Free Republic

Think back to 2016 and the campaign then. Donald Trump used to recite a poem about a woman who took a dying snake into her house and nursed it back to health. The snake did become healthy and then immediately whipped around and bit the woman. As she breathed her last breath, the woman asked the snake, "Why did you do this?" "Well, because I'm a snake," was the reply. "That's what we do." All of which somehow reminds us of disgraced former National Security Adviser John Bolton. Republicans in Washington might seem shocked to discover that Bolton has turned...

With all the talk about Hunter Biden these days, one might get the impression that he is the only child of a politician to benefit from his parents’ position and the last name they inherited. Before Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, got his strange but lucrative deal to sit on the board of energy company Burisma Holdings in Ukraine to the tune of $50,000 a month, there was Chelsea Clinton, the only child of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was similarly rewarded with jobs and board positions...

We write as historians to express our strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project. The project is intended to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes. The Times has announced ambitious plans to make the project available to schools in the form of curriculums and related instructional material. We applaud all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history. Some of us have devoted our entire professional lives to those efforts, and all of us have worked hard to advance them. Raising...

Stefan Halper is a crooked Deep State spy and there is ample evidence that proves this. We reported in April 2019 that the far-left New York Times finally mentioned Stefan Halper as an individual of interest in the Russia hoax. We identified Halper nearly a year earlier as a spy for the corrupt Obama administration. ... you get to the 14th paragraph of its article where The New York Times admits the FBI had a spy targeting and meeting with Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos. ... Now we have adequate evidence that not only did Halper spy on numerous Trump...

[Headline not true according to article] Navy Secretary Richard Spencer threatened to resign if the Navy was not allowed to go through with an administrative review board next month to determine if Eddie Gallagher could remain a SEAL, multiple Navy officials confirmed to Fox News. Earlier Saturday, The New York Times reported that along with Spencer, Naval Special Warfare (NSW) Commander Rear Adm. Collin Green also threatened to resign if the Navy carries out the request of President Trump to restore Gallagher’s rank to chief petty officer after he was demoted last summer. Gallagher was found not guilty of murdering...

Another insane opinion piece from the NY Times: Impeachment is a constitutional procedure that should be reserved only for extraordinary times with the most extreme examples of abuse of power by a president. That is why, in our country’s history, only two presidents have been impeached. But this is one of those times. The evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump is overwhelming. The impeachment inquiry has been conducted so far in a sober, responsible way. As Wednesday’s hearing made clear, the witnesses are credible and clear, and the story they tell is alarming. All members of Congress are now compelled...

Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk.. The New York Times on Thursday published a remarkable piece that essentially acknowledged the existence of an American “deep state” and its implacable hostility to Donald Trump. ... American foreign policy has become the almost exclusive domain of unelected bureaucrats impervious to the views of elected officials—even presidents—who may harbor outlooks different from their own. This is a big deal because, even in today’s highly charged political environment, with a sitting president under constant guerrilla attack, few have been willing to acknowledge any...

Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

The short-lived new "allegations" against Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh were so weak that Senate investigators didn't follow up on them during the confirmation process, author Carrie Severino said Monday. "This is the weakest of the weak type of allegations. It's really a shameful attempt to reignite these smears against Judge Kavanaugh that are utterly baseless," said Severino, the founder of the Judicial Crisis Network, on "Fox & Friends." Late Sunday, the New York Times walked back an explosive report about a resurfaced allegation of sexual assault by Kavanaugh from his college days. The Times piece by Robin Pogrebin...

PopeWatch: Delusional An example of how some people view the world through fact altering goggles:In a fascinating exercise in fact-flipping, Times writer Mattia Ferraresi made the assertion Thursday that, unlike his predecessors, Pope Francis has refrained from pronouncing on political issues, leaving a vacuum that contrary voices have filled.Francis’ approach “represents a sharp break with the policies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who attempted to keep the church’s views relevant in societies, including Italy, that have grown increasingly secular,” Ferraresi declares in an article titled “How the Catholic Church Lost Italy to the Far Right.”Mr. Ferraresi makes the...

