Free Republic

Set to appear in the January/February 2017 print issue, the responses published ranged from liberal authors to TV hosts to average readers of the monthly magazine and the people cited spanned nearly the duration of human history. . . . Ronald Reagan. Tens of thousands of gay men were wiped off the map simply because he refused to speak, much less act. What’s worse than ignoring a national health crisis while you stuff your face full of jelly beans and your wife reads her horoscope in the next room?

Miss Sloane, a highly anticipated movie demonizing the NRA and calling for gun control, has bombed. The movie succeeded only in emphasizing the top-down nature of the gun-control campaign and how little intensity there is for more regulations. The movie seemed to have everything going for it. Liberal movie critics loved it, and it was backed by a hefty ad budget along with heaps of favorable news coverage. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has already nominated the movie’s star, Jessica Chastain, for a prestigious Golden Globe, considered a strong predictor of the Oscars. But two weeks after its national release,...

Citing “overwhelming demand,” rock and roll musician Kid Rock recently started selling Donald Trump-themed apparel. One of three T-shirts tied to the president-elect depicts a post-election map with Republican states labeled “United States of America” and Democratic states labeled “Dumbf—istan.” Another features the words “God, Guns & Trump.” The third includes an image of Trump along with a crude message directed at his opponents. The hat, which is a spinoff of Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” cap, reads “Make America Badass Again.” The items are available through Kid Rock’s online store. (Warning: Some items feature vulgar language.) Related VideoBoone...

The New York Times called for an end to the Electoral College in an editorial on December 19, calling it a “living symbol of America’s original sin.” But the paper was forced to issue an embarrassing correction when the editors all of a sudden remembered that they used to support the Electoral College. Even worse for the Times? That support came in 2000 when another Republican president lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College: Correction: December 20, 2016 An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that the editorial board has been opposed to the Electoral College going...

Since the election victory of Donald Trump, numerous stories have surfaced about hate crimes allegedly tied to supporters of the businessman or to his rhetoric, some true and many not. Although the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that there have been hate crimes since the election, a number of the incidents have been disproven or shown to be hoaxes or ill-timed jokes. Here are some noteworthy ones. A Muslim teenager from Long Island by the name of Yasmin Seweid told authorities that she was harassed on the subway by men who yelled "Donald Trump!" while trying to remove her hijab....

One of the websites Facebook is to use to arbitrate on 'fake news' is involved in a bitter legal dispute between its co-founders, with its CEO accused of using company money for prostitutes. Snopes.com will be part of a panel used by Facebook to decide whether stories which users complain about as potentially 'fake' should be considered 'disputed'. But the website's own troubles and the intriguing choice of who carries out its 'fact checks' are revealed by DailyMail.com, as one of its main contributors is disclosed to be a former sex-blogger who called herself 'Vice Vixen'. Snopes.com will benefit from...

Dear Mr. Trump, You won. Welcome to hell. And to think, I thought you’d become president when hell froze over. Now that the election is finally behind us, may I ask a tiny question: Why did you want this job? Was it on your bucket list? After so many square miles of golf courses, trophy wives, gilt mirrors and crystal chandeliers, was there nothing left to mess with? I wasn’t surprised, by the way, when you said you’d spend half your time in New York. I mean, it’s New York! And the White House is a tad bourgeois in an...

A record high portion of people see reporters as low or very low ethical standards, after a year in which the winning president-elect made trashing the media's honesty a centerpiece of his campaign. A new Gallup poll said 41 percent of people polled said the media have low ethical standards. That's 10 points higher than the prior high of 31 percent of those who held the same view of the press in 2008 and 2009. Trust in college teachers has also slipped.

Despite a media blitz portraying fake news sites as having a real impact in national politics — and even capable of affecting the outcome of a presidential election — fake news sites struggle to reach any sort of real audience. Fake news site DenverGuardian.com, subject of coverage from the New York Times and the Washington Post, is ranked 91,688 in web traffic in the U.S., according to web analytics firm Alexa. To put that number in perspective: the site supposedly impacting the national political scene is more than 84,000 slots behind the website for a Virginia community college. On Sunday,...

