Free Republic

Oh, the emotions in the United States of America here in the Year of Our Lord 2026! There's despair. There's anger. There's...well, there's mostly anger. Heck, I tend to be dead inside and the partisan political acrimony has even been getting to me. In a recent VIP column, I wrote that I was taking a brief break from my workday habit of perusing the Opinion sections of The New York Times and Washington Post because I'm starting to worry about that kind of crazy being contagious. That followed a week or two of me venting in various ways about the...

This happened to my father when he moved from Italy to America around 1930. My mom told me that his given name was Giuseppe, and that he went by Joseph once he moved to America... Why do I bring this up? Well, recently I heard about some of my friends coming across a person who will only refer to Jesus Christ as Yeshua... The idea goes something like this: “When Jesus was on this earth, he wasn’t called Jesus. His name would have been pronounced closer to ‘Yeshua.’ So, all these people going around the United States calling him ‘Jesus’...

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice just got a leader to oversee its newly created unit to prosecute fraud, and it so happens he’s from California, which has been making headlines for its alleged fraud cases. The US Senate on Tuesday confirmed Colin McDonald, an associate deputy general at the Justice Department, 52 to 47 to be in charge of the DOJ’s new fraud division. The division is part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to declare “war on fraud” that was exposed in Minnesota and could also appear in California. “Similar schemes are now surfacing within California’s...

WBCA NCAA Division III Coaches’ Poll — 1/6/2026 The WBCA NCAA Division III Top 25 women’s basketball coaches’ poll, with teams’ RECORDS THROUGH SUNDAY in parentheses, total points based on 25 for first place through one point for 25th, ranking in last week’s poll, and first-place votes received. NOTE: The next poll will be published Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a career criminal who stabbed a woman more than 40 times in an unprovoked attack in a Dollar General parking lot. 54-year-old Lemar Beasley stabbed Cheyenne Kastens, 36, in the parking lot of a Fruitland Park, Florida, Dollar General last month.

“Is that Fale Pea?” a Seattle police officer asks another. “Yeah, you know him? “He’s notorious for random assaults on Third,” the officer says.

A black 18-year-old accused of fatally stabbing his White 16-year-old classmate in a classroom at Baytown Sterling High School in Baytown, Texas, has been charged with murder and is being held on a $3 million bond. Aundre Matthews reportedly killed his classmate, Sterling High School sophomore Andrew Meismer, in what prosecutors say was a fight over a vape pen. “Defendant followed the complainant to the bathroom, searched his pockets, did not find the pen, but instead found a pair of scissors on the complainant’s person. He took the scissors and put them in his own waste band,” prosecutors told the...

Charlie Kirk’s assassination will dominate the headlines—but before the truth is even clear, the disinformation machine is already spinning. This video exposes how suppression, radicalization, and division are weaponized—not by ideology, but by systems designed to keep you outraged, divided, and distracted. We’ll reveal: • Why suppression is the biggest red flag in history—and why it always signals weakness, not strength. • How highly suggestible people are radicalized—not by one side or the other, but through media outrage loops, algorithmic echo chambers, and deliberate manipulation. • The illusion of “left vs. right”—a distraction designed to pit neighbors against each other...

A U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee made up of scientific experts that was axed by the Trump administration earlier this year is resurrecting itself and meeting Thursday with no official blessing or formal ties to the statistical agency. The reconstitution of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, rechristened with an “Independent” in front of its name, is a defiant gesture by the research community against the Trump administration’s elimination last winter of three advisory committees made up of outside experts from private industry and academia. The decision to get the committee members back together is the latest effort by statisticians, demographers...

When it was recently reported that protesters disrupted Columbia University’s graduation ceremony, one might ask: which one?In addition to its main commencement, Columbia hosts no fewer than 10 separate graduation ceremonies, often referred to as affinity graduations. These include distinct events for black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQIA+, Jewish, native, international, disabled, and first-generation/low-income students.While Columbia claims that it has a “long history” of offering race-based and other segregated graduation ceremonies, this practice only dates back to 2005.To put this in perspective, Columbia was founded in 1754. For more than 250 years, the university held a single, unified commencement ceremony for all...