In 2012, I sat in a therapist’s office in a veterans’ hospital, defeated. My hands trembled and I couldn’t make eye contact as the words escaped me. I knew saying it out loud would turn my world upside down. I would be giving up my life, my family and the hyper-masculine persona I had spent decades creating. Then I said it: “I’m transgender.” My conversations with that therapist led me to the medical intervention that ultimately helped me to find my authentic self. My doctor explained that starting hormone replacement therapy would make me infertile and, without hesitation, I signed...

Sooo…this is messed up. The New York Times recently published a piece called “Madonna at Sixty,” written by Vanessa Grigoriadis. It explores her ever-changing public persona and such. It’s kind of the typical fluff piece you’d imagine the New York Times would put out about a celebrity: The night before the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas in May, Madonna was sitting in the arena attached to the MGM Grand hotel, staring at a double of herself. The double, who was standing on the stage many yards away, was younger and looked Asian but wore a similar lace minidress and...

A Jewish rabbi is calling out a Muslim lawmaker -- who has been accused of anti-Semitism -- and the New York Times for pushing the notion that Jesus was a Palestinian. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate and director of Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called out Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. after she retweeted a tweet from Omar Suleiman, an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies at Southern Methodist University, who said a Palestinian relative asked him why the "Christian right in America largely supports their oppression."

The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps. Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said. The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on...

President Trump announced that Republicans would not present a health care overhaul proposal until after the 2020 election, punting on coming up with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, which the administration is currently fighting in court to invalidate. The issue now will dominate presidential campaigns in the months leading up to the 2020 election. Mr. Trump announced his new timetable in a thread of Twitter posts late Monday, putting off one of his biggest campaign promises until, the president hopes, he is re-elected. “Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesn’t work,” began Mr. Trump, who went on to add that...

I often wonder who didn’t love Donald Trump. I often wonder who left an affection void that he has tried to fill by winning attention, which is not the same thing. He’s turned his life into a marketing strategy. As Michael Cohen said in his testimony on Wednesday, even the presidential campaign was a marketing campaign to build the Trump brand. In turning himself into a brand he’s turned himself into a human shell, so brittle and gilded that there is no place for people close to him to attach. His desperate attempts to be loved have made him unable...

For the judicial icon otherwise known as R.B.G., Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s past few roller-coaster months have included being lionized by Hollywood, laid low by cancer surgery, and most recently issuing one of the Supreme Court term’s more important decisions, placing limits on civil forfeiture, within a day of returning to the bench. People who know almost nothing about the court and can’t name another justice know her name. In a celebrity-saturated age, she is one of the culture’s most unlikely rock stars. Yet for all the accolades that have come her way, I’m willing to bet that among the...

The special counsel Robert Mueller will apparently soon turn in a report to the new attorney general, William Barr. Sure, there is still a lot of activity, including subpoenas, flying around, but that shouldn’t stop Mr. Mueller. The report is unlikely to be a dictionary-thick tome, which will disappoint some observers. But such brevity is not necessarily good news for the president. In fact, quite the opposite. For months, the president’s lawyers have tried to discredit Mr. Mueller and this report, but their efforts may have backfired. A concise Mueller report might act as a “road map” to investigation for...

There is considerable skepticism among Democratic leaders, and even some of Mr. Bloomberg’s close allies, that he will actually pursue the presidency, because he has entertained the idea fruitlessly several times before, and shown little appetite for the rough-and-tumble tactics of traditional partisan politics. A campaign would require him to yield his imperial stature as a donor and philanthropist, and enter a tumultuous political and cultural climate that could make him a highly incongruous candidate for the Democratic nomination. Though he has received a hero’s welcome from Democrats for his role in the midterms, Mr. Bloomberg is plainly an uncomfortable...

In the fall of 1968, Donald J. Trump received a timely diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that led to his medical exemption from the military during Vietnam. For 50 years, the details of how the exemption came about, and who made the diagnosis, have remained a mystery, with Mr. Trump himself saying during the presidential campaign that he could not recall who had signed off on the medical documentation. Now a possible explanation has emerged about the documentation. It involves a foot doctor in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and a...