Free Republic

Rural white people, as a group, now pose four interconnected threats to the fate of the United States’ pluralist, constitutional democracy.Rural white voters have long enjoyed outsize power in American politics. They have inflated voting power in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House and the Electoral College. Although there is no uniform definition of “rural,” and even federal agencies cannot agree on a single standard, roughly 20% of Americans live in rural communities, according to the Census Bureau’s definition. And three-quarters of them – or approximately 15% of the U.S. population – are white. Since the rise of Jacksonian democracy...

Cohost Mika Brzezinski asked the pair, “Why are white rural voters a threat to democracy at this point? You would think, looking at Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s background, that the opposite would be true.” Schaller replied that they “lay out the fourfold interconnected threat that white rural voters pose to the country,” in their new book. “They are the most anti-gay, xenophobic in the country. QAnon support and subscribers, COVID denialism, Obama birtherism.” The author also argued that white rural Americans continue to espouse “anti-democratic sentiments.” “They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech. They’re most likely to...

MSNBC’s Monday edition of “Morning Joe” featured an author duo who railed against white rural Americans as a “threat to democracy.” Professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Tom Schaller and journalist and opinion writer Paul Waldman joined “Morning Joe” to discuss their new book, “White Rural Rage,” while calling out the demographic for their voting patterns. Cohost Mika Brzezinski asked the pair, “Why are white rural voters a threat to democracy at this point? You would think, looking at Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s background, that the opposite would be true.” Schaller replied that they...

The Washington Post is going to have to cope. Its dismissal of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) warnings about the Boston Bomber getting paid under President Joe Biden’s gargantuan stimulus bill has resurfaced to haunt the rag.

Last week the corrupt media’s penchant for spinning all things conservative caused a near-fatal case of whiplash. The left began by chastising conservatives for supposedly building “its own echo chamber,” but by the next day, when news broke that Devin Nunes was resigning from Congress to serve as the CEO of Donald Trump’s new media company, the complained-of conservative ecosystem merely represented grift. Both narratives are false, however, which is precisely why leftists peddled them so hard. Axios launched the “echo chamber” accusation with its article titled, “Right wing builds its own echo chamber.” “Conservatives are aggressively building their own...

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the coronavirus, and approvals for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines could follow soon. This could be a significant step in convincing the millions of unvaccinated Americans to finally get vaccinated, even if it doesn’t quickly transform the state of the pandemic. It’s also an opportunity for us to say to the hard-core vaccine refusers: We’re done with you.

As protests against police brutality spread across the country, President Trump looked impotent, unable to offer anything reassuring and tweeting angrily from inside a White House under siege. But Trump has hit on a solution: designate “antifa” a terrorist organization, to make it look as if the protests have been taken over by radical terrorists, and to create the impression that he’s getting fearsomely tough in response. In an interview with us, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told us that the designation itself, which has no legal basis, appears to be a “characteristically political act." Schiff, the chair of the House...

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...

F YOUR job requires you to spin, some days are harder than others. And if you’re one of Donald Trump’s defenders, some very hard days are on the way. We may be at the beginning of a long and tortuous period for the president, with his former campaign chairman convicted of multiple crimes, his former personal lawyer not only pleading guilty to crimes but also directly implicating Trump, and who knows what else to come in the next few days, weeks and months. So rhetorical defences are already being erected. Unfortunately for the US president, these arguments range from irrelevant...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hasn’t lost his ability to make Democrats mad, and once again, he has triggered an intraparty kerfuffle on social media. As we head towards the next presidential cycle, many people — on the right, the left and in the media — will be saying Democrats are in the throes of an identity crisis, a struggle for their party’s soul that will tear them apart. But they aren’t, and they won’t be. The Democratic Party screws up plenty and contains its share of idiots, but when it comes to its identity, it’s doing just fine. On Wednesday,...

One of the enduring mysteries of the Trump era so far is how the president maintains the steadfast loyalty of many of the Republican Party’s key constituent groups despite the fact that his presidency has been a long series of blunders, bumbles, pratfalls and screw-ups, all against a backdrop of White House chaos and naked corruption. I have a theory to explain it, one that can be seen in today’s big news that the Trump administration has issued a rule to dramatically cut back the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate and in the administration’s ongoing sabotage of the ACA in...

Donald Trump is many things, but a deep thinker with a nuanced grasp of the complexities of public policy is not one of them. Yet he stands firmly at the front of the GOP presidential pack largely because of one issue: immigration. And before you dismiss his thoughts on the subject as the rantings of a simple-minded xenophobe, understand that more than any other candidate, he's offering Republican primary voters some actual concrete ideas for how to address this challenge. That isn't to say that those ideas aren't insane and impractical, because they most certainly are. Trump wants to build...

When Jeb Bush said last December that the Republican nominee would have to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles,” it sounded like either a starkly realistic assessment of the dynamics of Republican presidential politics or an awfully naïve statement of what was actually possible for a Republican candidate. Most observers — myself included — thought that he’d have no choice but to mirror the anger of committed Republican voters. As the candidate perceived by base voters and the most moderate of the contenders, he’d have to go through the same ritual that...

With a remarkable 15 announced or soon-to-announce candidates, including such dynamos as Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, there's still one thing we haven't seen yet: the Republican candidates attacking each other. There's been a vague insinuation here and an implied criticism there, but no real verbal fisticuffs to speak of. But worry not: The negativity is coming, and when it does, it will come fast and hard. http://theweek.com/articles/558405/why-gops-2016-bloodbathis-going-great-fun--instructive

It’s safe to say that no president in modern times has had his legitimacy questioned by the opposition party as much as Barack Obama. But as his term in office enters its final phase, Republicans are embarking on an entirely new enterprise: They have decided that as long as he holds the office of the presidency, it’s no longer necessary to respect the office itself. Is that a bit hyperbolic? Maybe. But this news is nothing short of stunning: A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they...

A few months ago, a day before one of the occasional marches the Capital sees demanding an end to the Iraq War, I began the descent into the Metro stop near my office, looked up, and saw a number of representatives of Code Pink standing at the railing overlooking the escalator. Or rather, I heard them first. They were screaming at the parade of commuters, at the top of their lungs and in a tone somewhere between simple frustration and righteous anger, "End the war!!!" Well, I thought, that ought to take care of things. Good work, hippies! I kid...

Photo caption: " War veterans Jere Hill, middle, from Warham, Mass., and Robert Gibson, right, from Lexington, Ky., stand with their backs turned during Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry (news - web sites)'s speech at the 105th Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Cincinnati on Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2004. Man in foreground is unidentified. Kerry received a polite if not overwhelmingly positive reaction from the VFW. But there was a clear divide, with scores of veterans sittings with their arms folded while others clapped. (AP Photo/David Kohl) "