Free Republic

New York CNN — Right-wing media is burning red at Taylor Swift. With the Kansas City Chiefs headed to Super Bowl LVIII, influential MAGA Media personalities have started circulating conspiracy theories about the pop superstar, promoting the deranged notion that she is part of a sprawling psychological operations plot staged by the NFL and Democratic Party to deliver the 2024 presidential election to President Joe Biden. The attacks on Swift have been steadily building for weeks (see Fox News host Jesse Watters asking on his prime time program earlier this month if Swift is a “Pentagon asset,” for example),...

Trump administration appointee Carl Higbie resigned Thursday as chief of external affairs for the federal government's volunteer service organization after a CNN KFile review of racist, sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT comments he made on the radio. "Effective immediately, Carl Higbie has resigned as Chief of External Affairs at CNCS," Samantha Jo Warfield, a spokesperson for CNCS, said in a statement. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Higbie's resignation. Higbie, a former Navy SEAL and conservative media personality, was a surrogate for Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, appearing on cable news and serving...

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wrote the foreword and publicly promoted a 2022 book that spread baseless and discredited conspiracy theories and used derogatory homophobic insults. Written by Scott McKay, a local Louisiana politics blogger, the book, “The Revivalist Manifesto,” gives credence to unfounded conspiracy theories often embraced by the far-right – including the “Pizzagate” hoax, which falsely claimed top Democratic officials were involved in a pedophile ring, among other conspiracies. The book also propagates baseless and inaccurate claims, implying that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was subjected to blackmail and connected to the disgraced underage sex trafficker...

Surging Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Kathy Barnette has a history of anti-Muslim and anti-gay statements. In many tweets, Barnette also spread the false conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one speech uploaded to YouTube in 2015, Barnette forcefully argued it was OK to discriminate against Muslims and compared rejecting Islam to "... rejecting Hitler's or Stalin's worldviews." In comments on her radio show, she said accepting homosexuality would lead to the accepting of incest and pedophilia. One post she wrote called a transgender person "deformed" and "demonic." (snip) "You are not a racist if you...

A Trump appointee serving on West Point's advisory board has repeatedly spread a conspiracy that the Biden administration is bringing in non-White immigrants as part of a "grand plan" to have them outnumber White Americans of European ancestry in the United States. In another interview, he also attacked women serving in the military in combat roles. The comments were made in April and May by retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, who was appointed to West Point's Board of Visitors in the waning months of the Trump administration, and uncovered in a CNN KFile review of his recent comments. Macgregor also...

Scott O'Grady: Trump Pentagon nominee spreads debunked conspiracies and tweets suggesting Trump declare martial lawPresident Donald Trump's nominee to become a senior Pentagon official spread debunked conspiracies on Twitter that called Trump's election loss to Joe Biden a "coup" attempt and shared tweets that suggest Trump should declare martial law.Scott O'Grady, a former fighter pilot and Trump loyalist, repeatedly retweeted tweets that falsely stated Trump won the election in "landslide fashion" and that millions of votes were stolen from the President.On November 25, O'Grady retweeted a tweet that said, "Trump won & Biden & his Comrades will now attempt...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) ate it last week. No, it wasn’t about the Green New Deal, which is a recipe for economic disaster; it was a poorly executed counterattack against…the media. Yep, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is running for the Democratic nomination in 2020, so your whole life goes under the microscope. Y’all know the drill. It so happens that she had quite the legal career as well, charging $675/hour and worked on over 50 legal cases. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski simply tweeted about this dot on Warren’s resume, which AOC thought was an attack, pulled the trigger, but got face-full...

One of President Donald Trump's picks to serve on the Federal Reserve Board has written that women should be banned from refereeing, announcing or beer vending at men's college basketball games, asking if there was any area in life "where men can take vacation from women." Stephen Moore, an economic commentator and former Trump campaign adviser, made those and similar comments in several columns reviewed by CNN's KFile that were published on the website of the conservative National Review magazine in 2001, twice in 2002 and 2003...

The call sounds like it is coming from President Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign. It even uses a recording of the President's voice: "I'm Donald Trump. Tonight I am asking you to defend our very dangerous southern border, out of love and devotion to our country." A deep-voiced narrator then comes on asking the listener to "be one of the hundreds thousands of patriots that helped President Trump finally build a the wall by making a one-time urgently needed donation to the campaign." Calls like this one, said to number more than 200,000, have helped raise more than $100,000 in...

Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie did not disclose his associations with Confederate groups on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee prior to his confirmation hearing last year, according to a copy of the form obtained by CNN's KFile. CNN's KFile reported in December that Wilkie, who was confirmed by the Senate as VA secretary in July 2018, gave a speech to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2009 and, in 1995, praised Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a speech at the US Capitol. Wilkie was also at one point a member of the Sons...

