Free Republic

The reality TV breakout hit of the season — White House Family Feud, starring Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon — is far from over. After the media frenzy of the last two weeks, Bannon’s been cut down to size, and removed from the National Security Council. Still, he remains a dangerous figure. Bannon reportedly works 18-hour days behind the scenes to promote a far-right, extremist, white nationalist agenda. He is still officially Trump’s “chief strategic adviser,” backed by insiders like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mega-donors like Rebekah Mercer, and many alt-right leaders (who have made personal and political...

Even today, Turkey does not allow dead Armenians to rest in peace. What is the most at is the most horrible crime against humanity in history? To Henry Morgenthau Sr., who served as the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1913 and 1916, it was the Armenian genocide. Morgenthau wrote in 1919: “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.” Up to 1.5 million Armenians were wiped...

America’s surgical strike on Syrian regime targets a week and a half ago — and this past Thursday’s “mother of all non-nuclear bomb” attack on Sunni terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — garnered surprisingly widespread bipartisan support, but put some of US President Donald Trump’s critics in a bit of a rhetorical quandary. How could they word their defense of Trump’s bold yet not extreme warning shots without putting a dent in their distrust of the new occupant of the Oval Office? Coming up with a solution to this problem turned out not to be so difficult for those pundits and...

Who really believed in the objectivity of journalists? As students we used to debate which was preferable: the Western system of arbitrary rich men owning newspapers, motivated by self-interest and the flow of advertising in determining what sells and what is news, or the communist system of a group of party ideologues deciding what should be published for the public good in Pravda or Izvestia? We knew perfectly well that each side was doctoring the news one way or another. In the Britain of my youth, we knew where the Manchester Guardian, the News Chronicle, and The Times stood on...

... Take steel, a Trump preoccupation. One reason for exceptions is that domestic manufacturers have limited capability to produce steel of certain strengths, thickness and flexibility. Most higher-strength steels used in thin-walled pipelines are made overseas. Retrofitting plants to produce a type of steel for one or two projects could delay construction and increase the cost. More U.S. workers would have to be retrained, which may not be practical in the short-term. So contractors often have no choice but to import foreign substitutes. The American Petroleum Institute chronicled some of these supply challenges in its response to Mr. Trump’s earlier...

The 'paper of record' attempts to turn a Jew killer into the new Nelson Mandela. The New York Times published an op-ed by arch-terrorist and convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti on Sunday. A respectable international newspaper giving a terrorist and a murderer an outlet to spread his venom and lies is detestable, but it’s also an affront to all those fighting terrorism worldwide. What the New York Times did to Israel is comparable to an international newspaper providing an outlet to Osama Bin Laden to spread his hatred and lies towards America. But who is Marwan Barghouti and why is the New York Times’s...

Agenda: Shortly after Donald Trump won the election, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that Republicans had to "go big, go bold, and do things." So far, the GOP has not delivered. "They have the House, they have the Senate, they have the presidency — and nothing's happening," lamented PJ Media co-founder Roger Simon earlier this week. "Nothing, that is, that Donald Trump doesn't do by himself. ... The Republicans in the legislature are a disgrace." Congress did pass, and Trump signed, 13 bills to undo last-minute Obama administration regulations. And the Senate approved Trump's Supreme Court pick. But what about...

Fox News Channel ditched Bill O’Reilly on Wednesday following the revelation of a series of sexual harassment allegations. His accusers—including Juliet Huddy, Andrea Tantaros, and Gretchen Carlson—also tellingly no longer work at Fox News. But the women who never worked at Fox News strike as the ultimate victims. Those who share the chromosomes of the aggrieved parties but not a CV that includes girl-next-door looks, or a rock-star boyfriend, or a Miss America crown don’t, generally, get hired in cable news. Strangely, the ladies that cable news regards as bringing viewers the most articulate, insightful opinions, cogent analysis, and trusted,...

For a change, the ultra-liberal New York Times sort of got it right. Pushing back against the reflexive tendency of so many on the Left embrace “gender fluidity” and to even encourage people to claim that they are really of a gender different than that of their birth and biology, the Times published an op-ed by Lisa Selin Davis which reads in part: “I just wanted to check,” the teacher said. “Your child wants to be called a boy, right? Or is she a boy that wants to be called a girl? Which is it again?” I cocked my...

Over his handling of North Korea so far, Korea has three reasons to thank U.S. President Donald Trump. First, despite some snafu, Trump's show of force ― the most dramatic being the redirection of the USS Carl Vinson to the Korean Peninsula ― has obviously forced North Korea to rethink its strategy of pressing ahead with its nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests. True, Pyongyang still has a window of opportunity to conduct a sixth nuclear test or fire a long-range missile. Indeed, it did fire one that exploded seconds after liftoff. Facing the world's strongest military, Kim Jong-un's...