Step one: Recruit a group of celebrities -- ranging from A-listers to D-listers -- to make solemn-sounding, straight-to-camera appeals in an open video addressing members of the electoral college. Step two: If that airtight plan fails to have an impact, get these self righteous Hollywood types to send personalized videos to individual electors. Step three: Deluge electors with thousands of daily emails in a frantic, last-ditch effort to sway today's vote. One of the 538 members of this powerful group from Missouri, which Trump carried by nearly nine points, has heard quite enough from these people.  Via CBS News in St. Louis: Jan, who asked us...

The first few weeks after President-elect Clinton won the election set the tone for what she expected would be the next eight years, and that tone was neither gracious nor inclusive. She wasted no time in flaunting her 306 electoral votes and the Democrats’ 52 seat Senate majority. “America has decisively rejected the hate embodied by Donald Trump and his deplorable supporters,” Hillary bellowed, as she gripped the podium unsteadily, still woozy from her 80 proof election night “party.” She went on: “I have a massive mandate to impose fundamental change and usher in a new America! And let me...

I am the opposite of a war junkie, I loathe the sound of fireworks because they remind me of a bloody night in Lithuania in January 1991, where I lay down in dirty snow to save my skin from Soviet bullets..... ...the old cliché that 'the first casualty of war is truth' is absolutely right, and should be displayed in letters of fire over every newspaper reports of conflict.... Almost nothing can be checked. You become totally reliant on the people you are with, and you identify with them..... .... we have been bombarded with colorful reports of events in...

liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the election was "illegitimate." "So this was a tainted election," he said in an op-ed this week. "It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won't be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate . . . Last weekend on CBS's "Face the Nation," liberal Slate writer Jamelle Bouie also said the hacking had cast a shadow on Trump's win, rendering it a farce. . . . Others have argued that when the Electoral College electors convene Monday to...

“If you love movies and or politics, it is sometimes impossible to watch these things and not hear the words of Aaron Sorkin about the hard work of the presidency, the real work of the presidency, the view from the cheap seats, his words, not the president’s,” Williams said. “This was a kind of fascinating walk through the mind and the presidency of Barack Obama among other things,” Williams continued.

Sometimes all you need to highlight “Fake News” is a screen grab:

Inaccuracies, melodrama, bias, outrage: Journalists showcased plenty during election night news coverage which proved to be intense — and endless. The phenomenon has taken a toll. The weary nation appears to be peeved at the press, and that includes Democrats and Republicans alike who are literally turning away.

This past year, however, Dr. Lott has published a book that seems to me to be the clearest successor to that seminal work, “More Guns Less Crime.” This new book, “The War On Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” brings a new level of sophistication and insight, as well as a greater variety of social and economic perspectives, to the great civil rights debates that continue around the Second Amendment. “The War on Guns” does more than just update and expand upon the research of the earlier book. It also takes a comprehensive and data based look at the...

Facebook had announced it will begin adding warning labels to “fake news” on its site. The plan is to add a link to stories which readers have identified as fake. The link will cite fact-checkers explaining why a story is false or fake. Facebook described the proposed changes in a blog post: "We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully. We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our...

As far I can tell the world is in a much worse place after eight years of President Obama. China, Russia, Iran and Cuba are stronger. The Middle East is in shambles. Terrorism deaths are higher and the world has a massive refuge crisis. I can think of nowhere that the U.S. is better off today after eight years of Obama, Hillary and Kerry. Isn't it time to give new ideas and a man accomplished throughout the world a chance? Not for the legacy media and its Democrat clients. I remember when George W. Bush was in office and the...

UPDATE: Shortly after this report was published Politico contacted The Daily Caller to say: “This tweet is completely unacceptable and is an obvious violation of POLITICO standards. Julia Ioffe is no longer with the publication.” Ioffe is joining The Atlantic in January but this tweet accelerated the timeline of her departure from Politico “immediately,” according to a Politico source. Julia Ioffe, a former contributing writer for Politico Magazine who will be joining The Atlantic as a reporter in January, suggested Wednesday on Twitter that President-elect Donald Trump is having sex with his daughter Ivanka.