Free Republic

MSNBC host Al Sharpton said Friday on “Deadline” that the Republicans were going to use “straight-out racially charged whistles” during the midterm elections. Guest-host Alicia Menendez said, “Let’s just talk about what the Jackson hearings tells us about the upcoming midterm battles, issues, and stereotypes they repeatedly tried to tap into here. Portraying Democrats, portraying Judge Jackson as being soft on crime, bringing up abortion and racist baby books, trying to victimize themselves by invoking previous Supreme Court hearings. Any question what the midterm fight is going to look like after what we watched this week?”

Nobody escapes the racial prism through which Joy Reid sees virtually everything. Not even a gay, liberal Democrat like Pete Buttigieg. With Buttigieg on her show today, Reid displayed a tweet in which he had said America needs a president shaped by "heartland" values, not by the politics of Washington. Reid told him that she had received a lot of "not-positive" texts about the tweet, and that it sounds to many people "like a dog whistle for white voters."Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Reacting to Donald Trump’s fury over a New York Times report that said the FBI investigated whether the president was working for Russia after he fired James Comey, Comey himself tweeted a quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made,” the former FBI director wrote on Saturday, adding an attribution: “FDR.” It soon became clear the tweet almost exactly matched one by Trump, issued on 21 November 2012, when the then reality TV star was digesting the re-election of Barack Obama....{snip} But it seems Comey might have been making a sharper...

Apologies to all my readers: Last week I carelessly wrote about President Trump's Warsaw speech as if the words therein corresponded to the definitions ascribed to them by Oxford, Webster's or any other English dictionary. My mistake. Apparently the plain meaning of the words is entirely irrelevant. Because the words aren't words per se, they're "dog whistles": Trump's white-nationalist dog whistles in Warsaw As James Taranto noted during a previous dog-whistling frenzy: "The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it's intended for somebody else," he wrote. "The whole...

Today, the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment. Section 230 provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Jihad Watch. As alleged in the lawsuit, Geller and Spencer, along with the organizations they run, are often...

It never fails to amuse me when people who make their living peddling racial indignation work hard to associate negative characteristics with black people, blissfully unaware of how racist they are. The latest example comes from a black-oriented newspaper in Atlanta, called The Atlanta Blackstar (hat tip: Top Right News), which claims they are just alternative forms of the N-word. No kidding! The piece is titled, “The N-Word, Updated: 6 Code Words or Terms That Often Mean the Same Thing” A favorite tactic is to claim that “code words” or else “dog whistles” are being used when negative words are...

Fresh off his shout-fest with Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews thought it would be a good idea to go toe-to-toe with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on the same topic, that is, the GOP’s insidious use of racial “dog whistles.” Oh, and before we go any further, it should be noted that the two actually met earlier on Monday and discussed the exact same topic. However, unlike that meeting (which was somewhat amicable), this one turned heated after Matthews flat-out accused Gingrich of engaging in “race baiting.” “What’s a ‘food stamp president’?” Matthews asked. He...

"Conservative filmmaker Stephen Bannon thinks his film can win hearts and minds — and maybe even, one day, votes — for the former Alaska governor" MINNEAPOLIS — He says his publicists didn’t think he should meet with me. “Why?” I ask. “They said you wrote something bad about Palin or something.” I tell him about the list I compiled of all her media feuds, with people like Dave Letterman and some former McCain staffers. Currently there are 86 names. My interviewee, filmmaker Stephen Bannon, shrugs, dismissing it, then goes about asking me questions about myself. This is a charming trait...