Free Republic

KEY TAKEAWAYS Biden’s unprecedented freezing of U.S. dollars owned by a foreign central bank has fundamentally jeopardized the currency’s hard-won reserve status. Janet Yellen dropped a bombshell last year, casually admitting that not only is de-dollarization happening, but Americans should expect more. At a minimum, it’d be multiple years of double-digit inflation like we’re used to seeing in third world countries. At worst, it’d be a full-blown Weimar Republic. America’s political establishment has less respect for the U.S. dollar than our foreign adversaries. That was made clear when Tucker Carlson recently interviewed the Russian strongman President Vladimir Putin, who clearly...

A township ordinance that limits firing guns to indoor and outdoor shooting ranges and zoning that significantly restricts where the ranges can be located does not violate the Second Amendment, Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The man who challenged Stroud Township's gun laws, Jonathan Barris, began to draw complaints about a year after he moved to the home in the Poconos in 2009 and installed a shooting range on his 5-acre property. An officer responding to a complaint said the range had a safe backstop but the targets were in line with a large box store in a nearby shopping...

(America First Report)—Every now and then, I hear ideas or come across stories that I don’t want to put in writing. These usually surround information that I do not want out there because I don’t want to give anybody ideas. The article below is one of those cases; I didn’t want illegal aliens to figure out how they can further exploit one of the most ludicrous types of laws on the books in many major cities and leftist states. With Fox News covering it and other outlets picking it up, it’s time to warn Americans about a huge potential problem:...

Atlanta is battling a squatting crisis as 1,200 homes have been overtaken and landlords have to clear the unwanted residents themselves or wait months for police. The situation has become so dire that some homeowners offer to pay off squatters to get them out of their homes - rather than risk losing months of rent. One squat in the Georgia city was even being run as illegal secret strip club and had to be cleared out by an entire FBI swat team.

If you need more evidence that America has become a "permission-slip" society, look no further than the City of Portland, Oregon, requiring homeowners to get permits to remove trees that've fallen on their houses during recent winter storms. Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week published a story last week about Joel and Sarah Bonds, who had a large Douglas Fir in the backyard squash their house after it became weighed down with ice. The tree barely missed the Bonds' young daughter and cat. As it turns out, the couple were not unaware of the danger posed by the tree. In 2021, they'd...

Naperville City Councilman Josh McBroom is adamant the city should not use taxpayer dollars to house or aid migrant families amid the continued and growing influx of asylum-seekers to the Chicago area. However, he would welcome Naperville families being given the option to host migrant families instead. McBroom brought the idea forward at the Naperville City Council’s Tuesday night meeting.(snip) With a new precedent of buses arriving announced in the suburbs, McBroom said Tuesday “there’s increasing pressure for some suburbs to … do (their) part.” (snip) McBroom broached the possibility of creating a sign-up sheet for local households willing to...

Those trying to deal with the impact of Joe Biden's decision to open America's southern border and entice millions of illegal aliens into the country now have started removing students from school buildings, so that the immigrants can be housed there. But what's coming is going to be worse, according to X owner Elon Musk. Soon, he said, authorities will be "coming for your homes." A report from Washington Examiner pointed out that Musk is charging that "the government may soon target people’s homes to accommodate illegal immigrants." He said, online, "This is what happens when you run out of...

The Biden administration has continued the modern Democrat tradition of perverse federal land use policy. It comes as a surprise to most Americans that the federal government owns nearly one-third of the nation’s land mass, in excess of 640 million acres. (It also owns 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), but that is another story.) Most know of the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior and its 80 million acres of parks, preserves, reserves, monuments, memorials, historic sites, battlefields, and recreation areas, in every state. Many Americans may be familiar with the 141 national...

Richie DeVillier steered his boat around floating carcasses. His son leaned over the edge of the boat, holding a calf's head above the floodwaters as they tried to lead the shell-shocked animal to higher ground. Many of the living cattle they had found so far would not survive the next few days. Their bodies were already bloated from standing in water for so long, the coarse black hair sloughed away in patches. The DeVilliers lost about 60 of their 300 cows and calves, plus seven horses. [snip] "We were artificially in the bowl that's created by the highway construction," he...

The dream of net-zero carbon emissions—and its vision of blanketing hundreds of millions of acres of American land with wind turbines and solar panels—is running up against the reality that most of the land in America is still privately owned and many Americans don’t want these massive industrial installations near their homes. But that may prove to be a temporary impediment. “There is a major effort under the Biden administration to consolidate power over land and resources, because whoever owns the land and resources of a nation, controls the people,” Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, a...

