Free Republic

My last two posts have been about the new Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, just out (December 31) from the Federal Justice Center. The Chair of that Center is U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts. The latest version of the Manual is the Fourth Edition. The prior version in 2011 was the Third Edition; and there were also two prior Editions from 2000 and 1994. In those previous two posts, I principally criticized a newly-added chapter in the Fourth Edition titled “Reference Guide on Climate Science.” Today, I want to take a look at another chapter titled “How Science Works.”...

Governments habitually lie. They lie so often that it is peculiar for governments to claim “authority” on anything other than falsehood. Before the Gutenberg press and general literacy, “authorities” announced self-serving lies in the public square. With the arrival of newsprint, “authorities” disseminated State propaganda as daily news. Radio and television revolutionized the mass manipulation of minds. The adoption of the personal computer, the rise of the Internet, the commercialization of pocket computers posing as handheld phones, and the sticky web of an ever-growing social media complex have made it possible for government “authorities” to reach inside every human brain...

Trash and rats are piling up as snow stays uncleared, but Mayor Mamdani has more important things to do. Under socialism, New Yorkers are learning the hard way how fast a city can go downhill. Garbage filled streets is providing New Yorkers with the Warmth of Collectivism. https://t.co/hewdZHfJKq — Rob Schneider 🇺🇸 (@RobSchneider) February 3, 2026 In Mayor Mamdani's New York City, they don't actually remove the snow, they just spread it out on the street so that everyone suffers equally. It's called Socialist Snow Plowing. pic.twitter.com/LW7EcOJoKe — Joel M. Petlin (@Joelmpetlin) February 4, 2026 NYC outdoor death toll rises...

The House Judiciary Committee’s recent findings present a simple but unsettling conclusion. American speech is being curtailed in the United States, not because Congress has changed the First Amendment, but because foreign governments have learned how to route around it. Europe’s Digital Services Act, presented as a domestic regulatory framework, has in practice become a lever for global speech control. Its effects now reach deep into the American public square. To see how this happens, begin with a basic fact about the modern internet. Major platforms operate with global content moderation rules. They do so not out of ideology but...

“The world sees you now: not as compassionate warriors, but as spoiled, entitled, reality-denying tyrants in yoga pants, wielding guilt and hysteria like switchblades.” —LHGrey on "X". The political grandstanding started way back in 1973 when the irascible Marlon Brando stayed home from the Academy Awards but sent an Apache princess, one Sacheen Littlefeather, to the podium to decline his award (Best Actor for The Godfather) on account of the 71-day standoff at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota between federal agents and Oglala Lakota activists who had seized the little town of Wounded Knee. After that, political...

A set of internal documents published by the Republican members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee (Judiciary GOP) has sent shockwaves through Brussels. Released under the title The EU Censorship Files, Part II, the investigation presents documentary evidence of a sustained strategy by the European Commission to influence public debate on social media and digital platforms, pressuring major tech companies to censor lawful content, alter their internal rules, and restrict certain political viewpoints. https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/2018683758006665352 The revelations go far beyond an abstract debate over content moderation. According to the material made public, the Commission has directly or indirectly intervened in at...

alifornians have a right to be angry about Minnesota. It’s getting all the federal government attention for its illegal immigration, street violence, fraud and graft when California, in fact, is the king of all those civic sins. Yes, Minnesota and its lead city, Minneapolis, are impressive in the scale of fraud, estimated currently at billions of dollars, according to the Cato Institute’s recent “Fraud Update.” Not bad for a blue state, especially one with just 5.8 million people. But let’s be honest. Minnesota’s inhabitants are mere pikers compared to those in the Golden State. There, the level of fraud and...

BASF plant in Ludwigshafen, 1881.In its ‘Climate & Energy’ newsletter on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal’s report on Germany’s chemicals industry headlined ‘The Agonising Decline of One of Europe’s Core Industries’ reads less like an industry report than a forensic examination of an industrial autopsy. Once Europe’s formidable manufacturing powerhouse, Germany is now presiding over the steady dismantling of one of its most foundational industries – chemicals – under the combined weight of self-inflicted energy scarcity, climate moralism and geopolitical miscalculation. In Politico’s view, the auto sector has already assumed the role of Exhibit A in Germany’s economic self-harm. But...

As discussed in the previous post, the Federal Judicial Center’s recently-updated Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence contains a new chapter on Climate Science. That chapter focuses on the promoting the hocus pocus of “attribution” studies that seek to blame every latest hurricane or flood or drought on human emissions of CO2, and thus on fossil fuel producers in particular. In my post, I characterized the authors’ write-up of the methodology of these attribution studies as relying on “logical fallacy,” and as “double-talk and bafflegab.” But I think that I inadequately articulated the nature of the fallacy. So I will try...

n less than a month, two “ICE watchers” have been shot and killed by immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis. On January 24, a federal agent shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse. His death follows that of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was killed on January 7. Both Pretti and Good participated in “ICE watching,” an anti-immigration-enforcement tactic that can involve tracking ICE agents, filming arrests, and alerting other activists of enforcement actions. While participants frame ICE watching as a “community safety” measure, these tactics often place untrained civilians in direct, high-stakes confrontation...

