Free Republic

Move over, Jean Valjean — Luigi Mangione will soon be immortalized on a San Francisco stage in a sickening musical comedy glorifying the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO gunman. “Luigi the Musical,” slated to debut at the Taylor Street Theater on June 13, promises a “bold, campy and unafraid” take on the life and times of the man accused of perpetrating an assassination that left two young children without a father. Opening night is already sold out on the official website, which uses the tagline “A story of love, murder and hash browns,” a reference to Mangione scarfing down the McDonald’s menu...

The mid-1990s feel like a different world. In the 30 years since, the global economy has shifted dramatically, across sectors and markets.But headline stats like GDP, GDP per capita, or growth rates don’t always reflect what’s happening at the individual level.So, has life actually improved over time?To help answer that, Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao visualizes figures from Our World in Data to show how daily median incomes have changed in 20 of the world’s largest economies from 1994 to 2024.All figures are in PPP-adjusted International dollars per person. They are also adjusted for inflation, taxes, and benefits.ℹ️ PPP-adjusted International dollars...

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has referred 57 cases of potential voter fraud to the DOJ, an official told NBC News.“Voter Rights” activists, like the leftists at the Brennan Center Justice, and their pals in the accomplice media have spent a lot of time and credibility telling us that foreign nationals never vote in U.S. elections. If they do, it’s extremely rare. A myth. But we’ve seen a lot of “extremely rare” pop up in recent years on the battleground of election integrity. “It amounts to a vanishingly rare phenomenon that is not going to impact the outcome...

‘No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.’On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order defunding NPR and PBS — two taxpayer-subsidized “news” organizations that have consistently published propaganda.The order proclaims that “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” the...

If we learned anything from mainland China's slow-motion take over of Hong Kong, it should be that China has option other than rolling tanks in the streets. In Hong Kong it used legal measures and police action to stop protests and jail activists. Then it threatened everyone into silence and shut down independent news outlets, raiding their offices and jailing publishers. And the bottom line is that freedom from the mainland is now just a memory. Hong Kong's oldest pro-democracy party shut down this month because talk about democracy leads to prison these days.The Democratic Party, one of the leading...

A new musical is coming to San Francisco, one singing the highs and lows of an imagined prison life scenario of accused CEO-killer, Luigi Mangione.

From stopping dust and dirt getting into the eyes to prompting our blink reflex, eyelashes do more than just look pretty. Which makes it hard to explain the social media trend of men trimming down — or even entirely shaving off — their eyelashes in a bid to look “more masculine.” Videos posted to TikTok, Instagram and X in recent weeks show men braving blades very close to their eyes, in barber shops from Turkey to New Zealand, in a quest for stubby lashes. While some barbers are seen wielding buzzing electric clippers, others are freestyling with just a pair...

OMG Our taxpayer dollars went to alpaca farming in Peru and improving the marketability of peas in Guatemala. But it gets worse… Most of the money marked for those grants NEVER even made it out of DC. ... It’s all a money laundering scheme and unless arrests are made this is all pointless ... Democrats giving Democrats taxpayer money so they then kickback some in the form of campaign contributions.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/05/02/an-unavoidable-trade-war-with-canada-is-looming-trigger-date-july-august-2025/According to the people present, when former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump, his primary objective was to inform President Trump his public demands for U.S. trade reciprocity with Canada were unachievable. Trudeau was not lying. In this outline we will explain a dynamic that is certain to surface this summer. President Trump has deferred all North American trade negotiations with Canada and Mexico until later in the year, after the priority trade deals with other large trade partners are completed. The USMCA trade pact is due for review and renegotiation this...

Last week, 60 Minutes’ executive producer Bill Owens resigned in protest — but Owens and the rest of the news program have never taken responsibility for their own corruption.Last week, Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS’ flagship news program 60 Minutes, resigned, “citing encroachments on his journalistic independence,” per The New York Times. In the first show since the news of Owens’ resignation broke, 60 Minutes ended the program with a glowing, if dubious, tribute to Owens that has since gone viral online. The program took the unusual step of alleging unethical behavior by CBS’ corporate parent Paramount for...

A Jeep Wrangler EV parked at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View burst into flames Thursday before spreading to three other nearby vehicles, according to the Mountain View Fire Department. Firefighters responded at 4:53 p.m. to the report of smoke coming from a parking lot charging station in the 1300 block of Shorebird Way. Arriving crews found an active fire involving the Jeep EV along with two Teslas and a Honda. Using a preconnected hose line, firefighters got the flames under control and prevented the spread to additional vehicles in the area, MVFD said. No injuries were reported in the fire....

