Free Republic

You need the First Amendment precisely when your ideas offend others or flout the majority’s orthodoxies. And then it protects more than your freedom to speak your mind; it guards your freedom not to speak the mind of another. Thus, in classic “compelled speech” rulings, the Supreme Court has protected the right not to be forced to say, do or create anything expressing a message one rejects. Most famously, in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), it barred a state from denying Jehovah’s Witnesses the right to attend public schools if they refused to salute the flag. In Wooley v. Maynard...

White House chief of staff John Kelly called the State Department on Thursday to dispel media reports that a plan had been developed to remove Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, agency spokeswoman Heather Nauert said.

There is no forgiveness from some on the left. It doesn’t matter how many decades or tens of thousands of articles a publication contributes to liberal causes and the overall progressive agenda. If they have a single moment of clarity and fairness, they’re evil and no longer deserve support from the leftist elites. That’s the scenario surrounding Hollywood snowflake Debra Messing. The Will and Grace star, who is known for being to the left of most leftists in Hollywood, took great offense to the posting of a single article: The frailty of liberalism isn’t universal, despite claims by many right-wing...

The Boston Globe recent ran an article where it acknowledged the obvious: the long term goal of the gun control movement (recently relabeled as  “gun safety”), is to confiscate a large number of Americans' firearms. The Globe has almost everything else wrong in its article, but they are honest about the desire for gun confiscation.From the bostonglobe.com:In other words, the proposals aren’t just difficult to enact in the current political climate; their practical effects would also be quite limited. On occasion, though, leading Democrats will make oblique reference to a more sweeping policy change: seizing a huge number of...

After weeks of continuously unfolding abuse scandals, men have become, quite literally, unbelievable. What any given man might say about gender politics and how he treats women are separate and unrelated phenomena. Liberal or conservative, feminist or chauvinist, woke or benighted, young or old, found on Fox News or in The New Republic, a man’s stated opinions have next to no relationship to behavior. Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men...

A profile in The Times of Tony Hovater, a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer in Ohio, elicited a huge amount of feedback this weekend, most of it sharply critical. Here’s how the piece came about, why we wrote it and why we think it was important to do so. The genesis of the story was the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, the terrifying Ku Klux Klan-like images of young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and the subsequent violence that included the killing of a woman, Heather D....

New York Times columnist Charles Blow took to Twitter Friday afternoon with a message of unity, no doubt inspired by Divine Providence after rejoicing in the Thanksgiving holiday. Just kidding. The author of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” told his followers point blank that Trump fans need not apply for friendship. If u support Trump, we don't have anything to talk abt & we can't be friends. This isn't abt parties or ideology; This is abt right & wrong— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) November 24, 2017 He followed up his Tweet saying that Trump’s lying was the cornerstone of his...

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach. This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast,...

New York Times reports: One idea now being discussed under this scenario, brought up by two different White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, would be for Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama to immediately appoint Attorney General Jeff Sessions to what had been his seat when it becomes vacant again. Mr. Sessions remains highly popular among Alabama Republicans, but his relationship with President Trump has waned since he recused himself from the investigation of the role that Russia played in last year’s campaign.

<p>WASHINGTON — One is a rail-thin liberal idealist who spent his career in government, on campaigns and at think tanks. The other is an overweight pragmatist who made a fortune lobbying for all manner of liberal boogeymen.</p> <p>And now, in a twist with Shakespearean undertones, the two influential Washington brothers have found themselves on opposite sides of the scandals over Russian interference in the 2016 election.</p>

...The New York Times marked the same anniversary in a different way: by running a series of articles extolling the virtues of communism. The irony of the series’ title, “Red Century,” seems lost on the Times’s editors. The 20th century was “red” indeed — red with the blood of communism’s victims. The death toll of communism, cited in “The Black Book of Communism,” is simply staggering: In the USSR, nearly 20 million dead; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million; Cambodia, 2 million; Eastern Europe, 1 million; Africa, 1.7 million; Afghanistan, 1.5 million; North Korea: 2 million (and counting). In all,...

