Free Republic

When resident Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden spoke with children and NORAD authorities monitoring Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, things went awry. "Let's Go Brandon," a slogan that has become an online phenomenon this year, was stated by a father named Jared Schmeck from Oregon at the end of his family's chat with the Bidens. If anyone believed this joke was going to die soon, Biden breathed new life into it with only two words that followed Schmeck's message: "I agree." Jokes have a short shelf life in the age of the internet. Typically, these jokes, or memes,...

A quick review of communist China's calculated territorial imperialism in the South China Sea helps clarify Beijing's calculated economic, political and criminal imperialism in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2016 the Hague's international tribunal ruled that China had seized islets and "sea features" in the South China Sea belonging to the Philippines. It had also plundered Filipino fishing resources. The ruling invoked the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty China had signed. Yet Beijing ignored the verdict. Chinese diplomats contend in Southeast Asia, China is recovering "stolen" territory. That defense is rubbish -- propaganda to blur a wicked...

It is time to vigorously go on the offensive against those who are selling the deeply deceitful ideology of “privilege” before they tear this country apart. Although the “privilege” peddlers point to many characteristics that they say create entrenched and undeserved advantage for some in society, one identified most frequently is so-called white privilege. “White” is a word with constantly shifting definitions. For a long time in this country, “white” designated people whose ethnic origins could be traced to Europe. But the current American definition of “white” (at least among those driving the national conversation) commingles European ethnicities that were...

Does anyone truly believe that our government -- which consistently creates monopoly privileges for companies with its own cronyism -- can be trusted to ensure that private markets remain competitive? Apparently so. Consider the resurgence of antitrust efforts against "Big Tech." If history is our guide, going after disfavored companies will result in less competition, not more, along with fewer choices and higher prices for you and me. Take the American Innovation and Choice Online Act recently approved by a Senate panel. This bill would block a handful of tech companies like Amazon and Apple from favoring their own products...

LIZ TRUSS's free trade pact with Australia faced renewed criticism from farmers today as they attacked the agreement for not being "a particularly good deal". The National Farmers Union (NFU) claimed the deal with Canberra would open the floodgates for imports. Under the terms of the agreement, quotas on imports from Australia such as meat will be phased out over 15 years. It means in the future there will be no limit on agricultural products shipped to Britain from Down Under. However, the NFU's director of trade and business strategy, Nick von Westenholz, said that while there would be an...

Massive protest convoy by truckers in Canada against mandates by Canada and US. MSM refusing to report. Same planned by US truckers.

We’ve long been familiar with media bias, where the opinions of those who own or produce news make their way into the stories they tell and even the choices of which stories are worth telling. But in recent years, there’s been a new kind of journalism that deserves more scrutiny – when publications produce stories for the express purpose of achieving certain results. In the case of Donald Trump, it was used to start the Russia collusion debacle and attempt to ruin him politically. But the tactic has more commercial uses as well. In Washington, a publication known as the...

Spotify is removing Neil Young’s music from its platform, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, following Young’s public ultimatum that the streaming service choose between him and Joe Rogan

Washington -- Accuracy is making a comeback. The plagiarist in chief gave a long off-the-cuff press conference, complete with misstatements and canards, and now his listeners around the world are apprehensive that the Russians may take him at his word and launch an invasion of Ukraine. White House spokesmen have spent days walking back the plagiarist in chief's misstatements, but he happens to be the president of the United States and, as he himself has said, his words matter. The electorate elected in 2020 a 77-year-old man with a lifelong record of plagiarism, lying about his achievements (and other people's...

SAN FRANCISCO — The black and yellow signs were hard to miss, their message spelled out in English and Cantonese: “Vote YES to Recall the School Board.” Volunteers with the Chinese American Democratic Club urged shoppers to get registered for the Feb. 15 election, telling them why three members of the city’s school board — all Democrats — needed to be removed from office. Yung Chen, 73, was already convinced. “Martin Luther King’s speech, I believe in that: Don’t judge people by racers ,” he said. His grandson, he explained, nearly missed out on a spot at the high school...

Democrats excoriated Sarah Palin as did some Republicans once upon a time for warning Obmacare would produce “death panels.” That is, government bureaucrats making decisions based on charts and graphs and demographic actuarial tables as to who deserved life saving treatments, procedures, etc. and who should just go home and wait for their time to run out. The doctor/patient relationship would no longer be stronger than the government/doctor relationship. Turns out that “fear monger” was prescient. We can only assume the White House was livid when the Supreme Court of the United States destroyed their authoritarian attempt to circumvent Congress...

