Free Republic

Nearly a year to the day that ZeroHedge raised suspicions over the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak - and were called 'conspiracy theorists' for it - the US State Department just revealed that they have new information suggesting it could have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).In a Friday statement, the state department announced that while they haven't determined whether the COVID-19 pandemic "began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China," the US government "has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in...

Officers in Washington DC arrested a Virginia man who tried to pass through a Capitol police checkpoint carrying fake inaugural credentials, a loaded handgun and more than 500 rounds of ammunition. The man, identified in court papers as Wesley Allen Beeler, was driving a pickup truck with several firearm-related bumper stickers, including one that read: “If they come for your guns Give ‘Em your bullets first,” the papers said. Beeler presented an “unauthorized inauguration credential” at a Capitol police checkpoint on Friday evening, court papers said.

Amid increasing calls for suspension of the use of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines produced by companies such as Pfizer, especially among elderly people, the situation in Norway has escalated significantly as the Scandi nation has now registered a total of 29 deaths among people over the age of 75 who’ve had their first COVID-19 vaccination shot.As Bloomberg reports, this adds six to the number of known fatalities in Norway, and also lowers the age group thought to be affected from 80.Until Friday, Pfizer/BioNTech was the only vaccine available in Norway, and “all deaths are thus linked to this vaccine,” the Norwegian...

Donald G. Tober, who became famous for putting Sweet’N Low packets on millions of tables, died Friday by suicide. The New York Post reported that the 89-year-old jumped to his death from his Manhattan apartment around 5:00 a.m. Friday and was discovered in the courtyard of the luxury Upper East Side building. He had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, according to the report. Sugar Foods, a New York-based company that has about 1,400 employees had marketed Sweet’N Low as well as N’Joy coffee creamers and Sugar in the Raw. Sugar Foods stopped marketing Sweet’N Low 15 years ago, according...

"This soft coup wasn’t a revolution. It was a coup. Thai coups are always committed by the elites. Usually for financial gain. The US coup was also an elite coup. Instead of the army, they used middle class wannabe elites to do their dirty work."

While more than 23.5 million people in the U.S. have been infected with COVID-19 and over 392,000 of them have died, a variant of the novel coronavirus that's even more contagious has been found in at least 15 states and might lead to a further rise in the number of cases and deaths, according to health officials. “I want to stress that we are deeply concerned that this strain is more transmissible and can accelerate outbreaks in the U.S. in the coming weeks,” The New York Times quoted Dr. Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at the Centers for...

BE HAPPY "Don't worry. Be happy" I'm sure everyone has heard that song on the radio at one time or another. But I wonder if we ask ourselves, "Are we happy?" I don't mean that we should be constantly ecstatic or exuberant, but HAPPY, full of that deep down inner contentment which persists even in the midst of trials and tribulations? Because we are the children of God, God is concerned and cares for us. Whatever our real needs, we can rest assured that God will fulfill them, albeit in His own time and accordance with His will. But...

Hundreds of Central Americans — many with families in tow — have begun the journey to the U.S. border hoping the new president will allow them to claim refugee status and enter the United States.They will likely be stopped in Mexico thanks to coronavirus restrictions, but the incoming Biden administration is worried that this is only the beginning. Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric promised a “more humane” immigration policy and expanded the number of those able to claim refugee status. This will inevitably lead to a massive influx of those seeking asylum at the border.Reuters:On Thursday, Guatemala cited the pandemic in...

Twitter has come under fire recently for refusing to ban the Chinese government for lying about not employing forced labor in the Xinjiang province.“‘Forced labor’ is the biggest lie of the century aimed to restrict and suppress the relevant Chinese authorities and companies and contain China’s development,” Chinese spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted.Accompanying the tweet was a video of forced laborers smiling and saying how good everything is at the factory. Nauseating."Forced labor" is the biggest lie of the century aimed to restrict and suppress the relevant Chinese authorities and companies and contain China's development.🔗https://t.co/olKiB2NxwM pic.twitter.com/SxzzxkrOja— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) January...

Some Republicans are looking to stage an internal coup using a playbook employed during an attempted ouster of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997. “We’ve researched the rules thoroughly and there has been a lot of discussion on how to handle this,” Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale told Newsmax. Cheney ”is out of step with the conference in such a monumental way.” Rosendale was the first House Republican to call for Cheney’s removal as the House Republican Conference chair after her renegade vote. Under current GOP caucus rules, any member can trigger a request for a panel to consider whether a member...

