Free Republic

In his first interview since dropping out of the presidential race, DeSantis told Blaze TV’s Steve Deace that the blame is on Iowa caucusgoers who rallied behind front-runner Donald Trump even though many didn’t like him. “They did not want to see Trump nominated again, but they had basically been told that it was inevitable, that it was over,” DeSantis told Deace on Tuesday. DeSantis, who lost to Trump in the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, added that those voters were “checked out” and had “just totally dropped out of the process.” The Florida governor told Deace he’d consider running...

The billionaire founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism to help Democrats win elections. He is the nation’s leading financier of the “mis”- and “disinformation” industries and is now the largest private stakeholder in America’s legacy journalism schools. The most recent Twitter Files released by Matt Taibbi add a deeply disturbing new layer to the story. They show Newmark is at the very heart of an incestuous web of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and corporate media institutions operating in concert to censor political opponents on social media. Newmark is financing the...

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

A left-wing think tank erroneously claiming to track Russian online activity was responsible for thousands of bogus stories asserting the nation’s influence in US politics, according to the latest batch of Twitter Files. The Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was the brainchild of former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts and operated under the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank founded in 2017 — shortly after former President Trump took office. The ASD Advisory Council included such figures as top Clinton ally John Podesta, Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former...

A ‘water pill’ used to reduce swelling could combat autism, experts claim. New research has revealed that a prescription drug, known as bumetanide, can also improve the symptoms of the developmental disability by boosting signals between neurons.... ….Bumetanide is a type of medicine called a diuretic which is available in the UK and the US and enables patients with cardiovascular, liver or kidney disease to produce more urine and rid the body of surplus fluid and salt. Diuretics are sometimes called “water pills/tablets” because they make you pee more. However, a study has shown that in autistic children it helps...

Children who receive the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine are not at increased risk for autism, and that includes children who are sometimes considered to be in "high risk" groups for the neurodevelopmental disorder, a massive new study finds. The new study, published today (March 4) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, is one of the largest studies of its kind to date. In it, researchers looked at the records of more than 657,000 children born in Denmark between 1999 and 2010, including about 6,500 who had received an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis. ASD is a neurodevelopmental...

A non-profit group linked to Fusion GPS has ties to a cybersecurity firm recently implicated in a self-described “false flag” operation in the Alabama Senate race. The Democracy Integrity Project, which works with Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele, partnered before the 2018 midterms with New Knowledge, an Austin-based firm that has been tied to an operation that created fake Russian bots in Alabama’s December 2017 special election. New Knowledge recently produced a report for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and TDIP’s founder was in contact with two Democrats from the committee. A nonprofit group linked to Fusion...

Can we trust the judgement of think-tanks who have labeled Twitter users as part of a ‘Russian influence campaign’ as sound when those same entities provide little evidence, and their high-level members include former Clinton supporters?At the beginning of 2017, an initiative was launched by a non-partisan think-tank called the German Marshall Fund US (GMFUS) under the name “The Alliance For Securing Democracy” (ASD).During the Summer, ASD started working on a project they called the “Hamilton 68 Dashboard“, an effort that was presented to the public as a means of monitoring Russian disinformation efforts on Twitter, apparently boosted by...

CNN)Russia-linked bots are promoting pro-gun messages on Twitter in an attempt to sow discord in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting, monitoring groups say. Hashtags, topics, and URLs related to the shooting overwhelmingly feature in the tweets pushed by these automated Twitter accounts in the past 48 hours, according to Hamilton 68, a tool launched by the Alliance for Securing Democracy to track what it describes as "Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts online." The Alliance is a group housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) think tank to "defend against, deter, and raise the costs...

Rosie O’Donnell is saying sorry -- and locking up her Twitter account. The outspoken comedian and former “The View” co-host came under fire for sharing a video speculating about whether or not Donald and Melania Trump’s 10-year-old son, Barron, could be autistic. Shortly before making her Twitter account private on Thursday, O’Donnell wrote a message apologizing to the future First Lady. “I apologize to @MELANIATRUMP - i was insensitive in my RT - i am sorry for the pain i caused - it was not my intent - i am truly sorry,” O’Donnell wrote. The YouTube user who posted the...

