Free Republic

In July 2024, I flew to a pop-up city named Vitalia that aimed to “make death optional.” Situated in the heart of a special economic zone on Roatan, a Honduran island, Vitalia advertised itself as a place to fast-track drug research outside of America’s burdensome regulatory constraints.The AI-generated pictures I’d seen made it look sleek and futuristic, like a cross between South Beach Miami and The Jetsons. Since its launch seven months before, Vitalia had attracted scientists, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts—among them longevity guru Bryan Johnson and Balaji S. Srinivasan, the author of The Network State. The special economic zone...

Senator Rand Paul is on a campaign to knock President Donald Trump off of his warpath. During Paul’s appearance on Fox News Sunday, host Shannon Bream asked the Kentucky Republican what information he wanted the government to provide about its military strikes in the Caribbean Sea. But Paul said that a briefing wasn’t what he was after. “A briefing’s not enough to overcome the Constitution,” Paul said. “The Constitution says that when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it. And during a war then, [there are] lower rules for engagement and people do sometimes get killed without...

Senator Rand Paul is tired of being the only Republican senator willing to stand up to President Trump. The libertarian spoke with Politico’s Dasha Burns just days after being deliberately left out of Trump’s gathering of GOP senators in the Rose Garden. “We have everybody but one person here,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re just missing one person. You’ll never guess who that is. Let me give you—he automatically votes no on everything. He thinks it’s good politics. It’s really not good politics.”

Unicorns are supposed to be rare and mythical. But at Saturday’s No Kings protests I saw the largest outbreak in America outside a Lisa Frank store. They were everywhere, but I was surprised to see almost a dozen of them down in New Braunfels, Texas. As at many of the No Kings protests across the country, attendees embraced the example set by the taunting frog outside Portland’s ICE facility and came in outfits that you could find threatening in only the most silly and specific of contexts: Cookie Monster was there.But you don’t pass up a chance to meet a...

Next year, the United States will observe the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. To begin a year of celebration, Donald Trump appeared at the Iowa State Fairground in early July. “We’ve saved our country,” he proclaimed to the crowd of supporters. Trump then announced a “giant patriotic festival” on the National Mall for next summer, and suggested an Ultimate Fighting Championship event could take place on White House grounds. UFC is one of the corporate sponsors of ­America250, the nonprofit organization that will be overseeing the country’s semiquincentennial celebration. Other sponsors represent different parts of Trump’s corporate coalition:...

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just made it his mission to go after liberal nonprofits. Speaking with Vice President JD Vance Monday during a tribute to Charlie Kirk on the far-right firebrand’s eponymous show, Miller said that he intended to “channel all the anger that we have” against the left, claiming that leftist groups and nonprofits had created “terrorist networks” that led to Kirk’s murder. “The last message that Charlie sent me … was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-leaning organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller told...

The far-left New Republic, in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, declared that Democrats’ responses condemning the killing were “too tasteful for the moment,” warned that “empathy helps prop up Republicans and Trumpists as legitimate and normal political actors,” and urged Democrats to adopt a “callous, perhaps, but short of cruel” tone — even suggesting they say, “I’m sorry his family is suffering. I wish his message would die with him.” In an article titled “Charlie Kirk and the Empathy Trap” — with the subhead, “Democrats will never be as cruel as Republicans after a political assassination. That’s to...

Imagine that President Donald Trump actively wanted to encourage radical right-wing groups and “lone wolf” individuals to wage open violent warfare on anyone they deem a leftist anywhere in America. If Trump wanted to send that precise message, he could hardly do much better than the words he actually did deliver on Fox and Friends on Friday morning.“We have radicals on the right, as well—we have radicals on the left,” Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt said as Trump listened during a discussion about the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk. Earhardt continued: “How do we fix this country?”“I’ll tell you something that’s going to...

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy appeared to have a mental episode live on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show Tuesday, adding yet another entry to the long, bipartisan list of alarming age-related lowlights from our country’s leaders. “I’m sure Jesus loves him, but everybody else thinks—everybody else …” said Kennedy, 73, before trailing off. You can see it in his face—his eyes and mouth particularly—as he struggles to remember what he meant to say or where he is before ultimately giving up

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not impressed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sudden ability to keep his mouth shut about U.S. military plans. Newsmax host Todd Starnes offered his congratulations to Hegseth Saturday for pulling off sweeping strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities without giving up the game. “Not a single leak. Well done, @SecDef,” Starnes wrote in a post on X. The New York Democrat didn’t see that as quite the cause for celebration. “This is like applauding a grown man for being able to wipe their behind,” Cortez responded in a post on X. “Not exactly a vote of...

