Free Republic

Alyx, a transgender woman who has served in the Air Force for 15 years, was approved in May for early retirement due to the Trump administration’s policy prohibiting trans people from serving and enlisting in the military. On Wednesday, that retirement was revoked under a new Air Force directive. She said she wasn’t provided any reason other than that her retirement was “prematurely" approved, according to documentation she provided to NBC News.

IN 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists. No demographic forecast expects anything else. Decades of research studying Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas tell a clear story of declining birth rates. The fall in global birth rates has lasted centuries. It began before modern contraception and endured through...

Can people like this even be brought into the fold of sanity and morality?History teacher on TikTok says that Incan child sacrifices were “kind” and “voluntary.” Children were merely left to freeze to death, which isn’t so bad when you think about it. She blames white people for having a judgmental view of human sacrifice. pic.twitter.com/PuB26tmVQj — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 5, 2025The hill she’s going to “die on” is the human-sacrifice-isn’t-all-that-bad hill? Spoken like a committed leftist. She must feel pretty virtuous and anti-racist, rattling off words like “Mochica” and “Tahuantinsuyu” and “Quechua” because she’s sooo educated and multicultural.In...

I once considered pitching publishers a book called 101 Things That Are Now Suddenly Gay, cataloguing the increasing number of completely non-gay things that fanatical homos now claim are gay after all, from ball bearings to hovercraft, upon no rational basis whatsoever. Yet I have already been beaten to it by a temporary daily series from the pages of lefty U.K. newspaper The Guardian to celebrate this summer’s annual Gay Pride Month(s). This was called “My Unexpected Pride Icon” and was basically my old proposed book in short serial form—but taken seriously, not as a rainbow-mocking joke. ...

Most reasonable people would agree that meth-fueled orgies are a bad thing, and that having sex with groups of strangers for days on end should be discouraged. Yet some “harm reduction” advocates have suggested that these orgies should be tolerated, perhaps even celebrated. This demonstrates that the harm-reduction movement is more interested in normalizing drug use than mitigating its negative consequences. Meth-fueled orgies emerged as a policy issue in the mid-2010s, following the popularization of so-called “chemsex” (also known as “party and play” or “PnP”) within the gay community. The term refers to having sex while under the influence of...

Like most red-blooded American boys, from the beginning of middle school on, I was very interested in girls. Indeed, I spent pretty much the entirety of my teenage years trying to figure out how to get girls. I never did find a formula, but I was forever looking. For the most part, my days were filled with sports of every type, from scuba diving to motocross to baseball, football, golf, karate, the gym, etc. But the entire time, all of that, and school, was set against a mental backdrop of how to get girls, how to get a date…and, umm…more....

The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights organization, is taking its LGBTQ equality message on the road with a multicity tour focused on changing more hearts and minds, particularly in red states. The “American Dreams Tour” will kick off Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio, and travel to cities in predominantly Republican-led states through November. The tour’s goal, according to HRC, is to amplify LGBTQ people’s stories “at a time of rising political attacks and cultural erasure” and “celebrate the communities pushing back against hate and fighting for a future of equality for all.” “For half a century, our movement...

Rising violent extremism linked to leftist and pro-Palestinian suspects in the U.S. flies in the face of legacy media narratives that President Donald Trump’s return to office would embolden right-wing extremists. Law enforcement has grappled with a wave of alleged or confirmed arsons, shootings, threats against government officials and mass rioting stemming from outrage at Trump’s policies or U.S. support for Israel. In the months following Trump’s reelection, media outlets and “experts” quoted in their articles predicted that America might see a resurgence of mostly right-wing or white supremacist violence on his watch.

In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand expounds her individualist philosophy by portraying a dystopian society in which titans of industry fight back against burdensome bureaucracy. Though widely panned by critics, the book has remained a cult favorite of the libertarian Right. Paul Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, gave out copies to staff members as Christmas presents. Donald Trump, not widely known as a reader, has named Rand as his favorite author. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged is among a handful of projects proposed by Founders Films, a...

Louisiana is one of 30 states with criminal penalties related to exposing or transmitting HIV. Most of the laws were passed in the 1980s during the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. Since then, several states have amended their laws to make them less punitive or repealed them outright, including Maryland and North Dakota this year. But Louisiana’s law remains among the harshest. The state is one of five that may require people such as Smith to register as a sex offender if convicted, a label that can follow them for over a decade. And state lawmakers considered a bill to...

