Free Republic

RUSH: I don’t know. Sometimes I just have to laugh. Like Larry King. Larry King, who has never gotten over what I did to him, and I didn’t do anything to him other than wipe him out. He’s never gotten over it. Now Larry King is working at someplace called Russia Today, and he claims I’m never gonna get a Pulitzer while he’s working at Russia Today, because I start talking about things like the coronavirus and I don’t know what I’m talking about and inside the radio business nobody respects me and I’ve never gonna get a Pulitzer. Larry,...

Many suffered collateral damage in the Deep State’s scheme to take down Donald Trump, but few will find justice. On Thursday, federal Judge Leonie Brinkema tossed Svetlana Lokhova’s defamation lawsuit against Stefan Halper and a slew of legacy media outlets. Brinkema’s 41-page opinion detailing why the Russian-born U.K. citizen had no recourse for the damage inflicted on her by the SpyGate plotters and their partners in the press exposed the sad reality of this wide-ranging scandal: many suffered collateral damage in the Deep State’s scheme to take down Trump, but few will find justice.Lokhova, an historian and former Ph.D. student...

The U.S. government is taking wise measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. But, as the saying goes, we should pray like it all depends on God and prepare like it all depends on us. When I was in school studying infectious disease epidemiology, none of the cool kids worked on flu. We all wanted to chase Ebola, HIV/AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, and other exotic killer bugs.Everyday, ho-hum killers like influenza, pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses were just too mundane for globetrotting adventurers like us. Who wants to spend her life hand-sanitizing and finger-wagging about vaccines when you could...

We have long heard the phrase “The dumbing down of America” to describe the effort of the Democratic Party to indoctrinate, under-educate, immigrate and acclimate, to influence the coming elections to favor the Democrat candidates. Usually, when we think about this process, we tend to imagine it to be the poorly educated, illegal aliens, the huddled masses who dwell generationally at the bottom of the prosperity chain, looking for someone to blame their plight on. And such a movement does exist in those echelons as the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party strives to tilt the playing field by hook,...

Employees at Bloomberg LP allege that Mike Bloomberg allowed a toxic work culture where he called a woman 'dog face', allowed an editor to continual give female staffers massages and is now championing the woman he allegedly called 'fat' in his presidential candidate campaign. Those who spoke out against the alleged workplace abuse were repeatedly ignored. Bloomberg's presidential dreams appeared to hit a very abrupt snag during the Nevada Democratic Debate when Sen. Elizabeth Warren accused him of allowing discrimination and sexual behavior at his 1981 company. He vehemently denied it, saying: 'I have no tolerance for the kind of...

Last Monday, Bernie Sanders came under tepid fire from the mainstream media for a comment he made to Anderson Cooper in a 60-Minutes interview on February 24. He defended his 1985 statement supporting both Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega. The context was that while Castro had done some bad things to Cuban citizens, he should be admired for promoting reading literacy and improving health care for the country’s children. While he criticized Cuba’s authoritarian regime, he likened it to the U.S. under Trump.  Sanders argued that when Castro first came to power, he established reading literacy among the children, gave...

It’s the question I’ve heard now for many years, specifically from evangelical Christians. “Since the world is only getting worse, why bother fighting the culture wars? What’s the use? What’s the point? Isn’t it better for us simply to share our faith and prepare for the return of Jesus?” To be sure, if I knew for a fact that Jesus was coming back in a week, I would not spend that week writing articles about transgender activism. Or trying to change hearts about abortion. In fact, I would not spend that week teaching a class in our ministry school. Or...

Every conservative knows that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, in addition to being a sanctimonious stealth-socialist and the bane of Mike Bloomberg's existence, is a nominal Native American. That's a polite way of saying that, for years, she falsely claimed not only to have Native American ancestry, but to be an “American Indian.” She made those phony claims, moreover, at times and in circumstances when they could potentially bring her personal advantage: when she was looking for work as a high-priced corporate legal consultant, for example, or when she was looking to advance her career as an Ivy League professor. Needless...

Who better to have as president during the coronavirus epidemic but a renowned germaphobe, the “build-the-wall” guy who refuses to kowtow to China? It’s a unique set of characteristics showing that President Trump understood early the need for decisive measures such as travel restrictions on China, which he imposed in January. Yet, for that sensible decision — in defiance of the World Health Organization — he was criticized by Democrats such as Joe Biden as xenophobic, and by China as racist. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering,” said...

Traffickers seek out victims from every background, pursuing any physical body, man, woman, teen, or child, that produces a profit. There are hundreds of thousands of trafficking victims in the United States alone, with millions of people victimized by traffickers globally. "Traffickers are utilizing technology to target victims. Because we have virtual identities and so much of our lives are public on social media, traffickers take advantage of that access to vulnerable people. Traffickers spend much of their time and resources searching for targets and building relationships to groom young people through private messages and apps," author and trafficking survivor...

