Free Republic

CAMP HILL, Pennsylvania -- With 48 seconds to go in a high school football matchup last fall between Cedar Cliff and Cocalico, the game came down to a shootout between the two central Pennsylvania rivals. To say that the intensity level was through the roof would be an understatement. Yet when the game ended, the two teams met in the end zone and prayed together. It is more common than not on any given fall Friday night in this country to see a coach praying silently on the field both before and after a local high school football game. Most...

During the armed militant takeover of the Seattle Police Department's East Precinct following the death of George Floyd to form the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020, Seattle officials drafted legislation to transfer the East Precinct to a local Black Lives Matter activist group, according to documents recently obtained by The Seattle Times. Three memos and a draft resolution about transferring the East Precinct were sent to former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan from Calvin Goings, the director of the city's Department of Finance and Administrative Services (FAS), in an email on June 8, 2020—the same day SPD evacuated the precinct,...

Spend enough time studying the “racial equity” and “ethnic studies” programs sweeping school districts across the nation and you’ll find that they are following in the footsteps, on a several-year delay, of one of America’s most progressive cities: Seattle. It’s worth examining, then, how all that worked out in Seattle. Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattle’s racial disparities are among the worst in the nation – and they’re getting worse, not better. At the forefront of Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented...

SEATTLE — A long-time Seattle business owner is sounding off after he said his business has been "hit" by crime seven times in the past three months alone. This past weekend, Jay Ashberg, the owner of Seattle Shirt Company, said there were back-to-back burglaries at his store. The Seattle Shirt Company is located on the corner of First Avenue and Pike Street. Ashberg is still in shock of how far he believes Seattle has fallen. "This city is unrecognizable to what it was even five years ago, between the homeless and the lack of police, the whole defund the police,...

A man who says he suffers from mental illness keeps cycling through the King County criminal justice system. He has a long history of suicide-by-cop attempts. Someone is bound to get hurt or worse if the man is not kept in jail. The suspect is accused of trying to take hostages at a Target in West Seattle, where he barricaded himself for hours. He allegedly posted videos of himself from inside the store after threatening would-be hostages with a knife. It’s not the first time he’s been accused of trying to hold shoppers hostage at a department store. The suspect...

On Wednesday, an internal probe claimed that members of the Seattle Police Department (SPD) deliberately faked police radio transmissions that indicated a right-wing protest was about to occur in June of 2020. According to The Hill, the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) concluded after its review that a “misinformation effort” was “approved, ordered, and led” by a high-ranking officer in the SPD. The radio chatter in question appeared to describe a gathering of the Proud Boys, a patriotic and conservative organization, that was heading towards the Capitol Hill region of the city, where a riot was taking place on June...

The recall campaign was bruising. Both the recall supporters and Sawant defenders spent roughly one million dollars each. The Kshama Solidarity Campaign set up pop-up tents around the district to convince voters to print, sign, and submit their ballots against the recall. This tactic, along with ballot harvesting, is legal in Washington state. Some Kshama supporters were accused of bullying and intimidation against those who openly supported the recall.

Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration had drafted legislation to transfer power in the Police Department’s East Precinct building to a Black Lives Matter activist organization. Newly released documents obtained by The Seattle Times showed that on June 8, 2020 Calvin Goings, the director of Seattle’s Department of Finance and Administrative Services (FAS) sent three memos and a draft resolution via email to Durkan about abandoning the precinct.

A homeless man is charged with burglary for trying to steal a massive flat-screen television from the downtown Seattle Target. Staff say it was the 22nd time he stole from the store in the past three months. The entire alleged incident was caught on surveillance footage obtained by the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. And thanks to a lenient judge, the man was released on his own personal recognizance.John Ray Lomack is a prolific offender who, according to the King County Prosecutor’s Office, has an extensive criminal history. During the holiday season, Lomack was banned from the department store in...

The Target department store in downtown Seattle is being absolutely ravaged by shoplifters, with one staff member telling me theft happens “about every 10 minutes.” He wasn’t kidding. On a recent trip to the store on 2nd Avenue and Pike Street, I saw staff confront two separate shoplifters within 12 minutes of one another. It’s so bad that it’s not just the Biden administration’s supply chain crisis creating the empty shelves. And it’s so dangerous that customers can now only buy some products online as they’ll likely get mugged on the way out of the store. Homeless men and women...

