Free Republic

President Trump’s mental acuity again became a hot button topic this week after the president boasted acing what many called an “easy” cognitive test. “If you’re in the office of the presidency, we have to be sharp,” President Trump told Fox News medical correspondent, Dr. Marc Siegel, on Wednesday. “It was 30 or 35 questions. The first questions are very easy, the last questions are much more difficult.” Trump said he requested the test “a little less than a year ago” to silence critics who have repeatedly called his mental fitness into question. Trump cited as one of the “more...

Self-censorship is on the rise according to a new Cato Institute survey that reports nearly two-thirds of Americans are afraid to share their political views. A new CATO Institute/YouGov national survey found 62% of Americans say the political climate today prevents them from saying what they believe. This is up several points from 2017 when 58% of Americans said they were afraid to share their political beliefs. “31% of liberals, 30% of moderates and 34% of conservatives are worried their political views could get them fired or harm their career trajectory,” the CATO survey stated.

Since the beginning of the anti-racism, anti-police brutality protests in late May, at least 183 monuments and memorials have been vandalized, desecrated, or taken down, according to a new report by The Federalist. Statues and memorials have been continually targeted during the civil unrest triggered by George Floyd’s death on May 25. In most cases, the statues targeted commemorated historic figures including Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, colonial and religious figures, explorers, and Confederate leaders.

Portland is still engulfed by antifa violence (as the Democrats side with the violent rioters), America’s history and heritage is under direct and unapologetic assault, covid hysteria is still hamstringing the nation’s economic life and prosperity, and on Monday, Joe Biden offered an all-purpose remedy: “One of the things I think is important, I wish we taught more in our schools about the Islamic faith.” I’ll bet you’re wishing you had thought of that.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been actively forcing its poor villagers to remove Christian imagery from their homes and replace them with pictures of Mao Zedong and President Xi Jinping or lose their welfare benefits. The story: In April, CCP officials visited believers in the city of Linfen in the northern province of Shanxi and targeted welfare recipients, warning them if they refused to remove crosses, icons, and other religious symbols they would lose their government benefits, according to the religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter. “All impoverished households in the town were told to display Mao Zedong images,” a...

representative for Johnson & Johnson told a congressional committee on Tuesday that the company is hopeful a COVID-19 vaccine will be brought to market next year with 100 million doses produced by March. Dr. Macaya Douoguih, head of Clinical Development and Medical Affairs at Janssen Vaccines of Johnson & Johnson, said she is “very much encouraged” by the company’s pre-clinical results and announced that their first clinical trial is starting this month. “We will be starting our phase three in September. Now, it’s very difficult to say whether or not we will be lucky enough to have setup our sights...

Former NBC Sports hockey analyst Jeremy Roenick is suing NBC for wrongful firing after the network terminated his employment earlier this year. NBC said Roenick made indecent comments on the air, but they did not take action against a gay colleague who made similar remarks. What did he say? The former hockey star was fired in February over comments he made on the Barstool Sports’ Spittin’ Chiclets podcast, where he joked about wanting to have a threesome with his wife and NBC Sports colleague Kathryn Tappen. “I’m swimming with my wife and Kathryn, and they’ve got their bikinis on, and...

All three men charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia entered not guilty pleas on Friday. The story: George McMichael, 64, his son, Travis McMichael, 34, and their neighbor William Bryan, 50, were indicted at the end of June. The McMichaels were charged with aggravated assault and murder, while Bryan was charged with murder and attempt to commit false imprisonment. They pleaded not guilty to all nine counts. The defense: Bryan’s attorneys are looking to ask the judge to set bail for his client, TMZ reported, and filed a motion and a list of more than 50 questions...

MARK Zuckerberg has blamed the Trump administration for the US coronavirus outbreak becoming "worse than many other countries" due to "less effective" leadership. The Facebook CEO slammed President Donald Trump's response to the pandemic during a Thursday afternoon discussion with Dr Anthony Fauci. Mark Zuckerberg slammed the Trump administration on Thursday for the worsening of the US coronavirus outbreak 6 Mark Zuckerberg slammed the Trump administration on Thursday for the worsening of the US coronavirus outbreakCredit: Reuters "At this point, it is clear that the trajectory of the US is significantly worse than many other countries, and that our government...

Virginia’s conservative Liberty University today filed a $10 million defamation suit against the embattled New York Times for a “made up” and damaging story that falsely charged that students returning from spring break became infected with the coronavirus because the school stayed open. In a 100-page suit, with exhibits, filed in Virginia’s Lynchburg Circuit Court, the 49-year-old school also charged that New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson and photographer Julia Rendleman ignored “No Trespassing” signs to tour the campus at a time when the school was trying to keep outsiders, who could potentially be infected with COVID-19, away. The long-threatened...

ZeroHedge has Google’s permission to use its advertising platform again after they carried out a thorough “cleaning” of its comment section which, according to the technology giant, was full of inappropriate comments. The popular website dedicated to economic and political issues had some problems with Google in mid-June when Google told the outlet that they were going to demonetize them and prevent them from earning revenue through Google ads. Google has a monopoly over the website advertising market. The issues Google alleged, however, were not caused directly by the site’s content, but by the comments section, which Google says contained...

The media this week ran an unverified story about a Texas man dying from the coronavirus after allegedly attending a “COVID Party.” The entire story is based on one source, lacks details, and serious corroboration but this did not stop it from hitting national headlines. A local station in Texas reported on remarks made by Methodist Hospital in San Antonio’s chief medical officer Dr. Jane Appleby. Appleby claimed that a man in his thirties confessed on his death bed that he went to the “COVID Party” because he thought the coronavirus was a hoax. “I think I made a mistake,...

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...