Free Republic

Huge funding from influential conservative donor networks is flowing into groups affiliated with a conservative venture aimed at creating a Republican "government-in-waiting," including over $55 million from groups linked to conservative activist Leonard Leo and the Koch network, according to an Accountable.US review shared exclusively with NBC News. Launched by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, Project 2025 is a two-pronged initiative to develop staunch conservative policy recommendations and grow a roster of thousands of right-wing personnel ready to fill the next Republican administration. With former President Donald Trump now the GOP's presumptive 2024 nominee, the effort is essentially laying...

Joe Biden's weaknesses are obvious, but the State of the Union last Thursday and the president's $7.3 trillion budget proposal this week are reminders of just how tough he can be. Biden isn't simply an old politician, he's an old-fashioned one — the kind who believes in buying the vote. He tried it in the 2022 midterms with a student-loan forgiveness push that had little chance of surviving the courts. Donald Trump gets called a "transactional" politician, yet Biden is an absolute master of the traditional pork-barrel method of courting constituencies. He learned something in his 36 years in the...

Just before former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina suspended her presidential campaign Wednesday morning, former President Donald Trump insulted his former rival — as well as her supporters — before inviting them to support him. "Nikki Haley got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "Much of her money came from Radical Left Democrats, as did many of her voters, almost 50%, according to the polls." After cheering his Super Tuesday performance, Trump invited Haley's supporters to join him in "the greatest movement in the history of our Nation" to defeat President...

As part of its undeclared role as a mouthpiece for President Biden and his administration, NBC News is trying to whitewash the FBI’s arrest of a Blaze Media reporter for covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol. After the FBI informed him early last week of its warrant for his arrest, Blaze investigative reporter Steve Baker surrendered himself to federal authorities in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, and was charged on four counts related to his coverage of the Jan. 6 riot. As The Federalist previously reported, Baker has been at the forefront of counter-narrative reporting on the...

In a scathing rebuke of a New York Judge’s decision to fine Donald Trump a staggering $355 million, the entrepreneur and media personality Kevin O’Leary minced no words, denouncing the ruling as “unjust,” “appalling” and ultimately “un-American.” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron’s Friday ruling not only slapped Trump with that hefty fine, but also with a temporary ban from conducting business in his native New York. O’Leary, known for his role on “Shark Tank,” lambasted the decision, arguing that it sets a dangerous precedent for the entire real estate industry. O’Leary had previously been critical of the months-long fraud...

The soft-landing dream is over; instead, the US economy is headed for a recession in the middle of 2024, Citi says. "There's this very powerful and seductive narrative around a soft landing, and we're just not seeing it in the data," Citi's chief US economist, Andrew Hollenhorst, said in a CNBC interview. "The question is where are these forward-looking indicators showing us that we're going to go," Hollenhorst said. One place the economy is showing a weakness is the labor market. January had a blowout jobs report, adding 353,000 jobs to the economy. But Hollenhorst noted that if you scratch...

In other news - the fight between Elon Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger has added another chapter. The CEO of X is now looking for people who want to sue Disney for discrimination, even offering to help pay for their legal fees. Musk's call to arms comes on the same day that actress Gina Carano filed a lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm, accusing them of wrongfully terminating her from her role in “The Mandalorian.” Musk is also helping to pay for her case. The new addition to the feud comes on the heels of Disney’s first-quarter earnings report, in...

Biden is losing to Trump by five points in the new NBC poll. Biden is getting smoked in almost every category, including having the necessary mental and physical health to be president, not, one assumes, an incidental matter when you are seeking to be president again. These numbers represent such a debacle, I understand why so many smart people assume that Democrats will switch out Biden — because he represents an insane bet for their party. I don’t think that’s going to happen, though. They’ve got to, as I mentioned the other day, hope the economy keeps improving and that...

With Wall Street expecting continued declines in the pace of monthly growth, and consensus looking for a decline from last month's 219K print to 185K, the BLS reported that in January the US created a ridiculous 353K jobs... ... double the 185K expected, and higher than than the highest forecast estimate, which as a reminder was 300K. In fact, as shown below, this was a 4-sigma beat to expectations...and putting the beat in the context of the past year, it was an absolute blowout: What is notable is that once again there was a huge dispersion between the Establishment and...

We have our theory as to how we got here: The relative incompetence of the NFL refs combined with the league's sudden embracing of gambling has created skepticism about the legitimacy of game results. In other words, some NFL fans are now habitually accusing the league of "rigging" games - especially, of course, when that fan either loses by way of his team's failure, or loses a bet. And now comes the AFC Championship Game, with the selection of the officiating crew for the Kansas City Chiefs at Baltimore Ravens showdown ... and a respected NFL analyst floating the idea...

The left wing response to the border crisis can be summarized as a series of misleading viral stories designed to vilify anyone who believes border control is a basic operation for a nation. It started under Trump with the panic over “kids in cages.” Unfortunately for a lot of the progressive dopes who shared this image below, it was taken in 2014 when Obama was president and Joe Biden was Vice President. This next photo of a little girl crying also went viral the same year. Time cut her out and made her part of a cover montage about border...

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman reacted to former President Donald Trump’s landslide victory in Monday’s Iowa caucuses by warning Democrats that incumbent President Joe Biden is toast. “If you haven’t figured it out already, it is now abundantly clear that @realDonaldTrump is going to crush @POTUS,” the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management wrote on his X social media account on Tuesday. Ackman, who has become far more vocal in the public sphere since the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel and the subsequent eruption of antisemitism on college campuses, repeated his call for the 81-year-old Biden to...

A year ago, Wall Street's forecast painted a bleak picture, foreseeing a prolonged bear market into 2023, with an average price target of -2.4%. Concerns loomed large over high inflation and anticipated tightening monetary policies that could trigger a recession that year. It marked the first time since 1999 that Wall Street had predicted a downturn for stocks. However, the consensus proved remarkably wide of the mark, as the US economy exhibited exceptional resilience. The S&P 500 defied expectations, closing the year with a surge of 26.3% at 4,769, significantly surpassing Deutsche Bank's most optimistic target of 4,500. Looking ahead,...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly estimate of jobs openings showed another decline in unfilled positions in November, leading a series of key data reports that could suggest the job market is weakening further. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as Jolts, showed that around 8.79 million positions went unfilled over the month of November. That's down from the revised total of 8.85 million recorded in October and the lowest overall tally since March 2021. The headline Jolts tally hit an all-time high of 12.027 million in March 2023. The quits rate, which tracks workers leaving their jobs...

Former President Trump went after Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) for vetoing a proposed ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender minors Saturday. “DeWine has fallen to the Radical Left,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “No wonder he gets loudly booed in Ohio every time I introduce him at Rallies, but I won’t be introducing him any more. I’m finished with this ‘stiff.’ What was he thinking. The bill would have stopped child mutilation, and prevented men from playing in women’s sports. Legislature will hopefully overturn. Do it FAST!!!” The bill, House Bill 68, also had the aim...

Former President Donald Trump’s latest business venture sees him return to the world of crypto, once again leveraging a surprising network that he has come to favor within the space: Polygon. Trump has announced a non-fungible token (NFT) collection, portraying his now-infamous mug shot from Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, minted via the Layer 2, Ethereum-interoperable blockchain network, which currently has an $8.3 billion market cap. “Former President Donald Trump has backed (Polygon) not once, not twice, but three times total in 2023, making a bold statement into 2024,” explained TheStreetCrypto’s Austin Arnold in the video above. “And this is...

The Iowa caucuses are less than six weeks away, and only eleven months remain until Election Day 2024. So maybe it is a good time to see what voters think before the nomination process begins. In the current Real Clear Politics polling average, Trump is up by +2. --snip-- Let’s look at three items from the polls likely to impact the 2024 election: Joe Biden’s job approval numbers, candidate favorability, and what voters believe are the country’s most serious issues. --snip-- An analysis of these numbers is pretty straightforward. My first impression is how consistent they are. Biden’s job disapproval...

The Labor Department will provide a key piece to the increasingly complicated job market puzzle Friday when it publishes the hotly-anticipated November payroll report at 8:30am ET, but it's unlikely to fill out what has become a confounding issue on Wall Street. Bond markets are acting in a way that suggests both a serious near-term recession risk by bidding-up benchmark 10-year Treasury bonds, pushing their overall yield to multi-month lows, while at the same time keeping short-term rates elevated amid Federal Reserve vows to maintain its fight against inflation. That competing dynamic has widened the gap between 2-year and 10-year...

Elon Musk is once again going after Disney CEO Bob Iger. After targeting the executive during the New York Times DealBook summit last month, Musk, who owns social media platform X (formerly Twitter) slammed Iger on Thursday, writing, "He should be fired immediately." Musk added Walt Disney "is turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company." Disney did not immediately respond to Yahoo Finance's request for comment. The posts began after New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a civil lawsuit on Wednesday against Meta Platforms and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a known rival of Musk. In...

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, says the advertisers that have stopped spending on the platform due to his endorsement of an antisemitic post can “f——” themselves. “What it’s going to do is it’s going to kill the company, and the whole world will know the advertisers killed the company,” Musk said at the New York Times DealBook conference on Wednesday. “Go f—- yourself.” The post was the “worst and dumbest I’ve ever done,” said Musk. Still, if advertisers leave the company, its failure will be their fault, not his — saying they were trying to “blackmail me with...