Free Republic

President Trump is assembling an administration stocked with prominent gay and lesbian Americans — defying hysterical Democratic rhetoric. “When it comes to whether you’re gay or straight, black or white and all those markers others calculate — President Trump is decision blind. He bases his decision on the kind of job he knows you will do, period,” said Bill White, a top Trump fundraiser tapped to serve as the US ambassador to Belgium. Among the picks: * Scott Bessent, 62, treasury secretary. If confirmed, the hedge fund manager would be the highest-ranking openly gay official in US history. * Ric...

A group of Republican-led states filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging a ban announced by outgoing Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month on new offshore oil and gas development along most U.S. coastlines. The lawsuit seeks a reversal of Biden’s ban with declaratory and injunctive relief, according to a court filing that argued Biden did not have the authority to impose such a ban and that the power to do so rests with the U.S. Congress.

... Monterey County officials say that the fire that erupted at the Moss Landing Power Plant Thursday night was difficult to fight because it was centered on a bank of Tesla batteries. “It is unknown how long this incident may last,” county spokeswoman Maia Carroll said. “No active fire suppression is taking place, the batteries must burn themselves out. No water can be used. This is standard action for battery fires.”...

A lawsuit filed this week accuses Vermont’s child welfare agency of using baseless allegations about a pregnant woman's mental health to secretly investigate her and win custody of her daughter before the baby's birth.

A hack and data breach at location data broker Gravy Analytics is threatening the privacy of millions of people around the world whose smartphone apps unwittingly revealed their location data collected by the data giant. The full scale of the data breach isn’t yet known, but the alleged hacker has already published a large sample of location data from top consumer phone apps — including fitness and health, dating, and transit apps, as well as popular games. The data represents tens of millions of location data points of where people have been, live, work, and travel between. News of the...

Outgoing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is announcing that she's planning to take "extraordinary measures" to save the U.S. economy beginning on January 21 — the day after President-elect Donald Trump will officially begin his second term in office. Politico reported Friday that Yellen made the announcement in a letter to congressional leaders including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). The letter comes as the United States prepares to reach the statutory limit on borrowing, which Yellen wrote last month would happen between...

More than half a dozen local D.C.-area police departments will not be assisting Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) with security for the 2025 Presidential Inauguration, the Daily Caller has learned. The MPD has been lambasted by both progressives and conservatives for its methods of policing, and the department refused to answer several questions from the Caller.Anne Arundel County, Maryland State Police, and Prince George’s County all said they would be helping Capitol Police — but not MPD — with security. This suggests that these departments have a particular problem working with MPD, not with the inauguration itself. Only two departments of...

The following is a press release issued by the Center for Biological Diversity: ....In response to a 2012 petition by the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed to protect the Clear Lake hitch — a large minnow found only in Northern California’s Clear Lake and its tributaries — as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

John Solomon @jsolomonReports Breaking: Majority of voters concerned about Trump's safety at inauguration, new poll shows From justthenews.com 8:56 AM · Jan 18, 2025

Sexual molestation happens all over. But we see Muslim migrants involved in this kind of story is seen on a not infrequent basis. Why? One reason may be because such treatment of infidel women is sanctioned in the Qur’an. In France, a Muslim quoted Qur’an while raping his victim. A survivor of a Muslim rape gang in the UK has said that her rapists would quote the Qur’an to her, and believed their actions justified by Islam. Thus it came as no surprise when Muslim migrants in France raped a girl and videoed the rape while praising Allah and invoking...

A group of more than 30 migrants, most of them Chinese citizens, was found inside a U-Haul truck Friday after a report of an alleged abduction, Florida authorities said. The discovery began when a security guard for a homeowners association in the Miami suburb of Coral Gables reported seeing an abduction around 9:35 a.m., Coral Gables Police Chief Edward James Hudak Jr. told reporters. The guard reported seeing a Toyota and a U-Haul truck involved in the incident and immediately alerted a patrol officer.. The officer then issued a BOLO, a be on the lookout alert, for the vehicles. The...

