Free Republic

At least 85 people, almost all of them young girls, have been killed in an air strike on a primary school in southern Iran, the Iranian judiciary said. The attack on Saturday morning hit Shajareh Tayyebeh schoolin the city of Minab, in Hormozgan province, as the United States and Israel began launching strikes on targets across Iran.The victims were between seven and 12 years old, according to Iran's Tasnim and Fars news agencies. A staff member at the Minab school, who asked not to be named, told Middle East Eye she remains in shock at the intensity of the attack....

Next month the most important political book of the year, or perhaps the decade, will be published. It is called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet. To summarize: shocked by the arrival of Donald Trump in 2016, American government officials, the media, and the technology giants created a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. The media was complicit and will never fully recover. Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many...

Jennifer Daskal, a Biden administration official who helped launch the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, has been appointed as an advisor to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) as of Feb. 1. Daskal will serve as amicus curiae, meaning “friend of the court,” and will advise judges on “legal issues related to foreign surveillance warrants in national security cases,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. Daskal is best known for her involvement in the Biden-era Disinformation Governance Board, for which she drafted the character. Daskal reportedly helped select Nina Jankowicz to serve as the board’s director. Jankowicz, you’ll recall, is the...

Democrats Biden Official Who Created ‘Disinformation’ Board Appointed as FISA Court Adviser, Sparking Concern From Republican Senators Jennifer Daskal helped select the board's controversial director, Nina Jankowicz, and will now advise judges on foreign surveillance legal issues Jennifer Daskal (flickr.com/photos/newamerica/39221031875) Chuck Ross February 17, 2026 A Biden administration official who launched the Disinformation Governance Board and served as co-chair of the so-called Ministry of Truth has been appointed to advise the powerful Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, prompting concerns from some Republican lawmakers. The presiding judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review appointed Jennifer...

When chief of staff Andrew Card knelt down and told George Bush “America is under attack” 15 years ago Sunday, the words he whispered in the president’s ear in a Florida classroom launched what was supposed to be a planned, orderly response to a national emergency. But what followed instead was chaos, a breakdown in communication and protocol that risked international conflict and could have made Sept. 11, 2001, a still bigger tragedy. There were live nukes on the tarmac at U.S. airbases, a failed communications system, and a security protocol for the president and his potential successors — the...

So far, almost nobody in the west fully comprehends the Oreshnik weapon system just demonstrated by Russia. Hat tip to Ted Postol, Scott Ritter and Brian Berletic, the only 3 people I've found so far who fully understand this. I've done the math on the kinetic energy of the submunitions (using estimates for mass), and I've studied up on what's publicly known about these weapons so far. My conclusion? NATO is done. The west has no idea what just hit them. Russia's Oreshnik weapon system is checkmate for NATO and the USA. All U.S. aircraft carriers can be destroyed in...

(NaturalNews) As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green...

Bill Cosby’s sprawling New York townhouse was sold less than a month after being listed for $29 million, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky identified as the buyer through an offshore company – Film Heritage Inc. While the final sale price remains undisclosed, the deal marks the end of a turbulent financial chapter for the disgraced entertainer and his wife, Camille, according to the New York Post. The purchase coincides with a $100 million corruption scandal engulfing Zelensky’s administration, with several of his closest allies accused of involvement in a massive kickback scheme. Earlier this year, the Cosbys were accused in...

UK Parliament/PA Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the BBC must fight to restore trust after criticism that a Panorama documentary misled viewers by editing a speech by Donald Trump. She said a review of the broadcaster's charter would ensure a "genuinely accountable" BBC, defending it as a "national institution". BBC director general Tim Davie earlier told staff "we've got to fight for our journalism" after the US president's threat to sue the corporation for $1bn (£760m). A leaked internal BBC memo said the Panorama film misled viewers by splicing together parts of Trump's speech on 6 January 2021 and...

ransomnote: Great little 2 minute 20 second video trailer on Twitter.The brilliant @0rf created a mini-documentary - entitled "The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation" - on how much @NicolleDWallace reflexively spreads lies. A million people have watched: https://rumble.com/v15xkey-nicolle-wallace-the-typhoid-mary-of-disinformation.htmlHere's the trailer. *This* is how disinformation spreads, and by whom:· Feb 12, 2023ransomnote: Full video on Rumble (26 minutes):Nicolle Wallace: "The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation"

...The new press corps includes rightwing outlets that have promoted conspiracy theories..... ...the new reporters, who agreed to the department’s new policies, were from outlets such as Lindell TV, started by Trump ally Mike Lindell; the Gateway Pundit; the Post Millennial; Human Events; and the National Pulse... ...The list also includes Turning Point USA’s media brand Frontlines, influencer Tim Pool’s Timcast and a Substack-based newsletter called Washington Reporter, the Post reported...