Ron Paul should have been president. That’s how I see it at least. On everything that has come to matter the most, he has been vindicated. The wars have been a disaster and Dr. Paul knew it. The money printing has run this country’s economy ragged and enriched its most deceitful. And Dr. Paul knew it. Our people are spied on, pried on, cajoled, mocked, and belittled by the intelligence agencies and federal bureaucrats who throw around words such as “terror” while targeting our civil liberties. And Dr. Paul knew it. When it wasn’t pretty, Dr. Paul would say it....

A horror story worthy of Edgar Allen Poe or Stephen King has been documented by Lila Rose, the noted pro-life activist who runs Live Action, among other endeavors. It involves two homosexual men who contracted with a surrogate for a baby, but when she needed to deliver early because of a cancer diagnosis, they insisted that their "property" die. A report at Not The Bee...documented how the homosexuals could not force the surrogate to abort, but once the baby was born, it became their "property." They simply allowed no life-saving efforts at all, and the baby died.

The United States Army plans to phase out most of its ceremonial cavalry units and put the horses up for adoption. Officials hope the move will “align more resources with warfighting capability and readiness,” according to a July 2 announcement. Shrinking its “military working equid” programs—which also include mules and donkeys—is expected to save the Army roughly $2 million per year, reports Tara Copp for the Associated Press. Soldiers who work with horses will also be reassigned to new duties.

In 1883, when the Pendleton Act was passed, creating the US civil service, it must have seemed like no big deal. The forgotten Chester A. Arthur was the president. The fear of being assassinated like his predecessor James Garfield convinced him to back the legislation. The case for passage: government needs professionals with institutional knowledge. Technicians were changing the world, so why not government too? Science and engineering were the rage – electricity, steel bridges, telegraphic communications, internal combustion, photography – so surely public affairs needed the same level of expertise. Who could deny that civil service could do a...

The alphabet wars are, as you might think, primarily about sexuality, sex, and sexual morality. When looked at in those terms, as many liberals do or claim to, you can see, if you squint hard enough, the point they make about just letting people live their lives in peace. At least until you start thinking about the impact that allowing men into women's spaces and reality slaps you in the face. Most liberals only like to think about the issue as a question of tolerance. What do we care if some men want to wear dresses? In many cases, that...

American Statesmanship for the Golden AgeWe all should have a profound sense of gratitude for the many blessings our nation has given us.Editors’ NoteThis a lightly edited version of Vice President Vance’s remarks as prepared for the Claremont Institute’s 2025 Statesmanship Award Dinner.California generally—and Claremont in particular—has produced some of the most profound and revolutionary conservative thinkers of the last half-century.And for a great many of them, it’s because they understood what’s at stake if we abandon our American identity.And we’re lucky enough to have a few of them, like Michael Anton, now working in the administration with us.Now, Claremont...

A federal judge ruled Los Angeles police cannot force journalists out of protest areas or use nonlethal weapons against them after reporters alleged officers targeted them during anti-ICE demonstrations last month. U.S. District Judge Hernán D. Vera granted the Los Angeles Press Club's request for a 14-day restraining order against the city's police department after the group said it documented dozens of incidents in which officers forced reporters away from public spaces where protests were taking place, hit them with rubber bullets and nonlethal weapons and exposed them to tear gas. Vera's ruling is an emergency order giving the court...

When several countries endorsed the notion of some high-risk people taking the antibiotic doxycycline after unprotected sex to lower their chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, as the U.S. did last year, there was a theoretical concern the shift could drive antibiotic resistance in some bacterial infections. That risk no longer appears to be theoretical. In a newly published letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers reported a steep rise in resistance to tetracycline — the antibiotic class to which doxycycline belongs — in gonorrhea isolates collected from across the country since results of the studies investigating...

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that a trans teacher in Florida has no right to refer to herself with the gendered honorific “Ms.” or ask to be referred to with the pronouns she/her under what critics have called Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. The trans algebra teacher, Katie Wood, sued her employer, the Hillsborough County School Board, in 2023 soon after Florida’s anti-LGBTQ law was enacted. A lower court found that the law likely infringes on her First Amendment free speech rights and granted a preliminary injunction. However, the conservative-leaning appeals court overruled the lower...

Current and former USAID and State Department officials are using their expertise in undermining authoritarian regimes abroad against President Donald Trump and his agenda at home, according to a new report Monday. The Trump administration is still in the process of terminating thousands of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) workers by September as the agency restructures to fall in line with the president's "America First" policy. NOTUS reporter Jose Pagliery reported, however, that "Some of the democracy-building experts President Donald Trump fired this year from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department are now reapplying...