Free Republic

A hospital told the police that a patient could not have been raped because her alleged attacker was trans, the House of Lords has heard. The attack took place a year ago and the woman reported it but when officers contacted the hospital, which has not been named, they were told “that there was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened”.

The AP reports on the message from the mullahs that landed in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan province: “Iran has claimed responsibility for a missile barrage that struck early Sunday near a sprawling U.S. consulate complex in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, saying it was retaliation for an Israeli strike in Syria that killed two members of its Revolutionary Guard….Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard said on its website that it launched the attack against an Israeli ‘strategic center of conspiracy’ in Irbil.” MENA’s Simon Rushton has more here and Israel National News adds this: “A senior US official confirmed to Fox News...

Here’s an interesting Twitter thread from someone named Riho Terras, a member of the European Parliament, posted a few hours ago. Obviously we’re not in any position to vouch for the accuracy of this thread (and some of it seems dubious), but pass it along in the interest of broad coverage: THREAD 1/7 Intel from a Ukrainian officer about a meeting in Putin’s lair in Urals. Oligarchs convened there so no one would flee. Putin is furious, he thought that the whole war would be easy and everything would be done in 1-4 days. Russians didn’t have a tactical plan....

guessed wrong on this one. I thought Putin would bluff and bluster, and then cash in his chips. I thought the weak Western powers would agree to a partition of Ukraine, with the largely Russian-speaking Eastern provinces going to Russia, along with other considerations, unrelated to Ukraine, that would be more or less secret. But Putin invaded instead, and seems bent on conquering all of Ukraine and perhaps more besides. What made Putin so bold? A key factor no doubt was the weakness of Western leaders, pre-eminently the doddering Joe Biden. But the West’s weakness is not a function of...

Rebecca Brannon describes herself as an independent photojournalist covering Minnesota politics, protests, and riots. Rebecca has the nerve to do much of her reporting from the inside. If I have the chronology right, Rebecca got inside the “two hour black bloc Antifa protest” on Lake Street in Minneapolis, and the perpetrators are not happy about it. They don’t really want the exposure. Say this for the Star Tribune. The paper’s nonfeasance is appreciated. Indeed, the Star Tribune’s nonfeasance is a critical component of the bizarre hellworld that Minneapolis has become. Below I have compiled Rebecca’s tweets on Friday night’s “protest”...

My wife is a naturalized American citizen who seethes over illegal immigration. When we see the stories on FOX News that highlight the cancellation of our border under the Biden administration, she always asks why the GOP isn’t doing a blessed thing about it. Drawing on the recent news that we have followed on Power Line, Miranda Devine channels and amplifies my wife’s thoughts in the New York Post column “GOP can’t complain about Biden’s migrants when they’re not stepping in.” She writes: It’s all very well for Kevin McCarthy and other GOP members of Congress to rant on Fox...

Guess what’s racist now? Yes, everything is racist, as we know, but specifically what new thing is racist? Traffic cameras. ProPublica reports: A ProPublica analysis found that traffic cameras in Chicago disproportionately ticket Black and Latino motorists. . . An analysis of millions of citations found that households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas between 2015 and 2019. Those evil racist cameras. But wait—there’s more! The coronavirus pandemic widened the ticketing disparities. So COVID is racist, too? It turns out that Chicago’s hapless Mayor Lori Lightweight was...

The basic point here is that wind energy shows up only sporadically and unpredictably, and tends to disappear when it is needed the most. The worst time for a blackout is when the mercury is at -20, as it was yesterday where I live. Note where electricity was actually coming from in the chart above: coal, the dark brown line, was the principal source, while natural gas, the light brown line, is only slightly behind. These are the sources that liberals want to do away with. Wind was flighty; sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t. Is that how you...

President Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017. In response, radical Democrats gathered in Washington to riot. The riot was ugly and violent: Protesters set fires and hurled bricks in a daylong assault on the city hosting Donald Trump’s inauguration, registering their rage against the new president in a series of clashes that led to more than 200 arrests. Police used pepper spray and stun grenades to prevent the chaos from spilling into Trump’s formal procession and evening balls. *** about a mile from the National Mall, police gave chase to a group of about 100 protesters who smashed...

I have said this many times, but it bears repeating: the shutdown policies that have devastated the lives of our children and young people were not just a blunder, but a crime. Jan Crawford of CBS put it well this morning on Face the Nation: “They will be paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives”: @JanCBS explains why she thinks 2021's biggest underreported story was the devastating impact of COVID policies on children pic.twitter.com/AUU1f6AFNi — Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 26, 2021 Heck, the point is so obvious that even the New York Times might be catching...

