Free Republic

A Romanian national pleaded guilty on Monday to charges related to his role in a “swatting” ring that targeted dozens of public officials, including a former US president. Going by the aliases “Plank,” “Jonah” and “Cypher,” 26-year-old Thomasz Szabo took part in a years-long conspiracy to place bogus 911 calls, claiming emergencies were taking place at the homes of top government officials, and make bomb threats against government buildings and houses of worship, according to Justice Department. Szabo and a co-conspirator, 21-year-old Serbian national Nemanja Radovanovic, allegedly targeted about 100 people, including members of Congress, governors, cabinet-level executive branch officials...

"Fact checkers" at the anti-Trump website The Dispatch tried to scold critics enraged over the millions in taxpayer dollars wasted on "Politico Pro" subscriptions, and ended up looking completely ridiculous in the process. Facebook originally hired The Dispatch as part of its old fact-checker squad, perhaps to lend an appearance of balance, as they have claimed. This wasn't balanced. Following the uproar over the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other government agencies doling out $8.2 million on Politico’s wildly overpriced Pro subscriptions between 2024 and 2025 alone, The Dispatch fact-checker Alex Demas followed with a knee-jerk response on...

Yesterday, I [Turley] was notified by the Justice Department confirming that a recent swatting indictment includes the person or persons responsible for my own swatting a year ago. One of the defendants, Thomasz Szabo, was arrested a couple weeks ago. The indictment below charges two foreign nationals: Thomasz Szabo, 26, of Romania, and Nemanja Radovanovic, 21, of Serbia. Szabo and Radovanovic are each charged with one count of conspiracy, 29 counts of threats and false information regarding explosives, and four counts of transmitting threats in interstate and foreign commerce. Their alleged conspiracy began as early as December 2020. It continued...

Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has...

Left-wing comedian Bill Maher tore into the corporate media during his Real Time Overtime segment for lying about Donald Trump calling for Liz Cheney to be executed. “I woke up to the headline ‘Donald Trump had called for a firing squad for Liz Cheney,’ said Maher, adding, “and this is what I really don’t like about the media — No, he didn’t.” Maher goes on to explain what Trump clearly said. “He’s criticizing her for being a war hawk. I mean she is Dick Cheney’s daughter.” Maher then read Trump’s full and unambiguous quote. Here it is:

Another day, another hoax. The mainstream media’s relentless campaign to misrepresent former President Donald Trump has reached new heights. In a Friday appearance on CNN, so-called conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg falsely claimed that Trump suggested a firing squad execution for former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). President Trump had criticized Cheney’s hawkish foreign policy views during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Thursday, condemning her stance on “endless wars.” At no point did Trump imply or suggest any such violent intentions toward Cheney—he merely called her out for her support of prolonged conflicts. Goldberg, however, attacked Trump with an inflammatory conclusion,...

Arizona Attorney General Investigating Whether Trump Violated State Law by Making 'death Threat' Against Former Congresswoman Cheney

CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign implied former President Donald Trump called for Liz Cheney to be put before a firing squad. FACT CHECK: False. Trump’s comments on “guns trained on her face” were about Cheney stoking foreign wars without being willing to fight in their front lines. Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign took former President Donald Trump’s words out of context, to suggest that he was calling for Liz Cheney to be put before a firing squad. Her campaign posted a video of Trump speaking to Tucker Carlson on X/Twitter, with a caption that paraphrased him:

The disgraced Jonah Goldberg’s latest act of liberal fascism involves him lying about Donald Trump on CNN and then claiming it was Donald Trump who made him lie. Not-So-Little Lord Fauntleroy grows more pathetic and self-loathing by the day. We all know what former President Trump said about Liz Cheney on Thursday. There was nothing ambiguous about what he said or what he meant: Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war...

Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg thinks Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “increasingly repugnant rhetoric” as the 2024 election enters its home stretch may actually be a deliberate ploy. And Goldberg suggested how it could pay off for the former president in the race against Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

Donald Trump isn’t normally thought of as a consensus-builder, but in one sense that’s exactly what he is. Many of Trump’s most ardent fans and foes alike believe he is the leader of a political movement with a clear and defined set of principles and goals. They disagree only on whether that agenda is good or bad.The tendency to cast Trump as a tool of the ideological right serves the purposes of both sides. The right needs to believe Trump is a warrior for its causes to justify its support for him, and the left wants to believe the same...

