Free Republic

Yet another Democratic Party thought leader has demanded that Joe Biden drop out of the 2024 presidential race. Ezra Klein, the co-founder of Vox and now a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times, said he understood that many liberals would be angry at him for calling on Biden to go but that it was necessary. "I want to say this clearly: I like Biden. I think he’s been a good president. I think he is a good president. I don’t like having this conversation. And I know a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going...

Carlos Campos came to Miami from Venezuela in 1979, before dictator Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution brought about the unraveling of the oil-rich country. But it wasn’t until 2016 that Campos became actively engaged in US politics. Donald Trump’s “America First” message stirred something in him. Sitting down at a Cuban restaurant just minutes from the Trump National Doral golf resort — one of the former president’s major Miami-area properties aside from his Mar-a-Lago estate — Campos described how he came to the realization that his values aligned more closely with Republicans than Democrats. He attends Alpha & Omega, a Spanish-language...

Even today amid a mounting exodus among those who can afford it, and with its appeal diminished to businesses and newcomers, California, legendary state of American dreams, continues to inspire optimism among progressive boosters. Laura Tyson, the longtime Democratic economist now at the University of California at Berkeley, praises the state for creating “the way forward” to a more enlightened “market capitalism.” Like-minded analysts tout Silicon Valley’s massive wealth generation as evidence of progressivism’s promise. The Los Angeles Times suggested approvingly that the Biden administration’s goal is to “make America California again.” And, despite dark prospects in November’s midterm elections,...

How to best ensure substantial long-run economic growth should be a question on everyone's mind. Its benefits can't be overstated, and it's undeniable that the lack of growth is a root contributor to many seemingly disconnected economic and social problems. That's the central theme of a recent podcast discussion between The New York Times' Ezra Klein and George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen. They both expressed support for reforms to make government less bureaucratic and more agile. For example, Cowen cited the Food and Drug Administration's recent failure to approve COVID-19 treatments quickly enough, while also getting in the way...

Today, President Biden announced the federal government would protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. It is official: the unvaccinated have become the scapegoats. As we said in August, “trust them at their word when they advocate restricting your rights and inflicting punishment if you remain unvaccinated.” This is the result (but not the end-result) of a creeping nastiness towards the unvaccinated that we warned about last month, after the NYC required a vaccine to “participate in society fully” and The Atlantic said the unvaccinated “belong on the no-fly list.” Others contributed and pushed things further. The call by the New...

Do a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on The New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story titled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of...

Hannah-Jones said Cuba has the least inequality between Black and White people 1619 Project writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said in a podcast that she believes Cuba is the most equal country in the Western hemisphere and could serve as a model for its integration agenda. In a 2019 podcast with Ezra Klein of Vox and The New York Times, Hannah-Jones was asked whether there were candidates or places that she thought had a "viable and sufficiently ambitious integration agenda." Hannah-Jones responded that while she is not an expert on race relations internationally, she believed the most "equal" and "multiracial" country in...

Not for the first time, Ezra Klein, a youthful hipster leftist writer favored by the elites, has said more than he probably intended to.Get a load of this from Fox News:New York Times columnist Ezra Klein feels President Biden is making life too difficult for Vice President Kamala Harris and feels she should be given simpler tasks to enhance her reputation, but critics on both sides quickly found problems with his argument. "Kamala Harris will probably be the Democratic nominee in 24 or 28. Biden's team should be giving her portfolios that make it likelier she'll win. Instead they're giving...

In the end, we didn’t crush the virus, but we did crush a lot of ordinary people.Did lockdowns take more lives than they saved? It’s an important question. Earlier this month, the Rand Corporation and the University of Southern California, working on behalf of the National Bureau of Economic Research, released a working paper to ascertain just that.Most casual news consumers might not have heard about it, and that’s not surprising because here’s what they found:We find that following the implementation of shelter-in-place policies, excess mortality increases. … We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented [shelter...

President Barack Obama said in an interview published Tuesday his former Vice President Joe Biden was finishing the work he began to redistribute wealth through programs like Obamacare. “I think that what we’re seeing now, is Joe and the administration are essentially finishing the job,” he said in an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “And I think it’ll be an interesting test. Ninety percent of the folks who were there in my administration, they are continuing and building on the policies we talked about…”

Click here to read the full articleUnearthed doc­u­ments from one of the lead­ing Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty pro­pa­gan­da groups reveal the names of “main­stream” U.S. jour­nal­ists tak­ing jun­kets from the group in exchange for favor­able cov­er­age, The Nation­al Pulse can exclu­sive­ly reveal. The trips often came just before opin­ion edi­to­ri­als and news reports excus­ing Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty crimes, or oppos­ing trade show­downs with the nation.The Nation­al Pulse can now exclu­sive­ly reveal West­ern jour­nal­ists – includ­ing those praised by Pres­i­dent Biden and mar­ried to poten­tial mem­bers of his White House – who are list­ed as hav­ing accept­ed trips from the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist...