I don’t like bullies. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece pushing back against Andrew Kaczynski and the rest of CNN’s KFile unit, which has made a mission of taking out certain Republicans. Townhall published the piece, in which I defended David Clarke, Monica Crowley and Congressman Jason Lewis from CNN’s attacks. But Townhall immediately removed it after CNN’s Kaczynski said my claims were incorrect.

Andrew Kaczynski and the rest of CNN’s so-called KFile unit ought to count their reporting as direct campaign contributions to Democrats.Last year, in falsely accusing Sheriff David Clarke and Monica Crowley of plagiarism when the Trump administration was considering them for positions, CNN omitted the authors’ footnotes, which contained the source attributions. As Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV and lecturer at the Yale English department, told the Yale Daily News in 2007: “Plagiarism is when you steal someone’s words and you don’t attribute it to that person.” He went on to address the case of Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres, who copied large chunks of writing without quote...

As America celebrated Independence Day, the Internet exploded following allegations that CNN threatened and coerced the Reddit user behind the popular Donald Trump/CNN Wrestling meme into silence for exercising his first amendment rights. In an article by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, it is detailed how Reddit user HanA**holeSolo “apologized for calls for violence against the press,” took down all his social media posts, begged for his identity not to be released an promised he wouldn’t engage in any similar behavior. The article noted that CNN agreed not to release his name, but “reserves the right to publish his identity should any...

It’s been right there all along; a sense, an instinctual sense, a gut feeling, since late June 2015, and in all the subsequent months, it just kept reoccurring – and with the passing of events, each time it became more and more difficult to dismiss…. Before getting to the heart of this entirely speculative presentation, and specifically because it’s so far out there that, well, if accurate, a litany of people will claim we had to hold some insider connection, we must restate and remind everyone – we have never had any contact with any entity from the Donald Trump...

Cruz’s numbers here aren’t a shock — he’s been in the high teens and low twenties for awhile — but Trump hasn’t dipped as low as 25 percent in a national poll since November and Rubio hasn’t seen a number as high as 21 percent since … ever. That makes some righty poll-watchers nervous since PPP’s credibility has been attacked in the past. Not only are they liberal, they were the subject of a famous critique of their methodology by Nate Cohn in TNR a few years ago. If you’re looking to throw out this result, which no other...

Donald Trump often rails against U.S. intervention in the Middle East that topples dictators whose exits lead to unstable regional consequences like the rise of ISIS and other terrorist groups. But one intervention he has subsequently come to pan — the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya, which led to the toppling of longtime leader Muammar al-Qaddafi — Trump once very loudly called for on humanitarian grounds. “I mean, look at Libya,” Trump said on CNN’s State of the Union last year. “Look at Iraq. Iraq used to be no terrorists. He [Saddam Hussein] would kill the terrorists immediately, which is...

Just four weeks from today, Iowans will cast the first official votes of the 2016 presidential election. And what was once a very crowded GOP field, with 17 people officially declaring their candidacies, is really down to only three potential scenarios. Let's assess the impact of each on the race going forward should it become a reality. Scenario #1-Ted Cruz Wins Convincingly And by convincingly, I mean with 35% or more, which only two Republicans have ever scored in Iowa's history (George W. Bush 2000 and Bob Dole 1988). With the combined strengths of his existing structure and the vocal...

“… Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” – Martin Niemoller, anti-Nazi pastor Donald Trump set off a firestorm with his recent remarks about Mexico. Good, he’s hit a nerve. At his campaign kickoff announcement at Trump Towers, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you (gesturing to audience member), they’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”...

1. Barack Obama Trump said in 2009 that Obama was “a strong guy who knows what he wants,” a person with “the mark of a strong leader,” and “totally a champion.” He even bestowed the greatest Trumpian honor upon Obama, saying, “I would hire him.”In 2011, while considering making a run for president, he placed himself at the vanguard of the “birther” movement, demanding that Obama show his birth certificate and fueling suspicions that the president was not born in the United States. 2. Hillary Clinton As has been widely reported, Hillary Clinton attended Trump’s wedding in 2005. Trump also...

Less than a decade ago, Donald Trump could be spotted on TV or in print gushing over Hillary Clinton. He publicly praised her health care plan (it had an individual mandate). He said he liked Clinton and her husband “very much.” He said she would do a good job negotiating with Iran. During the heat of the 2008 campaign, Trump took to his own blog to praise Clinton, writing that she’d make a great president. “Hillary Clinton said she’d consider naming Barack Obama as her vice-president when she gets the nomination, but she’s nowhere near a shoo-in,” wrote The Donald...