We’re nowhere near slam-dunk territory on this, but it’s something to watch. For Democrats, it could be an area that could produce another episode of politically induced heartburn. Jonah Goldberg is a notable anti-Trump commentator. He has been a vocal critic of the former president, though he’s returned to his classic roots amid the chaos on our college campuses. Still, while Biden has been disappointing for some Republicans who might have crossed party lines in 2020, Goldberg’s tweet about the rumblings he’s heard from within the Never Trump wing is interesting: Fwiw. I’ve heard from a LOT of reliably anti-Trump...

I’m all for raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but my favorite thing in the world is watching the smug fascists in the Never Trump movement deal with failure and despair. Oh, Jonah “Fauntleroy” Goldberg’s having a bad day? In the Nolte household, that piece of news ranks right up there with cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels. “‘Never Trumpers’ are close to giving up hope,” reads the Hill headline. Knowing Never Trumpers are giving up hope means you can keep your bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. It gets better, so much better… “Former President Trump is...

Sometimes revealing a communist is a little like taking off a Band-Aid. You’ve got to pick at the edges a little bit until you can get enough gripped to rip it off.It has been a decade since Jonah Goldberg and I had our back-and-forth editorial debate about “modern republicanism.” [He lost both a massive number of readers and credibility.] In the years since, we are both exactly the same people; the only difference is – his mask has completely dropped and he’s no longer pretending.In this brutally perfect appearance on his new network gig, CNN, Jonah Goldberg, the pontificating pustule...

Former National Review columnist and unhinged Never-Trumper Jonah Goldberg recently claimed that small donors in the Republican primary were a problem “for democracy” and are “just venting their spleen” rather than acting strategically. The pompous neocon told “Inside Politics” host Dana Bash, “Small donors in Iowa are more important as an indicator of grassroots support than anything else. But I also think we’re dealing with a time where there’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of cheering and self-congratulations about the rise of small donors a decade ago.” He then added, “Now small donors are one of the biggest...

Conservative syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Lead” that Republican “closet normals on the Hill” want to move beyond former President Donald Trump but are waiting for their voters to do so.Anchor Jake Tapper said, “Do you think that, assuming that Jack Smith does go forward and bring some sort of charges related to this, do you think that will have any impact whatsoever on Trump’s standing among must be members of Congress, Republican officials and voters?”Goldberg said, “Those are different constituencies, to be sure. I think there is a possibility, if not one that I think...

Is the GOP becoming a dysfunctional chatroom? In economics, Gresham’s law on currency markets holds that “bad money drives out good.” That principle also applies to the comment sections on online sites. In comments sections — including such mega-versions like Twitter — the nastiest commenters post more, and more obnoxiously, than the decent ones until, eventually, the decent folk just decide not to hang out anymore. The only remedy for this is comment moderation, where grown-ups in charge try to thwart the trolls lest they lose their more valuable customers. In Tim Miller’s book, “Why We Did It,” the former...

“The tapes are the real man — mean, vindictive, panicky, striking first in anticipation of being struck, trying to lift his own friable self-esteem by shoving others down,” Gary Wills wrote of Richard Nixon in the 2017 preface to his book, “Nixon Agonistes.” Wills added, perhaps unfairly, that “Nixon’s real tragedy is that he never had the stature to be a tragic hero. He is the stuff of sad (almost heartbreaking) comedy.” The passage comes to mind as we close out Donald Trump’s annus horribilis, during which he supplanted Nixon as the saddest figure in post-presidential politics. The Jan. 6...

It once again has become necessary that Mr. Jonah Goldberg, scholar, humorist, rationalist, and exemplar of moral consistency, bring to heel a rabidly partisan right-winger (Yearning for a Banana Republic). The burden is thrust upon him by a benighted epoch. "What an amazingly stupid time this is," laments Jonah. The immediate evidence of the era's stupidity is the enhanced partisanship for Donald Trump voiced by conservatives, after the FBI's raid on his estate at Mar-a-Lago. Apparently in reaction to the search, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, along with others, renewed his support for Trump's candidacy in 2024. He identified the...

President Trump annihilates RINOs, “losers” and backstabbers in a Save America StatementIn a statement put out today by President Trump, he identifies and absolutely crushes 5 RINOs and backstabbers whom he describes as “shortsighted ‘losers'” who spend their time criticizing him and the America First movement, while providing nothing positive to the Republican Party or to this nation.President Trump’s statement reads:I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about...