Free Republic

For the last 24 hours, I've had to listen, ad nauseam, to people debate and virtue-signal over the Super Bowl halftime show, and I'm over it. It was 15 minutes of our lives that we'll forget about next week. But the thing is, as annoying as it has been, none of us has died over it. You liked the Bad Bunny show? Great. You preferred the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) version? Good for you. You want to argue about it? Go for it. Donald Trump will never have you executed for watching, liking, disliking, or debating any of it. If...

During Thursday's cabinet meeting, Donald Trump mentioned that he'd spoken with his little Venezuelan pawn, "acting President" Delcy Rodríguez, and that the call had gone well. We later found out that they talked for a quite a while, at least half an hour, and that both Trump and Marco Rubio were on the phone. The actions that have followed in the few days since sort of give you an idea of exactly how that phone call went down. I'm guessing Trump may have reminded her that there could easily be a "second wave." First of all, Ms. Delcy has dialed...

CNN — The nominations for the 97th Academy Awards were announced Thursday and it was a big morning for “Emilia Pérez,” “The Brutalist” and “Wicked.” After acknowledgement of the impact of ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles by Academy leadership, Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott revealed the nominees for the film industry’s top prize, previewing the race that will play out in the weeks to come, culminating at the March ceremony.

Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet, Sandra Bullock, Viola Davis, Helen Mirren... Carlos Gascon? Even though one of these things is not like the other, they all have something in common: They've been nominated for an Academy Award for "Best Actress." Look, I couldn't care less about the Oscars, and I'm sure most of you agree. Hollywood has long proven that it is out of touch with reality and out of touch with the rest of the country. But as a woman — an actual biological woman in case we have any confused liberals lurking around — I'm so sick of...

With all this talk about the Chinese government infiltrating the United States through TikTok, many have asked: Aren't the Chinese already doing so through the purchase of U.S. farmland? About a year and a half ago, Georgia Rep. Mike Collins delivered a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, citing a 2021 report that China owned 384,000 acres of American agricultural land at that time — a 30% jump between 2019 and 2020 — and some of that land surrounded an Air Force base in North Dakota, making it a clear threat to national security. Grand Forks, N.D., apparently ended...

For decades now, I’ve been conducting my own informal survey of American views about CEO pay. Whenever family, friends, or random strangers ask about my job, I tell them it involves research on executive compensation. Last year, for example, I found that CEOs of America’s 100 largest low-wage employers made, on average, over 600 times what their median workers made — and often thousands of times more. Invariably, people see red when I share these numbers. And they often have choice words about the unfairness of it all. A new poll reinforces my informal findings: Americans across the political spectrum...

SENATOR JOHN KERRY'S Vietnam War record has been a focus of the presidential campaign for weeks. For a New York company that produces reality-based video games, that makes the topic ripe for a jump from politics to pixels. The company, Kuma Reality Games, which specializes in recreating military encounters, is making one of Mr. Kerry's Swift boat missions the situation for a game. It says that the game is intended to entertain and to inform, and that it is nonpartisan. Armed with a computer keyboard, players are invited to enter an interactive simulation of Viet Cong ambushes on a small...