Democratic strategist James Carville and Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg sparred over the best strategy to help the party win elections in a heated debate on Wednesday.Tensions between the two began weeks earlier when Hogg announced plans to spend $20 million through his political organization Leaders We Deserve to primary-challenge older Democrats in blue districts. Democrats were split on this strategy, with some anonymous committee members calling out Hogg for spending money on Democratic primaries over beating Republicans. Carville attacked Hogg's plan as the "most insane thing" he'd ever heard and questioned whether he was breaching his "fiduciary...

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel announced the arrest of two alleged leaders of a violent child exploitation network connected to a Satanic, neo-Nazi group. Authorities arrested Leanoidis Varagiannis, or War, 21, and Prasan Nepal, or Trippy, 20, in April, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release. Varagiannis, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Greece on Monday. Nepal was arrested in North Carolina on April 22. Patel announced the arrest of Varagiannis and Nepal online on Wednesday. “Working with [the DOJ] and [Attorney General Pam Bondi], I can now report the FBI and our partners have...

Over the weekend, Menashe Hidra’s body was found inside his fifth-floor Valley Village apartment after an assailant broke into a neighboring unit, jumped from the balcony to his and attacked. The assailant appeared to leave bloody handprints on an outside wall during their escape. That same day, Aleksandre Modebadze was found beaten to death inside his Woodland Hills home after a woman called 911 to report an attack. According to law enforcement sources not authorized to speak about the ongoing investigations, both slayings in the San Fernando Valley have a troubling similarity: Los Angeles police officers responded to the scenes...

The stock market rallied Friday after a stronger-than-expected jobs report eased concerns that President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs could tank the U.S. economy, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average extending their winning streaks to nine days.The S&P 500 closed at 5,686.67 — up about 1.5 percent for the day — and has now recovered all the ground it had lost since April 2, when Trump announced plans for sweeping tariffs. The Dow jumped more than 500 points to close 1.4 percent higher. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index gained 1.5 percent.Friday’s strong jobs report boosted Wall Street’s confidence...

Current and former staffers to Democratic Senator Jon Fetterman's raised concerns about his health in an article published by New York Magazine's Intelligencer on Friday, with his former chief-of-staff Adam Jentleson telling a Walter Reed medical director in 2024 that he worried the senator "is on a bad trajectory." In the article, Fetterman called the various concerns and allegations raised by staffers "past and present" as "disgruntled employees saying things that are either untrue or, so, that's kind of the business that we are in." Newsweek reached out to Fetterman and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's office by email...

Minnesota beaches may never be the same, following a unanimous state Supreme Court ruling this week overturning a woman’s indecent exposure misdemeanor conviction on the grounds that men, transgender individuals and breast cancer survivors are not held to the same standard. “Criminalizing the exposure of female — but not male — breasts does not provide Minnesotans with adequate notice as to the conduct the indecent exposure statute prohibits,” Associate Justice Sarah Hennesy wrote of the court’s decision. “Because a binary approach to breasts fails to recognize the more nuanced physical realities of human bodies, whether they are intersex, transgender, nonbinary,...

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end federal funding for NPR and PBS — because of news coverage he called “biased and partisan” — triggered a fierce backlash from public broadcasters that appears poised to expand the White House’s larger legal battleground with the media industry. Issued Thursday night, the order instructs the congressionally chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cut off direct funding to the venerable public media giants — producers of long-running news shows such as “All Things Considered” and “PBS NewsHour” — as well as any grants to local stations that might underwrite the national broadcasters’...

President Trump is considering an executive order to examine payments made to college athletes and whether they have created an unfair system, two people briefed on the matter said Friday.Mr. Trump’s focus on the issue — which he’s talked about in the past, one of the people briefed on the matter noted — was renewed after he spoke with Nick Saban, the famed former University of Alabama football coach, backstage at an event Thursday night in Tuscaloosa, where Mr. Trump delivered an address to graduates.The Wall Street Journal first reported on Mr. Trump’s consideration. The two people who were briefed...

House Republicans are planning to include several of President Trump’s campaign promises in the first draft of the bill, which they hope to release soon.It was easy to miss, but last weekend President Trump floated a fundamental rewrite of the American tax code. In a social media post, and again in remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump suggested the United States could stop taxing income under $200,000 and instead rely on revenue from his extensive tariffs. “It’ll take a little while before we do that, but we’re going to be cutting taxes, and it’s possible we’ll do a complete tax cut,”...