Free Republic

The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America issued a statement on same-sex relationships and sexual identity today. A resolution was proposed at the 20th All-American Council, which is currently underway in Baltimore, to affirm the Church’s stance on these issues. However, the OCA statutes dictate that such doctrinal and moral matters fall not within the competency of an All-American Council, but that of the Holy Synod. Thus, the hierarchs, under the presidency of His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon, issued a statement. In it, the hierarchs reaffirm the Church’s unchanging teaching that sexual activity is blessed only within the confines...

LGBT activists are pushing to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as “male” or “female,” arguing that scientists cannot know how an ancient individuals identified themselves. Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino took to Twitter earlier this month to point out that transgender individuals “can’t escape” their sex, not because it’s physically impossible to change one’s sex, but because archaeologists who find their bones one day “will assign you the same gender as you had at birth.”

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive...

Parents rallied outside of Luther Jackson Middle School in Fairfax, Va., on Thursday in opposition to a proposed policy change that would increase penalties on fourth- through sixth-graders for “misgendering” or “deadnaming” people — for example, addressing a boy as “he” even though he calls himself a female, or calling “transgender or gender-expansive” people by a name other than their chosen name.The Fairfax County School Board was initially scheduled to consider this change to the Student Rights and Responsibilities guide at their meeting that evening, but they rescheduled discussion of the topic to June 16.“It could be that some people...

Despite obvious resistance, within days of Emmanuel Macron’s re-election, France began progressing with the fourth dose of Covid injections for everyone and introduced a “digital identity assurance” app. The European Union (“EU”) as a whole is planning to introduce their digital identity application sometime this year to enable people to enjoy the “greater flexibility ideal for post-pandemic life.” However, a mere two days after his victory over Marine Le Pen, Macron launched a new law compliant with Brussels’ demands – the creation of the “Digital Identity Guarantee Service” (“SGIN”) which will allow French citizens to have a digital identity card...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 70 We often hear that Woke Marxism is a new ideology in the world. I've even said so. Well, it isn't. It's just an old one repackaged in various ways without any essential changes made to it at all. Critical Race Theory is Race Marxism in the same way as what we usually call Marxism is Class Marxism. Radical Feminism is Sex Marxism. Gender ideology and Queer Theory are Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Marxism, or just Gender Marxism or Sexual Marxism to be more concise. Fat studies is Fat Marxism. Disability studies...

Humans are varied. Some are old, some are fat, some are from Kentucky, and others are from Kenya. Some can touch the tip of their nose with their tongue, and others can flatulate on command. We all have intersections of privileges and disadvantages. The point is not to see each of us as unique individuals, but to parse all of humanity into groups based on these obscure and often meaningless attributes so that a new minority group can be created.

...By rigidly splitting Americans into two groups, white versus nonwhite, it reinvents the discredited 19th-century “one-drop rule” and applies it to a 21st-century society in which the color line is more fluid than it has ever been. In reality, racial diversity is increasing not only at a nationwide level but also within American families—indeed within individual Americans. Nearly three in 10 Asian, one in four Latino, and one in five Black newlyweds are married to a member of a different ethnic or racial group. More than three-quarters of these unions are with a white partner. For more and more Americans,...

The recent Bruce Springsteen concert celebrates the return to post-COVID normalcy...for some. Everyone attending this event was required to show proof of vaccination, which raises some uncomfortable "what if" questions.What if:Forged vaccination documents were used to gain entrance?A handful of people standing in line had a fever and were coughing violently, but carried written proof they'd received the COVID vaccine?A dedicated Springsteen fan had religious, allergy, and medical reasons for not getting the inoculation?An attendee "identified" as a male, but the vaccination "certificate" indicated that she is a female?A handful of enthusiastic "Bruce Tramps" arrived at the concert wearing hermetically...

Rep. Ilhan Omar has once again exposed a rift in the Democratic caucus. A dozen House Democrats rebuked the polarizing Minnesotan for appearing to equate the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban, adding that her comparison "at best discredits one's intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice." Omar's fellow members of the Squad were incensed. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) alleged that, by "skipping private conversations" and publicly chastising Omar in a way that will likely draw news coverage, they put Omar in danger. "Freedom of speech doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of...

