Free Republic

Right-wing influencers are dominating the political discussion on Facebook, raising questions about whether it will translate into electoral success in November. Listen, liberals. If you don’t think Donald Trump can get re-elected in November, you need to spend more time on Facebook. Since the 2016 election, I’ve been obsessively tracking how partisan political content is performing on Facebook, the world’s largest and arguably most influential media platform. Every morning, one of the first browser tabs I open is CrowdTangle — a handy Facebook-owned data tool that offers a bird’s-eye view of what’s popular on the platform. I check which politicians...

<p>The effort began only days after Paul Manafort resigned as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in August 2016.</p> <p>Manafort faced scrutiny for accepting millions in off-book payments from pro-Russian Ukrainian officials — an uncomfortable situation for the longtime lobbyist, since accusations were then emerging that Russia was interfering in the White House race to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.</p>

With an increased awareness of how some U.S. politicians appear to be reacting to the COVID-19 challenges; and with a new American perspective toward the way media outlets, some businesses and many politicians appear to be influenced by China; it’s worth revisiting a recent speech by Secretary of State Pompeo that might have been overlooked. Pompeo’s remarks were made to the National Governors Association (NGA) Feb 8, 2020; and there’s an interesting segment where Pompeo reveals his awareness of a list of U.S. governors compiled by China’s communist party; and their alignment with China’s interests. A transcript of the key...

"I helped Hillary" About a year ago, in March 2019, MP Boryslav Rosenblatt, a defendant in the "amber case," released a recording in which a man with the voice of the director of NABU, Artem Sytnyk, tells how he helped US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Rosenblatt entrusted his exposure to Facebook. "I have irrefutable evidence that the director of the Anti-Corruption Bureau worked for one of the presidential candidates in the United States of America, disclosing the investigation materials and transmitting them to a foreign state in order to influence the election process in support of...

Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer said on Wednesday that the Clinton Foundation, founded by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is losing revenue due to a lack of donations. “All that money has now dried up, literally,” Schweizer told “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “The Clinton Foundation has had a hard time raising money because they don’t have the influence to sell. They don’t have power access to sell and that, I think, is the primary evidence for what the Clinton enterprise was all about."

Two Republican senators are calling on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to release documents related to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s son and his work for a Ukrainian energy company, saying Hunter Biden’s role may have been used to influence the Obama State Department. Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, sent a letter to Mr. Pompeo Wednesday requesting all State Department records related to Hunter Biden and Burisma Holdings, the company at issue in the corruption probe. They also want to know if the inspector general or another official at the State Department is...

Serious commentary, or just a bad case of ratings envy rearing its ugly head? On CNN's New Day this morning, former Bill Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart, now a CNN political commentator, took some ugly shots at two of the Fox & Friends crew. Reacting to President Trump's decision not to agree to a government funding bill that would not have included money for the border wall, Lockhart said that Trump was going to sign the bill, but: "when the great powerhouses like Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy weighed in, and then Ann Coulter weighed in, Trump folded, and folded quickly....

They say you aren’t supposed to talk politics and religion, but who are “they,” and why on earth not? After all, those are the most interesting, and consequential, things. If you practice a religion, it’s probably a component of that religion to spread its “good news” to other people. There’s nothing wrong with that, even though Christians, in particular, are told to essentially “sit down and shut up” regarding the Bible’s take on things. But despite this, many Christians continue to spread the Gospel to their communities and the rest of the world, and that’s a good thing.But what about politics? Oh,...

Exactly how many votes is Russia alleged to have cast in the 2016 elections? I believe that the number is zero. Exactly how many votes have citizens of Mexico and Central America cast in the 2016 elections? We don't know the exact number, but we know that it is much more than zero.

Scientific studies used by the Obama administration to help justify tough environmental regulations are coming under intensifying scrutiny, with critics questioning their merit as the Trump EPA reverses or delays some of those rules. In one case, agencies determined the research used to prop up a ban on a particular pesticide was questionable. On another front, the Environmental Protection Agency never complied with a congressional subpoena for the data used to justify most Obama administration air quality rules. “EPA regulations are based on secret data developed in the 1990s,” Steve Milloy, who served on President Trump’s EPA transition team, told...

