Free Republic

New York City teachers, cops and firefighters lost nearly $30 million in pension funds tied to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Critics accuse Comptroller Brad Lander, who is custodian of the pension systems, of favoring the “woke” bank over shareholders. Five city pension funds had a total of $41,867,214 invested in the doomed bank as of Jan. 31, according to data provided by the comptroller’s office under a Freedom of Information request by The Post.

A federal judge appointed by former President Trump was ambushed by about 100 student protesters and a woke diversity dean who derailed his talk at Stanford Law School and accused him of causing “harm” to students. Tirien Steinbach, the school’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, subjected U.S. Circuit Judge S. Kyle Duncan to a lengthy harangue and made it clear to him his presence on campus was unwelcome, video of the event shows. “It’s uncomfortable to say this to you as a person. It’s uncomfortable to say that for many people here, your work has caused harm,” Steinbach...

A US Navy admiral begged the Cuomo administration to send patients to the nearly-empty hospital ship docked on the Hudson River during the height of the pandemic — but his pleas were met with politics and paranoia, The Post has learned. With city medical facilities packed with critically ill COVID patients in the spring of 2020 — and just days after the infamous edict by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to send COVID patients to nursing homes, which critics say resulted in thousands of deaths — the Trump administration sent the USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed ship, to relieve hospitals of patients with...

WASHINGTON — Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service, raising concerns about the influence of their onetime agencies over the social media giants. At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psychological operations” at the National Security Council, The Post has learned. Another is Matthew Williams, the company’s co-lead of its Trust and Safety department who spent more that 15 years in intelligence with the agency. The...

Gov. Kathy Hochul was called out about the state’s out-of-control crime surge on MSNBC — of all places — where an anchor on the ultra-liberal network even told her “we don’t feel safe.” “Here’s the problem. We don’t feel safe, you might be working closely with Mayor Adams, you may have spent a whole lot of money but I walk into my pharmacy and everything is on lockdown because of shoplifters,” said anchor Stephanie Ruhle during her interview with Hochul on her show “The 11th Hour” Friday. “I’m not going in the subway. people don’t feel safe in this town....

Paul Ryan says Trump will not be 2024 nominee Paul Ryan said he does not believe former president Donald Trump would be the GOP’s 2024 nominee for president. The one-time Republican House speaker — who has had an acrimonious relationship with Trump — offered a blistering assessment Thursday during an interview with Teneo, a D.C. consulting shop where he serves as a vice-chairman. “We all know he will lose, or let me put it this way: we all know he’s much more likely to lose the White House than anybody else running for president on our side of the aisle....

A non-citizen green card-holder in Manhattan may have been illegally voting in city elections for the past 13 years — possibly one of “thousands” of similarly bogus voters, a city Board of Elections whistleblower told The Post. Abdul Rahman Kargbo, 63, first registered to vote in November 2005. according to records from the New York City Board of Elections. He enrolled in the Democratic Party and voted in nine general and primary elections between 2008 and 2021, the records show. Federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting. “Non-citizens, including permanent legal residents, cannot vote in federal, state, and most local elections,”...

Hunter Biden allegedly begged one of Maryland’s “most wanted” bad guys to mail him crack cocaine at a luxury hotel. The ask was apparently made in a suspicious text exchange found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned hard drive. The messages show the first son communicating with someone over several months in 2018, asking for something to be mailed to him under an assumed name he was using, “Joseph Smith,” as in the founder of the Mormon church. While Biden never specified in the messages what he was asking for, The Sun reported the person on the other end of the texts...

The FBI raid of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf club could accelerate a widely expected presidential announcement, insiders close to the billionaire told The Post. “There are more and more people telling President Trump to announce right now. He’s got people calling him,” said one person in Trump’s orbit. There is an increasingly widely held belief among Trump’s friends and hangers-on that the energy and outrage generated by the federal search is the perfect springboard for an announcement in the months before the midterm elections in November. “In the days after the raid we saw all fundraising records broken. This...

The globalist billionaire who funded the woke transformation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello paid for a similar overhaul of James Madison’s house — where the author of the US Constitution has been shoved into a supporting role, while slavery and racism take center stage. No American flags fly at Montpelier, Madison’s plantation home in rural Virginia, and not a single display focuses on the life and accomplishments of America’s foremost political philosopher, who created our three-branch federal system of government, wrote the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, and served two terms as president. Instead, blindsided tourists are hammered by...

