Free Republic

The recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action once again highlighted an uncomfortable reality that a minority group (in this case, Asian Americans) mostly opposes a position held by the progressive movement and the Democratic Party. The response from the left was to depict Asian Americans — who, polls show, oppose the use of racial preferences in college admissions to increase diversity — as dupes or tools being used by white conservatives to attack other vulnerable minorities.

Former Trump Justice Department head William Barr, in the course of reiterating his strong preference that his party nominate a less deranged presidential candidate next time, expressed a fear that has been in wide circulation: If defeated in the primary, Donald Trump “will burn the whole house down by leading ‘his people’ out of the GOP.” One version of this is that Trump will either form a third party or simply refuse to endorse another Republican, thereby dooming his party’s chances. Those of us considering the question from a less friendly standpoint than Barr — I consider the Republican Party...

Republicans have been hammering the Biden administration over inflation. Democrats have tried to respond by blaming supply-chain shortages caused by the pandemic. But Republican senator Tom Cotton has a completely different theory: He blames inflation on Donald Trump’s poor selection to lead the Federal Reserve. Cotton’s view, laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, places the blame for inflation squarely on Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman. “Mr. Powell’s Fed has forced millions of American families to choose whether to pay the mortgage, feed their families, fill up their gas tanks, heat their homes or buy Christmas presents,” he argues....

The House Progressive Caucus has drawn scorn for its hardball tactic of holding up the bipartisan infrastructure bill in order to pressure moderate Democrats to support President Biden’s larger climate and social policy initiatives. “The liberals’ tactics,” observed the New York Times last month, “were reminiscent of those employed by the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, whose members routinely threatened to withhold their bloc of votes unless Republican leaders met their demands.” The Freedom Caucus has cultivated a toxic reputation in Washington for its destructive predilections, issuing impossible and constantly changing demands with no clear goal except derailing legislation of almost...

A New York Magazine writer tried to mock a family of 11 struggling with inflation because of their weekly purchase of 12 gallons of milk. The mother of the big family, Krista Stotler said during a CNN interview that “‘A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it’s $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week, times four weeks, that’s a lot of money.’” The Twitter Trends negatively portrayed the family’s purchase of 12 gallons: “A CNN segment analyzing 'how badly inflation is hitting the middle class' has some discussing why the family featured purchases 12 gallons of milk per week.”...

There are many, many, many things we should never accept lectures from CNN over, and defining what this country is and isn’t is definitely one of them.CNN’s editor-at-large Chris Cillizza, who once infamously declared that “Reporters don’t root for a side. Period,” apparently became fauxfended after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told the New York Times in a Monday piece on how Republicans are “shrugging” over Democratic “warnings of democracy in peril” that “the idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for.”Further, Paul stated, “The Jim Crow laws came out...

Axios has a small squib about “The Mischief Makers,” a handful of idiosyncratic congressional backbenchers who make trouble for their respective party leadership. The leading Democratic mischief-maker is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who advocates some left-wing views I consider simplistic and impractical and, in some cases, poll badly. The top example of a conservative mischief-maker, presented in perfect symmetry, is Marjorie Taylor Greene.The most recent Greene view to be unearthed comes via Eric Hananoki. Just over two years ago, Greene suggested in a Facebook post that wildfires in California were not natural. Forests don’t just catch fire, you know. Rather, the blazes...

Jonathan Chait, a left-wing writer for New York Magazine, penned a column which argues that President Trump is actually the beneficiary of media biased in his favor. Chait’s premise is that the President, through his supposed unwillingness or incapability to answer simple questions, has lowered expectations by the media, and they in turn lower their bar for what is acceptable. “It’s not the media’s fault that Trump continues to incriminate himself and is unable to answer simple questions,” he writes. “The problem is not that the media holds him to a difficult standard,” claims Chait. “He is held, by necessity,...

