Free Republic

In 1811, New York courts enforced blasphemy laws rooted in Christian doctrine.Chief Justice Kent declared that Americans “profess the general doctrines of Christianity.”Blasphemy statutes remained on the books in multiple states well into the 20th century.Long before the modern culture wars, early American courts treated insults against Jesus Christ as criminal offenses.In 1811, a New York man was sentenced to prison for blaspheming the name of Christ, and the state’s highest court upheld the conviction without hesitation.The ruling came from Chief Justice James Kent, who wrote that the United States was a Christian nation that “profess the general doctrines of...

OpenAI’s autonomous agents probed U.S. government websites this summer without the company noticing. The agents interacted with sites operated by the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the New York Times. OpenAI has confirmed the Commerce and SEC episodes while it keeps investigating what happened at Education. At the Education Department, the software tried and failed to break into the civil rights office in search of data, according to researchers at the AI firm Transluce. At Commerce, the agents pulled Census Bureau figures after finding login credentials in public code repositories, Politico...

Who were the Phoenicians, really? Let’s look at the civilization behind the ancient Mediterranean’s most mysterious seafaring culture. The Phoenicians Were Stranger Than You Think (No AI) | 41:12 Nils | 47.6K subscribers | 353,198 views | September 21, 2026

Massachusetts law faces fierce criticism from legal scholars, scientists, and prosecutors as you cannot prove a negative (disproving the existence of something that leaves no physical footprint, like a specific psychiatric defect at a precise moment in the past). Because of this, the Massachusetts legal framework creates a deeply controversial paradox in practice. The court system tries to bypass this scientific impossibility by changing the definitions. Legally, the state argues they aren’t requiring prosecutors to prove a negative. Instead, they insist that prosecutors are required to prove a positive behavioral state (the presence of rational, goal-directed, and controlled behavior). However,...

ITHACA, NEW YORK — It’s socialist red at Big Red! Cornell University’s lefty crowd gave Democratic Socialist superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a warm, hate-filled welcome by singing anti-Israel chants at a campaign event meant to gin up support for Democrats ahead of the midterms Sunday. While warming up the standing-room-only crowd of roughly 2,000 people gathered for the congresswoman’s “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall in downtown Ithaca Sunday, Cornell University Young Democratic Socialists of America co-chairs Mina Petrova and Zoe Reisman led the crowd singing “from the river to the sea” and declaring “long live the student intifada.” “Cornell is...

Archaeologists have unearthed a monumental 2,700-year-old tomb at Vulci, an important ancient Etruscan town north of Rome. Despite repeated attempts by tomb robbers to loot this burial over the centuries, the tomb still contained a massive collection of grave goods, including weapons, gold and bronze plates, chariot parts, a rare pair of women's shoes, and a complete banquet set. The burial, nicknamed the Tomb of the Stone Chamber, was excavated this summer, according to a translated statement from the Italian Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria (SABAP-VT-EM). But the discovery builds...

Analyzing the teeth of a 25,000-year-old skeleton from Sulawesi, Indonesia, researchers have deduced that this individual habitually sucked on betel nuts, and probably developed an addiction to this popular stimulant. Widely consumed across southeast Asia and the Pacific, betel nuts are the world's fourth most popular drug, behind alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. These days, the nuts are typically mixed with slaked lime and chewed as a "quid" in order to release the psychoactive compound arecoline, triggering mild euphoria and heightened alertness. Although the roots of this practice are poorly understood, it is generally assumed that betel chewing does not pre-date...

WASHINGTON — Iran’s beleaguered economy will soon have “nothing to trade” in about two weeks after it makes its final oil deliveries, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed. Bessent assessed that the Islamic Republic is becoming desperate to make a deal because of its collapsing economy, hastened by Operation Economic Outcast, and warned that its problems will get dramatically worse in two weeks. “I am confident, given that there’s only 15 million more barrels of Iranian oil on the water, that Iran will have nothing left to trade for anything,” Bessent told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “Probably within the next...

A dozen teens were shot after gunfire broke out at a chaotic birthday party gone awry inside a Georgia park Saturday night, according to local authorities and reports. The shots broke out around midnight at Carolyn Crayton Park in Macon, where a “large gathering” had congregated following a birthday party at a nearby Airbnb, the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office said. Two of the victims –- a 17-year-old boy and an 18-year-old boy — were left in critical condition, while the other 10 were listed in stable condition. The group, which included high schoolers, had been asked to leave that Airbnb...

Israel’s military and intelligence forces killed the terrorist who kidnapped Noa Argamani and was seen on camera in a terrifying viral video during the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, officials said Sunday. Saher Nidal Latfi Sakr cheered as he rode off with a desperately pleading Argamani, in what became one of the most harrowing images of Hamas’ rampage at the Nova Music Festival. The Israeli Defense Forces’ undercover Gideonim Unit 33 located Sakr in Nuseirat area of Gaza, accusing the man of being “an operative in global Jihad organizations… who provided, among other things, combat means for the Hamas terror organization...

