Free Republic

Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager, Robby Mook, made news when he told a court on Friday that Hillary personally signed off on sharing debunked allegations linking Donald Trump and the Kremlin-backed Alfa-Bank with the media in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Mook was a witness at the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been indicted by Justice Department special counsel John Durham on charges that he lied to the bureau's general counsel to hide his connection to the Clinton campaign. Mook testified that he and others at the Clinton campaign "weren't totally confident" regarding...

Less than five months ago, on January 1, 2022, Eric Adams was sworn in as mayor of New York City. Before that he was a Brooklyn Borough President, a member of New York State’s Senate, and a police captain. It’s certainly a nice local résumé but the emphasis is on “local.” Moreover, his short tenure as New York City’s mayor has been undistinguished. Nevertheless, Adams has announced that he is considering a presidential run in 2024. Only someone living deep within the leftist bubble would be so disconnected and egotistical to think that’s a logical thing to say. One of...

Bernie Sanders has spent the primary election season engaging in antisemitic dog whistles and endangering American Jews at a time when attacks on Jewish people are spiking across the country. It is unacceptable, and we must call him out for it. Sanders has a long history of making incendiary, ill-informed comments about Israel, casually accusing the Jewish State of horrible crimes, and then attempting to walk back or tone down the worst of his lies when people take him seriously. It is a technique he has passed on to some of his most famous acolytes, the notoriously fact-flippant anti-Israel (and...

The incessant media and progressive political campaign to claim that something called white supremacy is a major threat to Americans, especially African Americans, has been chillingly effective. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll reveals that three quarters of Blacks are worried that they or someone they love will be attacked by a white person. And nearly as many, 70 percent, believe that half or more of all White people “hold white supremacist beliefs.” Here is a screen of the relevant questions on the poll: Two-thirds of Black people believe that white supremacy is a bigger threat today than 5 years ago, and...

Elon Musk is proving to be an exceptionally interesting person. He’s been a Democrat throughout his years in America and still believes in anthropogenic climate change. He’s an extraordinary innovator who thinks “bigger” than almost anybody in the world. And like Donald Trump, who probably would have continued as a moderate if the left hadn’t gone “scorched earth” on him, Musk is responding to leftist attacks against him since he announced his plan to buy Twitter not by meekly retreating but by announcing that he intends to fight them all the way. Last week, within a day of Musk tweeting...

Scientists, it seems, are baffled by the unexplained appearance of the smallpox-like illness associated with rodents called "monkeypox" in the West which brings unsightly sores to the skin of those who are afflicted with it. Long a disease seen mostly in parts of tropical Africa, it has now made appearances in the U.S. continental Europe, Canada, and the U.K., all at approximately the same time. According to the Associated Press: BLONDON (AP) — As more cases of monkeypox are detected in Europe and North America, some scientists who have monitored numerous outbreaks in Africa say they are baffled by the...

The media and politicians are seeking to place illegitimate guilt on conservatives and Republicans for the heinous crime in Buffalo, New York, rather than on a mentally disturbed, hate-ridden, self-claimed leftist man. By contrast, when an attempted mass murder recently occurred in Laguna Woods, California, the media and politicians blamed no one but the suspect. And around Christmas last year, the media and politicians barely addressed either the race or racism of the subject in another attempted mass murder. With several multi-racial mass murders and attempted mass murders happening within a half year time span, it’s obvious that some politicians...

There are two things Nancy Pelosi has loudly and proudly boasted about for decades: Her absolute support for abortion and her staunch Catholicism. Of course, those two things are inconsistent because, even under the progressive Pope Francis, abortion remains anathema to the Church. With that in mind, it’s good news that, on Friday, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone had the courage to announce that, until Pelosi repudiates her support for abortion, she should not be admitted to Holy Communion in her home base of San Francisco nor should she present herself to receive the Eucharist. Nancy Pelosi is not just a lukewarm...

The past week has been a memorable one for officers everywhere, with National Police Week just concluded. This week is set aside to pay tribute to both active and fallen officers who have risked their lives to keep the peace. From a national event in Washington, D.C. to other tributes across the U.S., it's been a week where people have given thanks to these brave officers. I thought I would take the time to pay respects to a certain few who have risked life and limb for the safety of others. Whether they are with us or gearing up for...

In the wake of the SCOTUS leak, legions of militant feminists have thrown off their wino identities to put on their "activist" hats and usher in a "Summer of Rage" — on May 14, pro-abortion protesters participated in a "coordinated day of action dubbed Bans Off Our Bodies" to ensure that baby murder remain legally protected. The official Women's March quickly sponsored a new initiative to encourage others to "Pledge to Rage," while executive director Rachel O'Leary Carmona said: For the women of this country, this will be a summer of rage. We will be ungovernable until this government starts...

