Free Republic

Bari Weiss, a staff editor for The New York Times’ opinion section, announced her resignation Tuesday, citing what she describes as a “self-censorship” culture at the paper and “constant bullying” by colleagues. The story: Weiss announced that she is leaving The New York Times in a lengthy resignation letter she posted on her website. She alleged that she had been the target of verbal harassment by colleagues who have different views and who have made it explicitly clear that they do not want her working at the paper. She also suggested that the Times does not dare publish anything that...

On Wednesday evening, Rep. Xochitl Tores Small’s campaign sent out a fundraising email introducing Emma Caccamo as Torres Small’s new campaign manager. Caccamo previously worked as the campaign manager on Teresa Leger de Fernandez’s race up in the 3rd Congressional District, where Leger de Fernandez won against disgraced ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame, state Rep. Joseph L. Sanchez, District 1 District Attorney Marco Sernce, and a handful of others. Far-left, abortion up-to-birth Rep. Xochitl Torres Small is also another benefactor of EMILY’s List, which has endorsed her for her unashamed abortion up-to-birth policies, previously when she worked for Planned Parenthood, and...

On Monday morning, a man splashed red paint over the Black Lives Matter mural painted on the street in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue, the same mural that Mayor Bill de Blasio helped paint last Thursday as he yelled, “We are saying Black Lives Matter in New York City and Black Lives Matter in the United States of America! Let’s show Donald Trump what he does not understand; let’s paint it right in front of his building for him!”With shootings soaring in his city and the growing cries for defunding the police affecting the city, de...

The dwindling band of NeverTrumpers fondly imagines that Republicans will snap back to the former party of beautiful losers when Trump departs the scene. We’re the people with ideas, they say, and we have ownership rights over Republican thinking. But they’re merely a rag-tag bunch of neocons, libertarian purists, prissy mugwumps, and party apparatchiks who have little in common apart from their detestation of Trump. On both right and left, American politics has degenerated into a brain-dead battle over personalities, not principles. Which raises the question of where we’ll be when Trump leaves the scene. The Alexandrine poet C.P. Cavafy...

After finding 40 churches connected to around 650 cases of the coronavirus, The New York Times is calling Sunday worship services “a major source” of COVID-19 cases. “The virus has infiltrated Sunday sermons, meetings of ministers and Christian youth camps in Colorado and Missouri,” reads the Times piece. “It has struck churches that reopened cautiously with face masks and social distancing in the pews, as well as some that defied lockdowns and refused to heed new limits on numbers of worshipers.” The story does, of course, link to legitimate cases — like Calvary Chapel in San Antonio, where around 50...

More than 100,000 mail-in ballots were rejected by election officials in California’s March presidential primary. The six-figure tally highlights the big gap in the effort to ensure every vote is counted, as a national dispute rages over the integrity of vote-by-mail elections. State data obtained by The Associated Press shows 102,428 mail-in ballots were disqualified in 58 counties, mostly because they arrived too late. Another 13,000 voters forgot to sign the ballot and canceled their own vote.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan told "Meet the Press" on Sunday that the Republican party will have to look "at what happens after President Trump, whether that’s in four months or four years." "I think they are going to be looking to how do we go about becoming a bigger tent party," he said. "We're going to have to find a way to appeal to more people and have a bigger tent."

UPDATE: Goya Foods’ CEO Robert Unanue refuses to apologize after drawing intense criticism and calls for a boycott against his company for praising President Trump on Thursday. “We were part of a commission called the White House Hispanic Prosperity Initiative and they called on us to be there to see how we could help opportunities within the economic and educational realm for prosperity among Hispanics and among the United States,” Unanue said on “Fox & Friends” on Friday. Unanue said the backlash his visit to the White House and praise of Trump triggered is a “suppression of speech.” He pointed...

News outlets are falsely reporting that health officials blamed President Trump’s in-person rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma last month for a rise in coronavirus cases. The Associated Press posted a story titled, “Health official: Trump rally ‘likely’ source of virus surge.” The AP cited Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart, who never directly mentioned the Trump rally and said there were “several large events” that may have contributed to the spike in cases. “Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed new cases on Monday, a one-day record high, and another 206 cases on Tuesday,” the report said. “Although the health department’s...

Even in perfect conditions with teleprompters to read from, Joe Biden still forgets what he's talking about. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is barely there. Appearing virtually at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' 2020 Virtual Political Conference on Wednesday, Biden appeared to be reading from a teleprompter when he repeatedly lost his train of thought. "Lonnie knows I believe this every fiber of being, we're opposed," Biden began confidently enough before he seemingly lost his place with the teleprompter. Biden then switched to platitudes about making "it happen" and illuminating "the path forward." "What I propose is, is, it...

