to the temptation to counter policies that are not to their liking are likely to repeat such excesses of power. That is why the recent decision of U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston is so concerning. While there are good-faith reasons why some have objected to the removal of slavery and climate change exhibits from national parks and monuments, this is not about the merits but the authority to make such changes. Kelley’s recent...

MILAN (AP) — Ilia Malinin, the U.S. figure skater nicknamed the “Quad God,” became the first person to legally land a backflip on one skate in the Olympics — although one trailblazing woman pulled it off when the move was still forbidden. The 21-year-old from Virginia delivered a crucial free skate on Sunday night for the winning American team, filled with his trademark quadruple jumps, and punctuated the gold medal-clinching performance with his dramatic backflip. It’s a move known today as “the Bonaly flip” — named for France’s Surya Bonaly. Nevertheless, it is Malinin getting showered with praise, prompting many...

A set of internal documents published by the Republican members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee (Judiciary GOP) has sent shockwaves through Brussels. Released under the title The EU Censorship Files, Part II, the investigation presents documentary evidence of a sustained strategy by the European Commission to influence public debate on social media and digital platforms, pressuring major tech companies to censor lawful content, alter their internal rules, and restrict certain political viewpoints. https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/2018683758006665352 The revelations go far beyond an abstract debate over content moderation. According to the material made public, the Commission has directly or indirectly intervened in at...

If you’ve never watched this, it takes less than two minutes, and it’s a nice piece of framework: In her much-discussed essay a few months ago, Helen Andrews argued that American institutions have been feminized. Talking about tendencies and averages — “feminine patterns of behavior” — rather than all men and all women, Andrews argued that a transition from masculine control to feminine control produces radical changes in our shared culture:Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition….Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order...

Several monuments on the Gettysburg Battlefield were recently defaced with oil, resulting in costly damage, according to park officials. In a release issued Friday, Jan. 9, 2025, the National Park Service at the Gettysburg National Military Park shared that several monuments on the Gettysburg battlefield had been "defaced with oil-based substances." "While possibly intended as symbolic or ritualistic, the damage is real and lasting," the release stated, adding that "porous stone absorbs oil deeply, making stains nearly impossible to remove."

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland will create a commission to study potential reparations for slavery after lawmakers voted Tuesday to override a veto by Gov. Wes Moore — currently the nation’s only Black governor — that disappointed many fellow Democrats. Moore said in his veto letter in May that it was a difficult decision to veto the bill, which was a priority of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland. But he wrote there has been enough study of the legacy of slavery, and it was now time to “focus on the work itself” to address it. “Now is the time...

LONDON (AP) — In the past year, tens of thousands hostile to immigrants marched through London, chanting “send them home!” A British lawmaker complained of seeing too many non-white faces on TV. And senior politicians advocated the deportation of longtime U.K. residents born abroad. The overt demonization of immigrants and those with immigrant roots is intensifying in the U.K. — and across Europe — as migration shoots up the political agenda and right-wing parties gain popularity. In several European countries, political parties that favor mass deportations and depict immigration as a threat to national identity come at or near the...

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal judge has permanently ordered Georgia’s prison system to keep providing some kinds of gender-affirming care for transgender prisoners, although the state plans to appeal. U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert last week ruled that a new state law denying hormone therapy to inmates violated their protection against cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She ordered the state to keep providing hormones to inmates who had been receiving therapy and to allow others medically diagnosed as needing hormone therapy to begin receiving treatment. “The court finds that there is no...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a law requiring K-12 schools to provide gender-neutral bathrooms by July 2026.

Doctors have admitted to performing “non-standard” gender-affirming procedures on youngsters and sometimes base treatment purely on cosmetic goals — as they see a spike in patients seeking out “nonbinary” surgeries. The medical professionals copped to sometimes even performing the life-altering procedures with little to no assessment of an individual’s mental health or gender identity, newly emerged videos obtained by The Free Press show. The recordings, some of which have been made at closed-door medical conferences in the US within the last few years, captured clinicians openly discussing how they were trying to fulfill a patients’ desires — even if it...

Graduate teaching assistant Mel Curth failed student on essay advocating Biblical values and traditional gender roles. A University of Oklahoma student who received a zero out of 25 on an assignment regarding gender norms says she was targeted for her Christian beliefs, citing a scathing response from the teacher's assistant who doled out the grade. Samantha Fulnecky is a junior pre-med student at the Sooner State's flagship university. "I was asked to read an article and give my opinion on the article, and the article was about gender binary and mental health and gender stereotypes, specifically in children, because it's...

NEW YORK (AP) — TV shows like “Abbott Elementary,” “Hacks,” “Heartstopper,” “The Last of Us” and “Yellowjackets” helped increase the ranks of LGBTQ+ characters on prime time by 4% over the previous season, according to a new study by the advocacy group GLAAD. This year’s “Where We Are on TV” study, released Thursday, counted 489 LGBTQ characters across scripted prime-time broadcast, cable and streaming shows — up 21 additional characters. It marks a boost after two years of decline, but remains far below the 2021-2022 record high of 637 characters. GLAAD added that the number of transgender characters on TV...

Images of a London billboard that appear to urge white Britons to get sterilized have started to circulate throughout social media. Interestingly enough, the billboard lacks the ‘diversity standard’ that’s normally applied to every form of marketing or propaganda that can be seen in the UK, and especially in London, where, according to the last census, ‘white English’ composed just 41 percent of the population. Apparently, for whoever is behind this billboard, that number of white Brits is simply not low enough. The message, which has been spotted on North London’s Holloway Road, reads: “Imagine a city less crowded… do...

Imagine a world without McDonald’s, Nike, or Kraft Foods. A world where the budget-conscious and time-strapped have nowhere to grab a quick bite, where almost no one drives a car, where television is extinct. Sound pretty bleak? This is the utopian vision of the Adbusters Media Foundation. “We will wreck this world,” Kalle Lasn declares in his book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge -- and Why We Must. That, quite simply, is the goal of the Vancouver-based organization he founded and runs. A self-described group of “anarchists” and “neo-Luddites,” Adbusters are not merely environmentalists, animal-rights activists,...

Whoever once (perhaps apocryphally) said that younger conservatives have no heart and older liberals have no brain had a point. Conservatives communicate more effectively with words and reason; progressives, by contrast, with pictures and emotion. The Right's dominance of AM radio—has long been an annoyance to the Left, a blemish on an otherwise near-perfect record of winning the culture. Talk radio is perhaps the only major cultural redoubt the Left has failed to breach. The New York Times, NPR, and Crooked Media have thrived in the podcast space, but here too conservatives punch well above their weight. Where imagery is...

On Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel appeared before the House Judiciary Committee for scheduled oversight and gave details on how the FBI is working to combat online threats against Americans. As our sister site Twitchy reported, our children are the main targets of these dangerous predators and destructive online platforms. The alleged murderers of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson have become prime examples of where this type of radicalization leads. Patel mentioned in his opening statement a nihilist extremist group called "764," then alluded to the April arrests of two of their leaders. In May, Patel posted about...

A range of phrases related to cultural issues were found scrawled on a rifle and ammunition found in the woods near where conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered on Wednesday, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation. Authorities are analyzing those messages as they seek to identify a suspect in the killing, sources said, but it’s not yet clear if they point to a motivation in the attack.