The U.S. rejection of Russia’s main demands to resolve the crisis over Ukraine leaves little ground for optimism, the Kremlin spokesman said Thursday, while adding that dialogue was still possible. But as expected, the U.S. and the Western alliance firmly rejected any concessions on Moscow’s main points Wednesday, refusing to permanently ban Ukraine from joining NATO and saying allied deployments of troops and military equipment in Eastern Europe are nonnegotiable. The U.S. did outline areas in which some of Russia’s concerns might be addressed, possibly offering a path to de-escalation. “There is no change, there will be no change,” U.S....

Americans want an autonomous Ukraine to survive. They hope the West can stop Russian President Vladimir Putin's strangulation of both Ukraine and NATO. Yet Americans do not want their troops to venture across the world to Europe's backyard to fight nuclear Russia to ensure that Ukraine stays independent. Most Americans oppose the notion that Russia can simply dictate the future of Ukraine. Yet Americans also grudgingly accept that Ukraine was often historically part of Russia. During World War II, it was the bloody scene of joint Russian-Ukrainian sacrifices - over 5 million killed - to defeat the Nazi German invasion....

“Everyone cheats” is a hell of a lesson for the nation’s kids. When it comes to professional sports it might be true. When everyone is at the top of their game, and there are millions of dollars on the line, everyone will look for an advantage. Some people will cross the line, and many of those people will get away with it. Is it time to accept this? I’m not suggesting pro sports go the route of the great Saturday Night Live skit about the “All-Drug Olympics” from back when the show was funny, but maybe acknowledge that players, even...

The GOP-controlled Senate on Tuesday ended a nearly two-year Democratic filibuster of California judge Janice Rogers Brown, putting her on track to become the second black woman on what many people consider to be the nation’s second highest court. The 65-32 vote virtually assures the conservative jurist and Alabama native’s confirmation Wednesday evening to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, part of a historic deal to avert a partisan showdown over judicial filibusters. It takes 60 votes to bypass a filibuster. In November 2003, Brown’s Republican supporters were able to get only 53 votes for...

Sen. Joe Biden said Sunday that if President Bush nominates recently confirmed Circuit Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats will launch a filibuster. "If [Bush] sent up Edith Jones, I could assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight - and she would probably be filibustered," Biden told CBS's "Face the Nation." In the next breath Biden corrected himself, saying, "I misspoke, I misspoke. Janice Rogers Brown is what I meant to say." Asked whether that would break the Senate's much heralded compromise last month not to...

One of the big selling points for sticking our nose into a border incursion half-a-world away (while studiously ignoring a bigger border incursion right here at home) is that we need to show the world’s bullies and punks that America’s no pushover. Now, the people busy selling that line are the same people who presided over Iraq and Afghanistan, the places where our failed elite’s performance created said need to show the world’s bullies and punks that America’s no pushover. Think really hard about what foreign policy success our foreign policy elite can mark in the “WIN” column during the...

In an old episode of Star Trek, a powerful android threatened Captain Kirk and was defeated when asked an impossible question. Kirk actually employed “induced computer destruction” at least four times during the series. The human brain is like a computer in some ways and holding conflicting views can be very uncomfortable. The term “cognitive dissonance” comes up regularly in political discussions, probably because these issues are rarely cut and dried, but are considered very important. It is defined as “the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. People tend to seek consistency in their...

10m ago 06:11 A senior Russian official has said a nuclear missile crisis between Moscow and Washington was unavoidable without measures to ensure restraint and predictability. The Russian state news agency Tass was quoting Vladimir Ermakov, a senior Russian foreign ministry official. According to Tass, he said Moscow thought the United States was preparing to deploy short and intermediate range missiles to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. FacebookTwitter 25m ago 05:56 Philip Oltermann Philip Oltermann Germany’s restrictive stance on exporting weapons or military equipment to Ukraine is causing consternation in Kyiv and elsewhere in Europe, but the position has popular...

First school shooting in Montgomery County history follows vote to remove police from school buildings Maryland's Montgomery County became the latest Democrat-run jurisdiction to reverse its decision to remove police officers from schools after it suffered the first school shooting in the county's history last week, in which a 15-year-old boy was shot last Friday by a classmate. The district announced on Monday after the shooting that police would temporarily return to every high school in the county, a reversal of a March 2021 decision by county lawmakers to yank funding from its longstanding School Resource Officer program. The lawmakers...