Recently disclosed emails show how political hack Anthony Fauci was enlisted to bully scientific voices on the coronavirus into silence:New emails released by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that last year, outgoing National Institutes of Health Dir. Dr. Francis Collins instructed Dr. Anthony Fauci to carry out a “quick and devastating” takedown of The Great Barrington Declaration, a document authored by experts who advocated for herd immunity to stop the pandemic, and “focused protection” for the most vulnerable populations over universal lockdowns.With hindsight, the tens of thousands of medical professionals who signed the Great Barrington Declaration were...

I followed up this morning on my post looking at the current New York Times story on the investigation of Project Veritas with PV attorney Paul Calli. I asked Mr. Calli for the questions submitted by the New York Times to PV and the response given to the Times, both of which were omitted from the story. Mr. Calli has provided the following as O’Keefe’s unquoted response to the questions submitted by the Times (the Times reporter addressed is Michael Schmidt). Mike, Mr. O’Keefe responds to your email on your deadline, as follows. Please include Mr. O’Keefe’s response in its...

It seems that my friend may have been emailing Ron DeSantis: DeSantis Proposes $8 Million in Budget to Relocate Illegal Immigrants to Delaware, Martha’s Vineyard. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set $8 million in his 2022–23 budget to transport illegal immigrants out of The Sunshine State. He proposed the spending in the Freedom First Budget to protect against harms resulting from illegal immigration. The spending may include the transportation of unauthorized aliens located within Florida to other states or the District of Columbia. “In yesterday’s budget, I put in $8 million for us to be able to transport people illegally [in...

Yesterday in our “Picks” section we linked to Christopher Caldwell’s terrific CRB essay “France on the Verge of Civil War,” which was a deep dive into the rise of Eric Zemmour on the French political scene. The controversial Zemmour has rocked to the top of the early polls ahead of the presidential election scheduled for next spring, leaping ahead of Marine Le Pen, the previous outsider candidate from the right. Today Zemmour released a video declaring his candidacy for president, and I’ve heard comparisons (including from a French student in my political science class this semester) comparing it to Charles...

For a long time, I sympathized with Dr. Anthony Fauci. There he was, trying to deal with a pandemic caused by a virus no one knew much about. Sure, he was often wrong about pandemic-related matters, but so were plenty of others, on both sides of the political spectrum and in between, who opined on these subjects. Everyone was shooting in the dark.But at some point — possibly because of all the attacks on him, some of which were over-the-top, possibly because of a personality flaw or maybe old age — Fauci decided to cast himself as Mr. Science. Criticize...

Some of them, anyway. Donald Trump has endorsed candidates in 15 Senate contests to date, according to Politico. Many of them are incumbent Senators. They are expected to cruise to renomination by the GOP. But, says Politico, some of the others are struggling. Politico cites Mo Brooks in Alabama, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska, Ted Budd in North Carolina, and Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania (Parnell recently withdrew from the race due to allegations of spousal abuse). Trump hasn’t endorsed Blake Masters, but did appear at a Mar-a-Logo fundraiser for the Arizona Republican. Masters is also struggling, according to Politico. I don’t...

We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today. $14.92 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving.

I hadn’t heard of Winsome Sears until she appeared to acknowledge victory in her race for Virginia lieutenant governor on the evening of November 2. My immediate reaction was that a star is born. Of the politicians who spoke that night, she said what I most wanted to hear. Yesterday she appeared for a segment on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash. Bash went in search of a cudgel with which to bash Sears and somehow landed on vaccines (see CNN story here). Neither our nor CNN’s State of the Union is good. However, I stand by my...

GET WOKE, EMPTY THE PEWS It would be a full-time job to chronicle all of the irrational reactions by liberals to the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, and scarcely worth the effort. But I do want to note one such response because it affects me directly: that of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The ELCA, of which my congregation is a member, sent out this “Pastoral Letter” authored by Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton. Here is the letter, titled “A pastoral message on the Rittenhouse acquittal,” with my comments interpolated: ​Dear church, In the book of Leviticus we read: “You shall not...

A whistleblower has leaked an email exchange dating to October 2020, in which the Chief of Staff to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tells the state’s Department of Health that the Department’s numbers on how covid was spreading were “less useful than what I expected” because “these numbers are small.” The Commissioner of Health said, in turn, that “people look at the primary case numbers and think those are small impacts that don’t justify the dial backs we propose.” She urges her staff to engage in “creative thinking.” LEAKED! Email from last fall shows Walz chief of staff scheming with Malcolm...