Free Republic

Congress is broken. The vision of James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the most important document in the world second only to the Bible, has been blurred, distorted, and almost forgotten. Partisanship has eclipsed any thought of working together in the interest of the nation. Party loyalty is sacrosanct and any deviation in either Party is frowned upon and sanctioned. Gone are the days when members of Congress could reach across the aisle to produce legislation founded on common sense rather than sheer Party dogma. 'Negotiation' does not equate with 'capitulation.' But insistence on 'my way or the highway'...

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will reignite a continuing conversation about what to do when long-established religious convictions clash with gay people’s civil rights. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, a Colorado web designer, Lorie Smith, wants to create websites for clients’ weddings. She is a Christian, and because of her religious beliefs, she does not want to offer these services for same-sex weddings. However, she serves L.G.B.T.Q. customers for other design projects. This week’s legal arguments will most likely focus primarily on questions around free speech: Can the government compel artists or designers to...

Over the last few days, Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari have all reported out pieces of Donald Trump’s deplatforming, which is easily the most famous digital unpersoning in history. It is also the least compelling story in the series. While it’s good to finally know exactly what happened, it really just was what everyone assumed: Trump was not banned for violating policy. Trump was banned because Twitter employees, who donated literally 99% of their political contributions to the Democratic Party, demanded it be done regardless of their own rules. Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a...

Most of my life, I assumed that we elected serious politicians and appointed competent people to deal with the country’s complex problems -- the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the economy, immigration, terrorism, foreign policy, natural disasters, etc. -- major problems that required competent people, serious about addressing (and fixing) the issues. That was then, this is now. America is no longer a serious country, and the West is not a serious culture. Proof of how far we’ve fallen -- boys claim they’re girls, girls claim they’re boys and we must accept the new biology or...

Public-health officials ruined many lives by insisting that workers with natural immunity to Covid-19 be fired if they weren’t fully vaccinated. But after two years of accruing data, the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity is clear. By firing staff with natural immunity, employers got rid of those least likely to infect others. It’s time to reinstate those employees with an apology. For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New...

‘Follow the science” has been the battle cry of lockdown supporters since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Yet before March 2020, the mainstream scientific community, including the World Health Organization, strongly opposed lockdowns and similar measures against infectious disease. That judgment came from historical analysis of pandemics and an awareness that societywide restrictions have severe socioeconomic costs and almost entirely speculative benefits. Our pandemic response, premised on lockdowns and closely related “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” or NPIs, represented an unprecedented and unjustified shift in scientific opinion from where it stood a few months before the discovery of Covid-19. In March 2019 WHO held...

Jeffrey Epstein's access to the Clinton White House has been laid bare by visitor logs exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, which reveal the pedophile visited at least 17 times during the former president's first few years in office. Epstein, who died in 2019, visited Bill Clinton at the Executive Mansion over the course of three years with the first invitation coming just a month after his inauguration in January 1993. The logs show the late financier showed up on 14 separate days, even making two visits in a single day on three different occasions. Epstein was invited by some of Clinton's...

“Modern research is revealing that unborn babies do feel pain at an early stage, and we see that science in action regularly during fetal surgery, in which doctors apply analgesia in utero to prevent the suffering of the unborn child,” Dr. David Prentice, Charlotte Lozier Institute vice president of research and an expert on stem cell research, said in a Dec. 1 press release. “Respectfully, we suggest that Justice Sotomayor follow the science, which has not stood still since Roe was decided in 1973,” Prentice stated. The Court heard oral arguments Wednesday morning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a...

When the Supreme Court on Wednesday hears oral arguments about a Mississippi law that bans abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, the issue in contention will be clear. Ever since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 the court has held that women have a constitutional right to an abortion up to the point of viability—roughly 24 weeks. Expect to read a great deal about how pro-lifers seek to impose their moral views on the nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly the pro-life community would cheer a ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization...

The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday released its “official” cost estimates for the House tax and entitlement bill, but don’t believe it. The CBO gnomes aren’t lying about a 10-year deficit estimate of $367 billion. They’re obliged to score the bill under rules that Democrats have rigged with multiple tricks that disguise the real cost by trillions of dollars. Democrats phase out the biggest programs in the bill while paying for them with 10 years of tax increases. They phase-in other programs and off-load costs to the states. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the House bill would cost nearly...

