Free Republic

As attorney general, Josh Shapiro went to court repeatedly to defend Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration against legal challenges to his pandemic-era mandates and shutdowns. Now, as he’s running to succeed Wolf as governor, Shapiro says he is against some of the same COVID-19 containment measures that his fellow Democrat used to help manage the nation’s worst pandemic in over a century. On the campaign trail in the presidential battleground state, Shapiro’s Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, makes Wolf’s COVID-19 policies — and Shapiro’s defense of them in court — a source of derision. But disavowing Wolf’s COVID-19 policies while facing...

Seven more Republican leaders have announced their endorsement for Pennsylvania's Democratic candidate for governor Josh Shapiro, following photos of GOP state Sen. Doug Mastriano wearing a Confederate military uniform. This comes one month after nine Republicans vowed to support the Democratic candidate and called Mastriano an "extremist" who threatens American democracy. According to a statement released by the Shapiro campaign on Tuesday, the group includes Michael Chertoff, the former US Secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, and Mario Civera, a former state representative. Shapiro, the state's attorney general said he was proud to receive the endorsement from...

A podcasting convention in America has issued a “grovelling apology” for allowing Ben Shapiro into its venue, Sky News Digital Editor Jack Houghton says. “Shapiro is a conservative and in the age of safe spaces that means his mere presence supposedly causes people physical harm,” he said. Mr Houghton said the podcaster responded to the backlash in good spirits and released a video of himself meeting and greeting fans.

We now have two separate polls showing Pennsylvania’s closely-watched U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races are too close to call. After a series of polls showed Democrat U.S. Senate candidate and former Mayor John Fetterman with what looked like an insurmountable lead over GOP candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, that lead is not looking so insurmountable now. An Emerson poll shows it’s just a four-point Senate race, with Fetterman up 48 to 44 percent. Trafalgar, which has proven over three election cycles to be a remarkably accurate pollster, also shows a four-point race, with Fetterman up 48 to 44 percent. Oz’s hurdle...

A new poll has brought some good news for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz and governor candidate Doug Mastriano. The poll by the Atlanta-based Trafalgar Group surveyed nearly 1,100 likely Pennsylvania voters and found that Oz only trails Democratic opponent John Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, 48.4 percent to 43.5 percent. Trafalgar’s poll had a margin of error of plus/minus 2.9 percentage points. While still having to make up ground, the poll results will likely give the Oz campaign a much-needed morale boost after previous polls had him trailing considerably further behind. Most recently, a Fox News poll...

Campaign season is about to kick into high gear, as it normally does after Labor Day. By now, candidate debates are usually scheduled. But there are still questions about how debates will play out in Pennsylvania’s top two races—for governor and U.S. Senate. Race for Governor Republican gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Doug Mastriano will not participate in debates hosted by legacy media, a spokesman from the campaign confirmed. He has another plan that he believes will be more fair. Mastriano’s campaign sent a letter on Aug. 16 to Democrat candidate Attorney General Josh Shapiro, proposing the two campaigns work together...

Jackie Kulback was just one of the Pennsylvania GOP leaders who was worried in May when Doug Mastriano clinched the Republican primary for governor. Mastriano was a MAGA state senator who worked to overturn the 2020 presidential election and Kulback thought he would struggle to win the critical battleground state in the fall. But she’s feeling differently these days. “The higher the gas prices go, the more electable Mastriano is,” said the chair of the Cambria County Republican Party. “Honestly, I feel this is Mastriano’s campaign to lose.” In the immediate aftermath of Pennsylvania’s messy gubernatorial primary — which included...

Pennsylvania state is suing officials of three counties to force their local government to count undated mail-in ballots in a recent primary election. The Pennsylvania Department of State (DOS) and Acting Secretary Leigh Chapman filed a lawsuit on July 12 against the Board of Elections of three counties in the Commonwealth—Lancaster, Berks, and Fayette—to seek a court injunction forcing the counties to count undated mail-in ballots cast in Pennsylvania’s 2022 primary elections. Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, says in the filing that election officials in the three Republican-controlled counties refused to count absentee and mail-in ballots that were...

With the U.S. Supreme Court having overturned Roe v. Wade Friday, its landmark and controversial 1973 decision that established a core federal right to have an abortion, Pennsylvania’s governor’s race would seem to be a perfect referendum on the question - if, that is, there weren’t so many other issues. In this corner, you have Republican nominee Doug Mastriano, a state Senator from Franklin County who supports rolling back of Pennsylvania’s current abortion law to at least the so-called heartbeat threshold, which medical authorities have said essentially means a ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. Mastriano has...

