Free Republic

There are many damning anecdotes in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s new book, “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” but one from February of last year perfectly captures the astonishing pettiness of the world’s richest man. Attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, Musk had one of the most luxurious seats in the house, but rather than watching the game, he was glued to his phone in dismay. Both he and President Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles, but even though Biden had far fewer followers than Musk on the platform, the president’s...

The most consequential moment from Donald Trump’s glitchy interview with Elon Musk on Monday came during a discussion of government cost-cutting. “Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk, before launching, apropos of nothing, into a reverie about how Musk dominates his employees. “They go on strike,” said Trump. “I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone,’ and you are the greatest.”Trump’s sympathy with plutocrats over unions is not a surprise, given both his record in...

In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for...

Tracy Nailor, a 56-year-old Atlanta pediatrician, wasn’t particularly impressed with Kamala Harris when she first ran for president. “I think I succumbed to the narrative about her,” she said. She thought Harris wasn’t experienced or accomplished enough to merit the Democratic nomination. “I just didn’t know enough,” she said. “I didn’t do my homework.” Instead of Harris, she supported the trusted, familiar Joe Biden in the last election.But as Biden’s most recent presidential campaign ground on, her faith wavered. She knew it was going to be hard for the aging president to win again. “I was not hopeless, but I...

This week, Breitbart interviewed the former Trump official Peter Navarro, one of many criminals in the ex-president’s orbit, from the Miami prison where he is serving four months for contempt of Congress. While life behind bars is difficult, Navarro boasted that his stint has been smoothed by his ties to Donald Trump, which make him something of a made man. The former president, said Navarro, is beloved not just by the guards, but by the “vast majority” of inmates as well. “If I were a Bidenite, things would be a lot tougher here — and yes, they know exactly who...

The Jan. 6 committee, which held its ninth and likely final hearing Thursday, has lionized the figure of the Decent Republican. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the committee, was its obvious star, imbued with moral authority by the fact that she’d sacrificed her position in Republican leadership, and possibly her political career, to stand up to Donald Trump. There were many others. “When you look back at what has come out through this committee’s work, the most striking fact is that all this evidence comes almost entirely from Republicans,” the committee’s Democratic chair, Bennie Thompson, said Thursday. This attempt to...

To really appreciate Michelle Goldberg’s latest column on cancel culture, you need to consider how the left’s talking points on the topic have calcified over the past few years. For most of the past 5-6 years the left has been writing versions of the same story over and over claiming that cancel culture isn’t real. The progressive line is that cancel culture doesn’t exist, it’s just that some people are finally being held accountable for their bad behavior. Meanwhile, evidence of this sort of “accountability culture” going too far continues to pile up on a weekly basis. It’s an untenable...

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...

To try to break out of it, Biden’s campaign has gone on the offensive. On Sunday, he issued a statement condemning violence “of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right” and challenging Trump to do the same. On Monday he drove home the point: “This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it.” Biden is right. However violence plays politically, the reality is that only one of the two candidates cheers it. Trump has urged his fans to thuggery since his first presidential...

Rowdy New York protesters came out in force at Mayor de Blasio's Gracie Mansion residence late Monday night to express their frustration with sleepless nights throughout the city due to general lawlessness and an epidemic of illegal fireworks displays designed to sew discontent. “The reason why we came out here is for the simple reason that at 12 o'clock at night, our families can not sleep, our children are scared, our families are scared, and this is not the New York that we love!” a resident shouted through a megaphone. "Our message to the person that's occupying Gracie Mansion is...

Graphs of the coronavirus curves in Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy look like mountains, with steep climbs up and then back down. The one for America shows a fast climb up to a plateau. For a while, the number of new cases in the U.S. was at least slowly declining. Now, according to The Times, it’s up a terrifying 22 percent over the last 14 days. As Politico reported on Monday, Italy’s coronavirus catastrophe once looked to Americans like a worst-case scenario. Today, it said, “America’s new per capita cases remain on par with Italy’s worst day — and show...

How does Watergate differ from Obamagate? Journalists led the charge to uncover the first. But now? Now journalists are leading the coverup of the second. J. Peder Zane has illustrated the media coverup exactly: “This week’s news that at least 39 Obama officials had unmasked Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s private conversations during the last month of their administration seemed a little shocking. Today, major media outlets are telling readers and viewers that the practice is “routine.” A CNN headline told readers, “Trump pushes 'Obamagate' conspiracy based on routine intel activity.” Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN...

There are no more adults in the room. After three harrowing years, we’ve reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation, has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East. We don’t yet know how Iran will retaliate, or whether all-out war will be averted. But already, NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS. Iraq’s Parliament has voted to expel American troops...

Cancel Kirstjen Nielsen Her role in terrorizing children should make her a permanent pariah. By Michelle Goldberg Opinion Columnist April 8, 2019 On Sunday evening, news broke that Kirstjen Nielsen was leaving her job as head of the Department of Homeland Security. The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that according to people close to Nielsen, one reason she hung on as long as she did was because “she was aware how awful life would/will be for her on the outside,” given her role in defending Donald Trump’s policies. Let’s make it so. Nielsen did not create Trump’s monstrous...

Welcome to JEXODUS. On Saturday, Roger L. Simon lamented at PJ Media that anti-Semitism is once again becoming respectable – or at least acceptable – across the Western world, and that this time around the Jew-haters are predominantly Muslims and leftists. Among the more prominent new standard bearers of this old hatred, noted Simon, are our two recently elected Muslim congresswomen, who, he quite reasonably surmised, “were likely inculcated at an early age, as were too many Muslim children, with the belief that Jews only (pace Darwin) were the descendants of pigs and apes and should be wiped from the...

For a few hours on Saturday morning, I felt good about America. I was at a smallish rally in the Atlanta suburb of Riverdale, listening to Democratic politicians including Senator Kamala Harris and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who could become the first African-American female governor in American history. Abrams told a story she often repeats on the campaign trail, about being 17 and arriving at the governor’s mansion for a reception for Georgia’s high school valedictorians. Her family didn’t have a car, and she described getting off the bus and walking with her parents along a driveway to a set of...

New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg (on This Week) said President Obama should not be blamed for the losses endured by the party under his leadership because the party depended on him and thought he "had this" and thus did not mobilize. (snip) ..."I mean that was less about kind of his – his own failures as a campaigner or the fact that his own speeches maybe weren’t up to par as it was a huge failure of party building, a sense that kind of Obama had this so people didn’t need to mobilize." "It's not that Obama gave...

(Links to sources excerpted in the video are provided.)

Inflammatory: Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times perfectly embodies why the vast majority of Americans do not trust the ‘mainstream’ establishment media, let alone her hack rag of a newspaper. During an appearance on MSNBC Friday, she actually said that POTUS Donald Trump would have no problem rounding people up and murdering them because he’s such an authoritarian.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued with her fellow panelists on MSNBC’s "Meet the Press Daily" Friday about whether President Donald Trump is the leader of the free world or an aspiring despot. RealClearPolitics reporter Caitlin Huey-Burns was criticizing Trump’s communication strategy when she called him "the leader of the free world." Goldberg interjected to say that, actually, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the leader of the free world. "He’s not the leader of the free world, but, sorry," Goldberg said. "By default he’s the leader of the free world," Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz replied. "Angela Merkel is...