While many in the media are becoming more aware of the growing threat of human trafficking, they rarely cover the connection between sexual slavery and abortion. But a new documentary is doing just that.Blind Eyes Opened: The Truth about Sex Trafficking in America opened with a limited release in theaters on January 23, and is now showing at local locations nationwide. The Christian documentary “dives deep into the sex trafficking industry in the U.S.” and features politicians, law enforcement, and experts in an effort to inform the American public.Corporal Alan Wilkett of Pasco County Sheriff's Office in Florida begins the...

As we steamroll towards November, there’s a palpable feeling among conservatives that literally everything is at stake. I know, I know, each election is “the most importantest election ever,” they tell us every four years. It’s almost become a running joke. But this time, I’d have a difficult time making the argument that that isn’t true.  In today’s America, if you hold the keys to the federal government, you control more than an executive branch dweller a hundred years ago could even imagine, and the power only seems to have increased exponentially. In a sense we’ve become more like the...

The greatest thing I’ve ever found about the Army or the military in general is that we are all the same. Black, white, brown or striped. We are all the same. We were all people willing to give so much more than ourselves for a country we believe in. The greatest disbelief I have is how, our single nation, treats our Veterans. No one I know signed up for healthcare, yet it was a guarantee. Yesterday I sat in the VA Hospital for five and a half hours. I sat next to a Marine missing his leg. I saw an...

Harvard, the crème de la crème of Ivy League education, has been proudly engaging in racial discrimination — in 2020.  Harvard has a sordid history of employing and supporting racists and engaging in antisemitic limitations on the admission of Jews. But this article isn't about the past; it is about present-day discrimination of a different group of Harvard-hated students: Asians. Asians have had their share of discrimination in American history, recall the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese internment camps as examples. But the Asian U.S. community has proven themselves to be resilient and forward-looking, and they have effectively jumped over...

You would have thought that the vibe at CPAC this year would involve stressing about our November election prospects, but even as the market dipped over the coronavirus scare the general consensus was that whether we face Vermont Stalin or that miserable monied midget, we got this. The common image of conservatives is one of dour pessimism, but that is less due to some inherent doom-mongering on the right than to the decades of failure by Conservative Inc. Under the wise, steady guidance of our establishment betters, all we did was lose, but Donald Trump gave the cons a...

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman reportedly visited a construction site in a foreign country. To his surprise, the canal builders used no heavy machinery and instead armed thousands of men with shovels. He questioned the bureaucrat about this odd choice and the bureaucrat responded that it was a jobs program. “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal,” Friedman said. “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” Friedman’s absurd proposal illustrates the absurdity of make-work bias—the belief that conserving labor makes us poorer. Make-work bias was particularly popular during the Industrial...

Minutes before President Trump was preparing Wednesday to reassure a skittish nation about the coronavirus threat, he received a piece of crucial information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified in California the first U.S. case of the illness not tied to foreign travel, a sign that the virus’s spread in the United States was likely to explode. But when Trump took to the lectern for a news conference intended to bring transparency to the spiraling global crisis, he made no explicit mention of the California case and its implications — and falsely suggested the virus might soon...

In 1929 in an edict that seemed both impossibly savage and self-destructive, Stalin announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” The people he called kulaks were the relatively wealthy peasants in the countryside. For much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, they were the most important single economic sector of the Russian empire. They were also the cultural center. They preserved Russian traditions and honored religious faith. They grew more than enough food to feed the nation. The excess they produced created more wealth in international trade and hard currency for Russia than any...

Just before Christmas last year, Jill Biden figuratively stepped over the huddled masses of homeless on the streets of America, and headed across the border for a high-profile campaign photo-op. Her destination was a camp for migrants who had entered the US illegally and were awaiting adjudication of their cases in Mexico. Twelve thousand children are homeless here in California, and our homeless population has risen to 151,000. Last year, California was single-handedly responsible for the national increase in homelessness. Homeless camp on a street in front of a school in Los Angeles (YouTube screen grab) Adjusted for cost of...

It doesn’t take long to realize that Howard Ratner, the jeweler in Uncut Gems, a movie written by Benjamin and Joshua Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, is one flawed Jew. Howard (rivetingly played by Adam Sandler) is an accepted figure in New York’s Diamond District, where many Jews make their living. Judging by his offices, his posh Long Island home and his Midtown getaway apartment, Howard makes a good living. He is blessed with a beautiful wife and with healthy children but prefers the company of a young mistress (Julia Fox, in a finely nuanced performance) who works for him. It...