Free Republic

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...

Kamala Harris. Donald Trump. Gish Gallop. All three are expected at Tuesday’s presidential debate, even if most of America is unfamiliar with one name in that lineup. GG, as I’ve now come to call it, is a shell game/debate tactic that takes its name from Duane Gish, a prominent figure in the creationist movement who deployed dubious arguments, selective factoids, and rapid-fire lies to overwhelm his opponents in public discussions about the theory of evolution. The disinformation technique, coined Gish Gallop in 1994 by the National Center for Science Education’s founding director Eugenie Scott, is essentially the art of burying...

It's been a week since President Biden's disastrous debate performance, and his political fortunes only appear to be growing worse by the day. Now it all boils down to two questions: Will Biden drop out of the race? And who is in the top position to replace him? The answer to that the second question should be a no brainer — the vice president, of course. I honestly don't know if Harris can win in November, or if she truly is the best candidate to steer this country away from what appears to be certain ruin if Trump wins. What...

In 1932-33, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty reported from the Soviet Union that there was no Communist-induced famine in the Ukraine, indeed, that no one was dying of starvation there. In fact, between 4 and 7 million Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin's regime. Though Duranty's name has since been synonymous with Westerners who hid the evil committed by enemies of the West and enemies of liberty, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his false reporting. An unwillingness to identify evil and a desire to hurt those who do confront it were not confined to Western fellow travelers...