Free Republic

Republican-led efforts to re-examine last fall's vote are spreading as experts and election officials warn that the proliferation amounts to a grave threat to U.S. democracy. At the center of the push is Arizona, where the private company hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate continues its review of more than 2 million Maricopa County ballots, despite prior audits finding no evidence of fraud. With former President Donald Trump and others on the right following that count closely — despite it having no legal ability to overturn the result — GOP officials and voters have pushed for similar probes in at...

As even many casual observers of America's fractious politics are aware, the overwhelming majority of lawmaking at the federal level no longer takes place in Congress as the Constitution's framers intended. Instead, the vast majority of the "rulemaking" governing Americans' day-to-day lives now takes place behind closed doors, deep in the bowels of the administrative state's sprawling bureaucracy. The brainchild of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, arguments on behalf of the modern administrative state are ultimately rooted in, among other factors, a disdain for the messy give-and-take of republican politics and an epistemological preference for rule by enlightened clerisy. Put more...

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to relax safety measures for people who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus and the country begins to reopen, many employers, businesses, families and friend groups are finding themselves in the at-times uncomfortable position of having to ask about others’ vaccination statuses. Some Americans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), are balking at such questions and are claiming that asking about or requiring proof of vaccination is a violation of the HIPAA federal privacy law. “Vax records, along with ALL medical records are private due to HIPPA rights,” Greene recently tweeted,...

A New York Times opinion writer wondered in a new op-ed on Wednesday if the progressive cancel culture push will backfire on Democrats at the polls, and he isn't the only analyst asking the question. "Is Wokeness ‘Kryptonite for Democrats?’" Times contributor Thomas Edsall's headline asked. Edsall quoted several surveys finding most people are against the more radical campaigns, such as efforts to defund the police and upend traditional gender norms. And yet, he said, Republicans can still point to the extreme minority that is pushing these ideas to argue that the Democratic Party is increasingly beholden to the radicals....

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) - As Portland continues to be the subject of direct actions by black-clad protesters that often result in property destruction, fires being set, and smashed windows to businesses and other organizations, the question arises: Just what is considered to be a protest in the first place? In fact, it was the suggestion of Mayor Ted Wheeler that the press stop referring to participants at such events as “protesters,” but instead to use “their own description of themselves as anarchists.” **SNIP** KOIN 6 News reached out to Shirley A. Jackson, a professor of sociology and Black studies at...

A group of election security and administration experts are asking the Justice Department to send federal monitors to Arizona as the Republican-led state Senate carries out an audit of 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County in the state's 2020 presidential election. In a letter to the top official at the Justice Department's voting section, five elections experts from the Brennan Center for Justice, Protect Democracy and The Leadership Conference expressed deep concerns about how the audit is being conducted, warning that it has put ballots "in danger of being stolen, defaced, or irretrievably damaged." "They failed to ensure the...

Of the countless lies the American people are meant to believe, perhaps the greatest is the myth of expertise. The American managerial elite confuses the ability to perform verbal gymnastics with omniscience. This is an old story. Unlike the many iterations of sophists and pharisees before them, ours deploy increasingly gnostic feminist and racialist rhetoric to replace the real skill of parsing complicated situations. We’ve seen this dishonesty recently with the GameStop event, and persistently throughout the Coronavirus response. Our experts have become clerics. In all cases, “reality” is “explained” by our Social Justice shamans, who bamboozle everyone with terms...

Tensions between the United States and China seem to be growing by the day, prompting some in Washington to worry about a potential military conflict between our two countries within the next six months. The latest flashpoint: the vital waterways of the South China Sea. For the first time, the US government this week declared China's activities in the South China Sea illegal. "On Monday for the first time we made our policy on the South China Sea crystal clear: It's not China's maritime empire," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Thursday. Now, this four million square kilometer shipping...

