Free Republic

The billionaire founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism to help Democrats win elections. He is the nation’s leading financier of the “mis”- and “disinformation” industries and is now the largest private stakeholder in America’s legacy journalism schools. The most recent Twitter Files released by Matt Taibbi add a deeply disturbing new layer to the story. They show Newmark is at the very heart of an incestuous web of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and corporate media institutions operating in concert to censor political opponents on social media. Newmark is financing the...

Dr. Josh Adler is executive vice president and chief clinical officer at UCSF Health as well as vice dean for clinical affairs at the UCSF School of Medicine. I wondered if he would like to see these questions answered as well. So I asked him.Executive summaryI sent a list of questions to UCSF media relations on March 20 at 10am PST. I also emailed and called the head of media relations at UCSF to let her know about my questions.Their response: silence.You know what that means, don’t you?The questions I sent themThe UCSF Chief Medical Officer has issued a verbal...

Michael Cohen claimed he was not reimbursed by Donald Trump or his organization for hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels in a 2018 letter to federal authorities, contradicting his recent grand jury testimony,The bombshell document, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, could throw a wrench in the works of prosecutors pursuing criminal charges against Trump over the payments.Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and the star witness in the case over which Trump reportedly faces imminent arrest, claims that Trump got him to pay $130,000 to Daniels to keep her quiet about her alleged affair with the real estate mogul, just days...

Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was "missing context" and "could mislead people." According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the "censorship-industrial complex," I had committed the offense of "malinformation." Unlike "disinformation," which is intentionally misleading, or "misinformation," which is erroneous, "malinformation" is true but inconvenient.As illustrated by internal Twitter communications that journalist Matt Taibbi highlighted last week, malinformation...

Amid the Manhattan district attorney's reported planning to arrest former President Trump next week under a novel legal interpretation of a state law against falsifying business records, Chairman of the House Administration Committee Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) issued a blunt warning Monday to hyperpolitical big city district attorneys: Any federal funding their offices receive may be at risk if they are abusing their prosecutorial power to settle politcal scores rather than fight violent crime. "Often the federal government is funding and providing resources to prosecutors across the United States," Steil told the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "The purpose...

US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield addressed a UN Security Council Briefing on the Situation in the Middle East today (Wednesday). "The United States remains deeply concerned by the sustained violence in Israel and the West Bank. 2022 was the deadliest year since the Second Intifada. And 2023 is on track to surpass this staggering level of violence," Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield began. "The United States is troubled by the escalation of violent attacks by Palestinians against Israelis and by violent attacks against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We reject all such acts of violence, as well...

One of the architects behind the SAFE-T Act and cashless bail is now pushing legislation that would permit more prisoners in Illinois to become eligible for parole. State Rep. Justin Slaughter, D-Chicago, announced House Bill 2045 that would allow a person serving a life sentence to become eligible for parole. “We believe it is going to increase public safety,” Slaughter said. “The efforts will indeed help citizens become more productive, positive citizens.” Slaughter is a member of the Legislative Black Caucus, the group of Illinois lawmakers responsible for the controversial criminal justice reform package known as the SAFE-T Act. A...

A seemingly inoffensive bipartisan outfit created to help states sort out their voter rolls has emerged as the latest partisan battlefield, with a half-dozen Republican-led states canceling their involvement with the organization this year, saying it has turned into a proving ground for left-wing ideas. Ohio and Iowa withdrew from the Electronic Registration Information Center last week, and Florida, West Virginia and Missouri did so earlier this month. Alabama canceled its membership in January, and Louisiana withdrew last year. Alaska’s election chief is also eyeing the exit, and legislators in Texas are pushing for an out, too. “ERIC has chosen...

The conscripts and contract soldiers in Russia are not paid promised salaries, allowances and social benefits. According to the calculations of the news outlet, since the beginning of March 2023, the salaries of the servicemen have been delayed or not paid at all in 52 regions of Russia and in occupied Crimea. ...According to Dmytro Loboyko, the Head of the Regional Studies Centre, people from the Russian hinterland associated "the hope of qualitatively changing their lives, but they had to face reality" with payment for participation in hostilities.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A World Bank report released Wednesday puts the cost of Ukraine’s recovery and rebuilding from Russia’s invasion at $411 billion over the next decade, with the cost of cleaning up the war rubble alone at $5 billion. The report details some of the toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine: at least 9,655 civilians confirmed dead, including 461 children; nearly 2 million homes damaged; more than one out of five public health institutions damaged; and 650 ambulances damaged or looted. In all, the World Bank calculated $135 billion in direct damage to buildings and infrastructure so far, not...

