Free Republic

"Betrayed." Victor Avila is a survivor. Soft-spoken but iron-willed, he dedicated his life to law enforcement and to his country. Yet, the feds are now fighting tooth and nail to bury the full truth about the 2011 ambush by Los Zetas drug cartel thugs in Mexico that left him gravely wounded and his partner, special agent Jaime Zapata, dead. This week, two of the Mexican gangsters convicted in the horror on Highway 57 between Mexico City and Monterrey were sentenced to double life terms in prison. "HSI Special Agents Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila were in Mexico to protect and...

"#MeToo" is the social media meme of the moment. In a 24-hour period, the phrase was tweeted nearly a half million times and posted on Facebook 12 million times. Spearheaded by actress Alyssa Milano in the wake of Hollyweird's Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal, women have flooded social media with their own long-buried accounts of being pestered, groped or assaulted by rapacious male predators in the workplace. Count me out. It's one thing to break down cultural stigmas constructively, but the #MeToo movement is collectivist virtue signaling of a very perilous sort. The New York Times heralded the phenomenon with...

Cue the funeral bagpipes. My fourth health insurance plan is dead. Two weeks ago, my husband and I received yet another cancellation notice for our private, individual health insurance coverage. It's our fourth Obamacare-induced obituary in four years. Our first death notice, from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, arrived in the fall of 2013. The insurer informed us that because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)," our plan no longer met the federal government's requirements. Never mind our needs and desires as consumers who were quite satisfied with a high-deductible PPO...

I'm calling foul on all the leftists rushing to protect the NFL's protest crusaders from President Donald Trump's criticism of their national anthem antics. Their shabby line of defense? The NFL is a "private enterprise" whose "rights" are being violated by those who dare to challenge the league's political radicalization. The anti-Trump Democratic Coalition has even filed an ethics complaint alleging that the president's comments constitute a criminal violation against using government offices "to influence the employment decisions and practices" of a private entity. Funny. These fair-weather friends of corporate free speech and the First Amendment were nowhere to be...

The numbers don't lie. Across the entertainment industry, viewers and fans are tuning out. It's no coincidence ratings are cratering as unhinged celebrities crank up their anti-Trump and anti-American antics. Pro tip, Tinseltownies: Swapping your jazz hands for middle fingers and waving resistance fists at your customer base is bad for business. Let us count the waning ways. Emmy emetics. Who wanted to see smirking Stephen Colbert lead a cast of Botoxed starlets and men in hot pants, handing out TV industry awards to diamond-draped elites hoisting up their gilt statues as emblems of victory on behalf of the hegemonically...

Americans are becoming only too aware of the financial tricks and deceit in which some of the nation's largest and most respected corporations engaged during the Clinton administration to pump up stock prices with fraudulently inflated profits. When the huge bubble no longer could be sustained the men and women at the top would bail out of their stock and pocket millions, leaving pensioners and other investors holding an empty bag. To market insiders these are known as "pump and dumps." While federal investigators are looking into the corporate malfeasance at Enron, WorldCom, Qwest Communications, AOL Time Warner and...

Over and over again, from the mouths of politicians in both parties, identity politics purveyors and cheap labor lobbyists, we hear the same refrains about President Obama's 800,000 amnestied illegal alien youths: "They don't deserve to be punished." "They deserve protection." "They deserve the American dream." Deserve, deserve, deserve. Over and over again, in countless cookie-cutter op-ed pieces published over the past month, so-called DREAMers have vociferously lamented President Donald Trump's push to eventually undo their unconstitutional five-year reprieves from deportation plus coveted work permits: "DREAMers like me have flourished under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Trump might take...

The good news is that Sen. Charles Grassley on Tuesday asked DHS for all immigration summaries and detainers for Imran Awan, wife Hina Alvi, brothers Jamal and Abid Awan, and friends/associates Natalia Sova and Rao Abbas. Here is a radical proposition: The public has a right to know the immigration status and history of foreign criminal suspects. Their entrance and employment sponsorship records should not be treated like classified government secrets -- especially if the public's tax dollars subsidized their salaries. In March, I contacted the D.C. offices of House Congressional Democrats Joaquin Castro of Texas, Sander Levin of Michigan,...

It's "Made In America" week in Washington, D.C. You'd think this would be cause for bipartisan celebration. Who could be against highlighting the ingenuity, self-reliance and success of our nation's homegrown entrepreneurs and manufacturers? Enter Bill Kristol. The entrenched Beltway pundit ridiculed a festive kickoff event on Monday at the White House, where President Donald Trump hosted companies from all 50 states to showcased their American-made products. "Maybe it's just me," killjoy Kristol tweeted, "but I find something off-putting about turning the White House into an exhibition hall for American tchotchkes." (That's the Yiddish word for useless trinkets). "Tchotchkes"? Tell...

Junk science endangers lives. Forensic junk science in the hands of overzealous prosecutors, ignorant police detectives and reckless experts threatens liberty. There is a crisis in America's government-run crime labs -- and it's not just the result of a few rogue operators. The problem is long-festering and systemic. In April, Massachusetts state crime lab chemist Annie Dookhan made national headlines after investigations and lawsuits over her misconduct prompted the state's Supreme Judicial Court to order the largest dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history. Prosecutors were forced to dismiss a stunning 21,000-plus drug cases after Dookhan admitted to forging signatures,...