A roving reporter who covered Italy’s top politicians explains to The Grayzone how his country was reduced to a joint US-Israeli “aircraft carrier,” and raises troubling questions about an Israeli role in the killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.For years, Israel’s Mossad monitored and secretly influenced a violent communist faction that carried out the March 16, 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, veteran investigative journalist Eric Salerno has documented.Having worked closely alongside multiple Italian heads of state during his 30-year career as a correspondent, Salerno published an expose of their secret relationship with Israeli intelligence in...

A federal appeals panel just tossed Nina Jankowicz’s suit against Fox, ruling the broadcasts were opinion or substantially true — a major setback for the former Disinformation Governance Board head.

A major liberal dark money group is reportedly paying Democratic social media influencers thousands of dollars a month to promote progressive messaging online, WIRED reported Wednesday. Influencers who participated in the program could receive up to $8,000 per month, according toWIRED. The program, run by Chorus, a nonprofit arm of the influencer marketing platform Good Influence, is funded by theSixteen Thirty Fund, a major Democrat-aligned dark money group. In June, dozens of Democratic influencers with a combined following of at least 13 million were contacted about the Chorus Creator Incubator Program, which was pitched as a way to “expand their...

Summary ICE officers face burnout, frustration amid Trump's aggressive enforcement Public outrage grows over ICE's arrest tactics ICE launches recruitment drive to hire 10,000 officers WASHINGTON, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Under President Donald Trump, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has become the driving force of his sweeping crackdown on migrants, bolstered by record funding and new latitude to conduct raids, but staff are contending with long hours and growing public outrage over the arrests. Those internal pressures are taking a toll. Two current and nine former ICE officials told Reuters the agency is grappling with burnout and frustration among...

Democrats are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars to spin narratives on social media as part of a $110.5 million fundraising effort, according to images of slides from a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) donor event obtained by Breitbart News. Under a heading “Urgent Off-Year Funding Needs” on one slide, it states the DCCC looks to raise $10 million for social media and content creation, $20 million for “Accountability work,” $15 million for “Voter Registration,” $5 million for “Recruitment” and “Primary Engagement,” and $2 million for “Research” and a “Rapid Response Infrastructure.” One goal is to enlist at...

The Steele Dossier saga isn’t over—not even close. If anything, its rot is more obvious than ever, with each new revelation pointing directly to the highest levels of the Obama administration and even reaching into the early days of the Trump White House. What we now know is already damning: the phony Steele Dossier wasn’t just opposition research—it was weaponized disinformation, deliberately shoved into the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment under orders from Barack Obama himself. Senior analysts warned it was unverified and unreliable, but those concerns were bulldozed in the name of politics. Obama ordered the revised ICA not because...

Preface. This is my book review of Chris Mooney’s 2012 “The Republican Brain. The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality”. This has grown from a review of this book (far below) to more recent science and writing on the conservative mind. People who want certainty and do not like change or changing their mind have been with us since humans evolved. That is discussed in another post: Garcia, H. 2019. Sex, Power, and Partisanship. How evolutionary science makes sense of our political divide. Lately with all the division and even talk of civil war, there have been many broadcasts...

Media Matters, a left-wing media watchdog, is reportedly facing an existential crisis as it drowns in government investigations, legal expenses from a defamation case and loss of donors, according to The New York Times. Media Matters’s future looks so dire since layoffs were reported in May that some involved with the organization have contemplated declaring bankruptcy or shutting down entirely in recent months, the NYT reported Friday, citing internal documents and 11 sources familiar with the situation. The Democrat-aligned group purports to monitor and combat “conservative misinformation in the U.S. media” and is under investigation by the Trump administration’s Federal...

A motley crew of media and others, from Politifact to the CATO Institute, have claimed that illegal aliens have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans do. In a recent interview, prodigal presidential son Hunter Biden went even further. He claimed that white males are 45 times as likely to commit violent crimes as immigrants are. Why, even Grok artificial intelligence, in a contentious Monday thread, claimed that white men are bigger perps than illegals. The whole idea here, obviously, is to sanitize illegal migration. “These ‘undocumented’ enrich the country,” is the implied argument. “They’re safer to have around than...