Free Republic

High-profile journalists are saying they might leave Twitter after tweets attacking them and family members. The latest controversy is underscoring how the popular social media platform has become toxic in the current political climate. CNN reporter and commentator Chris Cillizza tweeted on Sunday that he was “about done” with Twitter, after tweets mocking his child’s peanut allergy. “We are talking about a 9 year old. Feel free to hate me. But don’t mock my son’s peanut allergy. Classless and indefensible,” Cillizza wrote. MSNBC Anchor Chuck Todd also offered support to Cillizza and criticized the abuse. “Every time I think Twitter...

President Donald Trump’s press conference with Russia’s Vladimir Putin was a debacle. The president went from an anodyne prepared statement to a question-and-answer session that ping-ponged between stunning and appalling (with a bit of emetic thrown in for good measure). Suffice it to say, it was a new low from a chief executive who is redefining the term. But the reaction on Twitter from the foreign-policy establishment was almost as untethered as Trump himself. John Brennan, who served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Obama, tweeted: Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds...

Exclusive – Melania Trump Spox: David Frum ‘Disgusting’ for Insinuating Domestic Abuse in White House(FULL TITLE) First Lady Melania Trump’s Communications Director Stephanie Grisham condemned a “disgusting” Monday tweet from Atlantic Senior Editor David Frum containing a hypothetical situation with President Donald Trump hitting his wife. Frum went after President Trump, his personal attorney Jay Sekulow, and now former Trump attorney John Dowd in a tweet that asked whether Trump would be obstructing justice if he punched the First Lady and ordered the Secret Service to cover up the assault. “Suppose President Trump punched the First Lady in the White...

A Rolling Stone writer speculated on Twitter that First Lady Melania Trump could be the victim of spousal abuse by President Donald Trump, hence her recent public absence. Melania Trump has not made a public appearance since a five-day hospital stay in mid-May following surgery for a kidney condition. She will not travel with the president for the G7 summit in Quebec this week, and there are also no plans for her to join him in Singapore for his June 12 meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Her last appearance in an official capacity was on May 10,...

Every Dem has his day. Hillary had her tour. Bernie had his. A number of Dem staffers and media people have done theirs. Now it's Ben Rhodes' turn to play Miss Obama. His documentary clips are everywhere. He's got a new gig with NBC. And he's churning out a stream of articles, editorials and excuses. As the Obama Whisperer, the manager of the echo chamber, he's back doing what he loves. Spinning. This time it's Obama on Syria. In an Atlantic piece, Obama's vizier blames the international community and Republicans. Obama had famously blamed the Euros. Rhodes goes easier on...

Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom. I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely seven years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like folk wisdom, because when I think of that era, I do not think of MTV, but of the futile attempt to stay awake and navigate the yawning whiteness of Friday Night Videos, and I remember that there were no VCRs...

China tries to contain fallout from sanction-busting scandal Smartphone giant Huawei is the latest tech giant under investigation after ZTE ban By GORDON WATTS APRIL 26, 2018 8:46 PM (UTC+8) Cybersecurity, cutting-edge technology and chips. This curious mix has taken the trade row between China and the United States to a whole new level. Just days after telecom titan ZTE was hit by new US sanctions in the ongoing Iran and North Korea export scandal, smartphone giant Huawei faces similar accusations. At the heart of the dispute are US-made components, which are crucial to the operating systems in a range...

After beating back the repeated Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Democrats, for the first time in years, are taking the offense on health care. While the flashiest proposal—for an entirely government-run system—remains a distant aspiration, Democrats are again looking for new ways to expand Washington’s role in shaping the health-care system. Their ideas include new plans to expand coverage, restrain drug prices, and create a public competitor to private health-insurance companies. Encouraging all of these efforts are polls showing that support for the ACA clearly increased during the long legislative struggle over its future. “People are increasingly...

Several weeks ago, acerbic conservative writer Kevin Williamson was fired from the job he'd just accepted at The Atlantic, a prestigious mainstream publication.  The supposed iniquity for which he was dismissed was a years-old exploration of potential policy consequences related to his views on the criminalization of abortion -- an outcome he supports.  The braying jackals who applied heavy pressure on The Atlantic's editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to kick Williamson to the curb homed in on the columnist's ostensible stance that women who obtain abortions should be hanged.  This is a gross distortion, for reasons we'll get to shortly.  Some of...

