Free Republic

On Nov. 5, the Democratic Party received what counts in our hyper-polarized age as a comprehensive drubbing. Donald Trump swept all seven battleground states, improved over his 2016 and 2020 performances with nearly every demographic subcategory, and became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote. In the end, Vice President Kamala Harris’ $1 billion-plus war chest and much-praised “ground game” proved a boon to the college funds of Democratic consultants and not much else. “This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party,” one congressman told Punchbowl News on the morning after the election....

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has won the special election for Oakland mayor in a close contest over “moderate” Loren Taylor, giving “progressives” hope and defying efforts by Democrats to shift their party to the center. Lee, 78, defeated Taylor, 47, thanks to late-arriving postal ballots, after Taylor led on Election Night. She will take the helm of a city suffering from poor left-wing governance in the wake of a corruption scandal involving former mayor Sheng Thao, also a “progressive.” Oakland had recently begun to emerge from the shadows of San Francisco — its wealthier, glitzier neighbor across the Bay —...

On Friday’s broadcast of ABC’s “The View,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said that Democrats shouldn’t “change the fundamental policies of the Democratic Party to move to the right to try to address” their problems with working-class voters because “The problem in the last election was messaging.” Co-host Ariana DeBose asked, “[W]orking-class voters have historically been a Democratic stronghold, until the last election, when either they voted for MAGA or they stayed home. Trump dominated issues on, like, trade, immigration, no taxes on tips, that sort of a thing. Do you think that Democrats have lost touch with the working-class...

In the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, social media platforms are facing challenges in moderating the influx of content from leftists praising and glorifying his alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione. Business Insider reports that as the case of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, continues to unfold, social media platforms are grappling with the challenge of moderating the surge of pro-Mangione content filling up their sites. Platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Meta’s Threads have taken steps to remove posts that they deem as violating their content policies, which prohibit the glorification or...

During an extended edition of CNN’s “Laura Coates Live” that covered the reported assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, CNN International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson stated that the killing of Haniyeh means that his “moderate voice is off the table” because Haniyeh “was seen as a more moderate within Hamas.” Robertson said, “This is going to be an extreme test of the new President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian. This is a man who’s quite literally just taken up his job, who has quite literally just seen one of his principal regional interlocutors who came to congratulate him and witness...

The New York Times posted an op-ed in favor of Donald Trump on Monday under the headline, “The Secret of Trump’s Appeal Isn’t Authoritarianism.” The article is a shocking departure from the newspapers’ progressive cheerleading — and its readers’ preference for anti-Trump news. The author argued that Trump’s style is conventional, but his statements zigzag along the centrist, middle-of-the-road, this-and-that line favored by non-elite, non-ideological voters:

Two men were lynched in the West Bank on Friday after being accused of collaborating with Israel. The alleged "spies" were murdered in the street while others filmed the carnage. Their bodies were then hung from a tower as a large crowd cheered in approval.. Pro-Palestinian accounts on social media celebrated the killings by claiming it was an act of resistance, though no evidence has emerged to confirm the claims that the two men were actually spies working for Israel. ... That this happened in the ostensibly more moderate West Bank says everything about the possibility of a "two-state solution,"...

Perhaps the most moderate candidate in the field as of this moment is Donald Trump. If you want a Republican who won’t cut spending or start foreign wars, Trump is still your man. Added to this now is clearly a discomfort with the fight over abortion in the post-Roe environment. Trump’s main line of attack against Ron DeSantis is from the left. He’s hitting the Florida governor hard for his past support for reining in Social Security and Medicare. He’s also called the governor’s culture-war clash with Disney “so unnecessary” and “a political stunt,” while not entering the fray in...

Mo Brooks opposed the Biden-Pelosi Defense Bill Katie Britt supports. Here’s what Britt’s endorsing: Red Flag Gun Confiscation, Critical Race Theory, taxpayer paid sex change operations, renaming bases and even drafting women. Katie Britt’s a woke moderate who supported Doug Jones over Roy Moore, while sitting silently as Britt Demolition took down Birmingham’s Confederate Monument. Katie Britt. Too Weak. Too Woke. Wrong. For Alabama.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” that Republicans would “make sure Joe Biden is a moderate” if they retake Congress in the midterm elections. Anchor Dana Perino said, “I want to ask about the midterms next anyway. You have a great way of transitioning, sir. Inflation, gas, and groceries. this is on everybody’s mind. What would be different for Americans if Republicans win back the majorities in the House and Senate this year?”

