Free Republic

Former President John F Kennedy’s only grandson Jack Schlossberg has vowed to leave social media “forever” after attacking his cousin RFK Jr., Megyn Kelly, Elon Musk, and more, in a flurry of incoherent posts that left some concerned about his mental health. “I’m sorry to everyone. I Was wrong. I’m deleting all my social media. Forever,” he wrote, before deleting his accounts. Schlossberg—whose mother Caroline Kennedy ripped first cousin RFK Jr. as a “predator” ahead of his confirmation hearing to be Health and Human Services secretary—faced backlash in January for seemingly mocking his cousin’s spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that...

Since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, a vocal subset of his supporters have been shouting online about the specter of voter fraud. On Tuesday night, however, as Trump’s 2024 victory came into focus, the noise died down. According to reports by The New York Times and Washington Post, social media accounts associated with election denial decided that, actually, everything was in working order. Thanks to their efforts, of course. “Shoutout to you all for keeping this election from being stolen this year, you are all heroes!“ one member of X’s “Election Integrity Committee” wrote. Speaking to the Times, Cleta...

George Clooney is facing a backlash from demoralized Democrats for demanding that Joe Biden step down from the White House race. The Ocean’s Eleven star urged Biden to quit in July, writing in the New York Times: “We are not going to win in November with this president.” Now embittered Democrats have blasted the 63-year-old actor for interfering in the botched 2024 presidential election campaign as the shattered party seeks explanations for how it all went so wrong. “Thank you George Clooney,” wrote journalist Joshua Hartley on X, with a pinned link to the Times op-ed titled, “George Clooney: I...

The editorial board of The New York Times just eviscerated Donald Trump in a single paragraph. The piece, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president during the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity. Rhetorically matter-of-fact, the piece succinctly lays out many of the reasons Trump’s critics think his second term would be disastrous for the country—the implicit point being that nobody really needs a lengthy review of all Trump’s actions; everyone already knows what he’s about. Here it is in full, with its original...

Idon’t care what you think of his politics—former President Donald Trump just struck one of the most iconic poses in U.S. history. His fist-raised salute of defiance is surely enough to win him re-election to the White House. Especially if the American people have to choose between a doddering incumbent and the man who got to his feet seconds after an assassination attempt and punched the air with blood trickling down his face.

...Speaking to reporters hours after a 28-year-old former student shot and killed six people at a private Christian school, Burchett contended that there were no solutions to the ongoing—and uniquely American—plague of mass shootings. “Three precious little kids lost their lives, and I believe three adults, I believe, and the shooter of course, lost their life too,” he declared. “So, it’s a horrible, horrible situation. And, we’re not gonna fix it.” Burchett continued: “Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said,...

In 2020, one hitherto unknown report accurately predicted what was to follow Biden’s election. It also laid out a plan to preserve democracy in an uncertain future. Weeks before the 2020 election, a secret 87-page document outlined in matter-of-fact language the threat posed by Donald Trump’s still-to-come campaign of election denial. The private paper — the existence of which has not been reported before — forecast with chilling confidence the likelihood of violence during the presidential handover and proposed a far-reaching set of political reforms to thwart Trumpism in the future. Americans remember that dark winter well. But the impetus...

Russian’s Vladimir Putin sparked the wrath of his own people by drafting hundreds of thousands to join the war against Ukraine, and now it seems some of those men were sent not to fight the so-called “enemy” but to “snuff out” any of the Russian troops who dare to retreat. Ukrainian intelligence on Thursday released an audio recording that appears to capture in disturbing detail the mayhem and internal rifts between Russian troops on the battlefield. In the five-minute clip, described as an intercepted phone conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife, the man says he and the other...

Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker is denying allegations that surfaced in the left-wing Daily Beast Monday that he paid for a woman’s abortion in 2009. Walker told Fox News’s Sean Hannity Monday night when asked if he knew who the unnamed woman was, “I have no idea, but it is a flat-out lie.”

Moscow planned to celebrated the annexation of huge swathes of Eastern Ukraine Friday but Putin’s party was wrecked by a lightning counter-attack that may have trapped thousands of his men in a key city supposedly now part of Russia. Ukrainian sources claimed that the strategic city of Lyman, which has served as a Russian military hub in Donetsk, has been encircled and supply lines cut. “Lyman! The operation to encircle the Russian group is at the stage of completion,” said Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko on Friday. The claim could not be independently verified but, if confirmed, it would be one...

