Free Republic

In the days after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States, a number of friends asked me what concerned me the most about a Trump presidency. The answer was comprehensive. I had concerns about Trump’s character, his associates, and his policies. Those concerns were well-founded. Our temperamental, impulsive, and inexperienced president began his his first term taking advice from the likes of Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn. His ideologically incoherent campaign had at various times cast doubt on our NATO alliances, advocated withdrawal from Afghanistan, argued that U.S. forces should commit war crimes,...

Waves are crashing along the shores of West Palm Beach as students prepare to engage in the largest gathering of conservatives under age 25. The Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA, is a networking event like none other, uniting more than 3,000 student activists and leaders from the conservative movement in sunny South Florida while the rest of the nation bundles up for wintery Christmas. Ben Shapiro,.. Dennis Prager,... Donald Trump Jr.,... Anthony Scaramucci,... and the Washington Examiner’s very own Lauren Cooley,.... along with many more are expected to provide vital leadership and activism training during this four-day...

"'The Boss Baby' sequel money is going to go a long way because of Trump," the Baldwin brother says. Stephen Baldwin is a rare Donald Trump supporter in Hollywood, so he knows how polarizing a figure the president can be. Hence, the actor was an obvious choice for a new TV show where he travels across the U.S. talking to Americans about the state of the union nearly a year into the presidency of a former reality TV star. The show, Great American Pilgrimage … The GAP, is one of the more popular ones on RT, a Kremlin-backed network...

Since his dramatic speech while accepting the award for best ensemble in a drama series at at his year's Screen Actors Guild Awards, Harbour has racked up several nominations for his role as Jim Hopper. The actor, who yelled that people should punch people in the face if they don't like their political views, went from zero nominations prior to several afterwards. Before the speech he snubbed by the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, and the SAG. Since then he has been nominated for all three of those plus the Emmy. meanwhile the boys from the show have received no...

Last week PJ Media D.C. editor Bridget Johnson was suspended from Twitter with no warning or explanation. It's been nearly a week now and thus far Twitter has yet to offer a reason for the suspension. According to Twitter's Help Center, there are two types of suspension — a temporary timeout that results in reinstatement in a matter of hours, and a second, much more serious "permanent" suspension. Bridget's appears to be the latter. The company did not flag a particular tweet that was problematic and her request for an appeal has gone unanswered. While many Twitter users engage in...

This summer, Twitter Inc.’s new diversity chief met employees to discuss whether they felt welcome at work. Among those who said they sometimes felt excluded, according to people familiar with the matter, were conservatives. The feedback reflects the strains in Silicon Valley as technology companies seek to bolster diversity of all kinds among their hundreds of thousands of employees. For the mostly left-leaning companies that includes cultivating ideological variety, just as they are trying to with underrepresented groups like women and minorities. “There is a lot happening in the world, and we need inclusion now more than ever,” Twitter’s diversity...

If you listen to the nattering nabobs of social media negativity, and you shouldn’t, you might get the false impression that our dreams of a conservative future are imploding. You would be wrong. There is a lot for conservatives to be thankful for, and we’re winning. To paraphrase noted tax reform advocate Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57, always bet on red. No. 1: Be Thankful That Hillary Is Not Our President. Every day, it is a joy to awaken, unlike Hillary Clinton, without a hangover. Oh yes, and also to awaken knowing that Felonia von Pantsuit is not, and will...

Fox News announced on Tuesday that it was hiring conservative commentator Mark Levin to host a new show on Sundays at 10 pm, drawing the network ever closer to its pro-Trump base and further protecting it from future competition on the right. “It’s clearly another step in Fox News channel’s evolution to a more Trump-friendly series of programming,” said Dan Shelley, the executive director of the Radio Television Digital News Association. “It’s right in their current wheelhouse.” Levin, who arguably ranks just behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity for influence in the world of conservative talk radio hosts, has been...

Conservatives are calling for Republicans in Congress to fulfill their campaign promises by supporting President Donald Trump’s spending proposal and to not enact amnesty in a year-end deal with Democrats. A letter released Monday and signed by 44 conservative leaders explains that Virginia is “in ruins” after Republican losses at both the statewide and local level earlier this month. The leaders warn that the Republican majority in the House could be in jeopardy next. “Your consultants and managers are out of excuses—and your conservative grassroots are running out of both patience and time,” the letter states. “So stop panicking and...