The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that President Biden's Build Back Better Act will increase the nation's deficit by $367 billion. The CBO's cost estimate contradicts President Biden's claim that the legislation will cost "zero." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also have said the bill would be fully paid for with tax hikes on corporations and wealthy Americans. According to the CBO's estimate, "enacting this legislation would result in a net increase in the deficit totaling $367 billion over the 2022-2031 period, not counting any additional revenue that may be generated by additional funding...

Due to the pandemic, Paige Santillo had been laid off from her job as a marketing manager at the publishing company Informa in October. As part of her severance package, the company paid her COBRA health insurance premiums through April. Come May, she’d be on her own with the $700 bill. She didn’t know if she could afford that tab and, without coverage, she feared having to stop taking her medication for anxiety and depression. But then the American Rescue Plan passed in March, and the $1.9 trillion stimulus package included a provision that offered many unemployed workers free health...

Polack et al. (Dec. 31)1 report a vaccine efficacy of 94.8% against Covid-19 after two doses of the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech). The authors also report a vaccine efficacy of 52.4% from after the first dose to before the second dose, but in their calculation, they included data that were collected during the first 2 weeks after the first dose, when immunity would have still been mounting.1 We used documents submitted to the Food and Drug Administration2 to derive the vaccine efficacy beginning from 2 weeks after the first dose to before the second dose (Table 1). Even...

As law enforcement continues its nationwide manhunt for violent pro-Trump extremists involved in last week’s deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, one of America’s top experts in disinformation is here to remind you that if you want to understand how we got here, you need to look beyond Donald Trump and Washington. “The internet is a crime scene,” says Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “We’re collectively witnessing the aftermath of probably one of the biggest lies ever told in terms of the amount of people it reached and the effects that...

Press conference is dedicated to new facts revealing international corruption and external governance of Ukraine. Because of the leaked information about today’s press conference last week it was announced that I was being sanctioned by politicians from the US Department of the Treasury under the request from Democratic senators. They really didn’t want us to publish what we are going to release today. WHAT WILL BE DISCLOSED TODAY? 1. Evidence of withdrawal through financial “holes” of millions of dollars stolen from the Ukrainian people, laundered with the help of banks and laundromats in various jurisdictions and their subsequent transfer to...

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald quit his job this morning. In a bizarre, ironic, and disturbing commentary on trends in modern media, the celebrated reporter was forced to resign after writing a story criticizing both the Biden campaign and intelligence community — only to have it spiked by the editors of The Intercept, the news outlet he co-founded six years ago with the aim of preventing pretty much this exact situation. “The irony,” Greenwald says, “is that a media outlet I co-founded, and which was built on my name and my accomplishments, with the purpose of guaranteeing editorial independence, is...

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories. One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring...

We the media have "fact-checked" President Trump like we have fact-checked no other human being on the planet, and he's certainly given us plenty to write about. That's probably why it's so easy to find lists enumerating and examining his mistakes, missteps and "lies." But as self-appointed arbiters of truth, we've largely excused our own unprecedented string of fact-challenged reporting. The truth is, formerly well-respected, top news organizations are making repeat, unforced errors in numbers that were unheard of just a couple of years ago. Our repeat mistakes involve declaring that Trump's claims are "lies" when they are matters of...

Minnesota has been in the grip of coronavirus hysteria for the last two months. We have submitted to unprecedented restrictions on our freedoms and stood by as our economy crashed, all because politicians, experts and journalists have warned we face an apocalyptic scenario. Gov. Tim Walz justified his first shutdown order with a mathematical model that predicted — horrifyingly — that 74,000 Minnesotans would die from COVID-19 without social distancing, and 50,000 even with the economic shutdown. A public health crisis remotely on that scale has not materialized. But an economic and social crisis has, and it is just beginning....

The Justice Department’s closing of its criminal case against President Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Thursday came as new red flags emerged from recently released documents revealing the FBI’s handling of the matter. Former FBI agents and federal prosecutors tell RealClearInvestigations that the documents show suspiciously irregular handling and editing of Flynn’s FD-302 form, the official document used to record what happens in FBI interviews. That form served as a key record used to charge Flynn with lying to federal agents. He pleaded guilty to that charge in December 2017 but had been trying to withdraw the...