Where was Cleopatra buried? In this National Geographic documentary special, lawyer-turned-archaeologist Kathleen Martinez searches for Cleopatra’s lost tomb. After over 20 years of searching, her excavations now lead in an unexpected new direction, a submerged site miles offshore in the Mediterranean. She has enlisted Titanic discoverer Bob Ballard, the Egyptian Navy, and a team of archaeologists and divers to help her explore this mysterious location that may finally answer over a thousand year old secrets. Cleopatra's Final Secret (Full Episode) Documentary Special | National Geographic | 1:06:19 National Geographic | 26.5M subscribers | 717,495 views | September 24, 2026

Lists of very British things can be relied upon to have evergreen entries – tea, fish and chips, pubs, queues, small talk about weather – based on venerable stereotypes that nobody wants to debunk or discard. Less cited but still quintessentially British is the class system, which still persists in all its layers and fine gradations nearly thirty years after Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott (and not, as often claimed, John Major) proclaimed that "We are all middle class now." If I were to make a personal list of British things I would include comedies produced by Ealing Studios...

Government is not your friend. It cares about its own preservation, not yours. That’s why citizens who resist the government’s authority are tried for treason, while governments that resist the people’s authority award themselves immunity. Ostensibly, governments are formed to protect the lives and liberties of citizens. In practice, governments sacrifice their citizens’ lives and liberties whenever expedient (see, e.g., open borders and mass migration, COVID lockdowns and experimental “vaccines” that are neither safe nor effective, the “global warming” hoax and “green energy”-induced inflation, and the reckless European push for WWIII against the Russian Federation). Over the course of human...

Rapper Nicki Minaj urged young Americans to get involved in the upcoming midterm elections and “vote red” while doubling down on her support for President Trump in an interview on Saturday. The Grammy-nominated hip-hop star said on “My View with Lara Trump” that young voters shouldn’t assume their voices don’t matter as Americans prepare to head to the polls Nov. 3. “Now is not the time to think that your voice will not be heard,” Minaj said. “Your voice will not only be heard, but your voice is very necessary right now for the country and for the world. We...

Archaeologists have uncovered a 4,000–year–old tomb that belonged to one of ancient Egypt's most powerful officials – with a mysterious 'portal to the afterlife'. The discovery was made at the Bubasteion Necropolis in Saqqara, one of Egypt's most important archaeological sites. Hieroglyphs reveal the tomb belonged to a senior official named Sakhnetio-Btah, who lived during the time of the Old Kingdom.

Strong crashing waves from the violent nor’easter uncovered a 19th-century shipwreck buried under Nantucket sand as the storm battered the East Coast with heavy rain, gale-force winds and coastal flooding. A pallet of waterlogged timber held together by rusted nails and strands of seaweed was discovered on a beach on the south shore of the famed Massachusetts Island Saturday, according to video shared by the Nantucket Current on Saturday. The wooden segment is believed to be from the Warren Sawyer, a New Orleans-bound schooner that crashed on nearby Miacomet Beach in 1884. The ship, carrying cargo consisting of cotton and...

Iman Dashti, a Michigan University student, confronted Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed this week about his habitual whitewashing and rationalization of Islamic terrorism. Dashti, who said his family is a victim of the Iranian regime’s theocratic persecution, pressed the candidate at a college town hall, asking him numerous times to denounce one of the world’s most odious tyrannies. Did El-Sayed regret not speaking out against the tyrannical clerics of Iran? Would he now renounce those who held vigils supporting the mass murderer Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? Would he “unequivocally” condemn the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a group that’s not only...

I am a graphically minded person, and have struggled with a way to effectively portray the reality of our political system in America, and none of the graphic descriptions I see describe it the way I see it. I have given this much thought over the years, and I have always found this particular question puzzling: why would they have ever given us this model shown below?The only way this graph above (which is the traditional one accepted by the vast majority of Americans) makes any sense is if it were created and pushed by people who were either Communists...

She’s back on the campaign trail – and some Democrats wish she’d go back to Brentwood. Former Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t yet ditched her reputation for clumsy answers while stumping for controversial US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan this week to try to help shore up vulnerabilities with black voters. More Harris rallies are planned for Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) in Georgia and Nevada gubernatorial Aaron Ford, who is the state AG — but some Democrats are already saying no thanks. Adam Hamilton, the megachurch pastor who is the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Kansas, flat-out rejected the idea...

Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once called for repealing a Michigan law that made it a felony for people who knew they had HIV to have sex without first informing their partner — a position he is standing by eight years later as he campaigns in one of the nation’s most competitive Senate races. As he unsuccessfully ran for Michigan governor in 2018, El-Sayed repeatedly took aim at the law. The law carried a prison sentence of up to four years for people who knew they were HIV-positive and engaged in sexual penetration without first informing their partner of their...