What just happened? At 9:44 PM ET on a casual Friday night, president-elect Trump launched the biggest memecoin in history, $TRUMP. Since then, the coin is up 9,500% with $2.2 BILLION of volume traded in under 12 hours. What does this all mean? Let us explain. The initial launch of the coin was so hard to believe, it came with skepticism. Traders figured Donald Trump's account was hacked. However, no statement on a hack surfaced so the coin kept rising. At 12:45 AM ET, $TRUMP broke above $10.00 and the rally accelerated rapidly In fact, not even Elon Musk was...

A new paper in the QJE [the Quarterly Journal of Economics], The Global Race for Talent: Brain Drain, Knowledge Transfer, and Growth, by Marta Prato uses extensive data on inventors and their migration to make the following points. (i) gross migration is asymmetric, with brain drain (net emigration) from the EU to the United States; (ii) migrants increase their patenting by 33% a year after migration; (iii) migrants continue working with inventors at origin after moving, although less frequently; (iv) migrants’ productivity gains spill over to their collaborators at origin, who increase patenting by 16% a year when a co-inventor...

Ukrainian police conducted nationwide raids on draft dodger gangs on Friday as the country battles to generate enough conscripted soldiers to keep its military competitive in the war against Russia without radically widening recruitment criteria. The National Police of Ukraine said they conducted “over 200 searches” of gangs assisting illegal border crossings by adult Ukrainian males, who have been banned from leaving the country since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in 2022. The searches “at the premises of persons involved in illegal transactions” took place in 19 of 27 Ukrainian regions, police said Friday. According to the AFP news agency,...

Recently, I read a phenomenal article in The Tablet titled ‘Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment’. If you haven’t yet, stop everything and read it here. It’s one of those rare pieces that crystallises so much of what’s wrong with modern governance and societal manipulation, dissecting how narratives are shaped and enforced in ways that feel insidious and disturbingly effective. Most people are completely unaware that this is how power works today. The article explains a strategy used to manufacture consent and control dissent called ‘permission structures’— the societal cues and signals that compel us to conform or stay silent. (Also known as...

In our modern age of camera-equipped cellphones and laptops, ubiquitous social media websites, and constant GPS tracking that everyone seems to use to go anywhere, you are not paranoid if you worry that Big Brother—the government—along with companies like Google and Facebook, are recording your every move. If the allegations made by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are true, you can add automobile insurance companies and a host of third-party app developers to that list. That is according to a lawsuit filed by Paxton that brings up shades of George Orwell’s book “1984” and the constant surveillance of citizens he...

President-elect Trump announced Friday that Matthew Lohmeier will serve as the under secretary of the Air Force. “Matt is a former fighter pilot, and Space Force Squadron Commander, who has devoted his life to serving our Great Nation,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “He is a proud graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.” In 2021, Lohmeier was fired from the Space Force, where he served as a lieutenant colonel, after criticizing the U.S. military on a conservative podcast. Lohmeier joined “The Steve Gruber Show” to discuss his book “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking...

LOS ANGELES—Barry Josephson enjoyed a peaceful life in his hilltop home in the Pacific Palisades, save for one constant worry: the highly flammable brush that clogged the surrounding government-owned land. “We all take a risk living here,” the producer of films including “Enchanted” said. “But that land should be maintained.” There have been at least five fires in the area since Josephson moved there eight years ago. Most were fueled by brush, which consists of drought-resistant shrubs that burn easily and intensely. Impatient with government bureaucracy, including a $150 fee for permission to remove brush from state parkland, some of...

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked Brandon Williams, a former Navy officer and one-term member of Congress, to become the keeper of the nation’s arsenal of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads. Trump’s selection is a shift from a tradition in which the people who served as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration typically had deep technical roots or experience in the nation’s atomic complex. What’s unknown publicly is the extent of Williams’ experience in the knotty intricacies of how the weapons work and how they are kept reliable for decades without ever being ignited. Terry C. Wallace Jr.,...

Despite being branded as 'disloyal' former Vice President Mike Pence plans to attend President-elect Donald Trump's second inauguration, according to a report. Four years after Trump's 'major falling out' with his once VP, Pence, 65, accepted an invitation to his former running mate's inauguration on Monday, two people with knowledge of the planning told the New York Times. The 48th Vice President of the United States was invited by the congressional committee overseeing the event, as per the custom for all former Presidents and Vice Presidents, according to the New York Times. The two men had hastily parted