Here’s a little tidbit from yesterday’s Michael Cohen hearing that’s pretty interesting… According to reports from inside the courtroom, Judge Kimba Wood was ready to allow Michael Cohen to submit the name of his 3rd client — who we now know is Sean Hannity — under seal, but an attorney for CNN and the New York Times convinced her otherwise. From Natasha Bertrand, The Atlantic:

An attorney for Trump, Jay Sekulow and his senior counsel Carly Gammill appeared in a Washington D.C. federal court last week to find out when they will be receiving documents related to the Obama unmasking scandal. The ACLJ (American Center For Law and Justice) filed a FOIA lawsuit last summer and they are just now beginning to receive documents. Sekulow revealed the first batch of unmasking documents on his radio show Jay Live on Tuesday. The ACLJ received heavily redacted emails from former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power that show unprecedented unmasking and political bias in the final...

The Atlantic‘s firing of Kevin Williamson over his views on abortion sent political Twitter abuzz this week. Conservatives and libertarians generally condemned the cowardice involved, and the swarming pushback from progressives captured the pitch-perfect drone of the hive mind.Perhaps there is a lesson here. Despite having achieved their goal, progressives felt it necessary with a torrent of widely-varying but equally flimsy rationales in support of the firing. Here is a handy guide to the seven most common (and dumbest) attempted defenses of the firing.1. National Review Doesn’t Hire Progressives. This response is based on the faulty premise that The...

While running for president the first time, Hillary Clinton , “I am sick and tired of those who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. And we should stand up and say, ‘We are Americans, and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.’” Not long after, once Barack Obama won the election, it became racist to debate and disagree with that administration. This is just one of many examples of liberals setting the rules, then changing them when it suits their needs. There is only one set of...

Social Justice Warriors have been trying to get Kevin Williamson fired from his just-started job at the meaningless dribble publication The Atlantic -- a magazine much admired by the cucks -- because he has previously tweeted that women who get abortions should maybe be hanged. The Atlantic just fired him. They said they'd found a podcast appearance where Williamson repeated that tweet, and that they now believed this wasn't just a provocative joke but his "carefully considered" opinion. It seems it was just yesterday that The Weekly Standard, which you should totally obey because they're smart guys who really "get"...

Obama's "echo chamber" lives on and the media are still buying... In an article on the Atlantic website, a former Obama White House staffer explains why she resigned from the Trump White House after only eight days. . . . Hers was the second story in less than a week in which a government official explained that they’d resigned because of Trump’s policies. Ned Price, a CIA analyst who worked at the Obama White House, authored a cri de coeur for the Washington Post to explain why his disagreements with Trump’s policies prompted him to leave government service. “To be...

Methinks the Goldberg doth protest too much . . . Twice during his appearance on today's Morning Joe, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg claimed that he wasn't there to "flack" for President Obama on foreign policy . . . but then proceeded to do just that. The Atlantic recently published a long piece by Goldberg on Obama's foreign policy, based on the author's interviews of the president and some of his top national security aides. In his first flack, Goldberg defended Obama's cool-dude shades-wearing, wave-doing attendance at a Cuban baseball game and his tangoing in Argentina in the immediate wake of...

In a wide-ranging conversation, Prince Mohammed bin Salman also recognized the Jewish peoples’ right to “their own land.” This much, at least, can be said for Mohammed bin Salman, the putatively reformist crown prince of Saudi Arabia: He has made all the right enemies. Among those who would celebrate his end are the leaders of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and the entire clerical and military leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As a bonus, there are members of his own family, the sprawling, sclerotic, self-dealing House of Saud, who would like to...

Mohammed bin Salman wants the U.S. military to maintain a presence in Syria, despite President Donald Trump’s declaration that American forces will be pulled from the war-torn country in the near future. “We believe American troops should stay for at least the mid-term, if not the long-term,” he told TIME Thursday in a wide-ranging interview. Bin Salman said the American troop presence inside Syria is the last effort stopping Iran, Saudi Arabia’s arch-enemy, from continuing to expand influence with regional allies. U.S. forces inside the country also allow Washington to have a say in Syria’s future, he said. Iran, through...

Saudi Arabia's crown prince affirmed Israel's right to exist...pointedly bucking other leaders in the Arab world and signaling support for President Trump's Middle East agenda...the crown prince told The Atlantic. "Hitler tried to conquer Europe. This is bad. But the supreme leader is trying to conquer the world...He is the Hitler of the Middle East. In the 1920s and 1930s, no one saw Hitler as a danger. Only a few people. Until it happened."

Important history was made yesterday, and the tectonic plates of Middle East moved, as the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, explicitly acknowledged Israel's right to exist, in a homeland alongside a Palestinian state.  In a wide-ranging interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic: He told me he recognizes the right of the Jewish people to have a nation-state of their own next to a Palestinian state; no Arab leader has ever acknowledged such a right. Later in his account of his interview, Goldberg judges: If Prince Mohammed actually achieves what he says he wants to...