CNN’s Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon mocked “ring-wing” news networks Tuesday for reporting on rising crime in major U.S. cities amid the Black Lives Matter protests. Cuomo began by appearing to criticize those who were skeptical about the goal of the BLM movement. He told Lemon “it’s all about creating division” and slammed “state TV” for supposedly spreading “lies” about BLM. “It all fits together, D,” Cuomo said. “The lies about the pandemic. The lies about, you know, what this President will make happen the lies of those around him echo of support. Lies about what Black Lives Matter is...

BLM folks are still hanging out nightly in the area of St. Johns’s Church, in Washington, D.C., near the White House. While the police cleared away any occupation, any tents and put up fencing around the church, they still show up nightly to walk around and yell things at the cops before they go home. Jorge Ventura picked up some video though that has to be one of the dumbest moves of all time by a BLM protester. Watch the Trump supporter lead this BLM guy over to the cops and watch this doofus take the bait.

CNN has joined Twitter in calling for the dropping of certain terms associated with slavery or that “evoke racist notions about Black people.” Some of these terms include “master bedrooms/bathrooms.” CNN argued while it remains “unclear whether the term is rooted in American slavery on plantations, it evokes that history.” The term “master bedroom” was first used in 1926, over sixty years after slavery was abolished. “Blacklist” and “whitelist” are also problematic, according to CNN and Twitter, because even though the terms “don’t appear to be directly connected to race, some argue that they reinforce notions that black=bad and white=good.”

After years of trying to mine the wealthy around here, and instead hitting themselves in the face, the Seattle City Council has finally fixed on a potent way to tax the rich. Seattle’s latest corporate tax scheme will almost certainly run into some familiar obstacles, such as a skeptical mayor and a possible legal challenge from big business. But politically, this one is nothing like the failures of the past. It’s the work of Council member Teresa Mosqueda, and the premise is simple enough: Instead of tilting at windmills to try to tax wealth or high incomes, which is legally...

Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw, one of millions of conservatives fed up with the left-wing extremism overwhelming the country, pointed to just a single example Wednesday of the deadly violence that this Democrat Party- and media-endorsed extremism has wrought. The example he cited from radio station WINS concerned just New York City, yet it involved a startling 112 shooting victims (some still alive, others dead) who’ve been harmed within the past nine or so days alone.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) urged residents Thursday to continue following the social distancing guidelines ahead of Independence Day to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, the police department in Los Angeles posted a photo of a crowded protest taking place in the city. What the mayor said: Garcetti praised the coronavirus measures the city introduced at the beginning of the pandemic and called on residents to avoid large gatherings and wear face coverings in public places or places where they cannot keep a recommended distance this July 4th because “COVID-19 has taken control.”

A group of about a dozen armed veterans in Lebanon, Tennessee have started watching over the Wilson County Veteran’s Memorial to avert potential looters and vandals from desecrating the site. Veteran Keith Sikora said they are not there to fight and simply want to send a message to those seen on TV rioting and destroying public and private property during the Black Lives Matter protesters. “A show of force can be a very powerful deterrent. We’re not here to fight, unless we have to,” Sikora said.

As my RedState colleague Bonchie reported earlier, the story about how President Trump had supposedly been briefed about Russia allegedly putting bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan is quickly falling apart. This is in large part thanks to former NSA John Bolton being caught in a lie about the story, and because numerous named and unnamed sources have stepped forth to state that the intelligence was not substantiated to a level that would require the information to be included in a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB). Nevertheless, the Usual Suspects are still running wild with the story in an effort to...

New York City's famous George Washington Monument in Washington Square Park was defaced with red paint on Monday as protesters gathered further downtown outside City Hall ahead of a controversial vote that could slash the city's police budget by $1billion - 16 percent of its total - despite escalating crime and chaos. In the latest symbol of police defiance and unruliness across the city, the vandals tossed red paint at the famous George Washington monument on Monday then fled the scene, leaving city workers to try to power wash it off. President Trump tweeted on Tuesday: 'We are tracking down...

School officials at Union College in New York recently exposed the personal contact information of student members of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) Union College chapter, resulting in a deluge of harassing comments and attacks from progressive students and activists. The story: Samuel Levit, chairman of the YAF Union College chapter, said the group has “been bombarded and slandered with hateful rhetoric, labeling, and vile mischaracterizations” after the university revealed the contact information, according to The College Fix. Union College exposed the YAF students after the group recently took to Twitter and Instagram to condemn the “violence, looting,...