Free Republic

Shortly before Thanksgiving 1919, as Antone Lepara was waiting to be hanged for murder, his soon-to-be widow received an unusual request. The letter asked Mrs. Lepara if she would be willing to sell her husband’s testicles after his death. The writer, a wealthy businessman, was willing to pay $10,000 — almost $150,000 in today’s money. It was a good arrangement all-around for the businessman. He’d have a new, virile pair of testes from a man no longer in need of them, and one of America’s foremost experts on gland surgery worked right on the prison premises: San Quentin Chief Surgeon...

The United States are in a tricky position right now and everybody knows it. The level of social division continues to rise and all of us, in some way or another, feel a tension that we all know isn’t going to be released merely by voting harder. Simply put, there are overwhelmingly powerful civil disjunctions that the normal methods of politicking simply will not resolve. A good model for understanding what is happening right now is to look back in time to the Classical Greek and Hellenistic eras. At one point or another, just about every polis had to deal...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — If you are Black or Hispanic in a conservative state that already limits access to abortions, you are far more likely than a white woman to have one. And if the U.S. Supreme court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women will bear the brunt of it, according to statistics analyzed by The Associated Press. The potential impact on minority women became all the more clear on Monday with the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion suggesting the court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion....

How does the Republican Party establishment choose its presidential candidate?  Typically, constitutionalists accuse their establishment rivals of being moderate, risk-averse, stubborn old fools who lack faith in conservative principles.  This is a soothing interpretation, as it begins from the hypothesis that the contest between conservatives and the GOP elite is a family feud. But there is another hypothesis -- less soothing, but, at least from an outsider's bird's-eye view, more reconcilable with the facts.  This hypothesis is that America has reached a stage of progressive soft despotism in which the only important family feud in national politics is between the fundamentally...

America, and by extension the rest of the West, are afflicted with a sickening pathology that is rotting away the strength and power of our nations. Like a cancer that eats away at the strength of a healthy body, this pathology has been systematically weakening the social and physical infrastructure that made the West strong and capable. This pathology is nothing less than progressivism. Progressivism is an especially divisive and destructive force because it combines three features that individually are bad enough, but when fused become an absolutely horrid composition. The first of these is a penchant for undermining and...

Working-class Americans are paying a heavy price for their elites’ moral posturing. As gasoline prices in the US continue to surge to an unprecedented $7 a gallon in some places, President Joe Biden seems more interested in finding someone to blame than mitigating the problem. ‘Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’, the president said on Friday at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference. The president then cited a ‘fact checker’ in the New York Times and a Washington Post op-ed to counter anyone daring to lay the blame for skyrocketing prices at the...

America’s most toxic two-term president left a lasting welt on the nation. If you were dragging getting out of bed to start this week, thank Woodrow Wilson. Daylight saving time is just one of a battery of ways that Wilson and his presidency changed America, most of them for the worse. I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more...

The classically-minded among you might be familiar with a set of events that are recorded by the Roman historian Livy as occurring in the early days of the Republic. These were known as the “secessions of the plebs,” or secessiones plebis, and they involved the literal withdrawal of the plebs - the common people - of the city of Rome from the city itself in acts of secession in which the common people would refuse to participate in Roman society until their grievances were addressed. As described by Livy, these grievances were indeed well-founded and involved severe financial (and even...

Trump is on the hook for FELONY tax fraud in New York RIGHT NOW. And if he’s convicted, the REAP Act would strip Trump of ALL Presidential perks. This bill is AMAZING. Just take a look: The REAP Act WILL: 1. Strip Trump of his $220,000 annual pension 2. End taxpayer funding for Trump’s staff 3. Take away his taxpayer-funded budget for cushy D.C. office space

Exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the population of the United States, a new study estimates. The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on people born before 1996 — the year the U.S. banned gas containing lead. Overall, the researchers from Florida State University and Duke University found, childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million points, or 2.6 points per person on average. Certain cohorts were more affected than others. For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption was skyrocketing,...

**SNIP** Unusually, resident Joe Biden had to draw those lines with fellow Democrats. Defund the police? Forget about it, Biden said Tuesday night. With crime on the increase around the nation – making for a nervous midterm electorate – the answer is to fund the police, Biden said. He also said very pointedly that he is a capitalist, albeit one who thinks big corporations should “pay their fair share" in taxes. On immigration, Biden called for reform – while also saying that those who "are not legitimately here can be sent back" to their home countries. He also made a...

