Free Republic

Under any scenario, however, the very fact of the McMullin candidacy is almost certain to have a major impact on the Republican electorate. Anyone can see this by heading over to large conservative communities like Free Republic where the members are positively incensed at McMullin’s bid and at the people backing him. Free Republic is an interesting case because, by and large, its members are more conservative than the Republican Party and also a majority of the membership took a long time to come around to support Trump during the GOP primaries. Initially, Anybody-But-Trump was the leading candidate with many...

Throughout the GOP primaries, online and automated surveys—which are generally less respected within the industry—indicated higher levels of Trump support than live ones. The discrepancy may have been a large reason why his Republican elite opponents refused to take the former reality star’s campaign seriously before it was too late. A similar dynamic appears to be taking shape in the general election. Instead of taking false comfort, Democratic elites are sounding the alarm about the Shy Trump Supporter Effect. Liberal pollster Celinda Lake is warning of a “secret Trump vote” which she discerned from differences between automated and live surveys...

Cruz thinks of himself as the second coming of Ronald Reagan but in truth, he’s probably more like Ted Kennedy. It’s mostly forgotten nowadays but in 1980 Kennedy fought to the bitter end against President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination but ultimately came up well short of victory. There are so many similarities between the two men's races. Both were senators who carried their cause to the party convention, each trying to force “conscience clauses” to allow delegates to avoid casting their ballots according to primary results. (Kennedy at least had the decency to make this campaign openly whereas...

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was famously criticized for his ability to convince others to believe anything he said through a combination of hyperbole and bravado. One Apple employee called the effect a “reality distortion field” in 1981 and the term persisted ever since. It’s quite clear by now that conservative philanthropists and grassroots donors have been living in a reality distortion field as well, the creation of a cadre of political consultants who have failed repeatedly at their jobs and yet manage not only to survive but thrive. The ineffectiveness of television advertising and junk mail at...

The Cruz presidential campaign is now claiming that the senator's attempted amendments and statements were only designed to be so-called "poison pills," a legislative trick designed to get supporters of a bill to vote against it. That was also the line Cruz took in an interview yesterday with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. But that does not square with the fact that weeks after the legislation failed in the House, Cruz was still talking up how he wanted to grant permanent resident status to illegal immigrants in an interview with the Texas Tribune in September: Immigration-reform legislation from the Senate's...

Instead of trying to grind out a victory by criss-crossing Iowa or New Hampshire the way that underfunded candidates like Rick Santorum managed to do in 2012, the Rubio campaign has explicitly said that it’s relying upon the media to carry the candidate’s message. That may seem ludicrous for a Republican to say, however, that actually appears to be the case as National Review reported as long ago as April. Besides trying to get the senator booked on as many shows as possible (a desire he shares in common with Donald Trump and any other breathing politician), Rubio’s team appears...

Despite the huge number of candidates, the 2016 race is now starting to have some similarities to the 2008 Republican contest with some 1996 thrown in for good measure. For all the talk about how this cycle is going to eventually come down to Cruz competing against Florida senator Marco Rubio, this contest is really a three-man race, just as 2008 was. ... Then as now, the party was divided over a candidate with a fair amount of support who was also widely disliked within the party. The difference this time, however, is that the divisive candidate is one favored...

Mixing news with a dose of comic commentary has paid off for The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. A Brookings Institute survey recently noted that he is a news source more trusted by liberals and independents than MSNBC is. “The real power to influence the left resides on Comedy Central not MSNBC,” says Politics USA. But if you’re searching your television lineup for a conservative antidote to Stewart, the field is rather limited. There is late night Red Eye’s Greg Gutfeld, there is… actually, there’s just Gutfeld. Or there was until this month, when The Flipside with Michael Loftus debuted on...

An incredible thing happened in the recent reply-comment period regarding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal to regulate the Internet like old-fashioned monopoly telephone service: the side telling the agency not to regulate carried the day. The radical left, demanding federal regulatory control of the building blocks of Internet, brought all the usual hype and hoopla and had free-spending corporate backers in Google and Netflix, who want regulators to force you to pay the costs of their downstream bandwidth. This campaign by liberal special interests like MoveOn and the Sierra Club converted forty thousand websites into campaign advertisements urging visitors...

The “global warming scare industry” is all about money and “control,” stand-up comedian Michael Loftus argued during an extended and humorous rant on his new TV show “The Flipside.” For about six minutes, Loftus ripped Al Gore and others that perpetuate the idea that global warming is ready to bring the world to an end — unless people pay more money to prevent it. “Here’s the deal, folks. Al Gore and some other dudes bought some companies and stocks in green technology and now all they have to do is scare the living daylights out of you until you are...

