Free Republic

There has been plenty of talk lately about Silicon Valley abandoning the news business. That’s largely true, but it doesn’t get to an even deeper problem: the utter erosion of public confidence in the media, which stems from a long history of self-inflicted wounds, high-profile errors and unmistakable bias. *** The newer iterations – TikTok and YouTube influencers – are now stealing some of their market share, so this blame game isn’t convincing. The mainstream media, which once monopolized the industry, have blown it. *** As Charlie Warzel put in the Atlantic: "Readers are breaking up with traditional news." ***...

Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the United States was losing moral credibility for not calling out Israel’s military moves in response to the Hamas terror attack. Kristen Welker said, “As The New York Times points out today, Hamas is actually sitting on a lot of that fuel, food and aid that you reference. Their headquarters is underneath that hospital there. So, ultimately, they are the ones who are depriving the civilians of Gaza of all of those necessary aid items that you referenced. If there were to be a cease-fire, what’s the guarantee...

The Costs and Casualties of Government’s Information Total War“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”This phrase, misattributed to Voltaire, has largely come to dominate—and confuse—our understanding of the importance of free speech in a free society. That misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the very lukewarm response elicited by the exposure of “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” unearthed through discovery in Missouri v. Biden now before the Supreme Court. The trouble with this framing of free speech is that it focuses...

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said on Sunday that the armed rebellion from the Wagner Group shows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s power is waning among his people. In an interview with Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday,” Cardin pointed to the rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group as evidence of Putin’s declining credibility, even among his longtime allies. “Putin has lost his credibility with his own people. His account of why he went into Ukraine is now being challenged, I think, with public opinion and Russia itself,” Cardin told Bream.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who is expected to become chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee next year, said he blames Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) for what he sees as lowered credibility of congressional probes. Schiff chairs the House Intelligence Committee and sits on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — and the California lawmaker also led the first impeachment effort against former President Trump.

Former Gov. Chris Christie created a firestorm on ABC News’ “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, with what he had to say about the Jan. 6 Committee. Christie pointed out that, to many Republicans, the Committee doesn’t have any credibility. That’s because they don’t have any real Republicans on the Committee to make any points against the Democratic narrative. The January 6 committee was “resigned to having a credibility problem because of the membership of the committee and the way that was done,” Christie opened by saying. “There are lots of Republicans across this country who just say, there’s...

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) does not have “credibility” when addressing his criticism of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson before her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Anchor George Stephanopoulos said, “You are the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings are set to begin. In the face of those hearing, we are seeing attacks. Josh Hawley set out a series of tweets suggesting Judge Jackson is soft on child porn. It has been debunked by several independent fact-checkers. What does that tell you about the confirmation fight ahead?...

2023 Synod Faces a Credibility and Practicality GapCOMMENTARY: The planetary process leading up to the 2023 synod has to confront two major challenges before it begins. Six weeks before the Catholic Church-wide consultations for the 2023 synod on synodality are set to begin, the Vatican released a vademecum, or “handbook,” that will guide a process that is supposed to occupy every single diocese in the world from October 2021 to April 2022.The most massive set of meetings ever conducted in the history of the Catholic Church was announced only four months ago, between the third and fourth waves of...

The establishment media, the president of the United States, left-wing politicians, Big Tech, establishment Republicans and even rising GOP star Ron DeSantis are telling Americans this is a "pandemic of the unvaccinated." Governments and organizations around the globe are now instituting vaccine mandates. In Israel, hospitals are being filled with a surge of new COVID-19 cases. But at a major hospital in Jerusalem, up to 90% of the hospitalizations and 95% of patients who are listed as "severe" were fully vaccinated. The Associated Press argues in a fact check that such information is being presented without context, noting the COVID-19...

Earlier this week, Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins appeared on CNN. There he dispenses some of the weirdest advice of the COVID era. He tells parents to wear masks at home around their own children if those children are unvaccinated, but the parents are.COVID vaccines aren’t even yet approved for kids below 12. So that’s an issue. Another is the fact that COVID still is very unlikely to spread to or from kids. They’re not vectors for this virus. Still, Dr. Collins clearly says to wear masks at home around your kids, even admitting that...

