Free Republic

As quickly as the Sunset fire started charring through Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening, an AI-generated photo of the Hollywood sign ablaze was rapidly circulating on social media. It was just one example of misinformation surrounding the Los Angeles-area fires spreading on social media, and experts warn that false information during natural disaster events disrupts recovery efforts and harms community trust. ** Misinformation can emotionally exploit a situation, hijack conversations from emergency information and, in some cases, lead to financial scams, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ** Unfortunately, there’s no way to avoid...

NEW YORK — President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his felony hush money case, but the judge declined to impose any punishment, an outcome that cements his conviction but frees him to return to the White House unencumbered by the threat of a jail term or a fine.Trump’s sentence of an unconditional discharge caps a norm-smashing case that saw the former and future president charged with 34 felonies, put on trial for almost two months and convicted on every count. Yet, the legal detour — and sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury affair allegations —...

Talk of a mass exodus of residents was always overblown and more political than real.A population uptick will hopefully end all those premature death notices — at least for a bit California is growing again, news that comes as a relief, vindication or vexation, depending on where you stand in regard to the Golden State. Or, perhaps more aptly, where you reside.The state, which had its modern birth in a fever of money-lust and speculation, gained population in every assay going back to those Gold Rush days. Growth — heady, unrelenting — was not only the natural order of things,...

President-elect Donald Trump has made clear his intent to supercharge his “America First” approach to foreign policy in his second term — and Mexico looks set to be at the tip of the spear.While many of Trump’s predecessors have also followed a “realist” strategy — that is, one in which relative power is at the forefront of international relations and diplomatic success is viewed through how it benefits one’s own nation — the incoming president has displayed an apparent unwillingness to consider the pain that his plans would inflict on targeted countries or the responses this will engender.Trump’s proposed policies...

Soon-Shiong said he was specifically looking for influential conservative voices like Scott Jennings at CNN. Jennings has been a commentator on the left-leaning outlet since 2017. Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong on Thursday night said that he was looking to hire conservative voices to help balance out the editorial section of his newspaper. Soon-Shiong previously stated that he would be working to make the newspaper more fair moving forward, after deciding not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 elections. Several newspaper owners withheld endorsements in the 2024 elections, with Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos claiming it...

Six years ago in this newspaper, I coined the term “rancho libertarian” to describe a political ideology I was observing in many of the Latino men I knew. Proud of their family’s rural immigrant roots but fully of this country. Working class at heart, middle class in income. Skeptical of big government and woke politics yet committed to bettering their communities. Believers in the American Dream they had seen their parents achieve — and afraid it was slipping away. Proud of their family’s rural immigrant roots but fully of this country. Working class at heart, middle class in income....

With about six weeks remaining in this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, we’ve already experienced multiple historic storms, vividly illustrating that as humans have warmed the planet, we have also made it more dangerous.Beryl became a Category 5 hurricane in July, the earliest in the calendar year that any Atlantic hurricane on record has reached that magnitude; Helene yielded catastrophic flooding and damage from Florida to western North Carolina; Kirk traversed the Atlantic to bring damaging rain and winds to France; Milton — one of the fastest-intensifying storms on record — caused damage across Florida; and Oscar surprised forecasters this weekend...

Since the Tesla and Space X owner purchased Twitter (now X) in 2022 for $44 billion, he’s assumed the mantle of “free speech” warrior. I put free speech in quotations because we’re not talking about the kind of free speech people fight and die for under dictatorships or theocracies. Musk’s idea of “freedom” is amplifying hate speech, sowing misinformation, stoking conspiracies, propping up nationalists in places like India and Argentina, and complying with censorship requests from authoritarian regimes like Turkey's. As for our presidential race here at home, Musk's misleading election claims on X were viewed 1.2 billion times between...

Independent challenger Nathan Hochman is destroying incumbent, George Soros-backed George Gascón in the race for Los Angeles County District Attorney, leading by 30 points with less than four weeks to before Election Day. A Los Angeles Times/University of California Berkeley poll of likely voters this week showed that 51% would vote for Hochman, while only 21% would choose Gascon. The percentage of undecided voters, 28%, cannot make up the gap. Gascón ousted incumbent Jackie Lacey, the first black woman to hold the job, in 2020 — thanks to the endorsements of Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Black Lives Matter...

