Free Republic

“We have to make sure — this will sound political but we have to make sure that the Constitution wins the next presidential election,” Pelosi said at an event at Cornell University’s Institute of Politics & Global Affairs. “We can’t be worrying about well, how long is this going to take? Well, that will take as long as it does. And we will press the case so that in the court of public opinion. People will know what is — is right. But we cannot accept a second term for Donald Trump if we are going to be faithful to...

"Public broadcasting" is a comical phrase. Its audience is not the public. It is the left. PBS and NPR don't care one iota what everyone else thinks...even if everyone else pays a chunk of their budget through taxes. On the morning before the last presidential debate, Kelly McBride, NPR's "public editor" -- the person who is supposed to bring outside perspectives from the public into the NPR bubble -- tweeted, "Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story?" Below a link to her newsletter was a quote in bold type from Terence Samuel,...

A tweet from the National Public Radio Public (NPR) Editor on Thursday — on the day of the presidential debate — explained why the taxpayer-funded news outlet has been ignoring the growing scandal surrounding former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and the family’s business dealings in China. “Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story,” the tweet said. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste listeners’ and readers’ time on that stories that are just pure distractions.”...

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top general declined on Sunday to endorse either of the sudden announcements on Afghan troop withdrawals that came out of the White House last week. In an interview with NPR, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the agreement reached with Afghan and Taliban officials to leave Afghanistan was “conditions based,” adding that the United States would “responsibly” end the war.

Yesterday when I drove up to the country to visit my mother, I listened to NPR until I couldn’t take it anymore. There was a story about black Mormons. Normally I would have found that compelling, given my interest in religion. The Mormon religion used to be formally racist, but changed its teaching. What is it like to live as a black Mormon? That’s a story that interests me. Or normally would, but I swear, I turned off the radio. Why? It had nothing to do with the black Mormons. It had to do with NPR. I thought: they’re only...

These days, Miriam Robles spends a lot of time on the phone. In between her day job as an environmental justice organizer at Mi Familia Vota, a Latino political advocacy group that opposes President Trump, Robles phone-banks to register new voters. One new voter she's worked with is her 18-year-old brother, Kevin. "I was super excited to get him registered," she says. "I helped him fill out his primary ballot and made sure that he applied for [Arizona's] Permanent Early Voting List. For him, he is looking at this fiercely as something that he could do for his family." Robles...

My Facebook page is awash in “I told you so” posts from liberals pointing to a study purportedly showing that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota was a “super spreader” event that resulted in an additional 250,000 Wuhan virus cases. What they don’t realize is that there’s not a word of truth in that “study.” It’s made up entirely of extrapolations from distantly related and erroneous facts. As of September 2, NPR was reporting that, more than two weeks after an event that attracted almost 500,000 people, there were over 260 cases tied to the Sturgis Rally. (The phrase...

National Public Radio (NPR) conducted an interview on Sunday comparing President Donald Trump to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and tied the president to the kind of conspiracy theories that led to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. Tax-payer-funded NPR also implied that former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush also embraced similar fascist ideology: Historians have noted similarities between Donald Trump and Mussolini since before the 2016 election. Some of the racial justice protesters this summer have said they are fighting fascism in the form of President Trump. And the presence of antifa — anti-fascist — protesters at...

In an effort to contrast himself with Trump, Democratic presidential nominee former Vice-President Joe Biden ventured into riot-torn Kenosha to show off his "healing" technique. He started out by blaming Trump for the violence tearing apart the city and other cities throughout America. "Turn on any TV station and you'll find commentators condemning Trump for dividing this country," Biden said. "The opinion is almost unanimous that Trump is a divider and not a uniter. In virtually every city people are crying out for racial justice, but police are slaughtering black men in numbers that defy belief. Struggling to be heard,...

Joanne Rogers, the 92-year-old wife of the late Fred Rogers, blasted the president on Thursday, calling him a ‘horrible person’ who ‘seldom tells the truth.' ‘This man is pathologically ill. Mentally ill,’ Rogers told The Daily Beast. When asked what she would do if Trump won re-election, she replied: ‘I will probably go into mourning.’ ‘I can’t even imagine. I would feel so badly.’

