Free Republic

On the path to voting Donald Trump out of office, the Left’s media machine would like to suppress revelations about the Biden Crime Family. As early as 2001, Senator Joe Biden set up his son, Hunter, with a lucrative ‘consulting’ agreement with a large bank. The agreement called for Hunter to receive $100,000 per year, concurrent with Joe, ‘the big guy,’ helping the credit card industry to attain passage of a bill to hamper consumers’ ability to file for bankruptcy.  Reports also are emerging that Biden had been sugarcoating huge payments to family members long before that, added to the...

The Great Barrington Declaration offers a way forward, but do most Americans have the courage to risk their sense of security to maintain enduring liberty?In an era in which every dubious decision is “due to COVID-19,” we hear policymakers repeating the same mantra: “If just one life is saved,” it’s worth relinquishing our freedoms, our sanity, and possibly our future. More often than not, this ethical dilemma is presented without mentioning the obvious trade-offs or long-term consequences.Imagine you’re an administrative dictator. If you could “save just one life” — or even thousands — by crippling the youth, vaporizing a million...

Unicoi County, Tennessee, is a dark-red county in a dark-red state. It’s a beautiful, mountainous place with low population density and an even lower probability of spotting a liberal. The place is as ‘conservative’ as anywhere in the country, yet its feckless mayor just extended a countywide face-covering mandate for yet another month. Though you could count the daily coronavirus cases throughout the entire county on one hand, if not a finger or two, reasons cited were - wait for it - ‘schools fully opening’ and ‘flu season.’ I’m only picking on Unicoi because I live nearby and nearly lost...

It was one week after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 when envelopes containing a white powder began showing up at random locations in four states; among them, a newspaper office in Florida, the Washington D.C. office of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, NBC News and the New York Post. The white powder turned out to be anthrax spores, engineered to be readily dispersed and inhaled – a potentially deadly bioterrorism weapon.Anthrax infections are treated with antibiotics. There are two that are most effective; ciprofloxacin and doxycycline.At that time, I was the CEO of a small pharmaceutical company that represented foreign...

The CDC wants Americans to have 'virtual' Thanksgivings, staycation holidays, and gatherings with only your household to avoid spreading COVID-19. But loneliness is a scourge, too. Make this the most joyous holiday season yet. In a nation fatigued by social distancing and dying to escape loneliness, the inimitable Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued recommendations for how to have a “safe” holiday season. Spoiler: A CDC-compliant season will not be “the most wonderful time of the year.”Our national public health experts have steered us confidently through some murky waters. After all, how else would we know that public...

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump called off negotiations over a stimulus bill until after Election Day. Blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's outlandish demands for the delay. Pelosi has been urging Republicans to pass her $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill to "crush the virus so that we can open the economy and open our schools safely." The truth is her bill would do almost nothing to achieve those goals. Worse, though Pelosi isn't telling you, the bill rewrites election law for 2020, barring voter ID requirements, forcing states to count absentee ballots that arrive as late as 10 days after Election...

Source: Official White House Photo by Tia DufourOver 3,500 doctors and health care experts just came together as one to plead for the world to end the punishing and unneeded lockdowns and replace them with “Focused protection.” Included on this growing list of sane, unbiased, and compassionate experts are doctors from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Prior to these courageous infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists authoring and signing The Great Barrington Declaration to warn of their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” I had spoken with two doctors who strongly...

The news that President Trump has tested positive for WuFlu certainly reminds us racist-sexist-homophobe-white-supremacist-systemic-racists what is at stake in America. It is that, without President Trump, we non-wokies are naked before our enemies. Don’t leave us, Mr. President! Not yet! We need you! No doubt the president will make a swift recovery with the help of the knowledge that six months of the epidemic has given us. But it makes you think. What happens after Trump leaves? Will the Republican Party continue his populist nationalism? Or will it sink back into the Swamp? Will people that violate wokie norms be...

Have you ever noticed that when Democrats catch the ‘rona it’s a simple, unbiased news headline, but when it happens to Republicans it’s a “cautionary tale”? Consider this straightforward CNN headline last month about Ralph Northam: “Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam tests positive for Covid-19.” Now, compare that to when Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a fan of freedom, personal responsibility, and getting things back to normal as soon as possible, tested positive: “This Republican governor refused a mask mandate. Then he got coronavirus.” These people seem to believe that if Parson had simply put a mask mandate in he wouldn’t have...

Inside one month to the 2020 election, an already circuitous plot takes on even tighter twists as President Trump rides out a hospital stay following his COVID-19 diagnosis. Current polls to the contrary, the November result has always been unpredictable, and now the winner is even harder to discern. An election that was once an overall referendum on the Trump record is now tilted by a variety of factors that will reveal themselves in the coming days. The realm of possibilities begins with the president’s actual health. If he rebounds quickly, he is on that second debate stage having thrown...

