Free Republic

On Monday's New Day show on CNN, during a discussion of the letter that Barack Obama gave to Donald Trump as the former President was leaving office, conservative CNN commentator Jack Kingston recalled several of the scandals of the Obama administration. Liberal CNN commentator Bakari Sellers claimed with a straight face that President Obama was "eight years scandal-free." He also took a shot at Fox News for covering Obama-era scandals, dismissing the coverage as "talking points." CNN's Sellers Claims Obama Was 'Eight Years Scandal Free'At 8:54 a.m. ET, after substitute host Dave Briggs read from the letter in which Obama...

Taylor Swift has remained notoriously tight-lipped on her political leanings, but her friend and back-up dancer Todrick Hall says that anyone who takes her silence as evidence she voted for Donald Trump are making a "huge assumption." Swift faced criticism throughout the election season for remaining mum, and not following in the footsteps of her fellow pop stars, who expressed their support for Hillary Clinton and disdain for Trump. Her sole foray into the world of politics was as an apolitical Instagram post on Election Day telling her followers to "go out and VOTE." But according to Hall, who has...

George Clooney’s “Suburbicon” has a timely subplot — based both on present times and a 1957 incident — about racism in white America. That subplot, however, resounded deeply during the Venice Film Festival press conference for the film, which stars Matt Damon and Julianne Moore. “I was watching a lot of speeches on the campaign trail about building fences and scapegoating minorities and I started looking around at other times in our history when we’ve unfortunately fallen back into these things,” said Clooney, talking about how the pic germinated. While casting around for story ideas, Clooney found a 1957 incident...

******************************************************* Introduction On May 12th, more than 60 artists and creative organizers engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social justice activism, and philanthropy came together for a White House briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery. This meeting combined the interests of several groups addressing intersecting issues. All are interested in the power of the arts to build communities and create change. Arlene Goldbard requested a meeting with community cultural development practitioners and thinkers to talk about how the remarkable mobilizing power of community arts can be used by the Obama administration as a tool and a pathway...

MTV awards go political in Trump era By Afp Published: 21:50 EDT, 27 August 2017 | Updated: 21:50 EDT, 27 August 2017 MTV's glitzy awards show took a political turn Sunday at a tense time in the United States, with the music world's top stars taking aim at white supremacists and President Donald Trump. The Video Music Awards, generally watched more for pop culture moments than for news of the winners, also gave Taylor Swift a platform to show off a new, darker image as she premiered her new video. Pop superstar Katy Perry, the host of the gala, floated...

Sigh. If only President Trump denounced neo-Nazis as passionately and sincerely as he castigates journalists. What could be an easier task than distancing oneself from Nazis or violent white supremacists? Yet Trump manages to make it infinitely complicated — and then get distracted by self-pity and excoriate reporters for committing journalism. The key strain of his sulfurous speech in Phoenix on Tuesday was an extended attack on “dishonest” reporters (including at “the failing New York Times”). Look, we in journalism deserve to have our feet held to the fire. We make mistakes all the time, and too often we are...

"Our leading media" are characterized by "indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly." Patrick Lawrence in The Nation, Aug. 9, 2017, on the media's reporting of the alleged collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia To understand America's crises today, one must first understand what has happened to two institutions: the university and the news media. They do not regard their mission as educating and informing but indoctrinating. In this column, I will focus on the media. I will dissect one issue that I know extremely well: the national and local coverage of the invitation extended to me to guest-conduct...

When Carl Valentine dropped off his daughter at the University of Virginia, he had some important advice for the college freshman: Don’t forget that you are a minority. […] As classes begin at colleges and universities across the country, some parents are questioning if their children will be safe on campus in the wake of last weekend’s violent white nationalist protest here. School administrators, meanwhile, are grappling with how to balance students’ physical safety with free speech. […] In an address to students and families on Friday, UVA President Teresa Sullivan welcomed “every person of every race, every gender, every...

How do we resist the tsunami of lies and leftist propaganda thrown at us 24/7 by the various "news" venues, Hollywood, celebrities, academia, the courts, and corrupt politicians? I like most of my fellow Republicans and conservatives was a victim of the progressive paradigm, embedded in all our institutions of culture, from academia to Hollywood to the media. ...the story that we had accepted, like suckers, was the idea that fascism and Nazism are inherently “right wing.”—Dinesh D’Souza “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left” For some years now I have been shouting from the rooftops...

A new report estimates banning transgender service members would set the U.S. back $960 million, challenging President Donald Trump's pro-ban argument about "the tremendous medical costs" associated with permitting transgender people to serve in the military. The report, co-authored by the Palm Center and current and retired professors at the Naval Postgraduate School, estimates the cost to replace transgender service members would be 100 times greater than current estimates for the annual cost of providing them transition-related care. "President Trump said that he wants to fire honorably serving transgender troops in order to save money, but that begs the question,...

