Free Republic

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

An anti-Trump blogger who presided over the demise of The Weekly Standard and now works at a neoconservative outfit called The Bulwark is leading a supposed “Republican” effort against Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. The Republican Accountability Project (RAP), which is funded by rich leftists and run by Trump-hater Bill Kristol, will reportedly spend two million dollars through its Political Action Committee (PAC) to defeat Lake in the upcoming November election. William Kristol is a founding director of Defending Democracy Together and chairman of the board for the Republican Accountability Project,” according to RAP’s website. Lake is herself a Trump-esque...

Dear Never Trumpers: The Cruise Is Over How a generation of "conservative" intellectuals finally turned into Democrats A lot has happened since my well known essay "The Collapse of the Never Trumpers" appeared in 2018 — and none of it has been good for that tribe of pundits or their garden gnome leader, Bill Kristol. In fact, most of them have seen their careers collapse so spectacularly that only Michael Avenatti could really understand. George Will has semi-retired to a life of boring students to death as a commencement speaker at small colleges. Jonah Goldberg and Steven Hayes used to...

I think Soros is pumping a lot of money into Political Opposition "Journalism." I remember when the Weekly Standard, failing and desperate for money and for a new buyer, started claiming that Soros had not meant he helped Nazis catalogue the art collections of Jews when he said he helped Nazis catalogue the art collections of Jews. George Soros seemed very interested in Reputation Management, and more determined than ever to impose socialism on America through spending his millions, and suddenly all sorts of people were very, very interested in helping him. Now Soros' paid minions have come to #Cancel...

(snip) -- So-called “conservative” commentator Bill Kristol reportedly has his never-ending campaign to take down President Donald Trump receive funding from a left-wing billionaire. Kristol, the editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, seems to have taken his never-Trump activities to another level, actively opposing Republican candidates and conservative causes through the group he founded, “Republicans for the Rule of Law.” But despite its name, the group seems to have no Republican donors according to a report by Julie Kelly of American Greatness, though there is one prominent benefactor: progressive billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay. One of Omidyar’s nonprofits, the...

Two possibilities arise from the guilty plea of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn’s plea marks the beginning of the end of the Trump administration. Flynn’s plea marks the end of the desperate hope that America will be delivered from the Trump presidency by impeachment and removal from office on the grounds that his campaign colluded with Russia to win him the 2016 election. There are other ancillary events one can easily imagine. For example, Trump could fire independent counsel Robert Mueller and/or pardon Flynn and others. But those moves would eventually make the end of his administration...

James Carville on Wednesday thanked "neocons" and praised the anti-Trump Lincoln Group for their attack ad "Mourning in America" that takes aim at the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Carville told MSNBC host Brian Williams that Democrats could learn from Never Trumper Republicans. The Democratic operative also praised "The Bulwark," a website founded by Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol for being mean and fighting hard. Kristol, one of the most vocal proponents of the Iraq War and War in Afghanistan, is one of the most visible faces in the Never Trump coalition. The Lincoln Project was founded by...

When Bill Kristol swore he would never vote for President Donald Trump, he meant it. The longtime conservative commentator took to Facebook today to admit that he is a Democrat—for now. In a tweet, the former editor-at-large of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, declared: "Not presumably forever; not perhaps for a day after Nov. 3, 2020; not on every issue or in every way until then. But for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now."

On Tuesday the New Yorker published Ronan Farrow’s expose of Harvey Weinstein, describing in detail the famous Hollywood producer’s long history of sexual abuse and assaults of actresses and other women in the movie industry. Coming on the heels of a New York Times article published last Thursday about Weinstein, the Farrow article seems to clinch the case against a major figure in the world of entertainment, media, and politics. The question is why, after years of protecting Weinstein, did the American press publish two pieces about him in less than a week? Was it because after stories detailing the...

