Free Republic

President Trump unveiled his 2026 budget outline Friday, proposing cuts totaling $163 billion to education, housing, medical research, foreign aid funding, energy and environmental protection — while seeking to boost defense spending to more than $1 trillion. The $163 billion cut in non-defense discretionary spending is a 22.6% reduction from current levels, ... The proposed cuts to government funding are in line with Trump’s greater mission to cut bureaucracy via the Department of Government Efficiency — and DOGE ... The defense budget calls for the elimination of “woke” and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs; a down-payment on a “Golden...

The Spanish blackout made us all aware of how unstable the grid can get when renewables are in the driver’s seat, but one should also not forget that they don’t come cheaply. The idea of getting free energy from wind and solar is inaccurate. Man must build machines to extract energy from nature and those machines, windmills and solar panels, are expensive. ... renewables are unreliable and expensive

MSNBC host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted in a new interview that she never saw signs that former President Joe Biden had declined while she worked for him. "I never saw that person —not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day, that was on that debate stage," Psaki said on the "Mixed Signals" podcast about Biden's performance during the June 2024 presidential debate which raised alarms about his fitness to serve another term. He dropped out the following month and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic...

The number of assisted deaths could be more than 4,000 in the 10th year after the law comes into force in England and Wales if MPs vote for it, a review of the policy says. The estimate forms part of the official impact assessment, external, carried out by civil servants to inform MPs as they debate whether to allow assisted dying. It said initially the numbers coming forward would be low, but are expected to grow over time. The impact assessment says that the total number of assisted deaths is estimated to range from between 164 and 787 in the...

Ten years ago, in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, Islamic terrorists opened fire on a free speech event because Americans dared to draw Muhammad. That moment — May 3, 2015 — should have been a turning point in the West’s battle against Islamic supremacy. Instead, it was quickly buried by media silence, political cowardice, and a deepening national amnesia of Islamic terror in America. Just four months earlier, in January 2015, the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris were massacred by Islamic terrorists for publishing cartoons of Muhammad. Incredibly, within weeks of that slaughter, an Islamic group held a “Stand...

'I used to support you,' protester shouted at the New York Democrat. 'You're a war criminal! War criminal! War Criminal!'A hysterical protester yelling about the "genocide" in Gaza interrupted a district town hall event being held by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shortly after it began on Friday night. As Ocasio-Cortez first began speaking, she pulled up a PowerPoint presentation for the night's event. She was then interrupted before even getting through her first slide discussing the Trump administration's budget cuts, including alleged cuts to local healthcare systems. "I am a healthcare worker and I want to know what you're doing...

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...