Free Republic

Republicans have spent months and millions of dollars on an effort to push former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal supporters to change their minds about voting early. There is some evidence to suggest it’s working. With polls opening on Tuesday in Wisconsin, some form of early voting has commenced in all seven of the swing states. As of Monday, 17 million people nationwide had already cast a vote — and there are initial indications that Republicans are showing up to the polls or returning absentee ballots with more gusto than in recent years. In many cases, Republican officials and...

Editor's note: The Washington Free Beacon has exclusively obtained the final draft of the New York Times obituary for Yahya Sinwar. The Hamas leader and architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack is believed to have been killed Wednesday in a firefight with Israeli forces. Yahya Sinwar, a formerly incarcerated novelist and scholar known for his mastery of the Quran and Semitic languages, was martyred Wednesday while resisting Zionist bullets with his formidable brain in the southern Gaza Strip. He was 61. An Arabic Studies major and father of three, Sinwar assumed leadership of Hamas, the anti-colonial activist organization,...

On the first day of early voting, residents of western North Carolina weighed which candidates would most help their yearslong recovery.Carolyn Burgess, 71, drove on cracked and crooked roads in Black Mountain, N.C., to get to her polling place on Thursday, the state’s first day of early voting. Hurricane Helene had devastated her town, and its 8,500 residents were divided on the government response. Ms. Burgess agreed with the Republican she was supporting for president: “Trump is right,” she said, standing in line to vote at the Black Mountain Public Library. “FEMA isn’t doing enough.” Toward the back of the...

The far-left New York Times disgraced itself Monday by clearing sitting Vice President Kamala Harris of obvious and blatant plagiarism. Now the expert used by the Times to exonerate Harris says he did not do a full analysis. ... Christopher Rufo dropped the bombshell that Harris “plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal justice book, Smart on Crime.” ... With the help of Dr. Stefan Weber, an internationally famous “plagiarism hunter,” Rufo provided one jaw-dropping example after another of Harris directly copying and pasting paragraph after paragraph into her book that were written by others. She did this...

How far does your head need to be buried in the sand to convince yourself that Bidenomics has been absolved of all the disaster it wrought on the U.S. economy? Only New York Times economics pseudo-savant Paul Krugman appears to know. Krugman's desperate attempts to rewrite the pathetic story of Bidenomics continues to get worse with each new column he spits out on The Times’s homepage. “All the Good Economic News Vindicates Bidenomics,” read Krugman’s latest drivel-laced headline. “It’s hard to overstate just how good recent economic numbers have been,” pointing to a small string of meaningless anecdotes that get...

I am not a ballistics expert and don't play one on TV. I didn't even sleep in a Holiday Inn Express, so what I write here is based entirely on the analysis of others. But I am pretty sure they are right, given the balance of the evidence and the provenance of the opinion piece published by the New York Times. 65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza https://t.co/5P10AijNyh— Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (@afalkhatib) October 11, 2024At issue is a piece published by the Times in which 65 medical personnel who have worked in Gaza during the Israeli...

Republican vice presidential hopeful JD Vance calmly fended off questions from a reporter who suggested a crackdown on illegal immigration could exacerbate the housing crisis. Vance, 40, who has long contended that illegal immigration reduces the housing supply and therefore sends prices soaring, brushed aside any notion that illegal immigrants are paramount in building more houses. “About a third of the construction workforce in this country is Hispanic. Of those, a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working...

How the @NYTimes censors calls to violence (and actual violence) at anti-Israel protests The New York Times reported on the Gaza protests in Manhattan yesterday. The photo caption says, "Demonstrators blocked streets in Lower Manhattan to call for a cease-fire in Gaza on the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel." The "Cease Fire Now" sign is prominently highlighted as the main photo of the article. The New York Daily News also shows that same sign. But they show it as it was seen for most of the march - behind several other much larger banners that led the...

When I’ve covered the campaigns of women on presidential tickets, the question invariably arises: “Is she tough enough to be commander in chief?”With the bubbly Geraldine Ferraro, a lot of voters had their doubts.There was less worry with Hillary Clinton. She was a gold-plated hawk who voted to let President George W. Bush invade Iraq and persuaded President Barack Obama to join in bombing Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya.It is not surprising, with cascading conflicts, that Republicans are leveling the toughness question at Kamala Harris. This week the Trump/Vance campaign released an ad called “Weakness.” (Donald Trump also ran an ad called...

As a candidate for president once again, Donald Trump could not be clearer about his plans to use the Justice Department to seek revenge against his enemies. During his 2016 campaign, his rallies exploded with the chant “Lock Her Up.” Now Trump talks about ordering prosecutions against so many people that his threats have become commonplace. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” Trump posted online in September about election administrators, among others. It’s just one example in a long list that extends...