In an interview with Fox News, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) pushed back against being labeled as a “moderate” and “Never Trumper” for saying that “the stakes are too high” to risk another Donald Trump presidency. Hogan told Fox News on Sunday, “With America on the wrong path, the stakes are too high to double down on failure.”

At the end of the day, senators care more about protecting themselves and their colleagues from unpredictable, inconvenient floor votes than they do about passing legislation.Official Washington’s conventional wisdom about the Senate filibuster is a fairy tale. It is utterly unmoored from the choices being made by individual senators, party caucuses, and the body as a whole. Every person who has ever told you that the mean, nasty, outdated legislative filibuster is the source of Senate gridlock and the obstacle to common-sense legislating in Congress has either swallowed, or is peddling, a lie. In an op-ed in the Washington Post...

Stone-Manning was linked to a 1989 Earth First! tree-spiking plot in Idaho. The commonly used eco-terrorism tactic involves inserting metal rods into trees to prevent them from being cut down and cause chainsaws of loggers to explode. ------------ In a 50-45 party-line vote Thursday evening, the US Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s controversial eco-terrorist-linked nominee Tracy Stone-Manning, who had previously endorsed population control, to head the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees millions of acres of federal land.

Progressives are imploring fellow Democrats to stop using the term "moderate" to describe some lawmakers in their party, arguing it inaccurately labels those holding up President Biden's agenda as merely staking out a middle-ground approach. The rhetorical pressure campaign is escalating over what liberals see as Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema's (D-Ariz.) lack of cooperation with their favored approach to passing social and physical infrastructure legislation simultaneously. That reluctance has prompted some on the left to cast the duo as intraparty obstructionists with a right-of-center posture on many top priorities. One House Democrat went so far as to...

President Joe Biden joked about once being thought of as a moderate, in an Oval Office meeting with leftist Democrats at the White House last week. “I used to be called a moderate,” he said, according to The Atlantic. The president signaled support with the fight led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and other leftists to get a $3.5 trillion spending bill through the House of Representatives, even as moderates are trying to block it or even cut the spending levels.

The political scene is evolving so quickly that I presume to offer some advice to President Trump: He can now win in 2024 by being the potential candidate of calm and moderation. The Democrats have become a Babel of contending extremists, suddenly and implausibly blaming the Republicans for defunding police forces and miraculously discovering the virtues of voter identification, after having denounced it for six months as the resurrection of Jim Crow. The utter moral bankruptcy of many elected Democrats was captured in the Texas state legislators fleeing the state in private planes, excitedly taking selfies of themselves unmasked and...

Americans increasingly view President Joe Biden as more far-left on policy now he is actually in office, with polling demonstrating a 10 percent surge since late 2019. Forty-six percent of Americans now view Biden as “too liberal” as of May. In December 2019, before Biden took office, only 36 percent said Biden was too liberal. LinkForty percent said Biden’s radical policies are “about right.” That is also down two percent from 2019. Only ten percent said Biden is “too conservative.”

'At his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we’ve had — and the public thinks he’s a moderate. That’s a winning strategy to me.' =============================================================== Democrats seem to believe Americans are so gullible and stupefied that friendly reporters can openly quote the left gloating about how they lie, steal, and cheat to get power. We saw it in February with a bombshell Time magazine article crowing about Democrats’ successful “conspiracy” to rig the 2020 election through aggressive lawsuits, a compliant corporate media, and the ability to deploy rioters. Big tech still chokes people on the right who make...

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) stated that he supports Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) over House No. 3 Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) amid a high-profile dispute over the party’s support for former President Donald Trump and its messaging moving forward.

With a 50-50 split in the United States Senate, there are two things Joe Biden cannot afford: Democrat defections and a filibuster. Senate rules require 60 votes for cloture to move on legislation, and recent years have turned the filibuster into an obstruction tactic by the minority party. Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from the very red state of West Virginia, has found himself in a very powerful position. His support or opposition to key legislation could make or break Joe Biden’s agenda in Congress. So, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at the fact that Joe Biden...