Free Republic

The Daily Beast wrongfully accused two fictitious white supremacists as the prime suspects in the Quebec City mosque shooting Sunday night after falling for a bogus Reuters Twitter account.

Abstract: Contrary to reports in the media, the crowd sourced investigation labeled by some as "Pizzagate" did not begin with internet sleuths digging through the Wikileaks Podesta Files releases looking for pizza parlors and encoded language discussing human trafficking. It began with the shocking discovery that Hillary and Bill Clinton provided assistance to convicted child trafficker, Laura Silsby, resulting in a reduced sentence for child trafficking. Silsby was arrested at the Haitian border attempting to smuggle 33 children out of Haiti without documentation. Her sentence and charges were reduced after an intervention by Bill Clinton. In the aftermath of Silsby's...

Streeeeetch! Yes you really have to stretch to find any hint of racism in the new Trump-Pence logo. Take a look at the logo below and see if you can find it? No? Are you scratching your heads over in bewilderment as to how anybody could detect any hint of racism in the logo? Well, you're not Daily Beast writer Olivia Nuzzi who somehow saw the link between that logo and the logo of a racist organization.

A Tweet from Carl Paladino, a former candidate for New York governor and a current surrogate for Donald Trump’s campaign, appeared to suggest that the Attorney General of the United States should be lynched on Wednesday morning. “Lynch @LorettaLynch let a Grand Jury decide,” Paladino said in the Tweet, which has since been deleted.

An appearance on CNN—which included some pushback against Trump’s reaction to the Orlando massacre—was enough to inspire 72 hours of online abuse. There is a shrinking but still very real possibility that a pumpkin-faced blowhard who lives like a Borgia, talks like a child, and wears a dead Tribble on his head may soon be in possession of our nuclear launch codes. To call this a national embarrassment is to implicitly hold our nation in higher esteem than I’m any longer prepared to do.

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL07.01.16 2:20 PM ET Mastermind of Istanbul Airport Attack Had Been Georgian Informant, Official Says Akhmed Chatayev is blamed for planning the deadly attack in Turkey, and an official says he was on the government payroll before returning to jihad. ODESSA, Ukraine — Sometimes the world of terror and counterterror is amazingly small. The day after at least 43 people were killed and more than 235 injured in a terrorist attack on Istanbul’s international airport, Turkish officials announced the arrest of the alleged mastermind behind the attack: Akhmed Chatayev, an ethnic Chechen from Russia who,...

You can’t make it up—there’s a 25 percent or so chance that an unhinged demagogue will be America’s next commander in chief. A few years ago I started noodling on a novel that I hoped would expose the fault lines that seemed to be splitting our politics. My thought was to take reality and push it to the edge both for comic affect and to offer up a cautionary tale of where our politics might be headed. I finished the book in the summer of 2015 and I was a little worried that I had gone too far. How believable...

Earlier this morning, The Donald Trump campaign called for an emergency meeting in order to discuss the future. A few things happened: Corey Lewandowski was fired from the campaign, and another man was brought on.

Blue Creek Academy was an abusive hell on earth, former students say—and the principal who ran it is now heading up a new Bible school in another state. Jacob* dressed himself in a camouflage jacket and a matching beanie on the summer morning he ran away into the West Virginia hills. At 14 years old, he was one of the youngest, smallest, and longest-attending students at Blue Creek Academy, a religious reform school for boys from which he was desperate to escape. Blue Creek Academy was made up of an old schoolhouse and several cabins situated on a remote campground...

It seemed like an outpouring of veteran anger against Donald Trump: over a dozen former service members protesting outside Trump Tower. But the reality was more complicated. The protest was actually a coordinated effort, led in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign, to embarrass her Republican rival for his failed efforts to raise money for veterans. It only looked like a grassroots demonstration. A spokesman for the demonstrators insisted they had no affiliation with any campaign. Later he said the protesters had reached out to the Clinton campaign for press contacts, but that’s all. Then the activist finally admitted that,...

