Free Republic

I arrived at three fundamental conclusion about America’s core interests in Afghanistan. First, our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives. The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory. They deserve the tools they need and the trust they have earned to fight and to win. Second, the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable. 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because that country was ruled by...

U.S. Capitol cops and DC Metropolitan Police officers called rioters 'terrorists', attacked Republicans who have downplayed January 6 and recalled the 'medieval battle' they faced during the first hearing of the select committee on Tuesday. Officers Harry Dunn, Aquilino Gonell, Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges gave harrowing testimony to the panel of seven Democrats and two Republicans - Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger - describing how they feared the rioters would kill them and criticized the treatment of their colleagues. They also told the panel how they were confronted by people waving MAGA flags, Trump supporters saying President Biden didn't...

PolitiFact’s aggressive defense of Biden and Harris popped up again on Friday. They tagged it as “False” for a Tik-Tok video that “Says Joe Biden and Kamala Harris distrusted COVID-19 vaccines.” The quotes in the video are all accurate, but they caused Facebook to flag the video as “Missing Context.” As in – the editing is too negative for their liking. Once again, they’re not “fact checking” – they’re context checking. The short summary in Tom Kertscher's article proclaimed “Video clips appear to show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris raising doubts about COVID-19 vaccines, but they were raising concerns about...

The drive is on for renaming the more “harmful colonial” names of more than 100 eponymous bird species in North America linked to an individual, a white American or European naturalist. Birds have eponymous names that celebrate the explorers, bird watchers, or colonialists who discovered them, some of whom who have been connected with slaveowners or white supremacists. Calls have begun for the removal of bird names that celebrate those accused of colonialism. Woke is for the birds. A group “Bird Name for Birds,” in 2020 launched a campaign to change names of birds named after people. It urged the...

So now @Marvel's latest attempt to sell comic books makes Captain America turn against US forces and side with the communists during the Vietnam War? In Fantastic Four: Life Story #2, written by Mark Russell with art by Sean Izaakse and colors by Nolan Woodard, Captain America attacks American soldiers in an effort to free communist prisoners held by the US.

American pride resonates with most segments of the population, though not with young adults, according to a new poll. Only 36% of respondents aged 18 to 24 said they were very or extremely proud to be American, a new Issues & Insights/TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics survey found. That made the age group the only tracked demographic in which pride falls below 50%. The poll found an almost identical percentage (35%) of the 18-24 group saying they are only slightly or not proud at all to be an American.

Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have voted to grant tenure to New York Times writer and author of the divisive “1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones, amid backlash over her “unfactual and biased” work. The board voted 9-4 in favor of granting tenure to Hannah-Jones after a lengthy closed-session meeting on Wednesday, according to a report by the Washington Post. The vote comes one day before Hannah-Jones had originally been set to start working as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina (UNC)’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The...

The sum total endgame of this reveal is the line, a canonical declaration that Loki dates men and women, with no effect on his character or the narrative.The MCU officially has their first openly gay main character. Sort of.Midway through episode three of the latest MCU Disney Plus series “Loki,” a small conversation between the God of Mischief and an alternate universe version of himself called Sylvie reveals that both have a dating history of impermanent dalliances with both men and women. Lasting under 30 seconds, the bit of dialogue serves little plot function except to show the bonding between...

Findings from a new North Dakota State University survey reveal that the majority of students identifying as liberal or liberal-leaning are not proud of America. In response to the question “Are you proud to be American?” 57 percent of liberal identifying students answered ‘no’. This is in contrast to the 73 percent majority of conservatives who answered ‘yes’ to the same question. This response was generated from a nationwide survey which asked over 400,000 students from more than 1,000 American college campuses questions about their feelings on a number of social and political issues. NDSU publicly announced the survey on...