A federal judge in San Francisco tossed a lawsuit from former President Trump against Twitter because of its decision to ban him from the platform after the January 6 riots in Washington D.C. In his suit, Trump alleged that Twitter and other social media companies which moved to curb his speech were acting as de facto government agents and were therefore infringing on his first amendment rights.

The Republican Party needs a concerted effort to combat the “tragic” influence left-wing billionaire George Soros has had on crime and quality of life in the Big Apple and other major cities, GOP insiders told The Post. “We need a Republican George Soros,” demanded conservative commentator and Manhattan Republican Jackie Toboroff, a former City Council candidate from Soho, calling the progressive activist “a ghoul haunting our legal institutions, bringing chaos to our southern border and anarchy to our streets.” The perfect counter to Soros should have more than just deep pockets, said Toboroff. They’ll also need conservative street cred, social...

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is backing up a Jewish congressman’s incendiary claim that he heard protesters scream “Jew!” at him during a September event in New Jersey. Garden State Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer caused a stir during a Dec. 13 speech at Rutgers University in which he said he was set upon by anti-Semitic protesters on Sept. 20 as he and Raimondo made a series of stops in Bergen County promoting President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. The pair were greeted by around 100 hecklers in Glen Rock — most of whom, Gottheimer claimed, came from the local chapter of the...

Imani Oakley's campaign was duped into almost planning a fundraiser with a nonexistent rabbi. A lefty New Jersey Democrat learned the hard way that not all rabbis are kosher. The campaign of Imani Oakley, a 31-year-old progressive activist running for Congress in Newark, thought it was in negotiations to organize a fundraiser with like-minded Linda Goldstein — the “chief rabbi” of Gaza — but instead were chatting up a Big Apple lawyer running a parody Twitter account. On the bizarre parody account, Rabbi Linda Goldstein warns Hamas fighters to practice social distancing in terror tunnels; posts photos of herself posing...

Disgraced Gov. Cuomo’s one-time top aide took a none-too-subtle swipe at his successor Friday evening over her handling of the coronavirus. “Time to shift with the times — ribbon cuttings and photo ops drinking beers in UES bars maskless won’t get this job done,” Melissa DeRosa, the former secretary to the governor said in a tweet that was later deleted.

Scientific American found itself taking heat this month after the scholarly, 176-year-old magazine published an opinion piece titled “Health Care Workers Call for Support of Palestinians.” The screechy diatribe accused Israel of “vaccine apartheid” and “war crimes” among other alleged abuses. The piece blasted “Israeli settler colonial rule” and called on US healthcare and academic institutions to condemn “long-standing oppression” against the Palestinians and adopt the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the country. The piece was written by Harvard University research fellows Osaid H. K. Alser and Asmaa Rimawi; Seattle Children’s Hospital Dr. Sabreen Akhter; Mayo Clinic Dr. Nusheen...

All eyes are turning to NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker as she prepares to host the third and final presidential debate Thursday. President Trump and Joe Biden will square off at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., in a 90-minute debate starting at 9 p.m. Welker, 44, has been the White House correspondent at NBC News since 2011, after working as a news reporter in Rhode Island. Welker comes from an established Democratic family — who have poured cash into party coffers, and to Trump opponents, for years. Her mother, Julie Welker, a prominent real estate broker in Philadelphia,...

“Anyone who’s ever dealt with Welker knows she’s an activist, not a reporter. The White House press team views her the same way they would AOC or Pelosi if they walked in the office,” a senior White House official told The Post.

<p>Roving gangs of Antifa rioters spent Friday evening rampaging through the streets of Seattle — with police often nowhere to be found, video and eyewitness accounts show.</p> <p>Video shared by journalist Andy Ngo shows mobs of individuals clad in black destroying property, smashing windows and spray painting anything in sight, all with impunity.</p>

Washing hair is about to get a lot more complicated if a trio of Albany Democrats have their way. A new bill moving through the State Assembly and Senate will require “shampoo assistants” working in hair salons to complete a minimum of 500 hours of a 1,000-hour course in cosmetology. The completion of 500 hours will entitle applicants to a newly established “Shampoo Assistant Certificate.” The legislation is sponsored in the Assembly by Carrie Woerner of Saratoga Springs and John T. McDonald III of Albany. A companion Senate bill was introduced by Sen. Jen Metzger of Middletown. There is currently...