Before he died May 4 from complications stemming from pancreatic cancer and a stroke, former GOP Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah asked his wife, Joyce, and son, Jim, if there were any Muslims in his hospital. If so, he wanted to "go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump." Joyce and Jim Bennett shared this story with The Daily Beast, as well as other tales involving his disgust with "Donald Trump's xenophobia" and proposal to ban Muslims from...

The American military is warning residents of ISIS’s Syrian capital to leave the city—suggesting that an offensive on Raqqa was imminent, two Pentagon officials told the Daily Beast. In the past day, residents of Raqqa have posted photos of the warnings on Twitter, saying they were airdropped on leaflets by the U.S.-led coalition. The defense officials were the first to confirm that the coalition had indeed issued the warnings.

Has there ever been a president cooler than Obama? That's the question that Newsweek, an ostensible "news" magazine, asked last week via Twitter. The tweet featured a picture of the president slapping hands with his friend and political supporter, the rapper Jay Z. It's hard to argue with Newsweek on this one. Obama is cool -- though that alone doesn't make him a great president. When it comes to leaders, coolness and greatness might actually be mutually exclusive. Cool people aren't usually substantive and frequently lack the moral courage to do the right thing when the right thing isn't cool...

Sympathy and money for the Rhodens dried up as soon as it was revealed they were selling marijuana. Even worse, most have ignored victim Hannah Gilley and her own family. PIKETON, Ohio — A family murdered for no apparent reason evokes a lot of sympathy from a community. Unless that family was dealing drugs. Drugs are so prevalent in this rural swath of the country that highway signs provide drivers with a number to report impaired—not drunk—drivers. So less than a week after this community rallied to support the families of the eight people shot to death in their beds...

Now that the 2016 presidential election season is in full swing, which candidate(s) are people in the adult industry supporting? Every election year is a nail-biter for pornographers, who are wracked with worry over potential persecution from the next presidential administration. Demonizing the porn industry under the guise of protecting the public’s morality is an old politician’s trick. Charge XXX producers with obscenity, collect fines and put a dent in the debauchery. “Obscene” porn is illegal but not all porn is obscene. Content that was considered extreme 15 years ago might be closer to the norm now. In the late...

It wouldn’t be a Republican primary without charges of foul play levelled at Ted Cruz. And New York is no exception. A few hours before polls closed in the Empire State, John Kasich’s strategist John Weaver tweeted that the Texan was responsible for misleading robocalls—which falsely claimed that New York’s Democratic governor had endorsed Kasich.

Lawyers object to any attempt to ask Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and others about how information was handled—and are dead set against Clinton testifying. Lawyers for the State Department want to limit the types of questions that a watchdog group can ask former aides to Hillary Clinton, and potentially the former secretary of state herself, about her creation and use of a private email system while she was in office. The department asked a federal judge Tuesday night to grant “limited discovery” to Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that wants to depose some of Clinton’s closest associates and staffers....

<p>CNN and Daily Beast contributor Dean Obeidallah told a Twitter user to “go fuck yourself” after he was asked to apologise for spreading a false story about “far right” activists and a hit and run attack on a Muslim woman in Molenbeek in Brussels.</p>

Glenn Beck has been one of Ted Cruz’s most high profile surrogates—but Beck’s support could become a little less desirable when he heads to court this summer for allegedly defaming a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing…… One of Ted Cruz’s most prominent supporters could be headed to court soon to defend his Islamophobic falsehoods about a victim of terrorism. “…But come this summer, it’s Beck who could face judgement. The radio talker currently faces a defamation lawsuit—because he doubled and tripled down on charges that a victim of a terrorist attack was actually the real terrorist. “… previously unnoticed...

As the inevitability of a Donald Trump nomination grows, many Republicans are moving to the acceptance stage of grief. Trump’s unfavorability ratings are historic for a presumptive nominee. Some reputable polls have him as high as 60 percent negative, many others have him losing by double digits to Hillary Clinton. Retention of the Senate, already an uphill climb in an election year swelling with vulnerable Republican incumbents, is an equally dim prospect. Not all conservatives have given up the ship. The presumptive Democratic nominee is a hair away from federal indictment. The presumptive Republican nominee is a reality-TV lunatic who...