One of the many maddening takeaways from the London Bridge jihad attack is this: If you post videos on YouTube radicalizing Muslim viewers to kill innocent people, YouTube will leave you alone. But if you post a video on YouTube honoring innocent people murdered by barbaric jihadists, your video will get banned. I know. It happened to me in 2006. Eleven years later, the selective censors at Google-YouTube still can't competently distinguish terrorist hate speech from political free speech. Islamic hate preachers such as Ahmad Musa Jibril, whose bloodthirsty rants against non-Muslims reportedly inspired the London Bridge ringleader, have flourished....

For now, everyone knows the sonorous name and cherubic face of 8-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos. She's the littlest known victim of Monday night's jihad attack in Manchester, England. Her doe-eyed image spread as rapidly across social media as the #PrayForManchester hashtags and Twitter condolences from celebrities. But I guarantee you that beautiful Saffie Rose will evaporate from the memories of those most loudly proclaiming "Never forget" faster than a dewdrop in the desert. Look no further for proof of the West's incurable terror attack amnesia than the reaction to the Manchester massacre. Reporters, politicians and pundits expressed shock at the...

I feel your pain. But please use your brain. On Monday, late-night TV comedian Jimmy Kimmel delivered an emotional monologue about his newborn son. His baby was born with a congenital heart defect that required emergency open-heart surgery. Millions of American parents, myself included, have walked in Kimmel's shoes. We've experienced the terrifying roller coaster of emotions -- panic, helplessness, anger, anxiety, relief, grief and unconditional love -- that comes with raising chronically ill kids. But Kimmel didn't use his high-profile platform to educate the public about coping with rare diseases. Or to champion the nation's best and brightest pediatric...

How thirsty does Variety look begging readers to join it in doing high V cheerleading moves for Chelsea Clinton? Thirstier than an ultra-marathoner lost in Death Valley in mid-July. Hyping the entertainment magazine's latest cover, Co-Editor-in-Chief Claudia Eller gushed this week, "How cool does Chelsea Clinton look on our Power of Women, NY, cover?" Welcome to the liberal media's manufacturing of "cool." Leather jacket? Check. Overzealous airbrushing? Check. Humanizing grin? Check. Democratic establishment pedigree? Checkity-check-check. This is just the latest attempt by The Media Resistance to make Chelsea Clinton a thing. The same liberal lunatics in the press who rage...

Here come the hyper-partisan hounds. A new nonprofit called American Oversight launched this week to combat President Trump's "culture of impunity." The outfit declared itself "nonpartisan" and claims its crusaders will fight for a "transparent and ethical government." But like Waylon Jennings once crooned, "Baby, that dog won't hunt." These Democrat operatives aren't interested in accountability. Their mission is to attack, obstruct and destroy their political opponents at all costs. Executive Director and Obama donor Austin Evers is certainly familiar with the "culture of impunity." He worked as a lawyer at Williams and Connolly -- the firm representing Hillary Clinton...

Leo Perrero still remembers the humiliation of losing his job. “All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days,” he was told, later recalling the experience before Congress. “Later that same day,” he added, “I remember very clearly going to the local church pumpkin sale and having to tell the kids that we could not buy any because my job was going over to a foreign worker.” Disney replaced Perrero using a little-known and oft overlooked provision of immigration law that allows big tech companies to replace their employees with foreign workers under...

Former Fort Worth, Texas, police officer Brian Franklin is finally free. But he is still fighting to clear his name. "I've been vindicated," he told me in an interview last week, "but not yet exonerated." Franklin served 21 years in prison -- a harrowing 7,700 days -- of a life sentence after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 1995. But he steadfastly maintained his innocence, studied law in the prison library and won a reversal of his conviction last spring. In December, a jury acquitted him after a second criminal trial. "It's been a roller coaster...

All that was missing from Hillary Clinton's video address to a left-wing women's group this week was a pink pussyhat and a "BOYS SUCK" T-shirt. Feminists at the MAKERS conference in Southern California gushed over the twice-failed presidential candidate's remarks, which exhorted her ideological sisters-in-arms to "be bold," "step up and speak out," and "set an example for every woman and girl out there who's worried about what the future holds and wonders whether our rights, opportunities and values will endure." (The alleged sexual assault victims of Bill Clinton who have stepped up and spoken boldly, however, did not get...

Hoodlums will be out in full force this Inauguration Day weekend. Count on it. I've covered the left's criminal anarchist element for more than 20 years — from the animal rights terrorists who have harassed, threatened and firebombed scientific researches across the U.S. and Europe to the anti-capitalist thugs who wreaked havoc on downtown business owners at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and the 2010 G-20 summit in Toronto to the ANSWER Coalition and Code Pink's not-so-peaceful peaceniks who disrupted congressional hearings and menaced veterans memorials and military recruiting stations throughout the George W. Bush years to...

I first read Thomas Sowell in college -- no thanks to my college. At the majority of America's institutions of "higher learning," reading Thomas Sowell was a subversive act in the early 1990s when I was a student. It remains so today. Why? Because the prolific libertarian economist's vast body of work is a clarion rejection of all the liberal intelligentsia hold dear. Among the left's most corrosive ideas is the concept of perpetual and permanent racial victimhood, which social engineers pretend to rectify through federally mandated, taxpayer-subsidized preferential policies. Sowell's groundbreaking academic analyses of these programs in the...