Free Republic

There’s something wrong with previous U.S. jobs reports. The government quietly erased 439,000 jobs through November 2023, a closer look at the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. That means its initial jobs results were inflated by 439,000 positions, and the job market is not as healthy as the government suggests. Since the government wiped out 439,000 jobs after the fact, the total percentage of jobs created by the government last year is even higher. Increased government hiring has been driving the jobs numbers higher.

In late December 2020, President Trump made a call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to look at some of the items that were uncovered by his auditor. There was plenty of evidence for a competent auditor or any man of integrity to know that the election was uncertifiable. Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger’s office secretly recorded the phone call with President Trump, then lied about its contents later when they leaked it to the far-left Washington Post. Raffensperger’s office ran to the Washington Post and leaked a fraudulent transcript of the call. After they were caught...

Former President Donald Trump has been asking allies and advisers for their thoughts about Nikki Haley as a potential vice presidential candidate, two sources familiar with the conversations tell CBS News. The feedback from the MAGA crowd regarding putting Haley on the ticket if Trump wins the GOP nomination has been overwhelmingly negative, according to these GOP sources. Politico first reported that Trump allies are working to quash the possibility of a Trump-Haley ticket.

Even though inflation is still higher than ideal, many things are actually getting cheaper. But perhaps not the ones most Americans want. The prices of durable goods, meaning long-lasting items such as used cars or appliances, have fallen year-over-year for each of the past five months. Data released Thursday by the Commerce Department showed prices for such goods were down 2.2% in October compared with the year prior. Some economists estimate the fall in goods prices could bring inflation back to the Federal Reserve's 2% target by as early as the second half of 2024. One inflation gauge, the personal...

Back in 2017, the Daily Beast wrote that Operation Mockingbird “has never been officially discontinued.” Wikipedia - the internet encyclopedia constantly propped up to be the #1 source for online information and constantly shoved down our throats — provides damning evidence that the government infiltration of American news and information is alive and well. Most Google searches rank Wikipedia at the top of the search results page. And YouTube uses it whenever they put one of those annoying “context tabs” on a video. Yet Wikipedia is not considered a reliable source of information by anyone with half a brain. Most...

Former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden, who has fashioned a post-government career attacking and censoring conservatives, is spending his Thanksgiving week smearing patriotic American Christians who own firearms, claiming they are “no different” from Hamas terrorists. On Wednesday, Michael Hayden responded to a post on X that juxtaposed two photos: one of a woman holding an American flag, Bible, and handgun; the other of Palestinian terrorist Reem Riyashi, who killed herself along with four Israelis in a 2004 suicide bombing that was claimed by Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

This conflagration has exposed as rotten a lot of stupid notions and will lead to the demise of things like “open borders, identity politics, corruption power hungry bureaucrats, Gramscian culture.” Murder and MayhemThis week the Ventura County Sheriff arrested Professor Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji in the death of Paul Kessler, a 69 year-old man who had been standing on the sidewalk peacefully supporting Israel. Alnaji, who bashed Kessler with a megaphone, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and battery causing serious bodily injury and both these charges contain special allegations that Alnaji “personally inflicted great bodily injury.” This comes as no surprise...

Misinformation is a key global threat, but Democrats and Republicans disagree about how to address the problem. In particular, Democrats and Republicans diverge sharply on removing misinformation from social media.Only three weeks after the Biden administration announced the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, the effort to develop best practices for countering disinformation was halted because of Republican concerns about its mission. Why do Democrats and Republicans have such different attitudes about content moderation?My colleagues Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts and I found in a study published in the journal Science Advances that Democrats and Republicans not only disagree...

A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is “faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.”The new...

With the 2024 election just a year away, the Oregon Secretary of State signed a contract with an AI-powered threat intelligence program to “identify, advise, and combat harmful MDM information online.” The contract was signed today, October 27th. OFA Media reached out to the Oregon Election’s Division communication team for comment, but haven’t received a response. According to sources, the platform is a company called “Logically Intelligence” whose mission is to “reduce the harms associated with mis- and disinformation” and “provide analysts with content analysis tools to detect harmful online narratives and threats at speed and at scale.” Here’s an...