An Alabama woman is being kicked out of her longtime home as investors are looking to buy the 40-acre plot from her family, which could be worth upwards of $20 million. Corine Woodson, 84, has been living in the same house on the outskirts of Auburn for over 60 years and is forced to leave the residence because the house sits on land with shared ownership throughout her family. “I would like to ask them why. You know, why, but I don’t. I can’t figure it out. Thinking about it, wondering about it. It’s not easy. I can tell you...

Artists have been fighting back on a number of fronts against artificial intelligence companies that they say steal their works to train AI models — including launching class-action lawsuits and speaking out at government hearings. Now, visual artists are taking a more direct approach: They're starting to use tools that contaminate and confuse the AI systems themselves. One such tool, Nightshade, won't help artists combat existing AI models that have already been trained on their creative works. But Ben Zhao, who leads the research team at the University of Chicago that built the soon-to-be-launched digital tool, says it promises to...

In the 1930s, Richie DeVillier’s grandfather purchased a farm in Winnie, a little town in eastern Texas named after a railroad contractor who prospered. For nearly a century, the DeVillier family raised cattle and grew crops on the 900-acre property without incident — until the Texas Department of Transportation started a highway project that had serious implications for DeVillier’s land. In the early 2000s, the state renovated Interstate 10, elevating and broadening the highway and erecting concrete barriers. The construction trapped the DeVillier property, turning his farm into a lake whenever the region experienced heavy rains, as it did in...

On April 15, Preident Biden signed an Executive Order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation. Contrary to its title, this EO is not about Russia. It is designed to allow the Biden administration to deprive American citizens and organizations of their rights and property by arbitrarily linking those persons to real, imagined, or vaguely defined activities of the Russian government. The Biden administration unilaterally makes the determination and requires neither criminal acts nor intent. The punishment is blocking assets and a prohibition on any dealing with the accused person....

The decision provides important protection for property rights, and features a powerful concurring opinion by prominent conservative Judge Amal Thapar. In many states, asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement agencies to seize valuable property based on mere suspicion that it was used in a crime, and then keep it even if the owner was never convicted of any crime. On top of that, some force owners to wait many months before they even have a chance to challenge the forfeiture in a hearing. Yesterday, in Ingram v. Wayne County, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a...

There is a famous scene in the film Dr. Zhivago where the eponymous doctor returns to his private home to find that the Bolsheviks have seized it and decided to house 30 families there. As Zhivago, who has been off fighting on behalf of Mother Russia, attempts to wrap his head around the new status quo, a socialist housing commissar scolds him for ever having had such a luxurious home in the first place. Most Americans watch that part of the movie and think, “That could never happen here!”After all, the Third Amendment to the Constitution of the United States...

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions are victories for anyone dealing with government administrative agencies, say lawyers interested in the cases. One constitutional scholar warns that the decisions are only the first steps in the fight to maintain our form of democracy. “Administrative power is the greatest threat to our constitutional rights,” Phillip Hamburger, a Columbia University School of Law law professor and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), told The Epoch Times. Mr. Hamburger is the author of “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” a treatise on the dangers of administrative law. Lawyers interviewed by The Epoch Times believe...

The Bureau of Land Management announced new rules that will greatly increase the cost of oil and gas development on public lands. Critics say if the rules become final, it will likely make oil and gas production in Wyoming uneconomical. The Bureau of Land Management has announced new rules that, if finalized, will increase bonding requirements, royalty rates and minimum bids for oil and gas drilling on public lands. Statements by the bureau on the proposed rules say they will lead to more responsible leasing and development processes. Critics say it’s just a step toward the elimination of oil and...

All three evening news broadcasts Thursday ignored the United States Supreme Court ruling against the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and sharply limited its powers to regulate wetlands. It was a big win for property rights in the United States and a stinging defeat for the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. Since that was the case, it's unsurprising that the "big three" evening news broadcasts of ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News would ignore the story. Instead, news about a recent shark attack (ABC & CBS), and another segment on recently deceased singer Tina...

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision reined in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) effort to impose extensive federal land use regulation through its broad interpretation of the Clean Water Act (CWA). The decision in the case of Sackett v. EPA turns on the question of the proper definition of the term "the waters of the United States" (WOTUS). Interestingly, all the justices concurred in the judgment that plaintiffs Michael and Chantell Sackett's property and actions were not covered by the CWA. In the case, the Sacketts had purchased property near Priest Lake, Idaho, and began backfilling the lot...