We Americans sure do love us some experts. Utterly fixated on credentials, we believe degrees and titles confer, if not magical powers, then at least superior wisdom and intellectual capacity. We seem to forget that a credential is no guarantee of competence, much less understanding, as any business owner who has just hired a recent college graduate knows very well. We also, to our peril, ignore the fact that the experts are frequently wrong. A greater problem, though, is that we all too often listen to the wrong experts. Yes, on balance, experts do know more about one specific subject...

Cornell says Brian Wansink “committed academic misconduct,” and is leaving the university. He’s a cautionary tale in bad incentives in science. Thirteen of Wansink’s studies have now been retracted, including the six pulled from JAMA Wednesday. ...To date, 13 of his papers have been retracted. And that’s stunning given that Wansink was so highly cited and his body of work was so influential. Wansink also collected government grants, helped shape the marketing practices at food companies, and worked with the White House to influence food policy in this country.

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of pandemic policies. “Because I don’t.”

Early in the pandemic, “trust the science!” could actually be used in a debate without attracting derisive laughter. But as the flip-flops, mistakes and, yes, lies have accumulated, a consensus seems to be forming that the health care authorities are no more trustworthy than the people running Congress or the Fed.For proof, let’s start with vitamin D, which sure seems to lessen the severity of coronavirus infections. As the chart below illustrates (couldn’t find the source, but google “covid vitamin D” and you’ll find lots of studies that track with this data), people with higher levels of vitamin D in...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) - The storming of the U.S. Capitol is a jarring but natural product of years of violence and hateful rhetoric stoked by disinformation and conspiracy theories, experts on far-right extremism said as they pored over images of Wednesday’s riot. Members of far-right groups, including the violent Proud Boys, joined the crowds that formed in Washington to cheer on President Donald Trump as he urged them to protest Congress’ counting of Electoral College votes confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s win. Then they headed to the Capitol. Members of smaller white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups also were spotted in...

Yesterday, RedState reported on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s sudden change of heart about opening schools (see The Exalted Doctor Fauci Changes His Mind Again Because Our Experts Are Cowards). That came after he spent most of the year refusing to back President Trump’s calls to do just that. It’s almost like so much of Fauci’s advice was politically time, right? None of that sat well with Tucker Carlson. He went on air last night and unleashed a blistering monologue targeting Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, and our expert class in general. Tucker: Experts finally admit they were wrong from the beginningCarlson begins by...

In recent weeks, Joe Biden has made his willingness to “listen to the scientists” a central pillar of his campaign and a major point of contrast between himself and Donald Trump. He has even said that he would shut down the nation’s economy again to stop the coronavirus if scientists recommended it. Unsurprisingly, Biden has since been endorsed by Scientific American and Nature, as well as 81 Nobel laureates, who praised him for “his willingness to listen to experts.” All told, this represents a startling readiness on Biden’s part to cede much of his decision-making power to a small, unelected intellectual...

The problem isn’t just the China Virus. It’s that we adopted the China Model to fight it. Public health experts adopted China’s draconian lockdowns without knowing how well they really worked and in a country that, fortunately, lacks the power to truly enforce them. China’s deceptiveness and lack of transparency meant that we did not know how well anything that the Communist dictatorship did to battle the virus that it spawned actually worked. Despite that, our public health experts, and those of most free countries, adopted the China Model. We don’t know how well the China Model worked for the...

On Oct. 4, 2020, three preeminent experts — Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University; Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and epidemiologist at Stanford University — delivered the following declaration, calling for a different approach to dealing with the novel coronavirus than the lockdown model: As infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted...

Anyone else notice the silence coming from Drs. Fauci and Birx since Thursday evening when Hope Hicks tested positive quickkly followed by the devasting news of our President and FLOTUS testing positive as well? It appears as though both have gone MIA. I appreciate their silence. But why?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on the 2020 presidential election (all times local): 12:40 p.m. Joe Biden is receiving a virtual briefing from a former U.S. surgeon general and a collection of health experts on how best to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Biden’s campaign created a virtual studio that connected the former vice president via video with former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and six other experts at a theater in downtown Wilmington, Delaware on Wednesday. Biden will give a speech on the topic later in the day.

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...