The Trump administration is open to arresting Supreme Court judges, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told it on Monday morning. “You guys arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit judge for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get away,” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Leavitt. “As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?” “That’s a hypothetical question, again I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at or individual cases. But let’s be clear about...

Blame Hollywood’s “unwokening” and the extraordinary rise of right-wing podcasters on slop: intellectually bereft, emotionally sterile content that’s shaped by data and optimized for clicks. There’s never been a better representation of Donald Trump than those generated by AI; no human being has ever been more suited to the medium. Even the images supplied by his fans exaggerate what makes him strange and terrifying to the rest of us: the strangely flat yet voluptuous contours of his face, the persnickety downward pull of his lips, that hair, that skin. At least the AI version can be made to do anything...

Al Gore is back in the spotlight with his new documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel, making him a top target again of the right-wing counter-intel complex. On Thursday, the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research released a report, “Al Gore’s Inconvenient Reality,” that paints the former vice president as a hypocritical climate advocate. In near-creepy detail, NCPPR author Drew Johnson maps Gore’s home in Nashville, Tennessee, down to the number of windows, and concludes that “Gore’s own home electricity use has hypocritically increased to more than 21 times the national average this past year with no sign of slowing down.”

El Salvador won’t let Senator Chris Van Hollen have any contact with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who is being unlawfully detained in a megaprison in the country. Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador Wednesday in search of answers about Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts. The father of three was deported last month due to an “administrative error” by the Trump administration, which continues to claim Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, despite there being no evidence to prove it.

Trump may have accidentally confessed to insider trading and market manipulation on Truth Social. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” the president wrote on Wednesday, a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for China, yet another market-shocking announcement that caused stocks to shoot up. Insider trading is a very illegal practice that involves using special or private information to give yourself an advantage in buying and selling stocks. Someone with knowledge of an economic policy change that would cause the markets to shoot back up would be posting about how great...

...statues of treasonous Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Albert Pike will soon be returning. Their statues were removed nationwide after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

Multiple vaccine projects have been paused by the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy paused a multimillion-dollar project to create a new Covid-19 vaccine in pill form on Tuesday, and the Food and Drug Administration canceled an advisory committee meeting on updating next season’s flu vaccine, an advisory committee said Wednesday. The Covid project was a $460 million contract with Vaxart to develop a new Covid vaccine in pill form, with 10,000 people scheduled to begin clinical trials on Monday. Of that, $240 million was reportedly already authorized for the preliminary study. Advertisement “While...

Donald Trump’s inaugural address Monday showcased an unusually refined version of the MAGA leader on the cusp of his presidency: it toiled over the economy and immigration, promising to bring America into a “golden age.” But Trump’s unscripted second speech to a throng of his supporters served as his cutting room floor, sharing all the gripes that his script writers implored him not to dish. Seemingly unrehearsed and riddled with grammatical errors, Trump’s second speech of the day was remarkably more like him. Trump ripped into a cohort of his so-called enemies, torching former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for supposedly...

The far-right is rejoicing at Daniel Penny being found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the May 2023 New York City subway strangling death of Jordan Neely. Penny, who is white, put Neely, a Black man, in a chokehold for six minutes while other train passengers captured the incident on film. Penny’s lawyers argued that he believed Neely was a volatile, mentally ill man who posed a threat to the public. Neely was unarmed and had a muffin in his pocket, but Penny quickly became a hero to the right wing. Right-wing figures, including one Donald Trump staffer, immediately...

Of all the promises, from quixotic to horrifying, that Donald Trump has made about the next four years, the one that seems least likely to be fulfilled is his vow to “defeat anti-Semitism.” He has nominated a slew of cranks who have dabbled in the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world. Over the past decade or so, pernicious lies about Jewish villainy have drifted into the mainstream of American life. That’s a fact Trump acknowledges when he talks about his plans to “defend Jewish citizens in America.” But he tends to focus on...