Senator Bernie Sanders said recently that he’s not “comfortable” with former President Trump’s Twitter ban, arguing it could lead suppression of users across the political spectrum. The Vermont Independent found common ground with many Republicans who accused the social media network of left-leaning bias and political censorship after they banned Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack US Capitol riot. Sanders made the comments to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein Tuesday, after Trump aides announced the former president would soon return to social media with his own platform.

The New York Times has taken eco-nuttiness to a new level by publishing a podcast speculating whether the solution to fighting climate change will include — wait for it — dimming the sun. Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein took his new interview podcast of global warming fearmonger Elizabeth Kolbert and turned it into an op-ed. Klein began his piece with a creepy quote from environmentalist Stewart Brand, “‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’” He later spewed that one solution he was obsessed with for fighting climate change was “solar geoengineering … Are we really...

It is infuriating that the Trump administration left so many of these things undone. I wish I could tell you that the incoming Biden administration had a genius plan for combating Covid-19, thick with ideas no one else had thought of and strategies no one else had tried. But it doesn’t. What it does have is the obvious plan for combating Covid-19, full of ideas many others have thought of and strategies it is appalling we haven’t yet tried. That it is possible for Joe Biden and his team to release a plan this straightforward is the most damning indictment...

Yglesias will become part of The New Contras, a band of center-left journalists whose willingness to critique the excesses of leftism have pushed them from major publications to ascendant self-publishing platforms.The state of the media is neatly explained by the recent separation of inseparable bloggers Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias. Six years after co-founding Vox in 2014, and nearly two decades after hitting the blogosphere, the pair is splitting up. Klein is headed to The New York Times. Yglesias is going to Substack. At the Times, Klein will become part of The Consolidation, another starry-eyed pioneer of new media settling...

On August 27, 2019, President Donald Trump held a 41.3 percent approval rating and a 54.2 percent disapproval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. During the 365 days that followed, Trump became the third president impeached by the House of Representatives; America assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani; more than 200,000 Americans died from the disease caused by the novel coronavirus; the unemployment rate rose from 3.7 percent to 10.2 percent; the US banned incoming travel from Europe, China, and Brazil; an estimated 12 million people lost health insurance coverage; Trump pardoned Roger Stone, who was facing jail time for dirty...

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 320 pp., $27.00) In 2016, Ibram X. Kendi became the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His surprise bestseller, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, cast him in his role as an activist-historian, ambitiously attempting to make 600 years of racial history digestible in 500 pages. In his follow-up, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi––now 37, a Guggenheim fellow, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic––reveals his personal side, weaving together memoir, polemic, and instruction as he invites the reader...

Journalists missed a reference to a Biden gaffe Monday after the Trump campaign launched a new website titled “Truth Over Facts.” President Donald Trump’s campaign launched what appears to be a joke website they described as “an investigative website aimed at uncovering the truth behind [former Vice President] Joe Biden’s never-ending, seemingly incomprehensible statements during his third, plodding campaign for president.” The “Truth Over Facts” title is, in fact, a reference to one of Biden’s public gaffes, where he made the comment during a 2019 campaign speech in Iowa. This seemed to go over many journalists’ heads as they attacked...

MSNBC’s The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell ganged up with Vox editor Ezra Klein Thursday night to discuss recent developments in the on-going showdown between President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. O’Donnell opened the topic by sardonically stating; “One of the developments today was the President taking time to publicly proclaim he’s not the crazy one.” Taking the ever favored side of Crazy Nancy, O’Donnell and Klein laughed over Trump’s defending himself with Klein quipping, “so things are going great in American democracy I guess.” https://www.mrctv.org/videos/msnbcs-last-word-trumps-behavior-strange-troublingKlein cited The New York Times comparing Trump’s actions on Wednesday to those of...

In liberals' imaginations, there are only four ways to lose elections -- and none has to do with their leftist turn, their hysterics or their one-dimensional identity politics. Democrats say they lose because of gerrymandering, voter suppression (sometimes known as asking for ID), Russian mind-control rays deployed by social media, and our antiquated and unfair Constitution. That last excuse is becoming increasingly popular among pundits who continue to invent new crises to freak out about. Take Vox's Ezra Klein, a longtime champion of direct democracy: "I don't think people are ready for the crisis that will follow if Democrats win...