Free Republic

U.S. hate crimes increased by 17 percent last year, federal officials said Tuesday, a surge driven by racial and anti-Semitic attacks and linked by some experts to the wider public emergence of white supremacists and other hate groups.

Under normal circumstances, Republicans would be poised to lose Tuesday’s midterm elections by a landslide. History says dozens of seats in the House of Representatives flip in the first midterm of a new presidential administration. But history is a guide, not a rule. And current the circumstances of the country are anything but normal. I’m not talking about President Donald Trump and his Twitter account, though that certainly is outside the usual. I’m talking about what it is the opposition party is offering and the idea that some people, perhaps enough to flip the House, might take it considering...

A little less than a year after the first QAnon post, which has since led hundreds of thousands of news junkies down a conspiracy rabbit hole, news correspondent Jack Posobiec from One America News Network spoke with one of the co-originators of the “Q” persona who runs a group of individuals posing as a high-level government intelligence officer. On an anonymous “free speech” platform called 8Chan, they leave thousands of riddles, “clues,” odd questions, and cryptic lines as bread crumbs for their followers to help them in their search for truth. Many major media outlets have overviewed the nest of...

Should deliberately false reports of sexual assault be subject to the same legal penalties as false reports of other felonies? Right now, accusers who lie about sexual abuse are criminally liable for filing a false report and perjury, as well as civil sanctions for defamation, but legal consequences rarely occur. The question was spotlighted by the accusations surrounding Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. It was clear during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: An accusation of sexual assault can devastate a man’s life, family and future. Those who reject the account of his main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, don’t suggest bringing legal proceedings...

... Until recently, the consequences of climate change were thought to be so far into the future that many average people, including those who live in coastal zones, declared they needn’t bother; they’d be long dead by the time catastrophe struck. No more. Climate change is here, costing billions of dollars every year to recover from destructive events. Without adapting to that new reality, the world will confront rising costs of disasters that put economic growth, health, and in some places, even survival at risk. To spur action, a coalition led by billionaire Bill Gates, former United Nations Secretary General...

An elaborate hoax based on forged documents escalates the phenomenon of “fake news” and reveals an audience on the left that seems willing to believe virtually any claim that could damage Trump. In the third week of January, an Israeli named Yoni Ariel flew from Tel Aviv to Rome carrying $9,000 in cash on a secret mission to bring down Donald Trump. There, he met with an Italian businessman. Seated at a table toward the rear of a café, away from the street where they might attract unwanted attention, Ariel recalled, he handed over the cash. In exchange he was...

ROME - For the second time, Pope Francis is sending a special envoy to the famed site of Medjugorje, in this case to care for a local parish that sees millions of pilgrims arriving each year because of what some believe are apparitions of Mary Our Lady Queen of Peace at the Bosnian-Herzegovinian location.The Vatican announced Thursday that Archbishop Henryk Hoser, now retired as the Archbishop of Warsaw in Poland, has been appointed Apostolic Visitor “for an undetermined time” to the Saint James parish of Medjugorje, which is run by the Franciscan friars.His missions, according to a statement released by...

The biggest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook … was fake news. Citing “a review of the page and associated accounts and websites,” CNN reported Monday that the page titled Black Lives Matter “was a scam with ties to a middle-aged white man in Australia.” The official Black Lives Matter page (https://www.facebook.com/BlackLivesMatter) has less than 330,000 “Likes” and “Follows.” According to CNN, the Australian page had more than twice that many. Facebook had suspended the Australian page by the time of CNN’s Monday report, but only because, CNN claimed, “it had suspended a user account that administrated the page.” The...

A man who told police he was stabbed with a screwdriver in a Palo Alto parking garage by is now accused of making up the story. Over the summer, 19-year-old Jesus Cabrera told police he was verbally harassed by three white men, authorities said. He said the men made disparaging remarks about his ethnicity, and police in turn investigated the incident as a hate crime. He was arrested Friday after police say he admitted to making up the story. Police say Cabrera now claims he was stabbed by a rival graffiti crew in East Palo Alto while he was tagging...

An alleged hate crime that sent Eastern Michigan University’s campus into racial unrest in has now been confirmed as a hoax by local authorities. As Campus Reform reported in September, students took to the streets to protest, and even blocked traffic at one point, in response to racist images found on campus, including “KKK” in red, white, and blue spray paint and “leave N*****s.” ... Now, M Live reports that officers have arrested 29-year-old Eddie Carlin, a black man who attended the institution for two years ...

