Free Republic

When the news broke that a young nonbinary girl in Oklahoma had died after being beaten in her school restroom, the outrage was instantaneous. The left and LGBTQ activists immediately targeted Republicans and conservatives, specifically LibsofTikTok's Chaya Raichik, to blame for the girl's death. They simply couldn't wait to turn this tragedy into political ammo. However, within a few days, as the school released a timeline statement, Dagny (Nex) Benedict's texts immediately after the incident were released and the Medical Examiner determined in a preliminary report that her death was not caused by injuries in the fight, the rhetoric should...

Twitchy US NEWS MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT CARTOONS Premium Content My Account × Search twitchy.com.... Here’s Andrew Sullivan vs. Christopher Rufo arguing over ‘trans strippers’ vs. British pantomime Posted at 5:53 pm on June 18, 2022 by Brett T. We can’t find it right now, but back when the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill was in the news, we did a post on conservatives arguing both for and against using the term “groomer” to describe those who wanted to teach sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. On April 6, Christina Pushaw posted a collage of headlines showing that...

At the end of 2016—and as they themselves declared, much in response to the election of Donald Trump as POTUS—Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as its 2016 “word of the year.” In other words, because Donald Trump had ascended to the White House, the largest university press in the world decided that much of the American electorate had simply abandoned the truth. Like-minded liberals the world over have decided that we who elected Mr. Trump must be taught a lesson. Such efforts demonstrate a particularly rich hypocrisy and blind ignorance of their own condition, for in their lust to rule their...

Journalism has never been better, thanks to these last few decades of disruption. So why does it seem to matter so little? Reflections on the media in the age of Trump. For the last two decades, the rules of political reporting have been blown up. And I’ve cheered at every step along the way. Not for me the mourning over the dismantling of the old order, all those lamentations about the lost golden era of print newspapers thudding on doorsteps and the sage evening news anchors reporting back to the nation on their White House briefings. Because, let’s face it:...

“Post-truth” has been announced as the Oxford Dictionaries’ international word of the year. It is widely associated with US president-elect Donald Trump’s extravagantly untruthful assertions and the working-class people who voted for him nonetheless. But responsibility for the “post-truth” era lies with the middle-class professionals who prepared the runway for its recent take-off. Those responsible include academics, journalists, “creatives” and financial traders; even the centre-left politicians who have now been hit hard by the rise of the anti-factual. On November 16, 2016 Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been selected as the word which, more than any other, reflects “the...

Experts manufacture whatever facts an activist, politician, or bureaucrat needs."Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) famously quipped. But when it comes to social and environmental problems nowadays, nearly everyone thinks he is entitled to his own facts, and an army of experts is on hand to manufacture and promote the carefully curated truths they require. The Progressive Era dream of empowering nonpartisan experts to solve social, economic, and environmental problems has failed spectacularly. What happened?Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger grapple with this question in...