Wednesday morning began with Seattle gray here in the Soviet of Washington State but quickly morphed to Puget Sound splendor with the arrival of the Sun. To celebrate the occasion, I added a little Frost (Robert, that is) to my morning coffee. My well-worn volume naturally fell open to "Mending Wall". There, I read: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't like a wall,Thus springs to mind the issue of the propriety of government secrets —...

All rights, including freedom of religion, stem from freedom of speech. Without free speech, we have nothing. Zero. In complete disregard for this basic American value, free speech is regarded by the left as an outdated concept. Mark Steyn, author of America Alone, observed that we are turning into "one vast college campus," where there is one correct view and all others are prohibited. On such a "campus," there is no room for free speech. The latest manifestation of the left's distorted vision is the attempt to mandate the use of subjective personal pronouns. Two examples have just been exposed....

The monster 1,160 point stock drop on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Wednesday, the highest drop since the advent of the pandemic in 2020 was kind of a ... nothingburger for the Biden White House. According to the Washington Examiner: The White House downplayed Wednesday’s drop in the stock market and defended the Federal Reserve’s independence after interest rate hikes to curb high inflation. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,160 points in the worst day of trading since June 2020 as investors expect further rate increases despite assurances from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Many economists think the Fed...

Just when I thought the Biden administration was beyond shame, it (at least temporarily) pulled the plug on the Disinformation Governance Board, causing the buffoonish Nina Jankowicz to resign. I can't recall a speedier and more embarrassing belly flop of a government initiative than the announcement of this transparently Orwellian state organ, headed by a cringeworthy exhibitionist besotted with her own musical talent and purported wisdom. The astonishing lack of forethought in choosing Jankowicz as the arbiter of truth, when she is on the record affirming that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation (even the Washington Post and New York...

A rather peculiar moment occurred during the Congressional hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenal (UAPs, aka, UFOs) Tuesday (May 17). Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis) asked a question about the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base incident, and got a rather astonishing, shall we call it, non-reply. Scott Bray, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, responded that he knew nothing of the event, other than that it has received some publicity outside of official channels. Of course, we cannot expect that the foremost people leading the UAP investigations, especially at this initial stage, will know everything about every reported incident going back decades....

The Democrats and the liberal media were quick to blame the Republicans and conservative television commentators after a recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, where 18-year-old gunman Payton Gendron killed ten people at a supermarket. CNN referred to the gunman's "writings about his perceptions of the dwindling size of the White population" and linked it to the "replacement theory," which they claim Tucker Carlson and other prominent conservatives have pushed. Most other media outlets stuck with this narrative. Joe Biden condemned the gunman's "hateful, perverse ideology rooted in fear and racism" and called out those who have pushed the...

Hart Research Associates, a Democrat-run polling organization, released a poll taken from May 5 to 10 that asked voters about various issues as well as their general feeling about how the country is doing. The numbers are spectacularly grim for Joe Biden and the Democrat party generally. These numbers do two things: they bode well for Republicans taking over Congress in the midterm elections, and they make Democrat cheating more difficult because it's impossible for Democrats to have final outcomes that deviate too much from the mood of the country. It's not a random opinion to say Hart Research is...

The abortion issue deserves a deeper perspective than is currently being offered. Democrats insist that abortion is a human right but there’s something much more pragmatic going on here. Given how our welfare society is causing a population collapse, with people having fewer children, why is there a high-pressure campaign to force this brutal procedure into our legal system? It must be very important to produce so many dead babies—and it is. The reason is simple: money. Our society has reached the point at which, through lack of intellectual clarity and cognitive ability, Americans fail to see that, in many...

Since the new millennium, what I term "rearview-mirror parenting" has precipitated in parents a sobering self-appraisal of how successfully they raised their children. Myers-Briggs probably won't venture to offer online assessment tools for that because I doubt many people really want to know their percentile. With the advent of Facebook, life's complaints are a thing of the past anyway. Yet friends with tales from Worry Land are semi-privately sharing their concerns — some straightforwardly and others cryptically with furrowed brow. Here are some examples. Some years back, our financial adviser was going through a divorce. We asked how his children...

National outrage over George Floyd's death was particularly virulent in super-progressive ("woke") Vermont, where schools widely displayed the BLM flag beside the American flag. Unconcerned that this was a blatantly illegal government endorsement of an overtly partisan organization, proponents donned the "hear no evil from constitutionalists" earmuffs and prided themselves on agitating their neighbors by violating the Constitution. Many Vermonters have complained publicly that this is obvious abuse by government, but school officials have stonewalled, gaslighted, and suppressed all efforts to assert this axiomatic constitutional truth. The state's capital city of Montpelier shamelessly painted BLM on the road in front...