Free Republic

Kraig Kitchin will stay with the company, but resigned from the top job after friction with fellow Beck executive Jonathan Schreiber. A ‘mass exodus’ of staff may follow. In what knowledgeable observers say is a sign of increasing turmoil in Glenn Beck’s troubled media empire, Beck’s longtime mentor and corporate executive, Kraig Kitchin, has quit as CEO of The Blaze. Kitchin’s replacement, Stewart Padveen, a digital startup entrepreneur who joined Beck’s company last summer, will be the fourth leader of The Blaze since late 2014. Kitchin, 54, who took over operations of Beck’s conservative-leaning subscription digital and cable television enterprise...

LONDON — No doubt Donald Trump will be thrilled that the entire world is mesmerized as he steamrolls over his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination. He probably doesn’t care that most of the international publicity is bad publicity—but even the master of ill-tempered putdowns and Twitter vitriol will struggle to keep up with the sheer number of attacks and jibes pouring in from every corner of the globe. He does have a select band of fans—more on those later—but they are being drowned out by an incredulity that stretches from Europe’s capitals to post-conflict Afghanistan; from the African deltas...

...there’s no basis for the common claim Obama won through a superb, unprecedented, supremely effective get-out-the-vote effort by the Democrats. Even downcast Republicans have hailed the opposition’s turnout operation as magnificent, but they fail to note that it resulted in far fewer voters showing up for President Obama. - The president drew 7.6 million fewer votes than he did in the hope-and-change election of 2008. - Exit polls showed that Obama got a slightly smaller percentage of the black vote than last time and that turnout was sharply down, delivering at least 1.5 million fewer African-American ballots for the Democrats....

The host of HBO's Real Time, which returns Friday, on why he's scared of Cruz, and the 'underage hookers' scandal that could sink Hillary Clinton's campaign. For the past month and change, there's been a void in the political commentary arena--and political incorrectness, in general. Yes, Bill Maher was on vacation. But the acerbic satirist seems recharged and ready to dive headfirst into election season--which he'll do by kicking off the return of his late-night series Real Time with Bill Maher with a big campaign of his own. You'll have to tune in to HBO Friday night to see exactly...

In 2015, once high-minded disagreements over policy and ideology descended into something much more primitive.When it comes to politics, in 2015 we witnessed nothing less than a paradigm shift. The old rules are out the window. Technology and changing mores have conspired to lower barriers of entry--and acceptability. Gatekeepers no longer exist. What we have right now is closer to direct democracy than we've ever seen, and our civilization is regressing as a result. One party (the Democrats) already represents the liberal half of the nation. The other half seems to consist of modern, Buckleyite conservatives, but also an increasingly...

During the darkest days of communism, Romanians had something to brighten their oppressed existence illicit American movie parties. Under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship, the Eastern European country had very little contact with the West. But thanks to Teodor Zamfir who was willing to smuggle VHS tapes, and his translator Ilina Nistor who dubbed them, over 3000 movies made it over to Romania between 1985 and 1989. Millions of lives were changed and uplifted as a result. Chuck Norris v. Communism (Variety Interview)After recognizing Nistor's voice at a film festival, Ilinca Calugareanu chatted with the woman whose inflection and tone were nearly...

o be sure, predictions of Trump’s demise have so far proven wrong—he has defied conventional wisdom, and continues to be the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary despite controversies that would have eliminated almost any other candidate. But the trajectory of the campaign thus far, Nunberg says, means that it is more likely than not that Trump will lose the first presidential contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, then hobble into South Carolina having lost frontrunner status and ceded momentum to his competitors. If Trump loses Iowa and New Hampshire, he’ll stumble into South Carolina. “Once Cruz wins Iowa, and...

They joined to fight Israel in Lebanon, but after multiple combat tours in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and around Damascus, Hezbollah reservists tell The Daily Beast that they are no longer willing to die in Syria's unending, bloody civil war. As a result of their refusal to continue volunteering to prop up the embattled government of Bashar al-Assad, they say that the Shia Party of God has cut off the money they were accustomed to receiving: reservist paychecks and permanent family benefits packages. What other consequences there may be remain to be seen. Imad, as we'll call...

Hundreds of fans were unable to get into his crowded rally Monday. But given the disorganized campaign in New Hampshire, they likely weren't missed or even counted in the first place. Hundreds of Donald Trump supporters received terrible news just moments before he took the stage in the gymnasium of a Nashua, New Hampshire, middle school: The event was over capacity. Some had stood in the cold for more than 90 minutes, waiting to hear Trump talk about how he is going to Make America Great Again. They were grumpy, sad, frustrated, and, well, angry like the man they love....