Donald Trump this morning tweeted another love letter to Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox and Friends, faux-asking “Was @foxandfriends just named the most influential show in news?” On Wednesday, web site Mediaite had named the FNC morning show the Most Influential In News Media for 2017, topping a list that also included, in reverse order, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Matt Drudge, FNC star Sean Hannity, and CNN chief Jeff Zucker. Mistaking Mediaite’s “most influential” for “best,” Trump crowed that the Trump News Network morning show hosts “deserve it” and that “the many Fake News Hate Shows should study your formula...

Three senators are putting pressure on internet giants like Facebook and Google to be more transparent about who is buying political ads on their sites in the wake of revelations that Russian-linked operatives placed ads on social media networks to sow division in the runup to the 2016 election. On Thursday, Republican Sen. John McCain announced he is joining Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner to co-sponsor the Honest Ads Act, which would require political ads sold on the internet to follow the same rules as ones sold on television, radio, and satellite networks, all of which have to...

The bipartisan Washington, DC “consensus” has so many blind spots, you’d think its exponents lived in a black box. Recently, it has become clear that one of the biggest of those blind spots is the federal government’s treatment of the pharmaceutical industry.This can be most clearly seen in the troubling continuity between the favored policy of pharma-friendly elements within the Trump administration, and the Obama administration’s own weakness on a critical policy in the battle over drug prices: namely, the 340B drug pricing program.As granular followers of pharmaceutical policy will already know, 340B is a program passed during the first...

Yes, the MSM has admitted they got 2016 exactly wrong and that they are out-of-touch with the average American. What truly terrifies the media about 2016, though, is something that has remained largely unspoken. It is what Trump’s victory said so clearly about the MSM’s inability to influence public opinion and, by extension, the outcome of elections. What has also remained unspoken is the media’s desperate and dangerous reaction to this waning influence. As a 25 year media-watcher, I have never seen anything close to the propaganda campaign the national media launched to defeat Donald Trump last year. It was...

After Donald Trump was swept into the White House on the shoulders of his far-right base, moderate Republicans and centrist Democrats clung to a hope first kindled after Election Day that his daughter would act as a tempering force on issues, a calming presence even on her father’s sometimes erratic personality. It didn’t happen. And by the end of this week, they know it likely never will. “I had hope she would make some difference,” lamented Connie Morella, a moderate Republican who represented Maryland in Congress for 15 years. “I know she makes an impression on him but she doesn’t...

A juvenile court judge announced a guilty verdict in the trial of Massachusetts woman Michelle Carter who was charged with manslaughter for sending her suicidal boyfriend Conrad Roy III a barrage of text messages encouraging him to kill himself. Judge Lawrence Moniz announced his decision Friday in Bristol Juvenile Court.

TAUNTON, Mass. — For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him. That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that...

Q: What were the five mass extinctions in Earth's history? A: Quick Answer The five mass extinctions in Earth's history occurred at or near the end of the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous periods. Four of these served as the effective border between one period and the next, while the Devonian extinction occurred over a period of 20 million years in the Devonian twilight. The species lost in each extinction ranged from between 60 to 96 percent of life on Earth. Continue Reading

Former FBI Director James Comey now believes that President Donald Trump was trying to influence his judgment about the Russia probe, a person familiar with his thinking says, but whether that influence amounts to obstruction of justice remains an open question.

President Ronald Reagan once said, “The future does not belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.” In that spirit, Newsmax has compiled a list of the brightest and bravest in the Grand Old Party under the age of 30. While a majority of these young people come from political backgrounds — including a few who even hold elected office — they all possess a great influence in promoting Republican values that belies their ages. Whether the influence of these 30 is demonstrated by becoming a viral sensation, by taking on the mantles of leadership, or by laying the...