As if on cue, the work has begun to rehabilitate Fusion GPS’s image and normalize its dossier and its behavior. Axios wrote that this is all really normal, and that Glenn Simpson and others at Fusion GPS, many of whom are former senior Wall Street Journal reporters and editors, are just good old regular gumshoe ink-stained, unhappy people trying to make a living. Last week, Hillary Clinton went on the Daily Show to “explain” that it really was just opposition research. To be clear, there is neither anything normal about Fusion GPS dossier nor the way the firm goes about...

*snip* The little-known Haiti Development Fund, an LLC incorporated in Delaware in August 2010, was created by the Clinton Foundation with an initial endowment of $20 million from shady Canadian mining mogul Frank Giustra and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. The Fund was supposed to supply desperately needed seed money to Haitian entrepreneurs after an earthquake devastated the country in January 2010. *snip* “This cries out for an audit or an investigation,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center a Virginia-based watchdog group. “Its director was in bankruptcy and there’s almost nothing in the public record showing...

The New York Times "conservative" columnist David Brooks has become as unhinged as Keith Olbermann. Yes, Brooks has joined "The Resistance" and now urges a scorched earth policy when it comes to President Donald Trump. Even if a policy would help the country, it must be resisted, according to Brooks' new twisted logic, if it also helps Trump. Even those who oppose Trump but support some of his policies,  such as the upcoming tax bill, would be considered lousy collaborators by Brooks who is now channeling his inner Olbermann.  Should you think your humble correspondent is exaggerating about just how unhinged Brooks...

According to Baker, those quick to accuse the Times of bias were simply confusing editorials with news stories.

Paper of CAIR Glossing over Hamas ties by Steven Emerson National Review Online February 8, 2008Once again, New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar has proven himself to be the chief public relations mouthpiece for radical Islamic front groups in the United States. In an article published Thursday titled, "Speakers at Academy Said to Make False Claims," MacFarquhar writes: The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists. The three men were invited as part of a...

The Audience Strategy Editor at The New York Times was caught on hidden camera boasting of his newspaper’s version of journalistic ethics. In a newly-released video by Project Veritas, the editor, Nicholas Dudich, is asked about being objective at the Times. “No I’m not, that’s why I’m here,” Dudich replies. Dudich, who manages videos which go on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram for the Times, said “my voice is on…my imprint is on every video we do.” Dudich goes on to explain what he might do to target President Trump: “I’d target his businesses, his dumb f–k of a son, Donald...

A whole lot of fur has been flying since last Thursday, when The New York Times published a game-changing investigative story about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct that in lightning speed brought the mogul to his knees. He apologized and took an immediate leave of absence from the company he co-founded, but that wasn’t enough. His board members and legal advisers have been resigning en masse. And as new, ugly details emerge of three decades of settlements for sex-related offenses, he’s quickly becoming a national pariah. I applaud The New York Times and writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for getting...

LAS VEGAS — Stephen Paddock was a contradiction: a gambler who took no chances. A man with houses everywhere who did not really live in any of them. Someone who liked the high life of casinos but drove a nondescript minivan and dressed casually, even sloppily, in flip-flops and sweatsuits. He did not use Facebook or Twitter, but spent the past 25 years staring at screens of video poker machines.Mr. Paddock, a former postal worker and tax auditor, lived an intensely private, unsocial life that exploded into public view on Sunday, when he killed 58 people at a country music...

Not so with guns. The Second Amendment, as applied in the last 30 years or so, has become so perverted, twisted and misused that you have to see it now as the second original sin in the founding of this country, after slavery. It wasn’t meant to be the instrument for the worst kind of American exceptionalism — setting up the United States as the most violent of developed nations. But it is now. The more we stand out for random mass killings daily, the more the leading cause becomes clear: the warped interpretation of the freedom to own lethal...