The Associated Press has some nerve browbeating readers over the alleged scourge of Israel-Hamas war “misinformation” on social media despite its own guilt of pushing terrorist propaganda. AP pontificated in its Oct. 24 headline how “Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is flooding social media. Here are the facts.” The leftist outlet lectured how “[i]n the days since Hamas militants stormed into Israel early Oct. 7, a flood of videos and photos purporting to show the conflict have filled social media, making it difficult for onlookers from around the world to sort fact from fiction.” Yes, AP actually sought to humanize...

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., blasted the mainstream media on Thursday for taking the Gaza Health Ministry's account of a hospital explosion at face value. See video

Democratic congressman lashed out at New York Times and Los Angeles Times for pushing false narratives on Palestinian hospital strikeRep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., accused The New York Times of doing something far "worse" than making a mistake, after the outlet quoted Palestinian claims blaming Israel for the explosion that rocked the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City earlier this week. President Biden said that U.S. intelligence confirmed Israel was not to blame for the attack and backed up Israel's military investigation, which found the strike was caused by Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Users on X roasted the paper for...

"System Update" host Glenn Greenwald looks into an article from the New York Times warning that Russian disinformation could undermine the U.S. effort in Ukraine: GLENN GREENWALD: Here's an article from the New York Times, and you're going to see so many of these articles. We've already seen so many of them, they are going to come one after the next. This is a particularly vivid one that I think is really worth looking at because it is just so flagrant, in terms of how it functions, in terms of the manipulative and deceitful nature of what this instrument is....

Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter (now X), he relaxed its misinformation policies on the platform and has become increasingly critical of Democrats and the Biden administration, federal agencies have begun probing X, Tesla, and SpaceX, raising questions about targeting of the billionaire’s breadth of companies. Following Musk’s takeover of Twitter last year, his companies have been probed by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission as he has been an advocated for free speech on the platform. The probes include the Justice Department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights division investigating a complaint of employment discrimination from a non-U.S....

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said Tuesday that parents who want to be notified by schools if their children want to change genders have been “ginned up” by misinformation produced by Republicans and conservative news outlets. The Newsom administration is currently suing the school district of Chino Valley in Riverside, California, over its new policy of parental notification, claiming that it violates the rights of transgender minors to “out” them to their parents. Newsom was asked about the issue Tuesday in a live forum by Politico‘s California bureau chief, Christopher Cadelago. We’re winning. Instead of answering @ccadelago’s question on parental...

Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before a House Judiciary subcommittee on the 'weaponization of the Federal Government.'

“Misinformation” is an elastic term. It can cover anything from intentional falsehoods to incorrect information to contested claims to unverified claims.But it’s hard to argue that it covers things known to be truthful.Now I am, to say the least, not a fan of any efforts to suppress “misinformation” because it empowers some authority somewhere to impose a standard of what is true and what is not, and doing so is dangerous in itself. While I would agree that in a perfect world everything we read, hear, and speak would be entirely true and completely in context, the reality is that...

Fox News retracted a hit piece against former President Donald Trump and admitted they “inaccurately attributed” an anti-Trump quote to former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Fox News’s story had the following headline: “Former Trump Cabinet member tells him to ‘kiss’ his ‘butt.” The since-retracted, purportedly exclusive story read, in part: EXCLUSIVE: Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told Fox News Digital there’s “no way” he will support former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. When asked whether he will endorse Trump, Price said, “After he fired me? No way.” “The only thing that guy has...

A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting an injunction that blocks various Biden administration officials and government agencies like the Justice Department and the FBI from working with big tech firms to censor posts on social media. The injunction came in response to a censorship-by-proxy lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who have accused Biden administration officials and various government agencies of pressuring social media companies to suspend accounts or take down posts. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, wrote in the July 4 judgment (pdf) that various government agencies, including the Cybersecurity and...