Free Republic

The financial services industry has evolved on the topic of equality over the last five years. Five years ago, firms were encouraged to bring greater diversity and equality to the workplace. Over time the message became increasingly urgent and instead of encouraging, industry writers started to guilt firms to speed up the process of back-office employees and advisors hired reflecting greater diversity and equality. More recently the tone of articles has shifted to shaming firms that haven’t made enough "progress" in equality/diversity advances. The shaming has been primarily focused to broker/dealers that are small and midsized vs. larger broker/dealers that...

Herman Cain was fond of saying that you need to ask “the Right Questions.” His point was simple. If you saw a car slammed into a tree, you didn’t worry about what color it was. You needed to be sure that the occupant(s) of the car had been extricated. Then you would go on to check for leaking gasoline and other ongoing hazards. After that, you could figure out why the crash happened. In short, you had to consider what was most important at the moment, and then proceed to other questions only as the more important ones were answered....

I have no idea how 2024 will ultimately play out for Republicans, but I believe if anyone is going to eclipse or defeat Trump, it will be someone like DeSantis who has learned from Trump and could critique him from the right. I wrote about this for Politico today. Ron DeSantis Knows the Formula to Defeat Donald Trump

The Joe Biden who swore his oath of office on the west front of the United States Capitol one year ago on January 20, 2021, is not the Joe Biden Americans see shuffling around the White House today. Last year, Biden presented his policies as a can't-fail way to "build back better," "shut down the virus," and lead the American economy out of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Flanked by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Biden's party controlled two-thirds of American government, and it seemed, on paper at least, that Biden would be able to do what he wanted. For those...

San Francisco children make up just 13% of its population, the smallest share of kids among the 100 most populous cities in the United States. Yet for the past 22 months and counting, an outsized burden of COVID-19 mitigation has been placed on them. As a parent, I have become increasingly concerned by the lack of cost-benefit analysis and rigor over which policies are the most effective or even necessary, and which policies may be causing long-term damage. Early and consistent evidence that children are at very little risk of serious COVID-19 complications has been largely ignored, while paranoia and...

Mayor Eric Adams admitted Tuesday that even he doesn’t feel safe riding the city’s subways. “Day one, Jan. 1, when I took the train, I saw the homelessness, the yelling, the screaming early in the morning,” said Adams, who entered office at the start of the year, during a press conference. “Crimes right outside the platform. “We know we have a job to do, and we’re going to do both: We’re going to drive down crime, and we’re going to make sure New Yorkers feel safe in our subway system,” he said. “And they don’t feel that way now. I...

For nearly fifty years, from the end of World War II until 1992 millions of people in Eastern Europe endured the oppression and brutality of Communism, courtesy of the former Soviet Union. For decades Soviet Russia maintained control over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, the Baltic and Balkan countries, and all of the ‘Stans’ with an iron fist. Tolerating no dissent in those countries, and responding brutally if it occurred. Ask the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968. In 1956 the Soviet Union sent troops and tanks to crush the Hungarian popular uprising, killing and wounding...

Many Republicans are giddy over a Gallup poll released this week that found a 14-percentage point shift in the nation from majority Democratic support to majority Republican support during the past year. Understandably so; this marks the largest Republican advantage in over 25 years. The last time Republican support was this high was in 1995, after the Republicans, led by my father, Newt Gingrich, won the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952. But Gallup's findings don't mean that Republicans hold all the cards. The reality is that independents will have a massive impact on the elections' outcomes...

Last Thursday wasn't a good day for President Joe Biden. First, the Supreme Court shouted "LET'S GO BRANDON" by killing his prized private-employer vaccine mandate. Then Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema destroyed his dreams of banning voter ID to ensure one party rule in America. After hearing all that bad news, I'm guessing Biden put a lid on it and headed for the White House basement where his wife prepared baby food, fed him milk from a bottle and then tucked him in with his favorite blankie. But we can't afford to rest because of two short-lived...

There is something that has been hanging over my mind over the last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Between all the measures installed by the government, be it lockdowns or even the current vaccine mandates coming up around the country, every action that the government has taken thus far has been rooted in the idea of preventing death. More so, it has been in reaction to the tremendous fear of the population to the idea of death. This concept has driven policy so much that even vaccinated people, who with two vaccine doses have practically zero chance of dying from...

resident Biden has built a catalog of racist and offensive statements about black Americans and members of other minority communities throughout his career. However, Biden’s latest political stunt comparing the resistance to voting for a federalized takeover of our elections, to a sequel of Jim Crow, takes the cake. In his own words, Biden claimed opposition to the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was, “Jim Crow 2.0.” Biden also claimed that this new Jim Crow 2.0, is because of voter suppression and election subversion. It strikes me as odd that a President who grew...