A black man has been arrested in connection with a string of racist graffiti incidents at Eastern Michigan University that were protested by students on campus last fall. Eddie Curlin, 29, was arraigned Monday, Oct. 23, in Washtenaw County District Court on three counts of malicious destruction of property, four counts of identity theft and one count of using computers to commit a crime, reports MLive. The charges are related to three incidents of vandalism that appeared to be targeting the black community at EMU. In September 2016, EMU discovered “KKK” and “Leave N***ers” spray painted in red, white, and...

Despite Mandalay Bay shooter Stephen Paddock’s history of high-stakes gambling, he had no known gambling debts, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said Tuesday. And, contrary to published reports, Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley, told investigators in Los Angeles she had no concerns about his mental health. In an extensive interview Tuesday with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Lombardo clarified those details and provided new information about the Oct. 1 shooting that killed 58 concertgoers and left nearly 500 injured. The sheriff said investigators have made contact with Paddock’s entire “family tree,” including the shooter’s two ex-wives. Their conversations have shed new light...

Officials at Michigan State University investigated and released strongly worded statements earlier this week because a female student claimed to find a noose on the handle of a stairwell door in a residence hall.Turns out, the alleged “noose” was just a stray shoelace.The first report of the packaged leather shoelace someone decided was a noose occurred on Wednesday morning, reports the Lansing State Journal.Police — and, of course, the office of institutional equity — investigated the shoelace after a female student reported it as a noose. The president of Michigan State University, Lou Anna Simon, rapidly released a statement denouncing nooses...

The tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, could have been an occasion to stop and consider how the tolerance for politically correct violence and politically correct hatred is leading the nation toward civil war. Instead, the media and the political left have turned this incident into the biggest fake news story of the summer, transforming its real lessons into a morality play that justifies war against the political right, and against white people generally.

European countries and major corporations are pressuring President Donald Trump to remain in the Paris climate agreement despite his promises on the campaign trail to withdraw the United States from the Obama-era deal that never gained congressional approval.The Trump administration so far is sticking with being undecided—at least until Trump returns to the United States from his first foreign trip, where on Friday, he’s meeting with Group of Seven ally countries, which support the agreement.Back home, the pressure is growing from multinational corporations, even the energy sector, which have opposed stricter limitations on carbon.Exxon Mobil Corp., once run by Trump’s...

There’s a new shocking revelation to the man whom Schenectady Police claim faked his own hate crime. It turns out he may not even be Jewish as he claimed to be. “I looked and said, ‘what the hell is going on here?'” That was Andrew King during a NEWS10 ABC interview in February. He showed the messages of hate, swastikas spray-painted on the front of his Schenectady home. ... They say he tried to convert several times but was turned down by at least two congregations. They strongly cautioned me that Mr. King does not represent the Jewish community and...

The tale of a notorious YouTube hoaxster who claimed to be kicked off a Delta flight for speaking Arabic turned out to be the latest in a growing series of false accusations of bias made in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory. Serial prank artist Adam Saleh set the Internet aflame Wednesday when he posted the clip of himself being asked to leave the flight because he “spoke a different language” — but his story quickly fell apart. “You guys are racist. I cannot believe my eyes. I cannot believe it,” Saleh pleads in the video. “I spoke a...

Since the election victory of Donald Trump, numerous stories have surfaced about hate crimes allegedly tied to supporters of the businessman or to his rhetoric, some true and many not. Although the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that there have been hate crimes since the election, a number of the incidents have been disproven or shown to be hoaxes or ill-timed jokes. Here are some noteworthy ones. A Muslim teenager from Long Island by the name of Yasmin Seweid told authorities that she was harassed on the subway by men who yelled "Donald Trump!" while trying to remove her hijab....

What this country needs is a fake hate-crime hotline. That way, if you’re a mourning Hillary voter suddenly overcome with an urge to concoct a fake hate crime, you can avoid tying up 911 and wasting the cops’ time. Just dial 1-800-555-FAKE. Camera crews and reporters from all the alt-left fake-news outlets will soon arrive to record your tearful recounting of the incident … that never happened. So now we have the Wellesley College hate-crime hoax, to go along with the 20-year-old guy in Malden who, it turns out, was not attacked by people who do not exist yelling, “This...

A staff writer for left-wing website Mic.com uncritically accepted a prankster’s account of a fictitious racially-charged interaction with a Trump supporter, later spreading the false story on Twitter while dismissing those skeptical of the story’s veracity.The story begins with a tweet from Mic staff writer Sarah Harvard, requesting stories of Trump-inspired attacks on non-whites, Muslims or LGBTQ people. “If you’re a person of color, Muslim, and/or LGBTQ, and have been attacked by a Trump supporter. DM/email me,” she wrote, providing her email for people to contact her. Harvard promised a “Safe space” for any alleged victims.Screenshot/Twitter That tweet caught the...