Free Republic

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...

Social Security's retirement fund is set to run short in just seven years — which could end up slashing benefits for millions of Americans by thousands of dollars a year. According to latest projections, retirees could face automatic 24 percent benefit cuts as early as the end of 2032. Social Security relies on its trust fund to provide monthly benefit checks to around 70 million Americans. Once the reserves are exhausted, federal law requires that benefits be cut to match incoming revenues

The full Hunter Biden interview: HUNTER BIDEN INTERVIEW WITH CHANNEL 5 ANDREW CALLAGHAN (3 hrs, 16 mins)

Britain's largest misinformation monitor and "fact-checker" went into bankruptcy, according to a report in the Times of London last week. In the U.S., left-wing groups like NewsGuard and GDI have come under fierce criticism as de facto tools for censorship. Logically, founded in 2016 by Cambridge engineering graduate Lyric Jain, aimed to combat "harmful and manipulative content" following high-profile events like the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election. A pivotal misstep was its decision to work with India's Karnataka state government's fact-checking unit, a move criticized by the Editors Guild of India and others for potentially enabling state censorship...

VIDEOHave you ever heard of concentration camps that provide air conditioning and serve up three square meals per day while NOT forcing the inmates to work? No? Then you will laugh at the Drama Queen hysteria of these liberals having meltdowns over Alligator Alcatraz while screaming DISINFORMATION such as that the back doors of cargo planes full of illegals are being opened over the ocean where they are unloaded. Or that that the Alligator Alcatraz incinerators are for disposing inmates, not trash. The source for this? Strictly feelings NOT facts. Will the media correct all the DISINFORMATION being spewed about...

Robert Salas was one of the men on duty in 1967 that experienced a nuclear silo being shutdown. He was name dropped in the article so he's taken the time to author a rebuttal. He gives his perspective and I tend to think that we should probably read it as it's a good data point to add to the fray. X Post by Robert Salas linking to Google Doc.

The Pentagon deliberately spread UFO conspiracy theories surrounding Area 51 in an attempt to conceal secret weapons programs, according to a newly released report. A report released by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) found that an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51 in the 1980s – providing the owner fabricated material depicting flying saucers around the highly classified military base, according to the Wall Street Journal’s review of the report released in 2024. The Pentagon reportedly intentionally ran a disinformation campaign on American citizens in an attempt to hide the development of the F-117 Nighthawk, the...

A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself. The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology. But the...

This week, we saw a spate of news stories blaming Democrats’ troubles on their vocabulary. They’re just using too many darn multisyllabic, academic-sounding words and turning off numbskull voters, is the basic message. Seriously? The Democrats’ problem isn’t linguistic, it’s ideological. But no one in the party wants to admit that. A Washington Post story this week – “Democratic troubles revive debate over left-wing buzzwords” – begins by saying: Maybe it’s using the word ‘oligarchs’ instead of rich people. Or referring to ‘people experiencing food insecurity’ rather than Americans going hungry. Or ‘equity’ in place of ‘equality,’ or ‘justice-involved populations’...

SummaryCompanies face uncertainty, paralyzing decision-making and affecting profit forecasts Economists predict final costs will be much higher than disclosed Tariffs impact automakers, airlines, and consumer goods importers significantly SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK/BENGALURU, May 29 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's trade war has cost companies more than $34 billion in lost sales and higher costs, according to a Reuters analysis of corporate disclosures, a toll that is expected to rise as ongoing uncertainty over tariffs paralyzes decision making at some of the world's largest companies. Across the United States, Asia and Europe, companies including Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab, Ford (F.N), opens...

There is a new trend of voters who chose President Donald Trump on the ballot speaking out against their vote and voicing their regrets now that they’ve had a few months to experience his presidency. These TikTok videos vary from satires to teary-eyed testimonials to cringy confessions that honestly don’t even seem real. However, it is astounding the amount of people — from a variety of backgrounds — who are denouncing the very man they just knew would help them prosper. The ignorance that blinded people from his racist, fascist, money-hungry ideals is beginning to lift slowly but surely.

Disinformation is on the rise, again. Russia has revitalized its long history of waging disinformation campaigns. While proving cause-and-effect is difficult, we suspect that Russia’s increased efforts likely are linked to the White House’s dismantling of counter-disinformation efforts. Executive Order 14149: "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship". On his first day in office, President Trump signed Executive Order 14149, prohibiting federal agencies from engaging in activities related to combating misinformation and disinformation. Dismantling counter-disinformation organizations. FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force: Disbanded in February 2025, this unit previously investigated foreign attempts to influence U.S. elections. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the Global Engagement Center as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the “censorship-industrial complex.”“Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, titled, “Rubio: To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.”Rubio wrote that, in 2016, the Obama administration changed the GEC’s focus on combatting international terrorism cover...

In a post on January 28 — a week into President Trump’s second term — I urged that it is time to “purge the climate scam from the federal websites.” Trump 1.0 did a remarkably poor job of taking control of communications on the climate issue on websites like those of EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Transportation. Are they doing any better this time? They have definitely taken some significant steps to address this issue here in the early weeks of the new administration. For example, on April 15 the Guardian ran a piece with the...