President Donald Trump on Monday said he had ordered the firings of the boards of visitors for all of the U.S. military’s service academies, the outside advisory panels that help oversee academic programs and student life, saying that the government’s training grounds for military officers had been invaded by so-called “woke” ideology. “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard.” The president did not immediately announce the appointment...

Lady Liberty will be depicted as a black women on a coin -- the first time in the nation’s history Lady Liberty has not been a white woman -- the U.S. Treasury Department announced on Thursday. The coin, worth about $100 face value, is part of a commemorative series to honor the 225th anniversary of the U.S. Mint. “The 2017 American Liberty 225th Anniversary Gold Coin is the first in a series of 24-karat gold coins that will feature designs which depict an allegorical Liberty in a variety of contemporary forms-including designs representing Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Indian-Americans among others-to reflect...

Israel used its humanitarian aid mission to Nepal as a cover for trafficking 25 Nepalese babies, two Spanish-language networks reported. Iranian HispanTV and Venezuela's Telesur networks broadcast the reports. Telesur is the national public television channel in Venezuela, which is rebroadcast throughout Latin America on other public television networks. HispanTV broadcast the original report, which quotes an unnamed NGO as stating that "Israel uses humanitarian help as a cover for trafficking of 25 babies in Nepal." Telesur picked up the report last week. The report stated, correctly, that of the 25 babies that were taken to Israel, "15 of them...

Eh, this could get messy. Apparently, Steve Bannon was talking to media in Italy and said some rather confrontational things about Elon Musk. (CP) “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person.” “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon added. “Before, because he...

You can smell it in the air. A deep sense of betrayal among Democratic voters. An underlying realization that the Democratic party’s politburo — Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, and their courtiers of elected official and consultant sycophants — sold voters a bill of goods: the gaslighting of the public on President Biden’s decrepitude; the false idol of the Kamala Harris “campaign of joy” as a smart last-minute stand-in; and the repeated cowering to the far left whose wokeness and moral condescension turns off most voters. In a just world, one might expect a formal no-confidence vote on this leadership failure....

There are many people who only became aware of Elon Musk after he dropped Ron DeSantis and took up a position in support of President Trump. Most of those people do not have a reference for Musk complying with the platform control demands of Brazil, France and Turkey [Durov (Telegram), and Pavlovski (Rumble) did not]. Most of those Pro-Elon people also do not have a reference for Musk claiming he and his legal team did not know former FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker was the legal counsel for Twitter at the time of the purchase, until after independent journalist...

A Yale-affiliated psychiatrist encouraged LGBTQ+ people whose family members voted for Donald Trump to cut ties and shun their relatives over the upcoming holidays — as fallout from the election reached hysteria on left-leaning MSNBC. Yale University child psychiatry fellow Dr. Amanda Calhoun dug into the issue of the post-election crises in the LGBTQ+ community with MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Friday night. “There is a societal push that, if somebody is your family, they are entitled to your time. And I think the answer is absolutely not,” Calhoun said in a clip shared online. “So, if you are going through...

This gentleman is amazing. I transcribed a little bit of his soliloquy below. It is worth watching and listening in its entirety. To the Democratic Party. I'm voting for Trump, but I have to say. You guys got me on this one. You are correct. I can definitely see, Trump is causing division. You guys have said over and over, you said, how can you as a Christian support somebody like Trump when all he's here to do is cause division and separation. And you're right! So let me read something to you. This is Luke 12:51-56. And this is...

North Carolina school reassigns DEI staff amid statewide crackdown The University of North Carolina Wilmington is the most recent college to close its “diversity and inclusion” office. The school announced the decision to shut down its Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion last week, ... “Based on policy requirements and consistent with System Office guidance, UNCW will close the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion (OIDI), eliminate the Chief Diversity Officer position and shift the cultural and identity centers from OIDI to Student Affairs,” Chancellor Aswani K. Volety wrote in a message to the school. “Careful and deliberate thought was...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology made headlines in May when its leaders told faculty to discontinue the practice of requiring mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion statements in faculty hiring. It blazed a trail for elite colleges, as Harvard did the same a few weeks later, and Cornell also appears to have followed suit. But a prominent MIT alumni group argues the move is not enough to protect free speech, academic freedom and intellectual diversity, and is calling on campus leaders to go further. The MIT Free Speech Alliance in mid-June released a set of recommendations urging the university to establish...