A homeless man is charged with burglary for trying to steal a massive flat-screen television from the downtown Seattle Target. Staff say it was the 22nd time he stole from the store in the past 3 months. The entire alleged incident was caught on surveillance footage obtained by the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. And thanks to a lenient judge, the man was released on his own personal recognizance. John Ray Lomack is a prolific offender who, according to the King County Prosecutor’s Office, has an extensive criminal history. A King County prosecutor argued that Lomack should be held on...

Eleven Tri-Cities residents are accused of participating in a widespread fraud ring that amassed almost $1 million in insurance payouts from staged car crashes. The scheme involved at least 14 vehicle accidents over a three-year period, with the conspirators misleading law enforcement officers, medical personnel and insurance companies, according to an 81-page indictment filed in federal court. The orchestrated collisions between vehicles often happened on remote roads and at night with no witnesses, the indictment says. No one was inside the “victim” vehicle during at least three of the staged accidents, hammers were used to break car windows in at...

Homes and businesses in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood have been without phone and internet service for five days, and now, CenturyLink says that repairs may take up to three weeks. Are AI cameras in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood start of troubling trend? The outage is being blamed on a pair of vandalism-related incidents from late last week. CenturyLink crews say that it appears as though someone cut through a wooden box running under the Magnolia Bridge that holds fiber-optic cables. Cables and copper wiring were then stolen. After initial repairs, some homes in the area had their service restored on Saturday. But...

Here is the campaign video of Ubax Gardheere, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 15 around 1996, which makes her something like 40 now. She represents herself as a "proud single mother" of three children, an immigrant, a Muslim, and a person of color. Here is a transcript of the video, which is pretty much a word salad that might have been written by an algorithm. Hi! I'm Ubax Gardheere. I'm a single black immigrant mother and homeowner in the unincorporated area of Renton, and I'm running for King County council in district 9. I came...

An Obama fundraiser awarded a cushy European ambassadorship after bundling more than half a million dollars for his presidential campaign ran her U.S. embassy like a hostile dictator, spent government funds on booze and bullied staff.Here comes the good part. State Department leadership (that includes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) knew all about it but took no action, presumably because the wealthy donor—a Seattle philanthropist named Cynthia Stroum—is untouchable. At least that’s what an internal State Department investigation seems to indicate. Made public this week, a scathing report of the probe says that during her year-long tenure as U.S....

Ready to hit bookstore shelves in less than two months, “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education” is a shocking expose that will come as a surprise to many. The author, Luke Rosiak, is an investigative reporter with the Daily Wire and former writer for the Washington Post. I’m hoping to get Rosiak as a guest on The Dori Monson Show closer to the book’s publication – but the advance was so good, I had to talk about it here. In his quest to reveal what is happening in “racial equity” and “ethnic studies” programs...

Luke Rosiak is a reporter for the Daily Wire and he’s about to have a book published about K-12 schools. It’s titled “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” Today the Daily Wire published an excerpt from the book about the director of ethnic studies for Seattle public schools, a woman named Tracy Castro-Gill. Originally Tracy Hammond, her husband asked her for a divorce and Hammond decided to leave him and her young daughter behind in California so she could marry a convicted child molester in Seattle, a man she’d met playing the video game...

SEATTLE — A frustrated Seattle business owner says she's tired of dealing with break-ins and threats to her customers and workers. She’s reaching out to nearby businesses to see if they want to band together to create a safer environment in their community. Crime statistics from the Seattle Police Department show a rise in burglaries and thefts at businesses in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Businesses in this area have dealt with countless break-ins and say when they call for help police can’t always get there. Vanessa Daiger owns Woodland Coffee in the Ballard neighborhood and says in the five years they’ve...

Seattle police say an officer shot and killed a man suspected of burglary after the man stabbed a police dog. The Seattle Police Department said on their online blotter that a South Seattle resident called 911 at about 2:45 p.m. Wednesday about a man with a knife breaking into their home. An officer with a police dog responded, saw the person suspected in the incident and started chasing him on foot, police said.The police dog engaged with the person on the 6700 block of Swift Avenue South, police said. The suspect fatally stabbed the dog and injured an officer in...

Seattle police exchanged detailed fake radio transmissions about a nonexistent group of menacing right-wing extremists at a crucial moment during 2020 racial justice protests, an investigation by the city’s police watchdog group shows. The radio chatter about members of the Proud Boys marching around downtown Seattle, some possibly carrying guns, and then heading to confront protesters on Capitol Hill was an improper “ruse,” or dishonest ploy, that exacerbated a volatile situation, The Seattle Times reported. That’s according to findings released Wednesday by the city’s Office of Police Accountability (OPA). The Proud Boys is a far-right extremist group with a reputation...