Keri interviews Dennis Pratt, a 40-year libertarian, who came from the left. He moved to New Hampshire for the Free State Project 2.5 years ago. This year he is the Chef de Village of the Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest 2021), which he reimagined and redesigned, an effort that doubled its normal attendance, shattered the prior 18-year record ticket sales three months before the festival started, and ultimately sold the festival out, for the first time in its history. Check out more information on PorcFest: https://porcfest.com.

A block of cheese proved to be the undoing of a man involved in a massive drugs conspiracy. Carl Stewart used the EncroChat encryption service in a bid to evade detection, adopting the handle "Toffeeforce" to cover his tracks as he supplied large amounts of class A and B drugs. But after the encryption device was busted by law enforcement agencies, Stewart was identified after sharing an image of a block of cheese in the palm of his hand, from which his fingerprints were analysed. Stewart, 39, of Gem Street, Vauxhall, appeared at Liverpool Crown Court for sentencing after he...

President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday rescinded a Trump-era plan to collect facial scans and DNA from immigrants when they apply to enter the United States. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it has “withdrawn a proposed rule that would have expanded department authorities and requirements for collecting biometrics by removing age restrictions; requiring submission of biometrics for every applicant, petitioner, sponsor, beneficiary, or other individual filing for or associated with any immigration or naturalization benefit or request unless DHS waives or exempts the biometrics requirement.”

The day you became better at BitClout I went from being bad at BitClout to great at it after listening to one Clubhouse. I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you won’t have to find one live...

Portland police detained a crowd of over 100 protesters during a Friday night demonstration, stemming a march only minutes after it began.The mass detainment was an apparent use of kettling, a police tactic of surrounding a crowd and containing people within a perimeter. Police told the crowd they were detaining everyone within the boundary for the “investigation of a crime” but did not specify the nature of the alleged crime.Demonstrators initially gathered in the Pearl District about 8:30 p.m. and started marching roughly a half-hour later. Police threatened to arrest protesters minutes after the march started, saying those walking in...

"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness."—Aldous Huxley, Brave New WorldAs Aldous Huxley said it would be, the Brave New World is foisted upon us.Enter "sissy hypno," a fascinating and eerie steampunk-style mass-scale psychosocial "movement" (for lack of a better word) that encourages men to renounce their masculine identity and become — as the term is used in the LGBTQ4GF150+ community — a "sissy."The term "sissy" has a long colloquial use dating back to the 1890s. In its original conception (and the way it was...

In September 2019, four researchers wrote to the publisher Wiley to “respectfully ask” that it immediately retract a scientific paper. The study, published in 2018, had trained algorithms to distinguish faces of Uyghur people, a predominantly Muslim minority ethnic group in China, from those of Korean and Tibetan ethnicity1. China had already been internationally condemned for its heavy surveillance and mass detentions of Uyghurs in camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang — which the government says are re-education centres aimed at quelling a terrorist movement. According to media reports, authorities in Xinjiang have used surveillance cameras equipped with software...

Megvii, a company that Hunter Biden invests in supplies technology for: “a China-wide surveillance program called the Skynet project, which uses more than 20m closed-circuit tv cameras to monitor citizens..."

The police department in the small hill country town of Kerrville, Texas, reported finding a man's body last Saturday, in the early evening, in the Pedernales River near the state highway-87 bridge. The dead man's name would not be released until his family had been notified. The victim apparently drowned due to excessive beer consumption while visiting "someone" in Fredericksburg. When he was found, he was wearing black fishnet stockings, 10 inch spiked heels, a red garter belt, a pink G-string, purple lipstick, dazzel dust on his eyelids, 2 1/2 inch false eyelashes, and a Biden T-shirt. The police removed...

John Harrison (Alex Kendrick) is a high school basketball coach whose team is just about to win their state championship. In the last few seconds of the game, however, his son Ethan misses the shot that would have sealed the deal, and the team loses narrowly. If that isn’t bad enough, it is announced that a major steel plant in the town (and thus its largest employer) is closing, and dispersing to other areas in the country. Because of this, many of the town’s residents will have to relocate. This causes major, transformational changes for the school. The school’s principal,...