Free Republic

The New York Times proudly announced last Monday that it had “won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.” Those prestigious journalism awards went to “Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times” for “photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.” The Times neglected to mention, however, one telling detail: Masoud has been unmasked as a member of Hamas who participated in the Oct. 7 jihad massacres inside Israel.The Paper of Record shows...

The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.” This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them...

Their normal human sympathies have atrophied. They live in the desert of their own inhuman politics. They are cold and apparently lack a spiritual life. Desperate to look down on other people, they take fatuity to a new level. David Atkins, recently elected as a California member of the Democratic National Committee, mused on Twitter (Nov. 21, 2020): "How do you deprogram 75 million people who would literally die to stick it to the domestic enemies the teevee and youtube conspiracy vids told them to hate? No, seriously...how DO you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?...

The most harrowing story I’ve read in The Times in recent days was Miriam Jordan’s account of a car crash last month in Southern California involving a Ford Expedition that had come from Mexico, straight through a breach in the border wall. The Ford was crammed with 25 people when it hit a tractor-trailer rig on Route 115, 110 miles east of San Diego. “Few of the survivors have been able to describe what happened next,” Jordan writes. “The crunch of metal and glass, the bodies flung dozens of feet across the pavement. Twelve people died on the spot, a...

The New York Times has killed a column by Bret Stephens that took issue with the paper's handling of the resignation a star health reporter over his use of the N-Word. Pulitzer-winning Stephens wrote to colleagues Thursday about his piece focusing on the Donald McNeil Jr. saga. He said: 'If you're wondering why it wasn't in the paper, it's because AG Sulzberger spiked it.' Sulzberger is the chairman of The New York Times Company and the publisher of The New York Times.

The New York Times' Bret Stephens took a lot of heat for arguing New York lockdown rules don't fit the rest of the country. I know the feeling. Bret Stephens has a tough job. I don’t mean like 19th-century coal miner tough, but as one of the “conservative” opinion contributors at The New York Times, he winds up pleasing none of the people a lot of the time. This is because much of the Grey Lady’s leftist readership doesn’t think the Times should run conservative views at all and much of the American right finds the anti-Trump “can’t we go...

Donald Trump’s first instinct when it came to the coronavirus was to dismiss the threat as overblown, over there, and “totally under control.” His second was to use the pandemic as an opportunity to show off his world-historical leadership skills by treating the virus as a threat on par with World War II. Both reactions were driven by politics, not evidence. The first was unquestionably wrong. The second needs to be questioned aggressively before we impose solutions possibly more destructive than the virus itself

SNIP Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations? The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3...

After a public uproar, The New York Times has revised a column by Bret Stephens that cited an academic paper co-authored by an anthropologist who has been branded a white nationalist. An editor’s note, appended to the column headlined “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” says a reference to the 2005 study was removed and that Stephens did not know the author “promoted racist views. “Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically,” the note said. “The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens...

Back when Donald Trump was running for president — and Republicans were still capable of feeling politically ashamed — a conservative friend made what was, to my mind, the decisive case against voting for him. No, a ballot for Trump did not automatically mean that his voters shared his bigotries. Nor did it necessarily mean that they weren’t embarrassed by them. It just meant that those bigotries weren’t deal-breakers. If their candidate was a birther, they could live with it. If he thought celebrity was a license for sexual predation, they could live with it. If he wanted to impose...

Donald Trump ought to be impeached and removed from office. This isn’t what I thought two months ago, when the impeachment inquiry began. I argued that the evidence fell short of the standards of a prosecutable criminal act. I also feared impeachment might ultimately help Trump politically, as it had helped Bill Clinton in 1998. That second worry might still prove true. But if the congressional testimonies of Marie Yovanovitch, Bill Taylor, Gordon Sondland, Alexander Vindman and especially Fiona Hill make anything clear, it’s that the president’s highest crime isn’t what he tried to do to, or with, Ukraine. It’s...