A Christian chaplain for the British penal system, Pastor Paul Song, is going to court to get his job back after he was banned for 10 years for exposing Islamic extremism inside prison walls. The British charity Christian Concern said said Song was banned in 2017 when Imam Mohammed Yusuf Ahmed, the former general secretary of the Islamic Party of Britain who advocated that Britain be transformed into an Islamic state, was made chief chaplain. Mohammed informed Song: "You do not have permission to enter the wings, nor do you have the permission to speak to any prisoners here at...

The suppression of any and all things conservative took an ugly turn yesterday when Politico staffers recoiled at the invitation to conservative writer Ben Shapiro to join the staff for the online publication’s popular “Playbook” section on Thursday. One staffer said in a Politico company-wide Slack channel that Shapiro has a “long history of bigoted and incendiary commentary.” This is a baseless, false allegation. Shapiro may be a partisan, but he’s hardly a bomb-thrower. Shapiro wrote in his “Playbook” posting, “Republicans believe that Democrats and the overwhelmingly liberal media see impeachment as an attempt to cudgel them collectively by lumping...

A part of government anti-immigrant policy that President Trump and his aides pursued throughout their four years in office reached its end on Friday in a federal courthouse in California. The aim was to exclude up to 11 million undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2020 census. Trump’s legal team told a federal judge that the plan cannot be finished before the new Biden Administration opens next Wednesday. Here is what President Trump and his Republican allies are now losing: the chance to gain seats for “red” (Republican-oriented) states in the U.S. House of Representatives and, with that, increased...

Until recently, worrying about the power of large corporations was the left’s job. It makes sense. Conservatives have historically been champions of the market, and large corporations have usually stayed out of the culture wars. They once reflected American culture, rather than shaping it. Big government was always the bigger threat to our liberty. Now, as social media giant Twitter bans the personal account of the president of the United States and even deletes tweets from @POTUS, the account owned by the U.S. government, one is forced to wonder who is more powerful, Washington or Silicon Valley? Twitter, acting in...

City officials denounced a "White Lives Matter" banner found Saturday morning near a busy Union City intersection and said that it was removed promptly

Following the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act in an attempt to keep us safe. While there have been no other mass-casualty attacks by terrorists, at what cost was this “safety” achieved. The government can now get access with relative ease to our personal and private information. They can surveil us even though we’re completely innocent. Yes, but you might argue that those same laws have made it much harder for terrorists to plot an attack in the shadows and have probably deterred or interrupted many such attacks. And therein lies the dilemma. Civil liberties advocates believe the Patriot...

Former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton told Shepard Smith Friday that “for the last 20 years our biggest concern was international terrorism — ISIS, Al Qaeda,” but “now it’s here and it’s us, and it’s the citizens of the United States, some of whom are rebelling against everything we thought we believed in for the last 300 to 400 years.” (Apparently Bratton subscribes to the 1619 Project, which dates America’s founding not from 1776, but from 1619, so as to add on 150 extra years of slavery and oppression.) And Bratton wasn’t alone: his analysis of the “far-right”...

In times like these, historical events often serve as a reliable guide to help us interpret what we're experiencing.The events at the Capitol on January 6 were certainly tumultuous and a harbinger of things to come. The Democrats are nothing if not ruthless and opportunistic. That they favor party and power far more than the national good is well established, with decades of behavior and actions as proof. They see January 6 as nothing more than an opportunity to expand their power and diminish their political opponents.The Democrats' very governing approach is one of pure cynicism and illustrates quite clearly...

When Trump entered the White House, the left gave everything he did a political spin. That escalated in 2020 when Democrats used the Wuhan virus for political ends. It’s reasonably certain they deliberately destroyed the economy to gain the White House. Even worse, after Trump praised Hydroxychloroquine, they made it impossible to give the drug a fair shake, possibly causing tens of thousands to die, for no other reason than to deny Trump a “win.” With Trump on his way out, though, there’s starting to be chatter about a common anti-parasite drug called Ivermectin. (Please be mindful as you read...

The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula — officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus — was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire’s most tyrannical ruler. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia. During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the [fake news edited out] of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill,...