Free Republic

As previously reported, The Washington Post’s so-called conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin quit the newspaper and joined forces with Deep State hack Norm Eisen to start a media venture called “The Contrarian.” Last month the insufferable duo painfully described how they will cover everything from law, to culture to cooking in their new venture. “We do politics, we’re going to do law. But we know that any successful pro-democracy movement also has to be very vocal about culture. We’ll have a humor column, we’ll even have a cooking column, but we’re going to sprinkle in a little bit of pro-democracy flavor!”...

You won’t believe this one. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to organizations linked to Bill Kristol, the neoconservative war hawk best known for pushing endless wars and failed foreign policy. But here’s the twist—Elon Musk just exposed it, and now the heat is on. Who is Bill Kristol? He’s the guy who cheered on the Iraq War, pushed for regime change everywhere, and now runs “Defending Democracy Together,” a group that’s received at least $2 million from USAID to influence American politics. Why is USAID involved? USAID is supposed to fund...

Former Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin joined MSNBC on Saturday and lambasted her former employer, accusing the Washington Post of trying to “ingratiate” themselves with President Donald Trump. “They seem to think that their own press outlet should be muzzled, should be quieted, should not upset Donald Trump so much. And so you see, for example, the refusal to endorse Donald Trump, which was the editorial position of both the Los Angeles Times, owned by another billionaire, and the Washington Post,” she said. Rubin, a former conservative writer who announced during Trump’s first administration that she was no longer a...

Rubin, widely regarded as the most courageous and intellectually dynamic opinion columnist in the history of American journalism, finally “resigned” from the Washington Post on Monday and launched a “pro-democracy” website, the Contrarian, on Substack. In a note announcing her alleged resignation, less than a week after the Post laid off roughly 100 employees in an effort to stop losing $77 million a year, Rubin accused the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, of sabotaging journalism’s “sacred mission” of “defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Contrarian is built on a premise some would describe as delusional. In Rubin’s view, the...

Our readers are well aware that one of MRC Business’s biggest pet peeves has been the extent to which the leftist media went to bat for the insanity of Bidenomics the past four years. But The Washington Post’s pseudo-conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin is arguing like they just discovered its made-up stroke of genius yesterday. “Surprise! The media just discovered Bidenomics works,” railed Rubin in yet another senseless screed published Jan. 9. “Trump is getting a strong economy. If only the media had explained the Biden economic achievements,” Rubin whined, as if simping for Bidenomics wasn’t exactly what the media have...

The New York Times wrote a few days ago, “President Biden is bequeathing his successor a nation that by many measures is in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced.” Just how good are things? Here’s how the Times described the state of the economy:For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring...

As justifiably alarmed as Democrats are by President-elect Donald Trump’s radical agenda and his nominations of unqualified candidates for Cabinet positions, these actions may be even more terrifying for Republican senators up for reelection in 2026. (What follows certainly applies to vulnerable GOP House members as well, although they, of course, play no role in confirming nominees.)The 2026 map is somewhat more favorable to Democrats than it was in 2024. For example, the reelection campaigns of Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina will be two of the most hotly contested races. While they hail from...

Defiant World @DefiantWorld The internet is forever.

The Washington Post has decided not to endorse a candidate for president this year. Ed has a post coming up discussing the matter, so I won't go into the reasoning or provide an analysis of what is behind that decision. Ed has been in this business longer than I have and is, frankly, better at that sort of thing. He is one of the best analysts I have ever met and a lot more dispassionate in his analyses. The Post, as far as I know, is the second major newspaper to bow out of the endorsement scramble this year after...

She would be a Potomac Joan of ArcThe non-endorsement is the new endorsement! Hot on the heels of the Los Angeles Times’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the presidential race, a controversial call made by the paper’s owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong that has been met with multiple staff resignations, the Washington Post is following suit.A statement published Friday reads: “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”Public statements from leading Post personalities have...

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin recently explored options she feels are available to conservatives critical of Donald Trump’s influence over the Republican Party, including electoral fusionism and the feasibility of organizing a new party. In her opinion piece, Rubin, a former conservative commentator who later became a critic of the former president, outlines several paths for Trump-critical conservatives beyond remaining in the Republican Party. Rubin first suggests that disaffected conservatives could align themselves with the right flank of the Democratic Party, comparing it to what the Democratic Leadership Council did in the 1980s and 1990s. However, she points out that...

Vice President Kamala Harris, realizing the limited reach of mainstream news outlets, spent the week reaching millions of Americans through appearances on the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” CBS’s “The Late ith Stephen Colbert,” the daytime chat show “The View,” Howard Stern on SiriusXM and even the Weather Channel. If you caught them, many of these interviews were revealing and meaty, covering a wide range of policy topics.

Is The Washington Post in full-scale collapse? A recent look at the numbers provides a fairly convincing answer to that question. According to the report, not only is the Post losing $100 million a year, but it lost over half of its online engagement by the end of 2023. The signs were already there by mid-year, and the worst has come to pass. See: The Washington Post Is Facing a Financial Buzzsaw“Of that audience, less than one in five read more than a single article per month, while less than one in 500 actually convert to a paying subscription.”— Josh...

Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin took some serious backlash on Saturday after she suggested in an X post that the GOP was somehow responsible for creating the conditions that led to Hamas’ unprovoked attack on Israel. Rubin appeared to be lashing out at Republicans, many of whom had suggested that President Joe Biden’s failures in foreign policy — particularly the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the recent deal freeing up $6 billion in Iranian oil money — had ultimately led to the attack on Israel, a close ally. “How about this: With US House in chaos and US...

Several days after Business Insider admitted they had published inaccurate numbers of state residents that moved to Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin cited them and used them in an attack piece about Gov. Ron DeSantis’, R-Fla., leadership of the state. Rubin published the column Friday in which she claimed, "DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. ‘An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021.’" Those numbers are wrong and the Post, in a correction on Saturday, admitting...

In an age of rage, Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin has long been a standout in her attacks on Republicans and conservatives: “We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.” However, her recent column shows that she has made a clean break not only from Republicans but from reason. The writer (long cited by the Post as their “Republican columnist” for balance) has called for the media to abandon balance and...

"Indeed, the MAGA movement venerates the Confederacy and managed to accomplish what the South never did: stage an assault on the U.S. Capitol bearing the Confederate flag and organize an effort to stave off the peaceful transfer of power. Both the old Confederacy and the MAGA movement pine for a fraudulent past and dress up base racism in a gauzy wrapping of honor, masculinity and military virtue. And the paranoia about an existential crisis that so many MAGA followers share tracks with the Confederacy’s fear that their way of life (slavery) was endangered by Northern forces," Rubin wrote. "No, the...

It is not often that you see Democrats tear up over a message from former vice president Dick Cheney. However, his campaign ad for his eldest daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) — part swan song, part defiance, part nostalgia — tells us more about the decrepit state of the GOP than any Democrat’s ad has this cycle. “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he declares. Coming from a former vice president and defense secretary responsible for defending America against hostile nations and foreign terrorists,...

Nervous pundits warn that for the good of the country, the Justice Department ought not to indict Donald Trump, since prosecuting a former president is the sort of thing “banana republics” do. That’s wrong on two grounds. First, it is not up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide what’s in the country’s long-term democratic interests. The decision whether to “spare the country” the turmoil surrounding a past president’s criminal trial rests with the chief executive, as was the case under President Gerald Ford. The closest the Justice Department’s prosecutorial guidelines come to that concept is the requirement that a...