<p>Media and the Democrats are promoting a false perception on the fifth anniversary of the mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub, in which Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 people.</p><p>There’s never been any evidence that the shooting was due to it being a gay club. It’s a horrible enough incident on its own, but that isn’t a proven aspect of the case. Indeed, the motive, at least as expressed by Mateen, was connected to ISIS, and the U.S. actions of Obama (and Biden) in Syria.</p>

At a Randolph Board of Education meeting on Thursday, board members voted to remove all holiday names off of the school calendar The move came amidst backlash over changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day from the 100-plus people who attended the meeting Instead, all holidays will be designated as simply 'days off,' according to Fox5 NY The idea behind the holiday name change stems from an effort to avoid 'hurt feelings' over holidays that target specific people or groups 'What did you just do? What just happened?' one man exclaimed incredulously as the board made a unanimous vote

Imagine if the U.S. were to open interior Alaska for colonization and, for whatever reason, thousands of Canadian settlers poured in, establishing their own towns, hockey rinks and Tim Hortons stores. When the U.S. insists they follow American laws and pay American taxes, they refuse. When the government tries to collect taxes, they shoot and kill American soldiers. When law enforcement goes after the killers, the colonists, backed by Canadian financing and mercenaries, take up arms in open revolt.

BARCELONA - A professor from a Barcelona art school has staged a protest at a museum dedicated to Pablo Picasso intending to shed light on the Spanish painter's sometimes callous behaviour towards women. Maria Llopis and seven of her female students appeared at the Picasso Museum wearing t-shirts that read "Picasso, women abuser" and others that referred to Dora Maar, a French artist who is believed to have suffered abuse by Picasso during their relationship in the 1930s and 1940s. The protest last week echoed the global debate on men's treatment of women, led by the #MeToo movement, which includes...

Earlier this year, the Wikipedia page on GamerGate, the anti-corruption movement in gaming, saw extensive updates about the “legacy” of the movement and associated controversies. These edits pushed claims that GamerGate, which Wikipedia labels a “harassment campaign” due to a years-long effort by left-wing editors, helped Donald Trump become President in 2016 and that the movement even contributed to what the page called an “attempted coup” at the Capitol on January 6.

President Joe Biden delayed the start of his speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre on Tuesday by asking two girls in the audience if they were getting ice cream. The commander-in-chief noticed the two youngsters off the side of the speech and ran over before beginning his remarks. 'I just had to make sure the two girls got ice cream when this is over. Almost five years old coming to hear the president speak. My lord. In my faith we call that purgatory,' he said before heading back to the podium.

...Biden will travel to Oklahoma on Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre... ...On May 31 and June 1, 1921, an armed white mob attacked the all-Black district of Greenwood. The violent racist mob destroyed the area, leaving 40-square-blocks in ruins and nearly 10,000 people homeless....

Tulsa (AFP) - In Tulsa, the city that still bears the scars of a 1921 racial massacre, African-American residents are eagerly awaiting the arrival of President Joe Biden on Tuesday, hoping he will hear their call for financial reparations. "I just want him to feel our pain," said local activist Kristi Williams. The Democratic leader, who has benefited from a strong support base among Black voters, will attend Tuesday's commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in US history. Williams, who is descended from some of the massacre victims,...

The possibility of a leak from a virus lab in Wuhan being responsible for the coronavirus pandemic was a mainstream theory on the virus’s origins when it was first advanced. The media was quoting their sources in U.S. intelligence that were looking into that angle. But after the tainted WHO origins team finished their “investigation” and announced that not only was there no sign the disease leaked from a Wuhan lab but that the team would no longer continue to investigate the lab-leak theory, the media began a campaign to silence those who wanted to write or talk about it....

Highlighted by computer scientist Paul Graham on Twitter, the changes appear in a Vox article originally published on March 4th, 2020. The article – “The Conspiracy Theories About the Origins of the Coronavirus, Debunked” – was revised on March 12th, 2021 in an effort to backtrack the piece’s adamant opposition to the possibility of COVID-19 leaking from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki incorrectly claimed that “a number of officers” died on Jan. 6 during the Capitol riots, at a White House press briefing on Thursday. “Obviously, the president’s view is that there were a number of officers who lost their lives, paid a tremendous sacrifice, on a day that will be a stain on our democracy for many years to come, and certainly, many who survived,” Psaki said. “This will be a long-lasting trauma. I’d have to check on the letter and the status of that.”...