Free Republic

In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was “no evidence” to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly “lied” to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.“It was entrapment,” Ramaswamy...

Ex-CDC director Robert Redfield said during a CNN interview that he believed the coronavirus was made in a lab and escaped. Since then, he received death by fellow scientists, including some he used to call friends, he told Vanity Fair ... 'I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science,' Redfield said.. The coronavirus origin has been at the forefront of debate since last week when Biden ordered intelligence officials to 'redouble' efforts to establish the origin.. It heated up on Tuesday when Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails were published on the Washington Post and Buzzfeed .. The former...

A former journalist and talk show host who was arrested on child sex crime charges in Massachusetts last week allegedly bragged in private text messages that they came close to having a sexual encounter with a teenager in their neighborhood. The conversation was detailed in a 24-page police affidavit obtained by The Desk on Wednesday that was written and filed in support of an arrest warrant for Slade Sohmer, the former editor-in-chief of the left-of-center politics website The Recount. Sohmer was arrested last week on suspicion of downloading and transmitting child pornography after police executed a search warrant on his...

A BuzzFeed feature story from 2018 about a journalist who told a group of schoolchildren that he was gay was taken down just a day after it was announced that he had been brought up on child pornography charges. Slade Sohmer, 44, the former editor-in-chief of the left-leaning video-driven news site The Recount, was freed on $100,000 bail on Monday after he was charged in Massachusetts court with possessing and disseminating “hundreds of child pornography images and videos.” He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of dissemination of child pornography. In...

Public officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp.Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that...

BuzzFeed’s founder Jonah Peretti reportedly turned down Bob Iger’s $650 million offer to purchase the company ten years prior. Now, the once mega-successful company faces removing their news division completely, laying off 15% of its staff. Peretti initially agreed to the deal. A few months after accepting the offer, Disney invited him to speak at the moviemaker’s management retreat in front of 250 members of staff. He was given a prominent speaking slot in anticipation of the deal going through as a sort of “welcome” into the company; however, the speech did not go as well as expected. Peretti delivered...

BuzzFeed News is no more, but its former editor, Ben Smith, spearheading the new Semafor media venture, decided to reflect on the moment he gave the green light to post the infamous Steele Dossier. The document was unverifiable and has now been dismissed as anything but legitimate. This tranche of papers is what set off the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into Donald Trump, the investigation that formed the core of the Russian collusion hoax that later evolved into the Mueller investigation. The media circus destroyed the last vestiges of credibility with many reporters in the legacy media. No bombshell development ever...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Buzzfeed News brand is to shut down, according to a new memo to staff from the company's CEO and founder, in order to concentrate more efforts on HuffPost. 'We are reducing our workforce by approximately 15 percent today across our Business, Content, Tech and Admin teams, and beginning the process of closing BuzzFeed News,' CEO Jonah Peretti said in the message. The company is only closing its news division. The announcement came shortly after rival Business Insider reported that it is planning to lay off around ten percent of its news division. 'While layoffs are occurring across...

BuzzFeed News will shut down, the company announced on Friday. BuzzFeed, the liberal website that famously published the since-discredited Steele dossier in 2017, will cut roughly 15% of its staff and shutter its news operation because of a downward trend in performance combined with a challenging economy.

[more context in following thread] Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy MORE: BuzzFeed boss @peretti just sent out a note to staff, announcing the shuttering of BuzzFeed News is part of layoffs where 15% of staffers are being cut across the company. Peretti says, "For BuzzFeed News, we have begun discussions with the News Guild about these actions."

The FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million if he could prove allegations recorded in his now-infamous dossier, a senior FBI analyst said in court on Tuesday.FBI analyst Brian Auten testified in the trial of Igor Danchenko, the primary source of allegations in Steele’s dossier, that the bureau placed a $1 million price tag on confirmation of the dossier’s outlandish allegations. Steele was unable to provide any evidence.Auten said he and a group of FBI agents met with Steele in October of 2021 and offered the former British spy $1 million for evidence supporting the dossier, according to Fox News. The...