Why the Pope Praises Modernist ArchitectsAbove: Azerbaijani First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva with Pope Francis.In his extraordinary Gifford Lectures of 2012, The Face of God, British philosopher and musician Roger Scruton talks about the “defacement” that occurs in temples and buildings when human proportions, cultural references, and richness of beauty are avoided in favor of empty, blank, machine-like, impersonal qualities. The discussion is fascinating; I can’t do justice to it in this short article, but I highly recommend the book, which is one of the most exciting I’ve read in a long time. Scruton addresses the iconoclastic drive that has dominated...

An Israeli think tank executive claims he told the FBI in 2019 that members of the Biden family warned a Chinese energy executive about a coming federal investigation, allowing him to flee the country before being placed under arrest. Gal Luft, the co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank, provided the "explosive" details to the FBI and Justice Department in March 2019, according to his lawyer. Sources close to Luft told the Jewish News Service members of the Biden family "tipped…off" their Chinese partner, China Energy Fund Committee chairman Ye Jianming,...

"As it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. "Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; And all flesh shall see the salvation of God." "I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the...

Vatican newspaper: Climate change report is ‘cry of alarm for the future of the planet’L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, devoted its most prominent front-page article on March 21 to UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s remarks on the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report.Without greater limits on greenhouse gas emissions, “the sustained rise in temperatures will cause an exponential increase in the number of extreme climatic events like floods, droughts, and storms,” the Vatican newspaper’s unsigned article warned. “And these consequences will hit low-income countries hardest.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a press conference held in support of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg yesterday, Democrats vowed to arrest as many political opponents as it would take to defeat fascism. "Fascism is a clear and present danger in this country," began Senator Chuck Schumer, "and the only way to defeat it is with a corrupt, all-powerful police state that can imprison anyone who disagrees with us politically. If we don't do this, fascism will win." "No one is above the law," agreed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. "Using campaign funds improperly to pay off someone you slept with is...

Only 10% of U.S. adults say they have high confidence in the nation’s banks and other financial institutions, a new poll finds. That’s down from the 22% who said they had high confidence in 2020. Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank this month, the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also finds that a majority say the government is not doing enough to regulate the industry. The underwhelming assessment of America’s banks and bank regulation comes after a series of shocks brought back disturbing memories of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. […] Though confidence in banks...

Russia's president Vladimir Putin, 70, is taking tanks as old as he is out of storage in his desperate bid to crush Ukraine on the battlefield. A video showing long obsolete Soviet-era T-54B and T-55A tanks - designed to be used in the armies of Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin - on a train carried across Russia, presumably destined for the frontlines of the war, has emerged. It comes with Putin having already raided museums and storage depots for retired T-62 battle tanks, which halted production 12 years ago. The geriatric T-54 was originally produced by Stalin after the Second World...

During the Obama years professional progressives could afford a certain smug magnanimity, confident that demographic change had bequeathed permanent lock on power. It was smarter to nudge the great unwashed toward what was decided than boil the frog too quickly. So the populist reaction of 2016 struck many as profound betrayal: perpetrators had to be punished, examples made, and push brought to shove. What began as institutional resistance amid the Trump interregnum has become actively vengeful governance under the Biden regime—a policy agenda nonsensical as to most of its official objectives but coldly strategic as retribution against structural opposition, not...

November 21, 1694, Paris, France—died May 30, 1778, Paris), one of the greatest of all French writers. Although only a few of his works are still read, he continues to be held in worldwide repute as a courageous crusader against tyranny, bigotry, and cruelty. Through its critical capacity, wit, and satire, Voltaire’s work vigorously propagates an ideal of progress to which people of all nations have remained responsive. His long life spanned the last years of classicism and the eve of the revolutionary era, and during this age of transition his works and activities influenced the direction taken