Free Republic

The drama offers a case study in how Elon Musk’s team sought to run a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts — and how longtime employees responded.Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line. Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record. That’s...

In 2016, Thomas D. Homan was a frustrated immigration bureaucrat ready to call it quits. A former border patrol agent with a lawman’s steely demeanor, he had been an odd fit for the Obama administration. Top officials would call on him when they wanted a hard-liner’s take. But his proposals — including an early version of the controversial family separation policy to deter migrants — were often rejected. In the years since, Donald J. Trump’s rise has fully unleashed Mr. Homan and his ideas. In Mr. Trump’s first administration, Mr. Homan helped make the family separation policy a chaotic reality....

The former president and his closest allies are returning to debunked claims about hacked machines as they prepare to contest the vote next month.It has been nearly four years since a parade of judges dismissed wild claims from Donald J. Trump and his associates about hacked election machines and a year and a half since a leading machine company obtained a $787.5 million settlement from Fox News over the debunked conspiracy theories. But Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and his closest allies are again trotting out the theories as part of a late-campaign strategy to assert that this year’s election is...

The New York Times ran a lengthy hit piece, titled, “Inside Ron DeSantis’s Politicized Removal of an Elected Prosecutor,” that demonstrates how fearful Democrats are of his appeal in an era when crime is on the mind of so many voters. So potent is the crime issue that President Biden and a significant number Congressional Democrats are overriding a soft-on-crime law passed the by the DC City Council over the veto of the District’s Mayor Muriel Bowser. Only a deep fear of voters’ wrath over spiraling crime would motivate these Democrats to anger their SJW pro-crime base. Thus, it fell...

The stolen election myth inspired thousands of Trump supporters to take over the Republican Party at the local level, exerting more partisan influence on how elections are run. One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up...