Free Republic

Oops, he did it again. After leaking fake Donald Trump, Jr. emails, fabricating the transcript of a 2019 phone call between former President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president, and lying about his interactions with the so-called whistleblower behind House Democrats’ first impeachment of Trump, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is now running the same con against a fellow lawmaker. During a hearing Monday night on the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Adam Schiff claimed to have proof that a member of Congress texted former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to instruct former Vice President Mike...

Recent battles over racially divisive curricula prompted Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe to remark, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” But those battles, and the peculiar response that parents are best kept away from the process of educating their children, are signs of a much larger crisis. The gap in perspective between professional educators and the communities they serve about what public education is for has grown unsustainably large. The gap is most evident, and costly, on the question of what outcome a good education should lead toward. For the current generation of reformers,...

White former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pleaded guilty on Wednesday in a federal court in Minnesota to charges he violated George Floyd's civil rights during the Black man's murder, reversing his not-guilty plea in September. Chauvin, 45, entered his guilty plea in the U.S. District Court. Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Chauvin to 25 years in prison, which would run concurrent to his state sentence, adding on about 2 years, The New York Times reported. Chauvin has already been sentenced to 22-1/2 years in prison in state court for the 2020 murder of Floyd, on whose neck the...

A Trump-appointed federal judge threw out a lawsuit from the 45th president late Tuesday that sought to prevent House lawmakers from obtaining his tax returns. US District Judge Trevor McFadden ruled that the House Ways and Means Committee has broad authority to obtain and potentially publish the former president’s tax returns — and described Trump’s claims as “wrong on the law.” “A long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquires,” McFadden wrote in his ruling, according to the Associated Press. “Even the special solicitude accorded former presidents does not alter the outcome.” McFadden stayed...

Comfortable Tyranny To combat the rise of comfortable tyranny, we have to strengthen our own virtue of self-government and be ready to exercise it in the face of a regime that seeks to destroy it.“What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Did we not tell you this in Egypt, when we said, ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians?’ Far better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” —Exodus 14:11-12All forms of slavery are dehumanizing, but not all forms of slavery are involuntary. The Israelites lost their identity as...

Live pic from inside the FOMC meeting. Decision expected at 2:00PM EST. Stay tuned pic.twitter.com/YSU9XCR6ec— Not Jerome Powell (@alifarhat79) December 15, 2021

One of the most ubiquitous tropes in politics is members of Congress finding ways to blame society’s ills on something new that they don’t understand. Rock music, violence in video games, and profanity on television all had their turn as the societal scapegoat in recent decades. The most recent flavor of moral panic is social media — in particular, lawmakers have begun to cast their suspicious gaze upon the mysterious algorithm as a potential public nuisance in need of their regulation. The story goes that the algorithms being used to rank what content is displayed on users’ social media feeds...

Administrators at a Chicago Public Schools high school have shot down an attempt by a right-wing group to form a chapter on the Northwest Side campus of “an organization promoting racial intolerance.” Meanwhile, Chicago police said they are investigating a social media post by a longtime CPD sergeant that praised supposed efforts by students to start the group, Turning Point USA. Taft High School Principal Mark Grishaber said in a letter to the school community earlier this month that he was “disturbed” by efforts to launch a Turning Point chapter at Taft. The right-wing organization has a presence at more...

Since the beginning of the Covid “vaccine” era, we’ve used the CDC’s VAERS data to illustrate how dangerous the jabs are to people. With nearly a million adverse reactions and approaching 20,000 reported deaths following the Covid injections, it’s clear that we’re well beyond the “rare” occurrences that vaxx-nannies tell us about. A new study from Columbia University isn’t drawing nearly the attention it deserves. Thankfully, Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA technology used in most of the Covid shots, noticed the study and broadcast it to his followers on Twitter. "We discuss implications for public health policies related...

Americans slowed their spending by more than expected in November, suggesting that the fastest inflation in decades and shortages have become a drag on the economy and that many Americans got their holiday shopping early this year. Retail sales rose by a seasonally adjusted 0.3 percent in November from October, a significant slowdown from the 1.8 percent jump in the prior month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Economists had expected sales to grow by 0.8 percent.

The Atlantic published an op-ed about COVID in America from one person’s perspective, and it sent liberal America into a tailspin. It was a meltdown that led to scores of people canceling subscriptions, albeit those declarations were made by liberals on Twitter. Matthew Walther of The American Conservative decided to give his insight on COVID in America. He was blunt and straightforward: except for the cities and the urban-based professional elites—no one cares about the virus anymore. Most Americans are getting on with their lives. I would say that’s true. I live in deep-blue Northern Virginia. There are no mask...