The miserable specter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bowing like a little pawn to her far-left Squad and calling for impeaching President Trump, something she's known better to do up until now, seems to have snapped some sense into #NeverTrump New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.He's got an excellent one out, pointing to the pattern of Democrats stewing in their own rage, firing into the dark without information, and then moving to impeach. Fire first, find out what was shot at later. And as he notes, they're doing it a lot. Once upon a time, prominent Democrats called for the impeachment of a powerful...

President Trump slammed New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, suggesting he's "loaded up" with bed bugs. After the president floated the idea of hosting next year's G-7 summit at his Doral resort, a report resurfaced that his resort settled a lawsuit in 2017 after a New Jersey man named Eric Linder alleged he woke up one morning at Trump's property with bites all over his body. Trump denied of having any bed bugs at his resort Tuesday morning, blaming "Radical Left Democrats" for spreading "nasty rumors."

The victory of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s election is a defeat for the New York Times. The Times threw everything it had against Netanyahu. The Times’ tone was set in a March 1 column by Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer prize-winning former editor of The Jerusalem Post whose hiring by the Times in April 2017 was interpreted as an attempt by the Times to bolster its faltering credibility among pro-Israel readers. “Time for Netanyahu To Go” was the headline over the Stephens column, describing Netanyahu as “toxically flawed.” The same column described Netanyahu as “a man for whom no moral consideration...

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said on Friday he would "love to see" what Fox News host Sean Hannity would say if a future Democratic president declared "a national emergency over climate change" or for another reason. Stephens made the comment on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," hours before Trump declared a national emergency in an announcement from the Rose Garden. "The powers that Trump appropriates for himself now and that Republicans like Mitch McConnell willingly grant him are powers that future Democratic presidents are certainly going to seize using this as a precedent," Stephens said. "And real conservatives already rue...

Donald Trump Is Bad for Israel via @NYTimes. Hopefully our President will reverse his decision to abandon Syria. https://t.co/nrZbhpV5Zj— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) December 27, 2018

For decades, the left sought to dethrone the idea of truth. Truth was not an absolute. It was a matter of power. [snip] Which brings me to Elizabeth Warren’s commencement address last Friday at Morgan State University in Baltimore. It sounded just like . . . a Trump stump speech. To an audience of nearly 500 new graduates and their families at the historically black college, the Massachusetts senator laid out a bleak vision of America. “The rules are rigged because the rich and powerful have bought and paid for too many politicians,” she said. “The rich and powerful want...

Rather, they’re proudly dependent on an unaccountable globalism If you want to know where media bias resides, simply look at who the media isn’t questioning. The most recent row between CNN’s Jim Acosta and President Donald Trump reinforced this observation. On the heels of the Trump Administration’s decision to revoke the press pass for Jim Acosta (which a D.C. judge has since ordered the White House to reinstate), the “mainstream” media backed Acosta in decrying the purported assault on America’s hallowed First Amendment. Piggybacking on the mainstream media’s argument, the New York Times’ “True Conservative™,” Bret Stephens, shared his fear...

For months we’ve heard from sundry media apocalypticians that this year’s midterms were the last exit off the road to autocracy. On Tuesday, the American people delivered a less dramatic verdict about the significance of the occasion. In a word: meh. Are you interested in seeing Donald Trump voted out of office in two years? I hope so — which is why you should think hard about that “meh.” This week’s elections were, at most, a very modest rebuke of a president reviled by many of his opponents, this columnist included, as an unprecedented danger to the health of liberal...

I was shocked reading this column (non-paywalled version here) appearing today in the New York Times, written by a true NeverTrump conservative, Bret Stephens. ... After briefly excoriating Trump for running on “fear” instead of basking in his accomplishments (which contradicts the political wisdom that voters rarely vote out of gratitude), Stephens gets to the nub of his semi-confession: Trump is really smart. Of course, he has to present that revelation in disparaging terms, but it is a couple of steps better than “Trump is an idiot.” The mystery of Donald Trump is what impels him to overturn the usual...