While Democrat John Fetterman holds a strong lead over Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race, the Pennsylvania Governor race is much closer in the early days of the race. Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, holds only a 4-point lead over his far-right Republican rival, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, with just under 13 percent of voters remaining undecided in the race in the newest USA Today Network/Suffolk University poll. That puts Shapiro’s advantage over Mastriano within the poll’s 4.4% margin of error.

Establishment Republicans are a middling lot who have attained and retained their side of the Capitol Hill power dynamic by ostensibly doing the least amount of work to further the agenda of the right while acting like a sieve against the unrelenting pressure of their progressive opposition. So, as the RINOs of the party slide toward the left courtesy of the Overton Window, it only seems appropriate that, where Democrats so often have their own past statements raised to dispute their current posturing, Republican leaders would get slammed for straying from conservative values by a gun-grabbing ideologue. In 2019, Rep....

This week, a racist mass shooter massacred 10 people and wounded three others at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. The shooter was a white supremacist; his hate-filled 180-page screed about why he had committed the shooting was replete with neo-Nazi sentiments. According to the shooter, he had to slaughter innocent black Americans in order to prevent the white population of the United States from being crowded out. "We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history," wrote the perverse murderer. "This is ethnic replacement. This is cultural replacement. This is racial replacement. This is WHITE GENOCIDE."...

What's up with Ben Shapiro's obsession with this stupid Depp Heard trial thing? Does Ben think people tune in to hear the latest on something stupid Hollywood tabloid trial? Of all that is going on in the world, he posts about this trial every ten minutes.

On Oct. 30, 2020, just days before the presidential election, Joe Biden tweeted, “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.” This was a lie. It was a lie because nobody can shut down the virus. Government does not have the power to end disease, as a general matter. When it comes to a wildly transmissible coronavirus specifically, no government can end the virus. Even the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted as much: “We’re never going to eradicate this … elimination may be too...

"‘The Ben Shapiro Show’ host expects legal challenges against federal vaccine mandates to reach"

Remember when they deplatformed Parler, accused American grandmas of insurrection, and digitally silenced the president of the United States? Remember how they did all of this after Black Lives Matter and antifa rioted for months and radical mayors and prosecutors refused to lock them up? Remember how academia, corporate America, and even the military suddenly stepped out of the shadows and pushed the exact same racist theory, all pushing the lie that America is racist at the same time radicals across the country were attacking statues of our founders and even President Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant? It all felt...

Human beings aren't great at assessing risk. In 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky posited a new branch of behavioral economics, which they titled prospect theory. One of their key findings was that human beings are naturally loss-averse -- we generally are willing to forego the probability of gains in order to minimize the chance of losses. Because of our loss aversion, human beings are also subject to what Kahneman and Tversky label the "planning fallacy": our self-serving bias toward believing that we are capable of planning for contingency more successfully than we are. As Kahneman writes, "Exaggerated optimism...

In 1629, frustrated by the unwillingness of Parliament to grant him taxation power, King Charles I of England dissolved the body and had nine members arrested. He did not recall Parliament for over a decade. The intervening period, known as Personal Rule, saw Charles I govern as a de facto dictator, with only a body of councilors to advise him. In 1640, forced by military necessity from Scotland, Charles I recalled Parliament in order to raise money to pay the military; shortly thereafter, stymied by Parliament, he dissolved the body again. But necessity encroached once again, and Charles I finally...

The tech giant Google is holding “antiracist” training for its employees that claims a direct link exists between listening to Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and committing “mass murder.” The training also places former President Donald Trump on a list of ideas and people that lead to “genocide,” along with “apolitical beliefs” and phrases such as “All Lives Matter.” Shapiro, Trump, and the rest all contribute to the “normalization” of racism that eventually inspires mass shooters and leads to the genocide of entire people groups, according to a slide of...

There are liberals who refuse to kowtow to the woke mob. Bari Weiss was one of those folks. She fled her job at The New York Times as an op-ed writer. Bill Maher, a comedian, is another target of the far left, which is evident on social media. He drives them nuts because he shreds liberal hypocrisy when it comes to coddling radical Islamic terrorism. He’s pro-free speech. He’s anti-political correctness. He’s not a conservative, but in lefty circles, he might as well be. Left-wing America is quite anti-free speech, pro-terrorist anti-cop, anti-reason, and utterly insane as of late. So,...