Former Assistant Treasury Secretary for Public Affairs Monica Crowley and WOR Radio host Mark Simone join ‘Kudlow' to discuss the web of lies by Sen. Richard Blumenthal. Kudlow: "Alright folks, I just have to ask this: How is this possible in America? Democratic Richard Blumenthal helping the Connecticut Communist Party celebrate their 102nd anniversary over the weekend...Connecticut Senator Blumenthal helping his Connecticut Communist comrades to celebrate. I think that is a remarkable story - and it deserves some visibility - and we're going to give it to him."

As it votes to hold President Trump’s top aides in contempt of Congress, the Democrat-controlled House showed its own contempt for the separation-of-powers doctrine that makes a presidency co-equal rather than subservient to it. Contrary to the grandstanding congresswoman Liz Cheney, President Trump had no obligation to remove First Amendment-exercising Americans from the Capitol building on January 6th. Cheney selectively released some private texts and emails involving Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and quickly distorted their meaning. She falsely insists that they show “supreme dereliction of duty” by Trump even though he was not the recipient of the...

Parents like me are fed up with inconsistent Democratic policies aimed at our kidsFor adults, life is closer to pre-pandemic normalcy. But for kids, school disruptions and restrictions continueWhen Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia a few weeks ago, a liberal friend (and former staffer at a progressive organization) told me, “He was elected by angry parents. I can’t tell you who I voted for because of my job, but I can tell you I’m a really angry mom.”She was angry over the course of the entire pandemic, as she watched her child’s first year of school happen on...

Researchers testing coronavirus samples in Washington state have recorded a rapid rise in cases with a mutation that is characteristic of the omicron variant, mirroring trends that have emerged in countries like South Africa, Britain and Denmark. Researchers at the University of Washington found that 13% of 217 positive coronavirus case specimens collected Wednesday had the mutation. That was up from about 7% of samples they had tested from the day before, and 3% from the day before that — in a region that had its first identified cases only two weeks ago. “It’s clearly looking like it’s rising really...

Today marks the 230th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the foundational document that guarantees basic liberties—like freedom of religion, speech, and association—to all American citizens. Never has it been more important for us to reflect on those rights, for never before have those rights been more threatened than they are right now. Our nation is fixated on the idea of “rights.” But even as we throw the word around constantly, we’re in danger of forgetting what rights actually are: who grants them, who has them, and what they really mean. If we lose sight of the...

More Americans Have Died Of Covid Under Biden Than Under Trump A grim milestone has been passed as the total number of Americans who have died from Covid under President Biden (400,821) has surpassed the total amount that died from Covid under President Trump (400,000). Link: Johns Hopkins University Covid Tracker.Much was made in the national media about the death toll reaching 400,000 on President Trump’s last full day in office on January 19, 2021. The Trump administration was accused of having blood on its hands: 'Blood on his hands': As US surpasses 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, experts blame Trump administration...

My estimate of the VAERS under-reporting factor (URF) at 41 was based on anaphylaxis rates reported in the Blumenthal paper published in JAMA. I have argued that the anaphylaxis rate is an appropriate number to use to (under) estimate deaths because I believed that deaths would be less reported than anaphylaxis to VAERS for two reasons: 1) usually lacks the time proximity to vaccination, 2) the person seeing the death may not know the vaccination status of the victim and may not technically be required to report the death. Some people have quibbled with that assumption, including my friend Professor...

Television star Jim Bob Duggar lost his bid for a seat in the Arkansas State Senate in a landslide defeat on Tuesday. Results released by the state show that Duggar only earned 456 votes in the election, amounting to just 15.34 percent of the 2,270 Republican votes cast on Tuesday and 202 votes cast in early voting. The election will now move into a runoff election on January 11 between Colby Fuller, who received 1,387 votes, making up 46.67 percent of the votes cast, and Steve Unger, who won won 941, or 31.6 percent.

Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney raked in almost $55,000 from the same donors who fund the Lincoln Project, according to a Federalist analysis of public finance records. After cementing a perpetual feud with former President Donald Trump and Republican voters as a hallmark of her legacy in the lower chamber, Cheney’s goals now seem indistinguishable from those of the super PAC cloaking Democrat attacks as Republican. The shared donor base makes that clear. According to receipts dated in August by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway, a “top donor” to the Lincoln Project, gave Cheney and...