Free Republic

At the end of January, President Trump issued executive orders that revoked security details for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Dr. Anthony Fauci — despite ongoing, credible threats against their lives. “Do you want to have a large detail of people guarding people for the rest of their lives?” Trump asked. “I mean, there’s risks to everything.” Asked if he would feel partially responsible if something happened to any of them, Trump replied, “Certainly I would not … They made a lot of money. They can hire their own...

In 2022, Kari Lake narrowly lost the race for Arizona governor to Katie Hobbs. Many pundits predicted a bright future for the outspoken former television news broadcaster in the MAGA Republican Party. But this month, Lake came up short again, this time by a larger margin, in her Senate race against Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). She ran eight points behind Donald Trump and six points behind GOP candidates for the House of Representatives in Arizona.

Republicans and their cable news allies are still hot and bothered about climate change. A few examples: Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) accused Climate Envoy John Kerry of being a “grifter,” trying to charge taxpayers “a quadrillion dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.” Liberals don’t “really believe in global warming,” Tucker Carlson asserted, because “the entire theory is absurd and they know it.” “It’s, hot, hot, hot, all right,” Laura Ingraham told Fox News viewers. “After all, we’re in the middle of a season called ‘summer.’” Stronger hurricanes are “a fact of life in the Sunshine State,” declared Florida...

n June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a unanimous U.S. District Court decision that partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina violated the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Although Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that the practice leads to results that “reasonably seem unjust,” he maintained that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question,” beyond the reach of federal courts. Each state, Roberts indicated, should manage its own redistricting process. Four justices dissented. In an emotional statement, which she read from the bench, Elena Kagan warned, “Left unchecked as the court does today, gerrymanderers like these may...

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" "That," of course, refers to John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Abraham Lincoln while he was watching the popular play, "Our American Cousin," at Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. on April 14, 1865. The joke, whose origin is uncertain, satirizes people who miss the point because they equate commonplace occurrences and transformational events. Alas, Americans who are considering putting Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024 have fallen prey to the same false equivalence. Paul Boyer, who represents a swing district north of Phoenix in the Arizona...

s the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus spreads across the United States, roughly 15 percent of adults remain unvaccinated. At the greatest risk for severe illness and death, they have already overwhelmed hospitals and intensive care units in many areas of the country, reducing services available to people who have non-COVID-19 related medical issues.

In American Cosmic, D.W. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, draws on a six-year ethnographic study and the work of Carl Jung (Flying Saucers) and Jacques Vallee (Passport to Magonia and The Invisible College) to explain the widespread belief in aliens. Pasulka identifies three aspects of UFO inquiry: physical evidence (crash sites and artifacts); testimonials made by experiencers; and the persistence of belief whether or not there is verifiable evidence to support it. Pasulka also challenges the view that UFO believers are uneducated, fringe members of society. Some very well-regarded scientists, she indicates,...