As a graduate of Oral Roberts University, I was blessed to spend a lot of time with Oral Roberts himself. Roberts repeatedly told me, “Go into every man’s world and meet them at the point of their need.” He was referring to Christians evangelizing throughout the world. We Christians cannot wait for people seeking God to stumble into our churches. Rather, Christians must go to them and invite them to join our movement. In a similar manner, conservatives must go! They must go to black entrepreneurs. They must go to black parents. They must go to black preachers. No more...

Sen. Ted Cruz ripped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wednesday, saying the agency had “destroyed their credibility” with their “absurd” recommendation that vaccinated people wear masks indoors in areas of “substantial” or “high” coronavirus transmission. “That’s not science. That’s politics. It’s pure politics,” the Texas Republican told Fox News’ “Hannity”. “You know what? Yesterday, vaccines worked. Today, they still work, but as a political matter, the Democrats decided they want to control your lives, they want everyone to wear a mask, and my view is real simple: We shouldn’t have federal government mandates on COVID.

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” Senate Majority Whip and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) said there should be an investigation of the sexual harassment charges against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and “credibility given to the charges.”

Mediaite has learned that Fox News was first approached by Rudy Giuliani to report on a tranche of files alleged to have come from Hunter Biden’s unclaimed laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, but that the news division chose not to run the story unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.

Ordinary Americans are growing wary of the so-called experts. This phenomenon extends well beyond the biased purveyors of fake news. Most of us gave up on the liberal media long ago. According to Gallop, we are now an overwhelming majority.  Today we include a growing group of experts and insiders, otherwise known as the elites. We’ve been mislead. We’ve been talked down to and dismissively treated like children who can’t handle the truth. Opinions are presented as facts. Decisions and pronouncements that were supposedly data driven regularly ignore data at odds with the decision makers’ opinions. The infamous hockey stick...

The problem with the Democrats’ impeachment gambit—aside from the fact that it appears to rest largely on a complaint riddled with inaccuracies, falsehoods, and hearsay—is that the American people don’t trust Congress and will likely have little confidence in any impeachment process undertaken by Democratic congressional leaders.And no wonder. Ever since President Trump won the presidency in 2016, Democrats have been grasping for some pretext to invalidate the results of that election.First, it was the outlandish claim that if Trump didn’t liquidate his global business interests upon taking office, he would be in violation of the emoluments clause. Then...

After years of smearing good people with false charges of bigotry, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has finally been held to account. A former Islamic radical named Maajid Nawaz sued the center for including him in its bogus “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists,” and this week the SPLC agreed to pay him a $3.375 million settlement and issued a public apology. The SPLC is a once-storied organization that did important work filing civil rights lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. But it has become a caricature of itself, labeling virtually anyone who does not fall in...

MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" has been hit with a serious one-two punch. One day after finishing May with its worst ratings since Donald Trump took office, the lefty pundit's eponymous program faced a Vanity Fair bombshell report that the New York Times didn’t want its reporters appearing on Maddow's show, not because her ratings were down, but because she was too far left, even for them. The New York Times had reportedly blocked its reporters from appearing on “Maddow” because the program is too partisan, with one insider from the Grey Lady's newsroom agreeing, telling Fox News “it rubs...

The Pope’s Laxity Catches Up With Him He dings the American bishops for a lack of credibility as his own takes another hit in the wake of a new Vatican scandal.Pope Francis lectured the American bishops this week on their “crisis of credibility” even as his own reputation took another hit in the wake of revelations about one of his protégés. It turns out that another McCarrick-like predator has been nesting at the Vatican under the patronage of this famously permissive pope. “Pope Francis’ Argentinean Protégé Accused of Sex Abuse,” reported the Daily Beast.The accused bishop is Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta, a...

Across the dimensions of her memory, her relationships, and her morality, all indications are that Christine Blasey Ford is either lying or deluded. Memory Her memory array is not plausible, given the events in her allegation. Have you ever been in a situation of natural disaster, crime, or accident wherein you were momentarily in fear of losing your life? Do you remember the location you were in? At such moments, the sensory portals open wide, creating an array of indelible memories, especially regarding the location. In the case of an attack, the avalanche of sensory input involved in the will...