Free Republic

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the rise of the reality TV presidency has marked the death knell for some of the nation's most notorious media hacks and grifters. Today, U.S. attorneys indicted not only Trump-era villain and creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti, but also celebrity attorney Mark Geragos as a co-conspirator. The nation's two most famous legal frauds now face charges related to an extortion scheme. Avenatti's been a walking dumpster fire and foil to the Trump presidency, but Geragos has scammed the system for years, representing not just the dregs of Hollywood — Chris Brown for...

California may not be able to build basic 19th century technology like a railroad, but boy they know how to cram down indoctrination in a fashion that would make gulag guards proud. The California Department of Education is working on new “health guidelines” — which are neither healthy nor mere guidelines — in a proposed Health Education Framework. This framework covers new educational resources that teach children to reject the old-fashion two-gender stereotype and instead embrace a plethora of ever-expanding gender options. One recommended resource is a booklet entitled “Who Are You?” This lovely teaching tool explains to students that...

RUSH: Okay, folks, stop applauding. Stop cheering this! There’s nothing to applaud here. Well, there’s something to applaud, but you should not applaud that Robert Mueller didn’t find anything. That validates Mueller, it validates this investigation, it validates this entire waste of time. It validates a hoax to applaud the fact that Mueller found nothing. There never was anything to find! There never was any collusion! There was never, ever any evidence of collusion! Therefore, there could never, ever be any evidence of obstruction of justice. The dossier was the sole reason all of this happened, and it was created...

Netherlands: Muslim migrant who was “reading the Qur’an a lot” stabs Jewish father and son The father responded “I don’t know” when asked whether it was an anti-Semitic incident. But what about that Qu’ran he was reading? The Qur’an demonizes the Jews in numerous ways. It depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the well-being of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); they fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they claim that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies...

Only in the Washington D.C. bubble can high drama and theater be created by a topic the media elites and establishment politicians have wet their pants over in excited delirium that the general population has become bored with for some time now. The release of the Mueller report is being portrayed in a stop-the-presses fashion. It’s all hype. Someone help me here, but I do not see what all the hoopla is about. I see it as an unwise investment of my time to sit around waiting for its release. Anybody who could smell the stink of a partisan political...

Terrorists Promoted, Victims Ignored by Uzay Bulut "An estimated 3,100 Yazidis were killed [in Iraq], with nearly half of them... either shot, beheaded, or burned alive... The estimated number kidnapped is 6,800... All Yazidis were targeted... but children were disproportionately affected." — PLOS Medicine, 2017. By contrast, Shamima Begum said that she had been fully aware of the beheadings and other atrocities committed by ISIS before going to Syria. "I knew about those things and I was okay with it," she said. "Because, you know, I started becoming religious just before I left. From what I heard, Islamically, that is...

Thousands of Muslim Women Raped, Tortured, Killed in Syrian Prisons Where are the Media, UN, 'Human Rights' Groups? by Bassam Tawil The plight of the Palestinian women in Syria is an issue that does not seem bother Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These leaders are too busy fighting and inciting violence against each other, against Israel and the US. They have completely forgotten about the suffering of their people in an Arab country such as Syria. These women, who are being subjected to rape and various forms of torture in Syrian prisons, are the victims of...

President Donald Trump is claiming victory after his attorney general published a summary of the special counsel’s nearly two-year investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and whether the Trump campaign conspired with Moscow. In a four-page letter to lawmakers, Attorney General William Barr summarized the key findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which Trump said unequivocally cleared his name on allegations that have dogged him over his presidency. "No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION," Trump tweeted. "KEEP AMERICA GREAT!" According to Barr, the Mueller report does largely exonerate Trump on the collusion question — but...

Pakistan: Muslims abduct two Hindu girls, marry them to Muslims, forcibly convert them to Islam Islamic tolerance. The Qur’an says “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256). However, what constitutes “compulsion” is in the eye of the beholder. The institutionalized subjugation of the dhimma, with its regular humiliation and harassment, from which one can be freed for the simple price of converting to Islam, is not considered compulsion. Remember Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the journalists who were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam — even though their conversions were obviously coerced, their captors made them say that they...

Attorney General William Barr told Congress Sunday that special counsel Robert Mueller did not find collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, destroying two years of media speculation and bad reporting. The obsession to prove collusion has dampened the media’s journalistic abilities, leading to a seemingly endless list of corrections, retractions and apologies. In light of Mueller concluding his investigation, we’ve compiled a list of some of the worst media screwups in the history of Russia theories. 1. CNN Accuses Don Jr. Of Wikileaks Collusion Last December, CNN’s Manu Raju reported that Wikileaks emailed Donald Trump Jr. to...

