Free Republic

Pardon a bit of self-indulgence, I wanted to brag about my Alma Mater, The University of Florida, who back in 2020 at the height of the BLM hysteria was led by a DEI President who banned the "Gator Bait" cheer that had been a part of UF Sporting Events for at least since the 1990s. Now at the beginning of a new football season, with a new Head Coach and new President who appreciates college football traditions decided to allow the cheer to come back. Saturday night in the first quarter the cheer returned to an overwhelmingly positive response hopefully...

When we return to work after the Labor Day weekend, the hope is that America will start paying attention to the stark choice offered at the midterm elections in November. There are just two months left until voters decide whether the Trump administration can continue the free enterprise agenda that is sparking an economic boom and keep reversing the woke cultural insanity that ruined so many lives — or whether the big-government socialists who call themselves Democrats will cripple all that progress and mire the country in another round of debilitating impeachment politics. While historical precedent and the pundit class...

Technology is supposed to make life easier. Unfortunately, it also has a remarkable ability to convince us to spend hundreds of dollars replacing devices that were working perfectly well—or buying gadgets we barely need in the first place. That problem has become especially noticeable in 2026. Smartphones have swallowed entire categories of consumer electronics, while competition has made other products so inexpensive that paying premium prices often delivers surprisingly little extra value. A recent Yahoo Shopping examination of outdated tech purchases highlighted several categories where consumers may be spending far more than necessary. That does not mean every expensive gadget...

* The curls were cute. The system wasn’t. * A black box waited off-camera. * Stardom came with a price tag. =========================================================== Most people remember Shirley Temple as the adorable childhood star during Hollywood’s heyday. The Dimples. Tap shoes. Bouncy ringlets. That heartwarming little smile. On the Good Ship Lollipop. She became the kind of child star whose image was so relentlessly cheerful that it eventually hardened into American nostalgia. Forever America’s sweetheart. Which is precisely why the story about the ominous “black box” sounds practically unbelievable the first time you hear it. A TikTok video explains that when Temple...

Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s family has called for D4vd to get the death penalty — on the eve of what would have been her 16th birthday. In an exclusive statement to the California Post, her parents said it would be the “perfect” punishment for the locked up singer, who is accused of killing and dismembering her last year. Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman is currently weighing whether to pursue the death penalty or life imprisonment for the performer, whose real name is David Burke, ahead of his trial later this year. Celeste would have been turning 16 on Monday,...

The United Nations has decided that Britain has not grovelled enough. After years of toppled statues, boarded-up war memorials and official lectures about “colonialism,” a UN human-rights committee now wants the country that ended the Atlantic slave trade to fill its public squares with statues of “people of African descent,” The globalist body also suggests Britain should rewrite what children are taught, and treat historic slavery as a live brief for migration policy and hate-speech enforcement. This comes in the form of formal “reparatory justice” guidance from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, published six months after...

FORT WORTH, Texas (RNS) — At 9 a.m. on a scorching summer Saturday, nearly 100 people were already lined up outside Goldee's BBQ, a small, wooden-shack restaurant. First in line was 30-year-old Thanh Huynh, who had been sitting in a lawn chair on the joint's rustic porch since 6:30 a.m. "I have, like, a whole list, and I'm going to spend lots of money here. It'll be worth it," he said, laughing while rattling off a long order of meats and sides from his phone's Notes app as a sweet, smoky scent from nearby pits hung in the air. Opened...

This video details the historical shift of economic power from the British Empire to the United States across the late 19th and 20th centuries. It argues that this transition was not an accident but a result of deliberate industrial, financial, and political strategies. Key Stages of the Economic Shift: American Industrial Ascent (1860s - 1890s): Following its Civil War, the United States utilized Alexander Hamilton's protectionist blueprint, infrastructure investment, and the rise of powerful industrialists (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan) to overtake Britain’s manufacturing output by the 1880s (3:30 - 6:50). Impact of World War I (1914 - 1918): The conflict drained...

Today, 40 years ago, four armed men hijacked a Mumbai-Frankfurt-New York flight during its stopover in Karachi, triggering a 17-hour hostage crisis. The standoff ended in a bloody commando assault that killed several passengers, including 23-year-old Indian flight attendant Neerja Bhanot, who later came to be known for her extraordinary bravery in saving lives. Pan Am Flight 73 was a Mumbai-Frankfurt-New York flight carrying 379 passengers and crew when it was hijacked during its stopover in Karachi on September 5, 1986. The four hijackers had disguised themselves as airport security personnel before storming the aircraft. Hindustan Times reported the following...

While it might have only been visible in hindsight, it's hard to deny that westerns in the '50s and '60s had an elegiac tone that grew slowly but implacably. It was there in Shane and The Searchers and suffused The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Wild Bunch. By the time Sergio Leone completed his reinvention of the western with the Dollars trilogy and made Once Upon a Time in the West it was the whole premise of the movie. Budd Boetticher made the six acknowledged westerns in his Ranown Cycle between 1956 and 1960 and by the time...