Some right-leaning voters who oppose Donald Trump are thinking of voting neither for him nor Kamala Harris. I understand how they feel. In 2016, I published an article urging Never Trump conservatives to consider casting their ballot for a third-party candidate. In the election that year, I did just that. regret writing that column. I regret casting that vote. To people like me, Trump represented a repudiation of everything that Ronald Reagan stood for. But as a conservative and former GOP staffer who had never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, I harbored reservations about Hillary Clinton. Voting for neither...

Justice Department prosecutors would launch criminal investigations of those Trump views as enemies. IRS workers would likely be ordered to audit prominent Democrats’ tax returns. WASHINGTON — If former President Trump wins the November election, he says one of his actions on “Day One,” right after he begins deporting millions of undocumented migrants, will be enacting a radical plan to force the federal bureaucracy to bow to his demands.Like any president, Trump would undoubtedly stock the top levels of the government with loyal appointees. But he also intends to enforce his will by making it possible to fire lower-ranking federal...

In 2021 and 2022, I conducted a series of interviews on this topic with millennials and members of Generation Z, all of them people of color. Some grew up in low-income families and neighborhoods while others were from the middle- or upper-middle class. Some of them identify as queer, or their close family members and friends do, which shapes their sensitivity to discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Their experiences as members of marginalized groups have shaped their experiences with climate emotions like anxiety, fear, and trauma — as well as hope and optimism. Paying closer attention to...

It’s been 15 years since workers earning the federal minimum wage got a raise. The cost of living has gone up more than 45% since then, with rents and home prices rising faster than incomes in most regions of the country. Yet the nation’s wage floor has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour.That is poverty pay, and an increase to the federal minimum wage is long overdue. It’s mind-boggling that Congress has gone so long without making even modest adjustments to help the lowest-paid workers. This is the longest stretch of time without an increase to the federal minimum wage...

WASHINGTON — Vice presidents seeking the top job almost always feel a need to separate themselves from the presidents they’ve served.For Hubert Humphrey, the moment came late in his campaign. In a nationally televised speech on Sept. 30, 1968, he called for a halt to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, departing from the Johnson administration’s war policy.George H.W. Bush struggled to establish a distinct identity with voters after eight years as second fiddle to the very popular President Reagan. In his speech to the Republican convention in August 1988, he called for a “kinder, gentler nation” — to which...

Hello and happy Thursday. There are 81 days until the election, and today we are talking about stayin’ alive — for the Harris campaign, the Trump whatever-it-is and for us voters who have 11-plus weeks to go.And for democracy. Don’t forget democracy!First, I know you’ve seen the AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Trump also posted it on his Truth Social, where truth goes to die. This bromance is hard to watch. Musk’s power and privilege seem to be veering him into Howard Hughes-weird territory, where his crazy theories are matched...

Kamala Harris had no sooner replaced Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee than Donald Trump began bashing her over the number of immigrants coming into the United States, declaring that they had driven countless American workers from their jobs.But the data on U.S. employment and the economy overwhelmingly suggest a reality far more beneficial when it comes to immigration than the nightmarish vision the former president has put forth.The surge of international migrants since 2021 — including refugees, asylum seekers and others entering legally and illegally — has lifted the U.S. and California economies by filling otherwise vacant...

Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz went viral with his observation that former president and current GOP nominee Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are “just weird.” After Trump wildly attacked Vice President and leading Democratic candidate Kamala Harris on “Fox and Friends,” the Harris campaign responded with a scathing press release titled “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance” that included in its bullet-point takeaways: “Trump is old and quite weird?” Since then the word has become a byword among Harris supporters, used to describe everything from Trump’s continued, and quite baffling, non sequiturs about “the...

Never has an NCAA Sports Day been so widely and breathlessly covered as it was on Monday.And never has it been clearer that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, did not just fall out of a coconut tree.With President Biden recovering from COVID-19, the task of honoring top college athletes from across the country fell to Harris, who performed the same duty last year with much less fanfare.This year, of course, the event occurred the day after Biden announced he was ending his reelection campaign and endorsed Harris as the party’s replacement candidate for president....

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...

The selection of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump’s running mate is a direct result of the political media’s failure to understand class in America. For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was venerated by many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-overlooked Americans. But he’s no working-class hero.Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity...