Free Republic

A half dozen states in recent years have enacted laws that aim to give parents more authority over what and how their children are learning. Individual districts and the U.S. House of Representatives have also passed their own versions of these policies, known as parents’ bills of rights. They vary by jurisdiction, but they often restrict instruction on race, gender, and sexuality, particularly at younger grade levels. Some require parental permission before a student can use a name or pronouns that don’t align with their sex assigned at birth. The policies can also give parents more latitude to opt their...

When another shooting happens at a place such as a school or a mall, politicians and the media are apt to claim that many hundreds of mass shootings occur each year. “Over the last year since Uvalde, our country has experienced a staggering 650 mass shootings,” President Joe Biden claimed last year. After a mass murder in Lewiston, Maine in late October, CNN said that there had already been “586 mass shootings” that year.

Analyzing Trump's presidency, a fascism expert argues he tried to use the office to make money. The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat described Trump to Insider as a "dedicated" and talented "grifter." When looking back on President Donald Trump's time in office, Ruth Ben-Ghiat sees someone who pursued a unique goal among his predecessors, one requiring extreme discipline and dedication from the unlikely leader. "Trump's aims as president were totally different from any other president, Republican or Democrat," Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who is an expert on fascism, told Insider. "His aims were autocratic in that he wanted to...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is best placed to take Trump's place as a 2024 GOP presidential nominee. An expert on authoritarianism told Insider that's because he's learned all of Trump's lessons. The expert added that DeSantis 'doesn't have the baggage of Trump,' and could rally voters.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Senate hearing Tuesday that people should stop going to bars “right now” — just as states like Texas and Florida, both of which have seen a dramatic uptick in the number of cases, were recently forced to close their bars a second time to stem the spread of the virus. “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news,” Fauci said. “We really got to stop that right now.”

A computer security expert says he found that a forensic image of the election server central to a legal battle over the integrity of Georgia elections showed signs that the original server was hacked. The server was left exposed to the open internet for at least six months, a problem the same expert discovered in August 2016. It was subsequently wiped clean in mid-2017 with no notice, just days after election integrity activists filed a lawsuit seeking an overhaul of what they called the state’s unreliable and negligently run election system. In late December 2019, the plaintiffs were finally able...

The head of an international vaccine group says that misunderstandings and false information about vaccines are spreading on the internet and should be stopped. Seth Berkley of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, spoke Tuesday to a gathering in Geneva, Switzerland, where the World Health Organization is meeting. Berkley said that false information “kills people.” He noted strong scientific evidence of the safety of vaccines. But, he said social media algorithms favor misinformation over facts. He added that such misinformation easily influences people who have not had a family member die from a preventable disease. Berkley said people must consider the belief...

MSNBC guest and Sirius XM radio host Mark Thompson said on Monday that he believes criticizing the FBI and law enforcement is a “high crime and misdemeanor.” During a discussion about the Nunes memo and the subsequent Democratic response on MSNBC, Thompson said he had “never seen anything” like the criticisms of the FBI and law enforcement from Republicans. “And the other thing, just to draw together, this whole thing with the NRA. The NRA and Trump are attacking local law enforcement. The White House is attacking the FBI,” Thompson said. “We’ve never seen anything like this coming from Republicans.”...