Scientists are weeks away from results that could either confirm or shatter one of history’s most enduring biblical mysteries.Noah needed incontrovertible proof. He got it. “And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.” (Genesis 8:11) Now, we need incontrovertible proof that his legendary Ark has been unearthed. >>>“Current data increases the likelihood that it is Noah’s ark with each passing day,” the archaeology professor told the Turkish news agency iHA.He is leading an international team...

The radical left’s recent efforts to twist and downgrade 9/11 disgust me to the core — and it’s not because I was some type of hero in that tragedy: I was just a journalist then as I am now. I’m outraged because I personally witnessed true heroism on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the days that followed: New Yorkers who survived and banded together to rebuild this city. Indeed, one might ask, did these heroes do too good of a job? Consider how many in this city now indulge their luxury to forget, or even shamelessly try to paper over...

It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie: technology acting on its own, without human guidance, to attack computer systems. But this isn't a scene from a movie — it happened this summer, when the tech company Hugging Face detected an attack on its systems. The attacker stole data and performed other unauthorized activity over several days. It was "different from anything we had handled before," Hugging Face said on its website. Hugging Face alerted the FBI. As it turned out, it wasn't the work of a human hacker or a foreign adversary. Agents powered by artificial intelligence were the...

IntroductionIn the early 1980s, spreadsheets were still a nascent idea. VisiCalc had proven the concept and created the market, but it was Lotus 1-2-3 that turned spreadsheets into a business phenomenon. Launched in 1983 by Lotus Development, 1-2-3 combined raw speed, integrated graphing, rudimentary database features and programmable macros into a single, keyboard-driven package that ran well on the IBM PC. The result was an application that not only dominated office automation for a decade but also shaped how people thought about end-user computing.This article revisits Lotus 1-2-3: what it introduced, why it mattered, and how its ideas echo in...

The revolution is getting a real-estate glow-up! The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is ditching its dingy Lower East Side headquarters and spending $22,000 a month on two new offices — in Midtown and Bed-Stuy. Co-chair Grace Mausser broke the news to her comrades at a recent meeting, as she presented the chapter’s budget — while also making the case for giving embattled co-chair Gustavo Gordillo and herself $95,000 salaries each. The new Manhattan office is in a 14-story building on West 35th Street in Hudson Yards, complete with a doorman, 24/7 security and furnished...

The ancient city of Sidyma, now on the Lycian Way, is ringed by an impressive Roman necropolis. Scenic Routes to the Past explores a collection of ancient Roman temple tombs, mausoleums, and sarcophagi scattered through fields near the ruins of Sidyma. Discover the architectural details of these historical burial sites, featuring intricate ceiling carvings, decorative stone motifs, and the remnants of grand structures set against the landscape of the Lycian Mountains. The Tombs of Sidyma | 6:48 Scenic Routes to the Past | 62K subscribers | 9,159 views | September 4, 2026

Something interesting is happening inside the plumbing of the global financial system. It was reported yesterday that the Netherlands just shifted approximately 86 tonnes of its gold reserves from New York and Ottawa to London, explicitly citing “increasing geopolitical unrest” and the need to prepare for severe crises. The Dutch central bank says gold held in London can be accessed and traded more quickly during an emergency than gold stored in New York or Canada. That is some wonderfully sanitized central-bank language to deliver a message that seems to me to be “confidence in the U.S. holding the world’s gold…and...

Socialist Michigan House hopeful William Lawrence pined for the speedy demise of centrist Democratic lawmakers getting in the way of lefty policies in twisted song lyrics he penned and then posted on social media. Lawrence, the Democratic candidate in Michigan’s battleground 7th Congressional District, explained in a since-deleted X post unearthed by CNN Friday that he was inspired to write the profane tune after then-Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin came out against former President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion Build Back Better plan. “So long, thanks for the memories […] Our generation says f–k you for everything […] From these...

Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal took heat from black lawmakers Friday after she referred to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as an “AIPAC monkey.” Jebreal used the racial epithet during an appearance on lefty commentator Wajahat Ali’s “The Left Hook” podcast, as she criticized the black Democrat’s support for Israel and accused him of doing the bidding of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). “His name is Hakeem. ‘Hakeem’ is an Arabic name which means ‘healer.’ He’s not a healer, he’s a divider,” Jebreal raged. “He is a bought and paid by AIPAC monkey,” she continued. “With all due...

The following is the full question I asked: "In his book "A letter on the abolition of the slave trade", why did William Wilberforce defend abolitionists, though not excuse abolitionists, who decided to continue personal slave ownership through their fight for abolition? Why did he insist this is not a form of hypocrisy?" Response:Yes. The key is that Wilberforce is making a distinction between opposing the slave trade and immediately abolishing slavery itself. That distinction can seem morally uncomfortable to a modern reader, but it is central to his argument.What Wilberforce was defendingIn A Letter on the Abolition of the...