According to a report at the Texas Scorecard, Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, is going after the fraudsters abusing the H-1B visa system: Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a wide-sweeping investigation into alleged abuse of the federal H-1B visa program by Texas businesses, issuing civil investigative demands to three North Texas companies suspected of operating sham enterprises to fraudulently sponsor foreign workers. [snip] Standing outside a single-family home listed as the office address for one of the companies highlighted in recent reporting, Paxton credited BlazeTV and Texas Scorecard personality Sara Gonzales with prompting the investigation. [snip] A portion of...

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Pearl Harbor happened. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and destroyed the bulk of our Pacific fleet. But nobody talked about it. Nobody reported on it. In fact, the press said that there was no attack, perhaps only a Japanese protest against American government actions in the Pacific. If you suggested going to war with Japan, you were called a Nazi, a racist, and a xenophobe. That sounds absurd, but it’s effectively what’s going on right now. Every day in a thousand different ways, we are being attacked. The republic is being threatened....

It is truly remarkable how easy it is to fool the smartest people. And especially when you tell them they are helping to save the world. So something called the Federal Judicial Center has just come out with a new edition, the 4th, of something called the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The publication date appears to be December 31, 2025. The idea that the federal government, and in particular the judiciary, needs a reference manual on scientific evidence seems to date from the 1990s. The courts, then as now, were facing an increasing volume of cases involving complex scientific...

When we talk about political violence, we almost always assume that its perpetrators are young men. That makes sense: men are statistically more likely to engage in physical aggression and get arrested for violent crimes at higher rates. At the same time, many are dealing with rising unemployment, declining educational achievement, and growing social disengagement. Given all that, researchers may reasonably assume that young men are driving greater tolerance for political violence. New data complicate that assumption. A recent survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers found that under certain conditions, women were more likely than men to...

Hillary speaks, but she doesn’t listen. She half-absorbs events and the lives of other people, and coughs out a kind of instinctive Reader’s Digest annotated version, but mangles all the details as efficiently as bad AI. If Michael Kelly can rise from the grave, this will be the week. He’s been summoned. Kelly was the most relentlessly savage chronicler of the Clinton administration, and of the Clintons personally, but his opening shot was so subtle you had to squint to see what he was doing. In a long feature story that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in...

Seattle’s communist Mayor Katie Wilson has announced plans to mobilize the city’s police force to gather intelligence on ICE agents conducting immigration enforcement operations and share that information with “community partners” on the streets. Wilson said she will also bar federal immigration officers from utilizing city-controlled property, “including parks, parking lots, plazas, vacant lots, garages, and Seattle Center – for civil immigration enforcement.” The mayor urged other local government entities, including the Seattle School District and Seattle Municipal Court, to adopt similar restrictions. “Whoever you are, and wherever you come from: if Seattle is your home, then this is your...

We may speak the same language, but our words don’t mean the same things. Perhaps the most discouraging condition of the modern age is the absolute breakdown in communication among members of society. It once seemed reasonable to expect that the Internet and social media might aid in our understanding of each other. Instead, online forums are filled with people who speak the same language but interpret words entirely differently. With the arrest of former CNN commentator Don Lemon for allegedly violating the religious rights of worshipers in Minneapolis, Democrats and the corporate news media have universally condemned Attorney General...

A Virginia Commonwealth University nurse recently instructed her TikTok followers to contaminate ICE agents’ food or render them lethally paralyzed. She did this through a series of social media posts, calmly and with a little smirk on her face. If people can no longer trust nurses or food service personnel, the economy will eventually crash and the country will come apart. A Miami nurse recently allegedly put up a Facebook post stating: “I will not perform anesthesia for any surgeries or procedures for [Make America Great Again]. It is my right, it is my ethical oath, and I stand behind...

We are witnessing before our eyes is the transformation of the German economy into a command economy. Contrary to repeated assurances by the Federal Chancellor, the German state apparatus is growing at an accelerating pace. What we are witnessing before our eyes is the transformation of the economy into a command economy. You may recall: In the days between last year’s federal election and the appointment of the new government, a political window opened in which Germany committed fundamental breaches of its own fiscal rules. The outgoing Bundestag decided on a redefinition of the debt brake and ultimately executed its...

When United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas first appeared, the Obama era was only beginning, Obama’s ‘New Middle East’ was still far on the horizon, and the ‘Iran Deal’ had yet to be dealt. What made Jamie Glazov's magnum opus so remarkable was how thoroughly it not only recapitulated the ugly history of communism, but anticipated what was only an emerging alliance between two terrible ideologies united by their hateful mutual ambition to destroy civilization as we know it and love it. Even as it connected the dots between the two totalitarian ideologies, United in...