You want predictions? After a year like this?! Who knows. I will say in my defense that after Donald Trump went after John McCain, and nearly everybody in Punditland was saying that’s it, he’s cooked, I wrote no, not so fast. Five-plus months later, that column reads pretty well! So here I go. Who Will Be the Republican Presidential Nominee?: As I write these words, I’m gonna go ahead and say Ted Cruz, although I actually kinda think it will be Trump, and I’m aware that I’m just saying Cruz to sound respectable (Cruz! Respectable!). Marco Rubio...well, here’s the thing....

<p>Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses—that religion itself is under attack.</p> <p>Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline—not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.</p>

He’s the GOP’s strongest candidate, right? But what if he can’t win a single early primary? The Rubio problem no one is talking about—yet. Everybody I know, I mean everybody, thinks Marco Rubio is the strongest Republican candidate. Yes, there’s a debate about how strong. Some say he’d beat Hillary Clinton, some say that what with some of the extreme positions he’s taken so far in this race, he’d be hard-pressed to do much better than Mitt Romney’s 206 electoral votes plus maybe his own Florida. So there’s a debate about that. But there ain’t much debate that he’s the,...

If all these candidates are going to pop off about Islam and Muslims, how’s about they at least have to do it front of one?Last Tuesday’s GOP debates were all about Muslims. The word “Islam” or derivations of it like “Islamic” were mentioned 27 times in the primetime debate and 31 times during the earlier “kid’s table” debate. If you had played a drinking game where you had to do a shot of whiskey every time the word “Islam” was uttered during those GOP debates, you would’ve been dead about 30 minutes in. And the discussion about Islam during the...

Out promoting his new film “The Hateful Eight,” longtime libertarian Kurt Russell opened up again about his politics, this time to the Daily Beast, where he pointed out an obvious fact: that Bill Maher is nothing close to a libertarian. “I’m not a Bill Maher libertarian,” Russell said. “That’s faux-libertarianism. He doesn’t know what it is. I like him, and he’s a nice guy, but seriously, that’s not libertarianism.”

Donald Trump is truly bringing out the best in everyone this Christmas season and that’s just as true among liberals as conservatives. (I’ve given up on sarcasm tags in these articles.) Seriously, if you’d like a look at the type of honest debate partners who are staring across the aisle at you this season, look no further than the Daily Beast’s own Michael Tomasky. He’s very worried about the current state of the GOP and wants to warn you all against slipping further into a futile maelstrom of racism and hate. With that in mind, he reminds us that Republicans...

On Sunday, The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey, a veteran of Newsweek and the Washington Post, furiously tried to connect the Second Amendment to the protection of slavery before the Civil War. Dickey touted how Charles Dickens and "several British visitors to American shores...discerned...[that] people who owned slaves...wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile." He also wildly claimed that "the Second Amendment...was essentially written to protect the interests of Southerners" to crush slave revolts: "To keep slaves in slavery, you needed militias and they needed to be armed. Such is the fundamental 'right' assured by the Second...

It didn’t take all that much to tip a great civilization into the shackles of empire. Rome holds a special place in the popular imagination. Cast as a culture steeped in myth, with values reminiscent of our own, it is often treated as the forebearer of our own political system, an ancestral democracy that provides a republican link between the present and the ancient past. From architecture to literature to political system, Rome is where it all began. But in his latest book, Richard Alston wants us all to think a little more critically about our beloved Rome. Alston is...

The GOP frontrunner has become synonymous with Islamophobia, but mere months ago he criticized a prominent anti-Islam activist for antagonizing Muslims.

... I should know by now that arguing with diehard Trump supporters is largely futile but, if any of you are reading this, I pray you'll take this issue seriously. Two equally grim prospects can explain your behavior. The first that you know Trump's claim is untrue, but enjoy living in his Reality Distortion Field simply to tweak mainstream America and the news media. You've become inhabitants of a funhouse-mirror version of the liberal culture and media you mock: insular, aggressively contrarian, obsessed with narrative over fact and anger over history. The second is that you want it to be...

Compare their quotes; uncanny. But there’s more to it than that. We may be entering a post-two party era. Guess who could start a new one? The continued radicalization of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has quickly become a movement centered on the fear and anxiety of foreign or non-white American bodies, and the hate-filled propaganda and lies that sustain it. He is coalescing his own American far-right political party with roots in white supremacy and neo-Nazi movements. He is copying the modus operandi of the resurgent far-right movements that are sweeping across Europe. He is becoming America’s own Le Pen—Marine...