Free Republic

The Trump administration is open to arresting Supreme Court judges, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told it on Monday morning. “You guys arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit judge for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get away,” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Leavitt. “As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?” “That’s a hypothetical question, again I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at or individual cases. But let’s be clear about...

Blame Hollywood’s “unwokening” and the extraordinary rise of right-wing podcasters on slop: intellectually bereft, emotionally sterile content that’s shaped by data and optimized for clicks. There’s never been a better representation of Donald Trump than those generated by AI; no human being has ever been more suited to the medium. Even the images supplied by his fans exaggerate what makes him strange and terrifying to the rest of us: the strangely flat yet voluptuous contours of his face, the persnickety downward pull of his lips, that hair, that skin. At least the AI version can be made to do anything...

Al Gore is back in the spotlight with his new documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel, making him a top target again of the right-wing counter-intel complex. On Thursday, the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research released a report, “Al Gore’s Inconvenient Reality,” that paints the former vice president as a hypocritical climate advocate. In near-creepy detail, NCPPR author Drew Johnson maps Gore’s home in Nashville, Tennessee, down to the number of windows, and concludes that “Gore’s own home electricity use has hypocritically increased to more than 21 times the national average this past year with no sign of slowing down.”

El Salvador won’t let Senator Chris Van Hollen have any contact with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who is being unlawfully detained in a megaprison in the country. Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador Wednesday in search of answers about Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts. The father of three was deported last month due to an “administrative error” by the Trump administration, which continues to claim Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, despite there being no evidence to prove it.

Trump may have accidentally confessed to insider trading and market manipulation on Truth Social. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” the president wrote on Wednesday, a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for China, yet another market-shocking announcement that caused stocks to shoot up. Insider trading is a very illegal practice that involves using special or private information to give yourself an advantage in buying and selling stocks. Someone with knowledge of an economic policy change that would cause the markets to shoot back up would be posting about how great...

...statues of treasonous Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Albert Pike will soon be returning. Their statues were removed nationwide after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

Multiple vaccine projects have been paused by the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy paused a multimillion-dollar project to create a new Covid-19 vaccine in pill form on Tuesday, and the Food and Drug Administration canceled an advisory committee meeting on updating next season’s flu vaccine, an advisory committee said Wednesday. The Covid project was a $460 million contract with Vaxart to develop a new Covid vaccine in pill form, with 10,000 people scheduled to begin clinical trials on Monday. Of that, $240 million was reportedly already authorized for the preliminary study. Advertisement “While...

Donald Trump’s inaugural address Monday showcased an unusually refined version of the MAGA leader on the cusp of his presidency: it toiled over the economy and immigration, promising to bring America into a “golden age.” But Trump’s unscripted second speech to a throng of his supporters served as his cutting room floor, sharing all the gripes that his script writers implored him not to dish. Seemingly unrehearsed and riddled with grammatical errors, Trump’s second speech of the day was remarkably more like him. Trump ripped into a cohort of his so-called enemies, torching former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for supposedly...

The far-right is rejoicing at Daniel Penny being found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the May 2023 New York City subway strangling death of Jordan Neely. Penny, who is white, put Neely, a Black man, in a chokehold for six minutes while other train passengers captured the incident on film. Penny’s lawyers argued that he believed Neely was a volatile, mentally ill man who posed a threat to the public. Neely was unarmed and had a muffin in his pocket, but Penny quickly became a hero to the right wing. Right-wing figures, including one Donald Trump staffer, immediately...

Of all the promises, from quixotic to horrifying, that Donald Trump has made about the next four years, the one that seems least likely to be fulfilled is his vow to “defeat anti-Semitism.” He has nominated a slew of cranks who have dabbled in the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world. Over the past decade or so, pernicious lies about Jewish villainy have drifted into the mainstream of American life. That’s a fact Trump acknowledges when he talks about his plans to “defend Jewish citizens in America.” But he tends to focus on...