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton on Sunday told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo that the three positive coronavirus cases in the Senate will not prevent Judge Amy Coney Barrett from being confirmed to the United States Senate. “Your colleagues have tested positive. It looks like it was that Amy Coney Barrett gathering at the White House to introduce her to lawmakers. That really was the place where so many people were exposed.” Cotton said he's been in contact with his colleagues who have tested positive or are in quarantine and, to the best of his knowledge, everyone is either asymptomatic or has...

Officials for the City of Cleveland said 11 cases of the Wuhan coronavirus could be traced back to the Sept. 29 presidential debate. The cases were a result of debate pre-planning and set-up, with the majority of cases impacting out-of-state travelers, particularly debate organizers and members of the media. The news comes after President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for the virus. Out of an abundance of caution, the president was transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday. "As the cases involve people in and out of state some of whom may be...

In an interview with Fox News Friday morning, Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Wuhan coronavirus task force, reassured Americans there is no reason to panic over President Trump's contraction of the disease.   Dr. Scott Atlas, a special adviser on coronavirus to President Trump, said Friday he expects the president and first lady to make a “complete, full and rapid recovery” after the two tested positive for COVID-19, adding, “there is zero reason to panic.”During an exclusive interview with Fox News, Atlas said the novel coronavirus is an infection “that is very difficult to avoid.”“It is no...

Political Power Ann Hornaday wants readers to believe in a fabricated dichotomy in which well-meaning liberals focus on culture to change hearts and minds while conniving conservatives focus on politics. “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier,” said Baltimore satirist H.L. Mencken. As a daily reader and subscriber to the Washington Post, I sometimes fear its residual effect on my intellect. Such was the case reading WaPo film critic Ann Hornaday’s Sept. 21 column, in which she claims the left’s aggressive cultural strategy hasn’t resulted in significant political victories.The left, says Hornaday,...

Imagine the panic our medical overlords, hand-wringing politicians, and a complicit media could create if they started treating the common rhinovirus like they are treating COVID-19 right now. For starters, maybe they change the name to something super-scary sounding, like COVID-20 (shudder). Then they start shouting from the hilltops about how deadly this thing is. To prove it, they start a massive ultra-sensitive testing regime whereby anyone with a scratchy throat is gaslit into getting a test, for which tens of thousands a day test positive and are subsequently quarantined for weeks. Finally, anyone who tests positive and dies, no...

After nearly one year, questions remain unanswered about whether the Chinese coronavirus was natural or man-made and whether its release into the world was accidental or malicious.Chinese scientist Li-Meng Yan has stirred up media attention with her claim that the coronavirus connected with COVID-19 is the result of Chinese bioengineering. SheÂ’s been saying this for a while, but the renewed attention follows a paper she and her coauthors uploaded to a public research repository. Tucker Carlson recently interviewed her on his popular Fox News show, where she went so far as to claim that Chinese authorities not only created...

Our family’s visit to a Virginia restaurant the other day wasn’t particularly unusual in the coronavirus era, although that state’s requirements are more stringent than most. The staff were all wearing masks and, in this case, plastic gloves as well. The iced tea bin was behind the counter where customers couldn’t touch it, and Virginia restaurants are apparently required to give customers a new plastic cup for every refill. (Somehow, the left went from banning plastic straws to probably tripling the amount of plastic waste generated by restaurants but hey, there could be a .000001% less chance of someone possibly...

I’m not anti-mask, per se. There, I said it. If you’ve been reading my rants, er, columns on the topic these past few months, you might get another idea though, and I understand that. It certainly SEEMS like I’m anti-mask, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that was the case. That doesn’t mean that I like wearing them, of course. They’re uncomfortable and stifling and, frankly, disgusting. Even so, I WOULD wear them, when necessary, if the arguments the mask-proponents used to con almost the entire world into accepting and even mandating the practice were actually, well, true. Ah, but...

Ordinary Americans are growing wary of the so-called experts. This phenomenon extends well beyond the biased purveyors of fake news. Most of us gave up on the liberal media long ago. According to Gallop, we are now an overwhelming majority.  Today we include a growing group of experts and insiders, otherwise known as the elites. We’ve been mislead. We’ve been talked down to and dismissively treated like children who can’t handle the truth. Opinions are presented as facts. Decisions and pronouncements that were supposedly data driven regularly ignore data at odds with the decision makers’ opinions. The infamous hockey stick...

"Trump lied. People died." This was the hot smear from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the first snippets of tape were leaked by Washington Post bigfoot Bob Woodward from his new anti-Trump book, "Rage." The president told Woodward back in March that he wanted to downplay the coronavirus so people wouldn't panic, even though he said he'd been told it was an airborne threat. Predictably echoing Schumer, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough dug into the mud bucket: "Donald Trump says he didn't want Americans to panic. No, he just wanted to sit by and watch them die." Insert the MSNBC pandemic...