National Public Radio is scrambling to do damage control this week after it promoted the views of a dangerously ignorant pro-looting activist who is also a gigantic anti-Semite. In late August, NPR’s Code Switch department published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting. In the interview, Osterweil was given free rein to spout several major falsehoods, drawing little to no pushback from NPR. “This Q&A with a provocative author did not serve NPR’s audience,” the newsgroup’s public editor, Kelly McBride, said Thursday. “On top of being wrong about recent events, the author’s characterization of the Civil...

A few days ago, NPR’s Code Switch interviewed antifa agitator Vicky Osterweil about Vicky’s book, In Defense of Looting. To call the interview ‘friendly’ would be a disservice, implying that NPR was favorable toward Osterweil from a sense of general benevolence. But that is not what the segment was. It was de facto propaganda ... ‘Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police,’ Osterweil said. ‘It provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t...

One of the common tropes we see in everyday news coverage is the claim that something said by President Donald Trump or his supporters is "without evidence." This is a stark factual claim. Sometimes, it's starkly wrong. The hashtag #DefundNPR started trending on Sept. 1 after NPR tweeted this to 8.3 million followers: "President Trump declined to condemn the actions of the suspected 17-year-old shooter of 3 protesters against police brutality in Kenosha -- claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense." Video evidence clearly shows a man holding a handgun approach the 17-year-old, Kyle Rittenhouse,...

The twisted logic of author Vicky Osterweil’s new book, In Defense of Looting, would be laughable, were it not so dangerous. Yet it is being taken seriously by NPR and other media outlets that should know better. In her interview with NPR featuring no pushback from the taxpayer-funded network’s interviewer, Osterweil says of looting: “You're mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it's just hurting insurance companies on some level. It's just money. It's just property. It's not actually hurting any people.” *snip* I also suppose Ms. Osterweil doesn’t consider the death of retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn to...

Beowulf: A New TranslationThe first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before. No, I don't care if you loved it/hated it, if it traumatized you, if it ruined and/or energized the English language for you, or ruined you for translations or whatever. I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this — this — version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing. A remarkable...

The former head of the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama and President Trump says he wishes the United States had taken more action against Russian meddling prior to the 2016 election and claimed the country is better prepared in 2020. Adm. Mike Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as NSA chief and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, spoke with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly on All Things Considered this week, saying that “I wish we had taken, broadly, more action prior to the election itself” in 2016. He said the U.S. was aware of Russia’s meddling efforts...

Authorities in Portland, Ore. may be racist in the way they define "riot," according to National Public Radio. The taxpayer-funded media outlet aired a report Thursday in which it claimed that state laws governing riot declarations "have roots in the state's racist history." An accompanying article by Oregon Public Broadcasting's Jonathan Levinson linked to a June interview with Black studies educator and writer Walidah Imarisha, who claimed the state's historically racist laws "absolutely" echo through Oregon's current governance. "Oregon began as a white-only state," Levinson wrote. "While it banned slavery at its founding, the state adopted strict Black exclusionary laws...

Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) is promoting a new book that justifies violent rioting. In "In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action," Vicky Osterweil argues that things like looting and arson are nothing more than pragmatic strategies for obtaining wealth redistribution and improving life for the working class.

As Republican Sen. Rand Paul left the White House on Thursday night, he was surrounded by a group of protesters and was escorted by police to a nearby hotel. The scene was captured on video by The Washington Post. The footage shows officers using their patrol bicycles to create a barrier between Paul, his wife and the crowd as the protesters walked around them and shouted "no justice, no peace," "justice for Breonna Taylor" and "you need to respond." Paul represents Kentucky, where police officers killed emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor, 26, in her Louisville home after they executed a...

For many loyal corporate media consumers the convention provided the longest slice of counter-programming they'd been treated to in years. Night one of the Republican National Committee’s first-ever remote convention kicked off Monday, rejecting Democrats’ hosted model for a faster-paced, single-location-centered event that beat its competitor in production value and rally atmosphere, although still stunted by the lack of a live audience. Activists and everyday Americans stole the show, telling moving stories of the fights, lessons, victories and tragedies that brought them to that stage, skillfully parlaying those stories into specific policies they support the president on. While some veteran...