Potential Trump AG Mike Davis made a horrifyingly violent threat to take revenge. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/POOL ============================================================== Potential Trump cabinet appointees are trying to get into the president-elect’s good graces in disturbing ways. Mike Davis, a right-wing activist considered a leading candidate for Trump’s attorney general, on Wednesday threatened to (legally) “drag their dead political bodies through the streets” and burn them, referring to enemies of Trump and the right. ============================================================= The violent threat came after Davis appeared to blame Democrats for the assassination attempts on Trump. Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch who calls himself “Trump’s...

They can't handle truth. Have you ever heard of Howard Lutnick? You most likely will soon. Howard W. Lutnick is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the venerable financial services firm. He was one of the lesser-noted speakers at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday — you know, the one where, if you believe MSNBC, jackbooted Trump supporters were goose-stepping around and shouting “Sieg heil!” in terrifying unison when a Charlie Chaplin-mustachioed Trump appeared and gave them the straight-arm salute. While all that is lurid fantasy and the left’s latest shameless smear of the Bad Orange Man, Lutnick really did...

In his new book, Donald Trump threatens billionaire and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with prison. Save America, set to be published next week, includes a photograph of Zuckerberg and Trump at the White House. Underneath the photo, Trump wrote that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me” and “bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” Trump went on to pin some of his election conspiracies on Zuckerberg, and gave him a serious warning. “He told me...

Jealousy is a heck of a drug. It can, for example, make a reporter say -- with a straight face -- one of the richest men in the world is 'simply not very good at anything.' Coming from a publication like The New Republic, that's both laughable and ironic: Behind all of Elon Musk’s bloviating and attention-seeking is a small man who is simply not very good at anything. https://t.co/KNEvksGxLV — The New Republic (@newrepublic) August 24, 2024 Why do they say Musk isn't good at anything? Well: Not so long ago, Musk was seen by many as a good...

We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face. Today, we at The New Republic think we can...

The New Republic has received massive backlash for using a cover image of Donald Trump as Hitler for a piece that argues America will be plunged into fascism if he wins the election.We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, , he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would...

The House speaker’s comments wrecked one of the far right’s most ridiculous, reprehensible tropes.It was a remarkable moment: After introducing a package of bills that includes military aid to Ukraine, Mike Johnson flatly told reporters on Wednesday that enabling Ukraine to defend itself is in the best interests of America and the world. This surprised a lot of people who had wrongly assumed the House speaker was effectively functioning as a stooge for Vladimir Putin—and Donald Trump—and would thus slow-walk Ukraine aid to death before ever allowing a vote on it.Johnson’s new stance has attracted a good deal of positive...

Fox News is amplifying a racist conspiracy on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. Because of course it is. At about 1:40 a.m. EST on Tuesday, a 1,000-foot cargo ship careened past large concrete obstacles ahead of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, colliding with one of its structural pillars and toppling it into the Patapsco River. Mere hours later, conservatives were already hurling their racist conspiracy theories against the wall to see what sticks. In an early morning broadcast, Fox Business attempted to tie the horrific situation—which was deemed a developing mass casualty event by the Baltimore City Fire Department—to...

NBC raised eyebrows Friday when it announced that former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel will join the network as an on-air contributor. McDaniel, who stepped down from the RNC at the start of this month, will provide conservative political analysis on NBC and its affiliate MSNBC. She makes her on-air debut on Sunday. NBC News political coverage chief Carrie Budoff Brown explained that McDaniel was chosen because she can provide “an insider’s perspective on national politics and the future of the Republican Party.” That insider knowledge is apparently enough for NBC to overlook the rest of McDaniel’s history. Although...

Ron DeSantis’s struggles on the campaign trail have eroded his influence back home in Florida, and even once-close allies are revolting against his control. DeSantis was crowned early on as the natural successor to Donald Trump: A demagogic culture warrior, but younger and more disciplined—he was a figure who could appeal, in theory, both to MAGA diehards and Trump skeptics. When he launched his campaign, he was fresh off a series of victories at home. The Republican-controlled Florida state legislature had helped him pass multiple draconian measures limiting LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, and abortion access. While candidates backed by Trump...