In the Middle Ages, guilds held a monopoly on who could work in a whole range of trades, from blacksmith to brewer. The guilds set high hurdles for new entrants, or blocked them entirely, in order to limit competition. France’s minister of finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert once ordered all French crafts to form guilds “so as to compose by this means a group and organization of capable persons, and close the doors to the ignorant.” But the great free-market economist Adam Smith held a different view of guilds: He called them “a conspiracy against the public.” The Washington policy guild often...

<p>JOLO, Philippines -- Two bombs minutes apart tore through a Roman Catholic cathedral on a southern Philippine island where Muslim militants are active, killing at least 20 people and wounding 111 others during a Sunday Mass, officials said.</p> <p>Witnesses said the first blast inside the Jolo cathedral in the provincial capital sent churchgoers, some of them wounded, to stampede out of the main door. Army troops and police posted outside were rushing in when the second bomb went off about one minute later near the main entrance, causing more deaths and injuries. The military was checking a report that the second explosive device may have been attached to a parked motorcycle.</p>

A transgender rights activist who reported a British Christian journalist to the police for "misgendering" her teenage child has withdrawn her complaint. Susie Green, who leads the transgender advocacy group Mermaids, decided to drop her complaint against Caroline Farrow, a Catholic commentator and writer for the U.K. Catholic Herald, because the media coverage, she said, was misrepresenting what had happened, the Guardian reported Wednesday. “If I had continued my complaint then [Farrow] would have continued to have a platform to spread misinformation about what actually happened,” Green said in an interview on BBC2's Victoria Derbyshire program. “Being involved in an...

Fox News daytime anchor Shep Smith is facing intense backlash after Big League Politics published an audiotaped interview with John Doe #1, a 35-year old man who describes Smith sexually attacking him in New York City in 2004. Smith did not immediately stop his aggression as the alleged victim tried to fight Smith off, according to John Doe #1’s account of the incident. A petition at Ourstand.org states its mission: “Demand Fox News Suspend Shep Smith to Investigate Sexual Assault Claim.” The petition reads: “According to a new bombshell report from BigLeaguePolitics, Shep Smith has been accused of Sexual Assault...

SANTIAGO - Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Saturday said his country “does not owe the world anything” when it comes to the environment. The far-right leader, who is critical of the Paris climate change accord, was speaking in Chile following Friday’s launch of the Forum for the Progress of South America (PROSUR), a conservative-minded group of South American leaders. He said he had thanked his counterpart President Sebastian Pinera for agreeing to host in December 2019 the 25th U.N. Conference on Climate Change (COP25), originally planned in Brazil. Brazil has declined to host the event, citing impossible objectives. “We can’t...

In the wake of the recent mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, Nick Riemer, a senior lecturer in English and linguistics at the University of Sydney, offered up a suggestion for preventing more such atrocities by presumed white supremacists: stop universities from promoting Western civilization. In a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece titled, “After Christchurch universities have a responsibility: abandon Ramsay,” Riemer argues that if “Australian universities really want to combat Islamophobia after Christchurch, only one course is possible: abandon Ramsay immediately.” He’s referring to the controversial Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation located in the University of Sydney. The...

There is a pall hanging over the left side of the internet today. The disappointment is palpable. How is this possible, they're asking? We were so certain that the president of the United States was a traitor — that Hillary Clinton didn't lose the 2016 election because she was the worst candidate in modern history, but because Trump and the Russians worked together to steal it. It's like election night, November 2016, all over again. Once again, leftist delusions have been shattered, this time by a putative ally -- special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller turned over every rock, looked in...

By now you’ve heard the news: San Antonio, Texas, has banned Chick-fil-A from San Antonio International Airport. The ban, passed by the city council in the form of a vendor contract, is based on a hit piece by the left-wing Think Progress. This the latest attempt by some on the left to ostracize and demonize Chick-fil-A over statements made by its founder or for its charity work -- matters that have nothing to do with its business competence. City councilman from district 1, Roberto Trevino, made the move to punish Chick-fil-A, saying “With this decision, the City Council reaffirmed the...

When I saw Barbra Streisand trending on Twitter, I assumed that she had died. Babs, of course, is still alive. It's her career that is dead. The once-revered-but-now-hated pop culture icon made the mistake of expressing culturally unacceptable beliefs about Michael Jackson and his alleged sexual fondness for children. As I read tweet after tweet condemning Streisand, I couldn't help but wonder how the tweets will age. Watching our society slide into moral degradation, few conservative Christians doubt that the day is coming when pedophilia will be a culturally acceptable practice. Because of that, the left may want to hold...

Three college students were arrested after allegedly setting fire to the Louisiana dorm room of another student, who is involved in several conservative organizations. Robert Money, 21, and David Shelton, 20, who attend Tulane University, were arrested, along with Naimi Okami, 20, a Brown University student. Police said they were caught on security cameras. Money, Shelton, and Okami were each charged with one count of aggravated arson after being arrested on March 23 and they appeared in court on March 24 before being released on bail. According to The Advocate, they could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted....