Free Republic

WHY IS DESANTIS TANKING? A new poll Wednesday from the University of New Hampshire shook up the world of political obsessives who watch each twist and turn in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. No, there was no change at the top — former President Donald Trump is still in the lead in New Hampshire, 26 points ahead of the nearest competitor. The news was that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), for a long time Trump's chief rival, has slipped to fifth place in New Hampshire, the second state to vote in the GOP primary contest. Fifth place! How...

Recently some liberals became incensed at the actor Woody Harrelson. His offense was being photographed wearing a campaign hat for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while posing with Kennedy's wife, actress Cheryl Hines. Left-wing Twitter soon became very angry, with one user declaring Harrelson "dead to me." An early comment on Hines's Instagram page explained the reason for the anger. "You might as well be wearing a MAGA hat," it said, "because that's who a Kennedy campaign will elect." In recent weeks, many Democrats have coalesced around the idea that support for Kennedy would equal support for former President Donald Trump,...

From the past, a look at Joe Biden's connections. Note — Barack Obama’s choice of Joseph Biden as his running mate is likely to bring up lots of old stories about the long-time senator from Delaware. In 1998, someone called me to talk about the sale of Biden’s house, which had been a minor issue in his reelection campaign two years earlier. But when I traveled to Delaware, I found there was more to it than met the eye, and it was just part of Biden’s close, intertwined relationship with MBNA, the giant credit-card company based in his home state....

Chief Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York charted a hypothetical path to the Republican nomination for newly announced 2024 presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC). "This is the kind of candidacy that's not just going to burst on the polls and all of a sudden he’ll be in second place next week," York said Monday on Fox News. "It’s the kind of candidacy that you visit Iowa a lot, and good news, good word starts spreading around you. "They say good things about you and, after a while, you just start rising in the most important first contest," he continued.

A slightly different story emerged in the Washington Post, which reported that the Pentagon knew of "past Chinese surveillance balloons near Florida and Texas." Wait a minute: Near Florida and Texas? What does near mean? Were the balloons over those states? Were they offshore but over U.S. territorial waters? The Washington Post suggested the Pentagon was not being entirely clear. "The Defense Department was not specific about where in each state the previous incursions occurred," the paper reported, citing Rep. Michael Waltz, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. "[Waltz] added that officials did not say whether the balloons...

TRUMP GETS PLAYED. What is sure to be one of the weirder moments of the 2024 presidential campaign has just taken place before the campaign is even fully underway. Here is the short version: Just before Thanksgiving, former President Donald Trump had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West, Nick Fuentes, and Milo Yiannopoulos. West is the famous rapper, businessman, and reported bipolar disorder patient who says he will run for president in 2024, a campaign he began last month by announcing on Twitter that he was "going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE," a threat that brought him widespread condemnation...

Harriet Hageman is the environmental lawyer who defeated incumbent Rep. Liz Cheney by a landslide in Wyoming's much-watched Republican House primary. Hageman, who will surely trounce token Democratic opposition in the general election, is now getting ready to take office. She was in Washington this week — not for that preparation but to argue in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over its disastrous actions causing the Gold King Mine disaster in Colorado in 2015. That's the kind of thing she does in her life as a lawyer. While in Washington, Hageman sat down with me to record an...

New Twitter owner Elon Musk is vowing to reform the social media platform. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement after his $44 billion bid to buy the company was accepted. Many, many conservatives hope Musk succeeds. But as much as Twitter needs freer speech, it also needs to tell the world precisely what it has been doing for the last few years. That is why it should conduct a full and comprehensive audit of all...

Most of us see President Joe Biden’s falling job approval rating as a measure of his declining popularity. But for every candidate, Democrat or Republican, running for the House or Senate this year, Biden’s numbers mean political life or death. That is because the president’s job approval rating is an extraordinarily important factor in the upcoming midterm elections. Biden’s is low and going lower. A recent Pew poll puts Biden at 41% approval, versus 56% disapproval. Those results are very close to the RealClearPolitics average of several polls, which has Biden at 41.4% approval and 54.7% disapproval. If those results...

Bill Clinton used to say that all elections are about the future. It's true. Voters want to know what candidates will do in office -- how they will fix problems -- and if they can be trusted to handle the unexpected developments the future brings. But now, in Washington, we have significant elements of both major parties obsessed with the past. One party wants to make the upcoming midterm elections about the 2020 presidential election, and the other party wants to make the elections about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. It's a crazy situation. Start with the Democrats, the party...

For the last year, we've heard one commentator after another tell us that American democracy is in crisis. The source of that crisis, we are told, is a hard core of the Republican Party that believes the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and that Joe Biden, therefore, is not a legitimate president. It's true that a significant number of Americans do not accept the results of the election. But is that something new, as the Trump-focused analyses would have us believe? No, it is not. Yes, these days, it is Republicans who doubt the results of a presidential...

THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE DUMPSTER FIRE. President Joe Biden's plunging public approval rating isn't his problem. It is a reflection of his problem.Biden has scheduled a big ceremony today to sign the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the $1.2 trillion measure passed after months of wrangling in Congress. The public is well aware of it. And yet, in a new Washington Post poll , taken after the bill's passage, Biden's job approval rating has hit a new low — just 38% among registered voters, versus 57% who disapprove. So much for those Democrats who thought passing a big bill would boost Biden's...

George Soros Backs New Media Firm to Fight Disinformation Called “Good Information Inc.” Conservatives are calling out Soros for this clearly "Orwellian" move. Tell me this isn’t the most purely “Orwellian” thing you’ve ever heard… According to Axios, George Soros is backing a new media firm in a move to help combat disinformation. The working name of this group? “Good Information Inc.” See, that’s how you know you can trust it, because it has “good information” in the title… Clearly this is just Soros being the great arbiter of truth that he is, right?.. Follow on Telegram @WeLoveTrumpNoah Joining Soros...

George W. Bush reaffirmed his status as garbage last week, for those few cons still in doubt. Bush got up on the 9/11 anniversary and proceeded to demonstrate, again, the essentiality of class in American society. Not “class” in the sense that he is classy; Bush, though it was very important to him to front that he has such class, in fact, has none. No, the “class” that is important to W is social class. He once again chose his country club pals over you and compounded it by issuing a disgusting blood libel against you. That’s his “thank you”...

New York Times blowhard economist Paul Krugman continues to brazenly contradict himself with impunity. The Washington Examiner’s chief political correspondent Byron York has finally had enough. In his Dec. 1 Daily Memo, York ripped apart Krugman’s latest commentary propagandizing that former Vice President Joe Biden will be “the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.” As York summarized: “Krugman seemed to anticipate that some would respond that some Democrats refused to accept Donald Trump's legitimacy. But that never happened, Krugman claimed. ‘And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump...

Pennsylvania looks to be a big player in the 2020 election. Just like in 2016, when Trump won the state and went on to win the election. The election nobody thought he’d win? You remember? Welp, sounds like there is a hidden group of supporters in the state: Allegheny County councilman in Pennsylvania: 'I'm an elected official. I have had at least a dozen Democratic elected officials tell me that they are voting for Trump... but as Democratic elected officials they can't come out and say it.'

Byron York, a Washington Examiner columnist spoke to Laura Ingraham on Wednesday about how the investigators came to realize that the person driving the events of ‘Ukraine Investigation’ wasn’t the so-called whistleblower, but none other than Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. In his new book, “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump“, Byron York reveals the details behind the House and Senate hearings on the Ukraine investigation. “If you remember early on in the Ukraine Investigation, the Democrats said they wanted the whistleblower to testify and then they changed their mind and they didn’t want the whistleblower to testify,”...

New book shows how Lt. Col. Alex Vindman was the real instigator of the Ukraine investigation that formed the pretext for Democrats' impeachment of President Trump. The most interesting thing about Byron York’s exhaustively reported and richly detailed new impeachment book, “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump,” is that the whistleblower who filed the official complaint that got impeachment rolling isn’t ever identified.It turns out that the heated discussion over the whistleblower, who was previously identified by Real Clear Investigations as the CIA’s Eric Ciaramella, was a diversion from allowing the American people to understand who was...

What do George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, Father Junipero Serra and Christopher Columbus have in common? None were Confederate generals, and yet all have had their statues torn down by mobs in the last few days -- or, in the case of Roosevelt, had New York's Museum of Natural History announce that a Roosevelt statue at the museum's entrance will soon be removed. The mobs ripped down statues in Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and several other cities without any fear of police interference. The police might as well have been defunded, for all they did...

Here’s Byron York with some declassified court papers indicating that top Justice Department official Sally Yates learned about the phone call between Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak from President Obama himself during a meeting in the Oval Office in early January 2017.