You might remember back in May 2018 when sketchy porn lawyer Michael Avenetti was releasing U.S. Treasury notifications on Michael Cohen received from an unknown source within the Treasury Department. You might also remember when New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow wrote a sympathetic article after talking to the leaking treasury official. As a result the Treasury Inspector General began an investigation. Today, a U.S. Treasury employee named Natalie Mayflower Sours-Edwards was arrested and charged with leaking to numerous reporters multiple financial reports about suspicious financial transactions related to: Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, Maria Butina, and others.

Stories about parental regret might get clicks, but BuzzFeed acting as a PR machine against motherhood might also influence people’s decision to become a parent.As BuzzFeed contemplates its future, the website should reconsider its approach to motherhood. The media outlet is rethinking its news division because it loses money, offering voluntary buyouts. BuzzFeed would likely gain some mom consumers if it changed its tune on motherhood. In April, BuzzFeed ran an article headlined, “Mothers Are Revealing How They Realized They Regret Having Children And How They’re Coping Now, And They’re Such Nuanced And Valid Feelings.” The first mom the article...

A sappy article indicating support by the MSM of the Simps at Buzzfeed taking buyouts as Buzzfeed still searches for a mission. "They all cant get jobs at the NY Times" When fellow media companies cannot retain a critical eye to their compatriots and competitors failures, the self regulation is gone.

NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself as a source of expert knowledge on which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot, will be rolling out to millions of American schoolchildren due to a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Per Axios, the AFT will purchase NewsGuard licenses for all of its 1.7 million teachers, in a major deal for the news-rating project. NewsGuard has had a reputation as a project of the political establishment since its inception. NewsGuard maintains a list of news outlets it considers “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy,” data which it uses in...

No one is safe. That’s the disturbing lesson of 2021, a year when every corner of the US was pounded by deadly weather disasters.

"The article misses entirely that "the majority of parents of all racial backgrounds," as Christopher Rufo notes, "oppose critical race theory in the curriculum." Buzzfeed wants to "deplatform white parents." Their reason is that "white parents" are allegedly the ones behind the rallies against critical race and gender theory indoctrination in schools. As such, Buzzfeed's Alessa Dominguez posits, they should simply not be listened to or permitted to speak. The article, simply titled "Deplatform White Parents," complains that media gives too much space to those who are opposed to transgender or anti-racist ideology. And it claims that opposition to critical...

Solution: More masks and jabs. BuzzFeed staff who attended a company party in New York tested positive for COVID despite wearing masks, showing vaccine passports and being triple jabbed. Whoops. “Three BuzzFeed employees who tested positive following the party told Insider that they were vaccinated and received their booster shots prior to contracting Covid-19 at the event, and are experiencing mild symptoms,” reports Mediaite. The gathering took place at the Starrett-Lehigh building in Manhattan and was attended by employees from BuzzFeed’s New York and Washington offices, as well as employees from Buzzfeed-owned Huffington Post. Two days before the party, attendees...

Former Treasury Department official Natalie “May” Edwards said she is a whistleblower who sent suspicious activity reports to BuzzFeed News after trying in vain to work through lawful channels. Her actions became the basis for the global FinCEN Files investigation.. Natalie “May” Edwards has made a pact with her 16-year-old daughter: Every night before bed for the next six months, each will say a quiet prayer at the exact same time. Her daughter will be doing so from home in Virginia. Edwards will be doing so from a women’s federal prison in West Virginia. “I am emotionally prepared as far...

Steve Bannon—the right-wing media personality turned adviser to Donald Trump turned right-wing media personality again—became the first person in nearly 40 years to be indicted on a charge of criminal contempt of Congress last month after he refused to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Now, Bannon appears to be using his criminal case to go after the committee that went after him. Bannon is attempting to force investigators to potentially expose who they’ve talked to and what they’ve said, peek into secret communications on the committee, and create a playbook for other resistant witnesses, according...