Conservatives slammed the campaign to effectively end the Electoral College's role in presidential elections, saying that the National Popular Vote Compact circumvents the Constitution, saying it resembled President Barack Obama's abuse of the law through his extensive use of executive orders. "It is pretty startling," Bill Kristol, founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV this week. "If they want to make the case for the popular election of presidents and a Constitutional amendment, they should make the case.

There are not that many Never Trumpers anymore, though the media (and the remnant Never Trumpers) try to fool you into thinking so. The honest Never Trumpers, the ones who thought that this orange New York real estate developer with the succession of hot wives was not a real conservative and would betray us the first chance he got, have evolved. It turns out that Donald Trump is the most consistently and effectively conservative president since Reagan. The Never Trumpers who weren’t in on the scam noticed his track record of conservative success and morphed.Some became actively pro-Trump. I fit...

Former Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Steve Hayes and National Review's Jonah Goldberg will be joining forces to launch a new conservative media company, according to a Thursday report. The Axios report comes just three months after The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that was critical of President Trump that has been printing since 1995, announced it would be ceasing publication. The report says Goldberg and Hayes, who are currently seeking investors, plan "a reporting-driven, Trump-skeptical company that will begin with newsletters as soon as this summer, then add a website in September, and perhaps ultimately a print magazine." It adds that...

Jonah Goldberg is leaving National Review in the coming months to start a new conservative media company with Steve Hayes, who was editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard when its owner shut it down in December. Details: Goldberg and Hayes tell me they plan a reporting-driven, Trump-skeptical company that will begin with newsletters as soon as this summer, then add a website in September, and perhaps ultimately a print magazine. •Hayes, the likely CEO, and Goldberg, likely the editor-in-chief, are the founders. •Hayes tells me about the startup, which doesn’t have a name now: "We believe there’s a great appetite on...

The Democrats are pushing for straight-up infanticide, and they're emboldened enough to not even bothering hiding it any longer. When asked about the controversial late term abortion bill presented in Virginia's House of Delegates this week, Governor Ralph Northam said a fully developed child born in the third trimester would be kept alive, but the physician and mother would get to discuss and decide whether to take its life or not. "If a mother is in labor... the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the...

“In one of contemporary history’s intriguing caroms, European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter. Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal tenet of conservatism, the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of decisions in complex social situations are often larger than, and contrary to, those intended.” That’s the elephantine lead of George Will’s recent column, headlined “Today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen.” The real...

Jonah Goldberg wrote a column for National Review before departing for his Christmas holiday in Hawaii. Was it a retelling of a long ago night before Christmas, when a tiny Jonah in footy PJs couldn’t sleep for hope of a pony under the tree? No. It was a screed titled “Conservative Facts.” What set off Goldberg was a column in American Greatness by Chris Buskirk titled “Death of The Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right.” Goldberg speckles his efforts with pop culture references to things like Star Trek. Example: in this column, he says Washington “picked a wrong week...

Never Trumper John Podhoretz, a contributing editor for the now-defunct Never Trump magazine the Weekly Standard, tweeted on Wednesday that he wondered whether the U.S. economy tanking would lead to President Donald Trump losing enough support from Republicans in Congress that he would be removed from office.

Trumpism (if not Trump himself) has given oxygen to some of the ugliest impulses among us. Near the end of his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump laid out his theory of a vast globalist conspiracy. “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors,” Trump said. “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a...

I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth. I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and the lack of interest in ideas that go with the type. This week, Anschutz and McKibben murdered The...

“Wow, 19,000 Texts between Lisa Page and her lover, Peter S of the FBI, in charge of the Russia Hoax, were just reported as being wiped clean and gone,” Trump posted Saturday morning. Page and Peter Strzok, who worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probes into Trump’s campaign, reportedly texted each other about plans to “stop” Trump from winning the presidency. The Justice Department revealed Thursday that thousands of their messages to each other had disappeared, blaming the loss of data on a technological failure. “Such a big story that will never be covered by the...