I've dated conservative and liberal women in the past. However, what truly is the real differences between how they think and carry themselves?

News Nanny: The Race to Censor Internet News If we don’t fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet. November 10, 2017 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model. Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by "qualified,...

ANNAPOLIS — In 2009, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley closed the visitor center at the Sideling Hill cut, the symbolic gateway to Western Maryland, as a cost-saving effort. Some saw the move as personal, or at least confirmation of how the former governor felt about the state’s rural counties. “We had only two visitor centers that were closed in the entire state under O’Malley,” said William Valentine, an Allegany County commissioner. “It wasn’t too hard to figure out what happened.” Current Gov. Larry Hogan reopened the Sideling Hill Visitor Center in 2015. Earlier this year when Hogan took the stage...

Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t). Then there are the false beliefs about generally accepted science. Only 25 percent of self-proclaimed Trump voters agree that climate change is caused by human activities. Only 43 percent of Republicans overall believe that humans have...

A year into the Trump era, President Trump is living up to his advance billing as a “black swan” event for American politics — disrupting everything he touches. He has opened divisions and brought chaos to both parties, and the turmoil is not going to abate with the midterm election next year, no matter what the result. The GOP may never be the same, while a lurch further to the populist left by Democrats might be a formula for additional electoral disaster. The culture wars have gone thermonuclear, with institutions such as the NFL suddenly embroiled in heightened political controversy....

The White House on Saturday disparaged the legacies of the only two living Republican presidents to precede Donald Trump, after reports that both men castigated Trump in interviews last year and refused to vote for him. Former president George H.W. Bush mocked then-candidate Trump as a “blowhard” and voted for a Democratic president, while the younger Bush worried aloud that Trump would destroy the idea of a Republican president in all but name, according to “The Last Republicans,” which is scheduled to go on sale later this month. The White House responded after quotes from the book were published on...

“It wasn’t [Obama]!” Boehner said. “It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide,” added Boehner, who resigned in September 2015 after facing several GOP protests. He then raised his accusing finger at Levin and said: “I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that...

In a fiery column for The Hill, Rand Paul takes on the "swamp creatures" in Washington, D.C., who tried to pass "tax cuts" that would actually raise taxes for the middle and upper-middle classes. When Senator Paul first spoke against the Republican tax plan, his party's leadership attacked him for "not supporting tax cuts." Not true, Paul writes -- he was trying to make the plan better: "The D.C. swamp has paid-for toadies on the left and the right. From the right come cries that I am opposing the tax plan. Far from it. I am trying to make it...

I’m a political junkie. Every day I read The Washington Post and The New York Times, among other media giants, with great interest and appreciation. Here in conservative rural America, Trump is ascendant. I was loafing in a booth at the coffee shop Saturday morning, and my friend Mark said something like, “Hey Bob, if you want to understand why rural conservatives like Trump, watch the speech he gave at the Values Voters Summit.” Doing my best to understand how my conservative friends might read Trump’s speech, I read. I contrasted Trump’s messaging with how rural conservatives often view Democratic...

On Thursday night, conservative commentator S.E. Cupp devoted her entire one-hour "Unfiltered" program on HLN to talk about sexual harassment. She recalled three experiences of her own that make clear that the #MeToo movement certainly is of value. Although she said she could've gone on for hours and hours with dozens of examples, Cupp decided to keep it short by giving "just" three. "One," she said, "an anchor grabbed my ass." Some men may think that doing so is "funny," but if these stories make one thing clear, it's that to women, it is anything but. It frightens them and...

s someone who voted for Barack Obama twice, supported the Affordable Care Act, and could be persuaded to vote for the right kind of single-payer system, I've found the entire health-care debate over the past several months deeply depressing. That's no doubt why my first instinct was to cheer when reading a recent rant against the right from an editor at The Huffington Post. The transparently titled opinion column, "I Don't Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People," is a perfect expression of our political moment — in its utter exasperation at those on...