Subpoenas went out Wednesday to local election officials and a former Republican Party chair in a rural Georgia county, with attorneys seeking to find out how a covert team of 2020 election conspiracy theorists were able to improperly access and copy a voting system server last year. The eight subpoenas, issued by attorneys representing voting rights activists in an ongoing lawsuit, were greenlit by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg. She expressed “great concern” last week about the unauthorized access of a voting system server following an investigation by The Daily Beast that revealed details about who was involved in this...

Hundreds of Ukrainian fighters trapped for more than two months in the vast Azovstal steel works have surrendered to their Russian besiegers after their commanders finally called time on the defense of Mariupol. A total of 264 soldiers, 53 of them badly wounded, were taken in a convoy of buses to two towns held by Russian-backed rebels in the Donetsk area, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday. It is unclear how many more are left in the steelworks, where as many as 1,000 fighters had been holed up in a network of underground tunnels and caverns in a medieval siege. (snip) Russia...

Desperate to avoid the shadow of Vladimir Putin’s bigoted regime falling over Ukraine, LGBTQ combat volunteers told The Daily Beast that members of the gay community had been rushing to prepare for this invasion of Ukraine in recent weeks. Now, they stand ready to fight back and resist a Russian occupation if Putin’s forces look to remain on Ukrainian soil. Veronika Limina, who lives in Lviv in the far West of the country, has been running a camp, teaching volunteer LGBTQ cadets basic combat and paramedic skills.

It’s all fun and games till they seize your Italian villa Soloviev learned this week that the latest sanctions imposed against the Kremlin’s regime and its accomplices would impact him personally. His access to properties in Europe is now being impacted, and perhaps his ownership as well. During Friday’s edition of The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, the host raged: “I was told that Europe is a citadel of rights, that everything is permitted, that’s what they said… I know from personal experience about the so-called ‘sacred property rights.’ With every transaction I was bringing paperwork demonstrating my official salary, income,...

Yes, perhaps the NBA’s most unassuming on-court legend believes in gonzo anti-vax conspiracies, and even appeared in an anti-vax documentary alongside RFK Jr.Most public-facing individuals who have indulged in vaccine denialism have not surprised me. Joe Rogan, for instance, is an MMA commentator who hosts a three-hour-long daily podcast where he browses the internet and conducts gormless interviews, nodding along to the sentiments of contradictory grifters. Of course that dude was going to “question the science” and seek “alternative treatments.” His whole life is one big alternate treatment-seeking journey that people pay him copious amounts of money to go on....

If you can't get the backing of former President Donald Trump, perhaps that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) will suffice. According to four "longtime Republican operatives" working on competitive GOP primaries nationwide, an MTG endorsement is "not only considered as welcome, but also as one that should be actively courted," The Daily Beast reports, noting the congressmember's power lies in her direct line to the former president, as well as her large network of grassroots donors. "It is stunning," one source told The Daily Beast. "Her popularity among much of the base and what she brings to a campaign...

The late-night comedy show took yet another surprising stance of late, criticizing the anti-fascist collective for its tactics. Occasionally, The Daily Show will surprise its (mostly left-wing) viewers by echoing the overheated rhetoric emanating from the right-wing echo chamber. This week, for example, the late-night comedy program defended Melania Trump’s decision to wear designer stiletto heels to tour the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas. (Of course, the tony first couple ended up comforting a grand total of zero survivors, and the best evidence the White House could muster to back Trump’s assertion that he’d witnessed “first hand”...

Switzerland has just legalized a new way to die by assisted suicide. The country’s medical review board has just given authorization for use of the Sarco Suicide Pod, which is a 3-D-printed portable coffin-like capsule with windows that can be transported to a tranquil place for a person’s final moments of life. Conventional assisted-suicide methods have generally involved a chemical substance. Inventor Philip Nitschke of Exit International told the website SwissInfo.ch that his “death pod” offers a different approach. “We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves,”...

While America had been rocked by riots and assassinations when I was a kid, the first big political development in America that shocked me was the election of Ronald Reagan. He was a boob, a Hollywood actor, not even a very good one. At the time, just out of college, I did not really understand the darker forces that were behind his election—the racism and greed, the anti-government ideology that was really just a formula to enable the richest among us to make more and the most racist states to chart their own course.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A group of white supremacists stormed through downtown Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening, bearing American flags and mildly menacing plastic shields while marching to the beat of a snare drum down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial [photo in Comment #1].