God help us and protect our children The clapping-seal social media of the largely lib-left anti-Trump movement will do anything and everything to keep Donald Trump from stepping foot into the Oval Office—even throw their own humanity into the wind to go after his 10-year-old son, Barron. Ravening wolves have come howling at the bedroom door of Barron Trump in a blood-curdling shrieking wolf pack worse than any scene from a Hollywood horror movie.

Rosie O'Donnell sparked an uproar on Twitter by sharing a video that speculates about President-elect Donald Trump's 10-year-old son, Barron, possibly being autistic. "Barron Trump Autistic?" she asked."[I]f so, what an amazing opportunity to bring attention to the AUTISM epidemic," the tweet read. Read Full Article The actress/comedian, who very publicly feuded with Trump starting in 2006, was immediately criticized for bringing up the subject.

A new study suggests a connection between the two A new study finds a correlation between the aerial spraying of pesticides to kill mosquitoes and an increased risk of developmental delays and autism among kids. In the new findings, presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2016 meeting, researchers looked at the rates of autism and developmental delays from eight zip codes in a region of New York that is exposed to yearly airplane pesticide spraying to prevent mosquito-borne disease like eastern equine encephalitis virus. They compared those to the rates in 16 zip codes where the pesticide spraying doesn’t happen....

Folks, let's be clear: Autism is almost-certainly not caused by vaccines. Let's remember the first rule of observational studies, which incidentally I was surprised to find a few years ago in my daughter's High School intro-to-stats class: Observational studies can only show correlation and correlation cannot prove causation. However, the absence of correlation is damn near bomb-proof evidence that the alleged cause you believe exists is false. Measles vaccination in the US began in 1963 following approval in 1962. Within five years near-complete compliance was obtained within the US. MMR, the combined vaccine that people like to blame autism on,...

Autism can be identified in babies as young as two months, early research suggests. US researchers analysed how infants looked at faces from birth to the age of three. They found children later diagnosed with autism had shown diminished eye contact - a hallmark of autism - in the first few months of life. The findings, reported in Nature, raised hope for early interventions to tackle autism, said a UK expert. In the study, researchers led by Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta used eye-tracking technology to measure the way babies looked at and responded to social clues. They...

Enlarge Image Monkey business. Young rhesus monkeys that receive human antibrain antibodies in utero act oddly in social situations. Credit: Nancy Collins/Creative Commons "Antibrain" antibodies that slip through the placenta from mother to fetus during pregnancy may account for roughly a quarter of autism cases, a new study suggests. Some scientists say the work could lead to a blood test that accurately predicts whether a mother will bear a child with this immune-triggered form of the disorder—a claim that's raising eyebrows among skeptics. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a range of communication and social deficits estimated to affect 1 in...

Scientists from King's College London have identified patterns of epigenetic changes involved in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by studying genetically identical twins who differ in autism traits. The study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, is the largest of its kind and may shed light on the biological mechanism by which environmental influences regulate the activity of certain genes and in turn contribute to the development of ASD and related behaviour traits. ASD affects approximately 1 in 100 people in the UK and involves a spectrum of disorders which manifest themselves differently in different people. People with ASD have varying levels of...

One of the most popular and widely accepted theories on the cause of autism spectrum disorders attributes the condition to disrupted connectivity between different regions of the brain. This 'connectivity hypothesis' claims that the social and cognitive abnormalities in people with autism can be explained by a dearth of connections between distant regions of the brain1. Some flavours of this theory also predict more connections between nearby brain regions. Recent studies, however, have found that when a person moves their head while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) |[mdash]| a method that maps how different neuroanatomical structures of the brain...

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of children in the United States with autism has risen by 78 percent over the past decade.  It is now estimated that 1 out of every 88 children in the United States has some form of autism disorder. 

One family's surprising experience leads to an innovative initiative.Gage Gilbert is a bright, 3 1/2-year-old boy with ocean blue eyes and golden blond hair. He loves reading books about science and enjoys singing songs with his Mom. His teacher says he’ll go to Harvard one day.But right now, his parents’ biggest wish for him is to go to a regular kindergarten class. That’s because a year and a half ago, Gage was diagnosed with autism, a neurological disorder affecting 1 in 100 American children.Gage is just one among a growing number of autistic kids. But as parents and researchers pursue...