For much of the Biden administration’s first three years in office, migration surged at the Mexican border. Administration officials frequently argued that the problem was beyond their control...Then, starting in December, when the issue threatened President Biden’s re-election, he began a crackdown. The traffic of people crossing the border plummeted. Today, it remains near the lowest point since 2020 and not so different from levels during parts of the Trump and Obama administrations. This week, the Biden administration imposed tough new rules....Border crossings reached record levels this past winter, with almost 250,000 migrant arrests in December alone. it pushed Mexico...

Some politicians enjoy mixing it up with crowds on the campaign trail, while others revel in fund-raising.JD Vance loves debates.Mr. Vance, the first-term Republican senator from Ohio, will get his moment on the most prominent stage of his fledgling political career on Tuesday, when he represents Donald J. Trump’s presidential ticket in a matchup against his Democratic rival, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.It’s a moment he has been anticipating for months.Mr. Vance spoke eagerly about the vice-presidential debate shortly after being named to Mr. Trump’s ticket in July. When President Biden dropped out of the race, Mr. Vance reacted with...

Former President Donald Trump surged ahead by five points in Arizona, maintained a four point lead in Georgia, and held steady in North Carolina, according to New York Times/Siena College presidential election polling on Monday. Seven states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina — will decide the presidential election, political experts believe. If Trump wins one or more of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, Kamala Harris’s path to obtain 270 electoral votes becomes almost impossible.

Readers of the New York Times know the news may change, but the message is always the same in their paper of record. It will play up every Republican kerfuffle and downplay Democratic scandals while presenting the choice between the two parties as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Now clad in rainbow colors, the Gray Lady will, in the name of inclusion, celebrate a wide range of heretofore marginal behaviors – homosexuality, polyamory and transgenderism – while sowing divisions by separating Americans into warring camps based on race, gender, and ethnicity.The transformation of the Times, and much of...

The New York Times encouraged a reader last week to “help” a 97-year-old woman with advanced memory loss — who is “becoming nearly impossible to communicate with” — to complete her ballot. “When the situation is hazy, my inclination would be to err on the side of helping someone to vote, because voting is such a central form of civic participation,” wrote the Times’ “Ethicist” Columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah. The Problem A reader wrote the Times, saying the grandmother has “advanced” Alzheimer’s and hearing loss. The reader wanted to know if it would be “unethical” to help the elderly woman...

What is it about the New York Times op-ed page and every crackpot idea under the sun. Somehow, they always find each other. So now we have their latest: kill your air conditioner to save the planet The Times found some guy in Salina, Kansas, who praises going without and says he does it himself: "Whenever people ask me how my wife and I have endured 25 Kansas summers almost entirely without air-conditioning, I like to say we do it because air-conditioning makes it too hot outside. We’re not ascetics, Luddites or misers; we just want to keep living comfortably,...

Billionaire Elon Musk slammed a New York Times writer that wrote an article which claimed the U.S. Constitution can be considered one of the "biggest threats" to the country. The Times' book critic Jennifer Szalai claimed that "The United States Constitution is in trouble" due to the fact that former President Trump was able to become president through the Electoral College. "Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it," Szalai said. "The document that’s supposed to be a bulwark against authoritarianism can end up fostering...

Attitudes on abortion are deeply entrenched and have motivated voters across the American political landscape for decades. But in a post-Roe world, with abortion access sharply limited or at stake in several states, voters who want to protect abortion rights are increasingly energized. Although the economy remains the No. 1 issue for voters, a growing share of voters in swing states now say abortion is central to their decision this fall, according to New York Times/Siena College polls earlier this month. This represents an increase since May, when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic presidential nominee. And by a...

Defamation isn't always easy to prove in court. If it were, the New York Times and the Washington Post would be launching GoFundMe pages and holding bake sales to pay off their legal bills. Most prominent Republican candidates and politicians probably have at least a dozen legitimate defamation lawsuits against various mainstream media outlets that they'd file right away if they had a decent chance of winning. With publications like the Times and WaPo, the line between editorial opinion and journalism was obliterated years ago. They're not news organizations, they're one big op-ed. The editorial boards of both use their...

Kamala Harris is beginning to offer the first definitive clues of a new economic vision — one with the potential not only to offer a unifying vision for the Democratic Party but also to serve as the foundation for a governing philosophy that crosses party lines. In recent years, both parties have broken with a markets-know-best default setting. The question is, what comes next? One influential school of thought, advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, argues for increasing the supply of essentials such as housing, health care and clean energy, in part by using government to break the choke...