The old saying that only the good die young is certainly apt to describe the passing of my dear friend and colleague Noel Sheppard at the age of 53. I’ve known Noel since early 2005 when my brother Greg and I saw him contributing freelance pieces to the American Thinker. At the time, blogging was still relatively new and the political and media establishments (of both left and right) were still very wary about the idea that people without formal academic training could write about politics. As it turned out, the rest of America strongly disagreed. Noel never intended to...

For decades, there has been a lot of discussion about a “cultural war,” primarily between people of traditional faith and those who see religion as something of little value. Whether war is quite the right metaphor to describe the phenomenon, there certainly is a lot of pressure on people who adhere to traditionalist opinions, as Phil Robertson of A&E’s Duck Dynasty can certainly attest. Yet while opponents of traditional beliefs and a politically unbalanced media have certainly proved harmful to faith in the public square, those two groups cannot be entirely blamed for the less prominent place that Christians now...

Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly took on the left-wing hate mob that has come after her following a humorous segment that she featured on her program Wednesday evening in which she and her guests staged a mock debate over the racial identity of Santa Claus. To the haters, Kelly had a message tonight: Lighten up and learn to realize what satire is. “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show but sometimes that is lost on the humorless,” she said. Since the Wednesday segment, an absurd controversy has been swirling around the newly minted...

Radio and TV blowhard Ed Schultz decided to take a break from his normal act of ranting against Republicans today by raging against some fellow liberals who had the temerity to criticize him and other MSNBC hosts for declining to publicly take the side of union members in a dispute they're having with the cable channel's parent company, NBC Universal. Schultz, whose shtick is that he is just a working stiff looking out for people like him, lashed out at a report from Salon.com which mentioned him: “I become the target because I’m living good. I become the target because...

New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza caused a bit of a stir in the conservative media world today in a report he filed for the New Yorker about the ongoing debate in the U.S. Senate over an immigration bill that is currently opposed by many conservatives. According to the piece, the so-called Gang of Eight see the role of Florida Republican Marco Rubio as being to “neutralize” conservative talk radio and to get opinion hosts on Fox News Channel to either talk up the legislation or at least not oppose it. In their view, Rubio, who was initially touted by many...

Compared to the Reagan years when there were literally three conservative publications: The Washington Times, Human Events, and National Review, the media environment on the right has exploded in size. While there are more right-leaning publications than before, since the left’s overwhelming dominance of the mainstream media became common knowledge among conservatives, has the media environment really changed that much since Reagan’s day? Leaving aside the efforts of the Media Research Center and its journalism division CNSNews.com (given my obvious conflict of interest in the matter), the case could be made that in dollar amounts, conservatives have actually done rather...

Yesterday was a historic day. Sure we had presidential inauguration but it was also perhaps the first and only day when loudmouth MSNBC host Chris Matthews actually shut his mouth for a few seconds. The cat that got Matthews’s tongue was being reminded by fellow MSNBC host Martin Bashir of his inane 2008 remark that he gets a “thrill going up my leg” when hearing Barack Obama speak. Watch below for the video. The joke at the former Democratic operative’s expense happened during a post-inaugural panel on MSNBC which was predictably stacked with all liberal participants. Matthews was joined by...

Most observers of the 2008 presidential campaign -- even including some liberals after the fact -- were shocked and appalled by the media's pro-Barack Obama sycophancy. Unfortunately, the intentional and unintentional advocacy of the media on behalf of Obama was even worse in 2012. There are many reasons why the conservative movement failed to achieve electoral success this year, but perhaps one of the most significant is the enduring power and influence of the left-dominated "mainstream" media. The 2012 cycle demonstrated that left-wing journalists have far more sway on Americans' opinions than many conservatives have been willing to admit. While...

Political losses are interesting to watch. Generally speaking, the left and the right handle them differently. Too often, the tendency of the right is to talk about how certain groups are holding the rest down. Primarily the debate is between those who favor social conservatism and those who favor economic conservatism. Each group insists that its approach is the correct one to get back to a ruling majority vote. There certainly are quite a few larger problems facing the conservative movement. Right now, particularly among Hispanic, black, and Asian voters, the conservative side has a number of trends that do...

During Tuesday's post-debate coverage on CNN, as the panel discussed moderator Candy Crowley giving cover to President Obama's attempt to defend his initial flawed response to the Benghazi terrorist attack, CNN correspondent John King blamed former Governor Mitt Romney for giving Crowley the opening to undermine the GOP candidate's criticism of Obama for taking so long to recognize that the attack was a premeditated act of terrorism. Shortly before 11:30 p.m., CNN anchor Anderson Cooper had raised the subject as he defended Romney's reasoning and suggested that Obama was taking himself out of context to cover his own tracks. Cooper:...