The Russians are off the hook. The chattering geniuses have discovered a new villain to blame for the shattering demise of their heroine, Hillary. White guys did it. The same reporters who cheered Hillary’s every misstep and doubted every Trump triumph are now trying to convince us that Hillary would be wearing the presidential pants suits today if only her staffers had not forgotten about white voters. That is what we learned from Shattered, the latest 2016 campaign obituary that crashed into bookstores this week. The pundits were so busy misreporting the election, they did not listen to what was...

How thirsty does Variety look begging readers to join it in doing high V cheerleading moves for Chelsea Clinton? Thirstier than an ultra-marathoner lost in Death Valley in mid-July. Hyping the entertainment magazine's latest cover, Co-Editor-in-Chief Claudia Eller gushed this week, "How cool does Chelsea Clinton look on our Power of Women, NY, cover?" Welcome to the liberal media's manufacturing of "cool." Leather jacket? Check. Overzealous airbrushing? Check. Humanizing grin? Check. Democratic establishment pedigree? Checkity-check-check. This is just the latest attempt by The Media Resistance to make Chelsea Clinton a thing. The same liberal lunatics in the press who rage...

The New England Patriots have called out the New York Times for lying to people in multiple tweets about the NFL team meeting with President Trump. On Thursday, New York Times tweeted out two photos. One photo showed the Patriots with President Obama at the White House in 2015. The second photo showed a picture of the Patriots with President Trump in 2017, showing fewer people standing with the President Trump than Obama. The only reason to tweet such a comparison photo would be to ridicule President Trump. However, the New England Patriots official Twitter account responded to the photo...

Bill O'Reilly's Fox News career now swims with the fishes.The conventional wisdom is that after the NY Times exposed a history of sexual harassment settlements, and two new accusers came forward, advertisers "fled" the show, forcing the hand of News Corp and the Murdochs.That conventional wisdom is only partially correct -- advertisers didn't flee, they were chased away by the same organized effort as was used against Glenn Beck once upon a time, and Rush Limbaugh in 2012.Longtime readers will recall my extensive and groundbreaking research into the StopRush operation just after Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke in 2012, for...

Press secretary Sean Spicer publicly apologized several times for this comment about Bashar Assad, the murderous dictator of Syria: "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons." Spicer got hammered for supposedly minimizing the horror of the Holocaust. MSNBC's Chris Matthews, in 2013, made the exact same comment about Syria's Assad: "It's been enforced in the Western community, around the world -- international community for decades -- don't use chemical weapons. We didn't use them in World War II. Hitler didn't use them. We don't use chemical weapons. That's no deal." What, no...

Whatever happens in the special runoff election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, Republicans better be paying attention. Democrats are motivated; Republicans are not. If Republicans don’t follow through on what they’ve been promising, what they’ve said for years they will deliver, they not only will lose in 2018, they will deserve it. Democrats are fired up. Sure, it’s by hate, but the motivation doesn’t matter. Anger is usually the motivation for the party out of power, though rarely does it manifest itself in gangs of spoiled college kids attacking people and smashing things. Still, Democrats are willing to use...

Politics: The special election held in Georgia on Tuesday was supposed to a blockbuster event showcasing the anti-Trump wave sweeping the nation. Instead, it was an overhyped dud. So sure that Georgians shared their loathing of Donald Trump, Democrats from around the country poured more than $8 million — almost none of which came from people in Georgia's 6th District — into the campaign of 30-year-old political novice Jon Ossoff. Celebrities endorsed him. The media showered him with free publicity. And he was running against 11 Republican candidates. But even with all that support, Ossoff wasn't able to win a...

Media Bias: By now, it should be no surprise at all that the big media lean left and, at times, behave as if they were an arm of the Democratic Party, not a fair dispenser of news and commentary. But a new report shows that, under President Trump, the problem has grown even worse. The conservative-leaning Media Research Center did a lot of TV watching earlier this year, looking at all of the mainstream evening news coverage — from ABC, CBS and NBC — of Trump and his new administration from Jan. 20 through April 9. During that time, they...

Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obama's soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." He elaborated: "What I mean by that (is) it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." Disasters, such as the September 2008 financial crisis, were thus seen as opportunities. Out of the chaos, a shell-shocked public might at last be ready to accept more state regulation of the economy and far greater deficit spending. Indeed, the national debt doubled in the eight years following the 2008 crisis. During the 2008 campaign,...

The authorization by President Donald Trump to launch dozens of Tomahawk missiles at targets in Syria signaled to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the rest of the world that America’s tolerance for provocations and threats has finally waned. No longer should we expect meaningless red lines or disadvantageous diplomatic pursuits that have an emboldening effect on adversaries that have either viewed America as weak or sought to attack the nation’s interests. In just a few short months, President Trump has been decisive and unapologetic, whereas his predecessor was just the opposite. Already, President Trump has put Iran and North Korea...