The New York Times has done some shameless things in its past, but exploiting a man’s death to serve its agenda has to be among its worst. That’s what it did in a recent portrait of, as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it, “a man killed by Fox News”: Ginia Bellafante’s story of the COVID-19 death of Joe Joyce, owner of Brooklyn’s JJ Bubbles bar. On March 1, Joyce and his wife took a cruise to Spain. Joyce was a fan of Fox News, especially host Sean Hannity, who declared on air that Americans were getting “unnecessarily” scared by...

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon. “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox’s German Lopez, while acknowledging...

New York Magazine writer and Twitter hot-taker Jonathan Chait shared a New York Times article over the weekend, describing it as a “portrait of a man killed by Fox News.” That tweet got around quite a bit, quote retweeted by dozens of blue check media personalities, ratioed by Twitter users at large, and ultimately becoming a de facto headline for the article, which was actually written by New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante.

... Working from the premise that the country largely agrees with them on everything, or that agreeing with the majority of voters on issues is not necessary to win, the [Democrat] campaign has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again... A new batch of swing state polls from the New York Times ought to deliver a bracing shock to Democrats. The polls find that, in six swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona — Trump is highly competitive. He trails Joe Biden there by the narrowest of margins, and...

In March 2010, Professor Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University released a study about President Obama’s stimulus package. It contained many informational gems: *Public entities received 42 percent of awards under the stimulus package, but received over half of dollars awarded (meaning they got larger chunks of change than private contractors); *Even according to the administration, $285,814.61 was spent to create each job under the stimulus; *On average, Democratic districts received 1.53 times the amount of awards that Republicans were granted, with Democratic districts receiving 2.65 times the amount of stimulus dollars Republican districts received. Democratic districts received 73...

It is bizarre, however, to spend two years insisting collusion is not a crime and then turn around and call the absence of crimes proof that there was no collusion. Of course Trump colluded with Russia. He literally went on camera and asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, promising that Russia would be rewarded by the American media, and Russia responded to this request by attempting a hack to steal Clinton’s emails that very day. Trump’s campaign aides repeatedly welcomed and sought out Russian assistance. His campaign manager passed on 75 pages of intricate polling data to a Russian...

Strange yet unexpectedly true: Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the single biggest pain in the ass for Pelosi and Democrats from the freshman class.In fact, if not for the obsession on all sides of political media with AOC, Ilhan Omar’s periodic tweet-farts about AIPAC and dual loyalty would be a bigger story than they already are. She’d be the “new face of the party” to righty critics instead of you-know-who.But don’t underestimate her. She’s nothing if not persistent in pushing her favorite anti-semitic canards. We can’t be more than a few weeks away from her approvingly quoting something from the Protocols of...

n June 14, 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s files and gained access to its research on Donald Trump. A political world already numbed by Trump’s astonishing rise barely took notice. News reports quoted experts who suggested the Russians merely wanted more information about Trump to inform their foreign-policy dealings. By that point, Russia was already broadcasting its strong preference for Trump through the media. Yet when news of the hacking broke, nobody raised the faintest suspicions that Russia wished to alter the outcome of the election, let alone that Trump...

NY Mag’s Jonathan Chait is promoting a forthcoming book that already feels a little, um, dated:

New York magazine published an interview with President Obama Sunday night which is really Obama recounting some of the high profile political arguments of his tenure. One of the arguments which gets a lot of space is Obamacare. Here’s a sample picking up from the moment Scott Brown won a special election which ended Democrats’ 60 vote majority in the Senate: The most important phone call I made after that was to Nancy Pelosi, because the question I posed to her and to Harry Reid was, “Are you guys still game? Because if you guys are still game, we’ll find...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/did-bernie-sanders-just-hand-trump-the-election

He uses the Left’s identity politics strategies against them ___ For years I’ve warned that the Left is playing a dangerous game by embracing illiberal identity politics. Last week, the liberal writer Jonathan Chait wrote about the “ideological fissure” on the Left: Why is it wrong for Trump to gripe about how a Latino judge is bound to be unfair to him by virtue of his ethnicity, but okay for Sonia Sotomayor to assert that a Latina judge could be more fair as a result of her ethnicity? Why is it wrong for white people to look out for their...