Free Republic

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe...

Timothy Egan, liberal New York Times reporter turned left-wing Times columnist, filed "Not Like Us" for Saturday's paper, portraying the Republican field as avidly chasing the "red-faced" "immigrant-hatred vote," calling out not only Donald Trump but Ted Cruz, a Cuban-American. But first, Egan unveiled a supposedly clever historical sleight of hand designed to shame conservatives: They were criminals -- thugs and thieves -- a single ethnic group that filled the jails of big cities. “Scum unloaded on American wharves,” one speaker in Philadelphia said of them. Dirty, filthy, foreign. As for their children, they were “utterly ignorant of a place...

Since the tragedy in Tucson, the New York Times has started an all-out campaign for gun control, with a relentless number of pieces -- news, editorials, and op-eds. In its advocacy, even the news stories are heavily biased by selectively quoting only academics who support pro-gun control positions. These seemingly unbiased sources are then contrasted with opposing views from clearly biased people on the other side, such as an NRA spokesman or a right-wing politician. The implied conclusion: scientific evidence favors gun control, but self-interest stands in the way. Take two recent news stories by Michael Luo (here and here)....

In the midst of one of the most precipitous political crashes in the Mountain West, Sarah Palin made a mad dash into Boise on Friday, urging the election of a man who had plagiarized his campaign speech from Barack Obama, had been rebuked by the military for misusing the Marine uniform and had called the American territory of Puerto Rico a separate country. And why not? Vaughn Ward, the Republican congressional candidate from Idaho, has the dubious character trifecta of the Palin brand: bone-headed, defiant and willfully ignorant. When told that Puerto Rico was not a country, he said, “I...