Real Rabbi or Phony Rabbi?-Rotten people can study Torah - and dress in rabbinic garb. In these extraordinary times we are compelled to step out of our comfort zone and rethink many things we always took for granted. Many of the leaders and institutions we always supported, and which we believed were fundamentally on our side, are taking off their masks. It behooves us to see them for what they are, and not serve as their apologists. Chazal taught us long ago that before the arrival of Moshiach the leaders would be mostly Erev Rav – essentially, moles working to...

Emma Watson, the actress who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies, made news recently when she declared on Instagram “Free Palestine” and declared her “solidarity” with the oppressed Palestinians. Why her opinion should matter tells us something about the mental state of our giddy globe. What’s next? Should we consult Mick Jagger for his views on the expansion of NATO? Or ask Randy Quaid for his thoughts on the IMF? Watson’s sentiment isn’t wrong, writes Stephen Flatow: the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank do indeed need to be free, but she’s sending her message to...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett drew the ire of abortion advocates with a comment during oral arguments for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case in December. The case, to be decided this year, may spell the end of Roe v. Wade and its policy of abortion-on-demand. Recent responses from abortion proponents show how blind they are to the compelling realities of abortion alternatives. Barrett, an adoptive mother herself, asked if a woman who lacks access to abortion is freed from forced parenthood when she leaves her baby at a safe location for adoption. Barrett’s comment was...

“The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted.” So states Mollie Hemingway in her important book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections(2021)I spoke with Mollie on the radio when her book came out. She told our audience, “I found after 2020 the way that you weren’t allowed to talk about [the election] to be completely suspicious. We all lived through it. It was the weirdest election of our lifetime---but then you weren’t allowed to notice that in any way.” Nothing to see here---move along. In order...

A pair of Republicans want Ohio to join a national effort to amend the U.S. Constitution with term limits for members of Congress and a balanced federal budget. "It’s time for the states to step up," Rep. Riordan McClain, R-Upper Sandusky, said. His proposal, House Joint Resolution 1, would submit Ohio's official application for a Convention of States to create new amendments in three specific areas: A balanced budget, term limits and reducing the jurisdiction of the federal government. "Congress has had plenty of time to act on the subject items that we’ve laid out," McClain said. "But they've shown...

An antitrust proposal scheduled for markup in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday would arbitrarily choose which American businesses are subject to stringent new laws and massive fines unless lawmakers fix the bill’s serious flaws. The bill, S.2992, the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act, is aimed at imposing new parameters on ‘Big Tech’ business practices. But it uses flawed metrics to attack certain businesses and favor others. If the legislation’s cosponsors – Sens. Klobuchar, Grassley, Durbin, Graham, Blumenthal, Kennedy, Booker, Hirono, and Hawley – are serious about addressing consumer concerns, rather than simply penalizing popular businesses, they should...

Big Tech’s push to censor speech and content has reached a new level in weirdness. Microsoft, which controls 89 percent of the productivity software market, has slipped into its operating system a bizarre spellchecker which notifies users when they are using words outside of the ‘approved’ language of the far-left radicals.Microsoft’s spellchecker flags words that might be offensive in the following ways:Age biasCultural biasEthnic slursGender biasGender specific languageRacial biasSexual orientation biasAccording to the tech writers at Gizmodo examples include changing “blacklist” and “whitelist” to “accepted” or “allowed list,” and swapping the gender-specific “postman” with “postal worker.” Similarly, “humanity” or “humankind”...

A rare moment of truth from billionaire National Basketball villain Chamath Palihapitiya the other day when he frankly suggested in an interview that “nobody cares” about the persecution, internment and extermination of the Uyghur minority in China. The “nobody” that he refers to are the elites who he hobnobs with and who often own or play for NBA teams. China can do no wrong because it is a source of vast capital. You don’t criticize a mountain of money like that. You don’t even suggest there is anything worth assessing. You just remain silent. Of course, China is poised to...

It's only mid-January, but we are starting to see signs of spring -- at least if we're talking about coming out of the "nuclear winter" that Democrats and other professional fearmongers have tried to keep the country in for the past several years. As I wrote last week, the country is waking up to the fraud that's been perpetrated on us with COVID-19. This is thanks in part to people like megapodcaster Joe Rogan, whose two podcasts featuring Peter McCullough and Robert Malone have garnered more than 80 million views between them. McCullough and Malone, both medical doctors, have raised...