The Democratic Party and its media fifth column are using Charlottesville to legitimize Black Lives Matters and the "AntiFa," and suppress any criticism of these dangerous revolutionaries. If they succeed – and they well could – criticism of these monsters will be denounced as support for fascism.        I said it before, but it bears repeating, the White Nationalists/Supremacists/Neo-Nazis are evil – just as ugly, crazy and violent as the BLM/AntiFa.        But here's the difference: There is no White Supremacist threat to America. Their numbers are insignificant. They have no popular support and no resources. At what was called...

One wouldn’t expect Seymour Hersh, a lefty journalist par excellance, to pop the Trump-Russia propaganda balloon Obama’s CIA director John Brennan released last year. But he has. Hersh has been quoted as saying that the collusion claim is a product of “disinformation” — “a Brennan operation,” as he puts it. Hersh says that Trump is not the villain but the victim in this story, and that the press has served as a shameful stenographer for Brennan to smear Trump. It has shown no skepticism toward any of his claims or the supposedly nonpartisan reports his cronies and political hacks assembled...

Bridgewater, New Jersey (CNN)President Donald Trump, a man known for his bluntness, was anything but on Saturday, failing to name the white supremacists or alt-right groups at the center of violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Did you know when you search the internet, you're not actually searching the whole internet? Google is the largest search service in the world. But even with trillions of websites indexed, Google’s search only covers about four percent of the net. So what exactly is the 96 percent of the internet that’s ungoogleable? The "mysterious" Deep Web, as tech expert Shelly Palmer facetiously called it in an interview with Circa, is the internet that isn’t indexable by search engines. "It's mostly private information that actually should be private and is set up to be that way," Palmer said. This is...

Vegetable prices may be going up soon, as a shortage of migrant workers is resulting in lost crops in California. Farmers say they're having trouble hiring enough people to work during harvest season, causing some crops to rot before they can be picked. Already, the situation has triggered losses of more than $13 million in two California counties alone, according to NBC News. The ongoing battle about U.S. immigration policies is blamed for the shortage. The vast majority of California's farm workers are foreign born, with many coming from Mexico. However, the PEW Research Center reports more Mexicans are leaving...

Project Description Since 2012, we have been investigating the use of algorithms, automation and computational propaganda in public life. Political bots are manipulating public opinion over major social networking applications. This project enables a new team of social and information scientists to investigate the impact of automated scripts, commonly called bots, on social media. We study both the bot scripts and the people making such bots, and then work with computer scientists to improve the way we catch and stop such bots. Experience suggests that political bots are most likely to appear during an international crisis, and are usually designed...

Matt Drudge has been in the White House an awful lot these days -- "all the time," as one senior administration official puts it. He's met with President Donald Trump, spent time with Ivanka Trump, and doled out advice to Jared Kushner. That he'd have influence in the Trump White House should not be all that surprising. The internet news tycoon, who founded and edits the Drudge Report, the narrative-setting conservative news website, has been one of Trump's most ardent supporters since Trump announced his candidacy. He boosted him through the contentious Republican primaries, helped him defeat Democratic presidential candidate...

Senators Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse have already been to Iowa this year, Gov. John Kasich is eyeing a return visit to New Hampshire, and Mike Pence’s schedule is so full of political events that Republicans joke that he is acting more like a second-term vice president hoping to clear the field than a No. 2 sworn in a little over six months ago. President Trump’s first term is ostensibly just warming up, but luminaries in his own party have begun what amounts to a shadow campaign for 2020 — as if the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue weren’t...

When DCs’ Legends of Tomorrow returns for a third season on The CW later this year, a new superhero will enter the fold in the form of a Muslim computer hacker from the future: Zari Adrianna Tomaz, who will be played by Tala Ashe.... Legends executive producer Marc Guggenheim spoke about the casting and referenced the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump’s presidency and the policies that ultimately established restrictions on travel to the United States from six predominantly Muslim countries. “You might have heard there was this election,” Guggenheim explained. “Not to get political, but something that we all gravitated...

A New York City couple jumped to their deaths from the 9th-floor window of a 17-story office building because they couldn't afford health care, according to their suicide notes. The Daily Mail reports that eyewitness Perry Kim, 49, was outside the Murray Hill building at around 5:30 a.m. on Friday morning when he heard screaming and saw two people falling from the sky. The bodies of 53-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman were found shortly thereafter on 33rd Street between Park and Madison avenues, according to the New York Post. Heartbreaking suicide notes were discovered in the pockets of both...