The Laws of Economics are as immutable as the Law of Gravity, but few leftists grasp this fact. When it comes to the Democrats’ energy policies, I believe this immutability will finally be the Democrats’ downfall. People are reaching a pain point that the progressives can no longer deflect onto others. Based on the progressive left’s detrimental influence on President Biden’s energy policies, the resulting accelerated inflation and energy-cost rise are very visible to average Americans. The administration acts as if there is no causal connection between the two. But what can we expect from people who work from feelings...

A progressive New York lawmaker has been blasted for describing uniformed NYPD cops taking the subway as a “frightening show of intimidation” and “a massive health risk” — then liking a tweet comparing the group of officers to Nazis. Democratic Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, who represents parts of Lower Manhattan, made the eyebrow-raising comment Monday in response to a video showing mostly maskless officers in a Midtown Manhattan subway station following the Friday funeral for slain NYPD Officer Jason Rivera...

NASCAR has officially rejected Brandon Brown’s “Let’s Go Brandon” sponsorship deal. According to multiple news reports, the auto-racing giant told Mr. Brown’s team that cryptocurrency firm LGBCoin cannot sponsor his car. The company’s first three letters are an allusion to “Let’s Go, Brandon,” the coded form of a vulgar insult of President Biden. Mr. Brown’s team publicly trumpeted on Thursday the news that LGBcoin - the self-styled “America’s Coin” - will be its full-season primary partner for the 2022 NASCAR Xfinity Series. The company released a photo of Mr. Brown standing next to his #68 Chevrolet Camaro in a red-white-and-blue...

In this episode of the Remnant Underground, Michael J. Matt excoriates the truly preposterous development in Rome whereby the increasingly intolerant and angry Pope Francis choses Christmas 2021, in the middle of a pandemic, to crack down on one of the few growing movements within the Catholic Church today. As Catholics increasingly abandon the out-of-touch Church of Accompaniment, plagued as it is by sexual abuse and financial scandals at the highest levels, Francis turns his sights on faithful Catholics whose only “crime” is their love and devotion to the traditional liturgy and sacraments. A pope who marketed himself on being...

I've written about this several times, and here is another instance. The Guardian asks: "Is society coming apart?" Most of the article is throw away, but here we get something extremely important: According to the Reagan-Thatcher worldview, there is no such thing as society. There are only families, who look after one another, and individuals, who participate in markets. The idea that government is the solution to people’s problems rests on a mistaken belief in the existence of society.The amount of honesty in these few lines is rather quite remarkable. First off they are completely incorrect about the "Reagan-Thatcher worldview",...

Brian Murray knows just how fierce an opponent Arizona's Sen. Kyrsten Sinema can be. The Republican strategist saw his candidate lose to Democrat Sinema in their 2012 race for the House. Calling the experience "unpleasant," Murray admits his candidate, Vernon Parker, was flawed, but "flawed candidates win all of the time. Kyrsten, however, was an absolute machine." Sinema, along with fellow centrist Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has recently become the epicenter of American politics largely because she insists on siding with the interests of her constituents instead of the demands of her party. Over the past few...

Progressives are trying to push President Joe Biden further to the left, encouraging him and congressional Democratic leaders to energize an unsatisfied base by delivering on his campaign promises as the party struggles with retaining control of its razor-thin majorities ahead of next year's midterm elections. Democrats have scored some significant victories under the Biden administration in passing the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and advancing the $1.75 trillion social spending bill - both key to the president's domestic agenda. But a chaotic Afghanistan troop withdrawal, a spike in inflation, supply chain woes, and the unrelenting COVID-19 pandemic have hurt...

There is nothing worse than a progressive. That’s it, no qualifiers necessary; that not only sums it up, it’s the whole thing. How else to explain their actions? Without suffering a closed-head injury, being bad people is the only other way to explain how the left acts. Rude? Can the truth be rude? Where to start with something like this? The choices are too plentiful. Could it be the Black Lives Matter leadership tweeting out “You are eating dry turkey and overcooked stuffing on stolen land” on Thanksgiving Day? First off, you’re eating dry turkey that’s your fault. Not drying...

Career criminal Darrell E. Brooks Jr. has emerged as the top suspect accused of plowing his red SUV through Waukesha, Wisconsin’s annual Christmas parade on Sunday, killing at least five people and injuring dozens of others, including children. But just last week, Mr. Brooks was released from Milwaukee County jail on $1,000 bail for charges including battery, domestic abuse, reckless endangerment, resisting arrest and bail-jumping. In July of last year, Mr. Brooks was charged with reckless endangerment and possessing a firearm as a felon. In addition, he’s a registered sex offender in Nevada. “A background check from Wisconsin’s Department of...