Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Hate crimes driven by homophobia and racism resulted in a 33% surge in reported incidents in California last year, following a similar spike in hate-driven attacks the year prior and confirming what officials have been hearing anecdotally since the pandemic began, the state’s attorney general said Tuesday. Attorney General Rob Bonta said that crimes against Black people were again the most prevalent in 2021, climbing 13% from 2020 to 513 reported incidents. Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias increased nearly 50% to 303 incidents while crimes against Asian Americans were up 178% to 247 incidents....

Though the conservative Supreme Court appears poised to strike down Roe v. Wade, Democrats control slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, and they have a president in the White House supportive of abortion rights. They also have public opinion on their side. But one thing stops them from passing a federal law protecting abortion rights and codifying Roe into law: the filibuster. The filibuster is a Senate rule that requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. Most controversial legislation is passed on party-line votes these days, and it’s very rare for parties to have 60 senators. Democrats only have...

Those remarks weren’t just vintage Trump braggadocio. They’re likely also smart politics, as they provide an opening to win back some suburban voters that fled from him toward Biden in 2020. Sixty-seven percent of suburban residents were vaccinated as of August, according to a late summer NBC News poll. That was below the 79 percent of urban residents who got the vaccine, but well above the 52 percent of rural residents, where support for Trump runs deep. Even Biden gave credit to the Trump administration for the development of the Covid vaccine and for getting a booster shot.It’s unclear that...

The past and current master of the GOP sees a future threat arising. [cut] “It was a mistake to ever embrace Donald Trump, and now we want to be the party of Adam Kinzinger.” [cut] Would DeSantis be audacious enough to run against Trump in 2024? The case against waiting is that it’s extremely unlikely that the governor can maintain his exalted status in the party until 2028. On the other hand, the case against running in 2024 is that it involves the enormous risk of encountering the business end of the Trump buzz saw, which could change DeSantis’s image...

CHRISSY Teigen’s Cravings kitchenware line has been removed from Target’s website following Courtney Stodden’s claims she was “bullied” by the star, The Sun can reveal. Earlier this week, Courtney said she was urged by Chrissy to “kill themselves” at just 16-years-old in addition to her publicly posting a series of hateful messages aimed towards the then-minor. As the backlash rages on, the social media personality's culinary empire is now in the line of fire as thousands of fans have vowed to “stop shopping” with the companies all together if they continued selling Cravings by Chrissy. It appears Target listened to...

Pop star Demi Lovato, a gun control proponent and left-wing activist who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, says she cut her hair in order to free herself “of the gender and sexuality norms” she says were placed on her “as a Christian in the South.”

In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, right-leaning news sites with millions of readers have published dozens of false or misleading headlines and articles that effectively back unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and his allies that mail-in ballots threaten the integrity of the election. The Washington Examiner, Breitbart News, The Gateway Pundit and The Washington Times are among the sites that have posted articles with headlines giving weight to the conspiracy theory that voter fraud is rampant and could swing the election to the left, a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by data. On Sept. 25, Gateway Pundit...

On Friday, the World Health Organization reiterated that the novel coronavirus, which caused a major pandemic in the world, is "natural in origin". Frankly speaking, that's not a fresh conclusion. As early as in January, there had been wide consensus among scientists that the novel coronavirus could not possibly have come from man-made sources and that its origin was definitely in nature. A few Indian scientists claimed it might have been "man-made" in origin in their shared paper on the pre-publishing website BioRxiv, but they soon withdrew that paper and apologized for that groundless guess. Yet some US politicians have...