Free Republic

NBC News’s recent hiring of Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, has baffled Democrats, journalists, and pretty much all of MSNBC’s star anchors. But to those who remain deep in the thrall of MAGA—and those, like me, who escaped it—it was utterly unsurprising that a mainstream (i.e., “fake”) news organization would shell out $300,000 a year for McDaniel’s point of view. I became a MAGA activist in 2015, shortly after Donald Trump famously descended that golden escalator. For the next half-decade, I not only vociferously supported Trump and those who pledged fealty to him, like Ron...

Fox News is amplifying a racist conspiracy on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. Because of course it is. At about 1:40 a.m. EST on Tuesday, a 1,000-foot cargo ship careened past large concrete obstacles ahead of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, colliding with one of its structural pillars and toppling it into the Patapsco River. Mere hours later, conservatives were already hurling their racist conspiracy theories against the wall to see what sticks. In an early morning broadcast, Fox Business attempted to tie the horrific situation—which was deemed a developing mass casualty event by the Baltimore City Fire Department—to...

The function of the RNC changes again if Trump becomes president. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, weaponizes government agencies, and becomes a dictator on “Day One,” the RNC is likely to become a tool for some epic-level shakedowns of individuals and corporations, reminiscent of Trump’s mob-like past. “Nice corporation you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it. So, how much can we put you down for in contributions this year?” Corporations are likely to comply as long as they think paying the extortion is less of a hassle than fighting it. The RNC, for its...

Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six...

Ron DeSantis’s struggles on the campaign trail have eroded his influence back home in Florida, and even once-close allies are revolting against his control. DeSantis was crowned early on as the natural successor to Donald Trump: A demagogic culture warrior, but younger and more disciplined—he was a figure who could appeal, in theory, both to MAGA diehards and Trump skeptics. When he launched his campaign, he was fresh off a series of victories at home. The Republican-controlled Florida state legislature had helped him pass multiple draconian measures limiting LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, and abortion access. While candidates backed by Trump...

Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says he can handle the heat. As it turns out, not only is that not true but he sometimes even loses his cool. While on the campaign trail, Ramaswamy likes to portray himself as someone who has everything under control and can roll with the punches. But former employees at his companies say he was an exceptionally demanding boss, particularly when it came to office temperature, Business Insider reported Friday. The former employees, speaking anonymously, said that Ramaswamy insisted office thermostats be set to 64 degrees or lower. It would be so cold in the offices...

As conservatives increasingly turn to secular culture war outrages to fire up their base, it would seem that God is no longer their co-pilot.If a single image could encapsulate the Trump era, perhaps it is the infamous photo of the former president standing alone on a sidewalk in front of a boarded-up church with a stern expression and a Bible in his hand. The shot was captured in June 2020, shortly after police had used tear gas to clear Black Lives Matter protestors from Lafayette Park outside the White House, where they had gathered to voice their anger about the...

Former Trump Justice Department head William Barr, in the course of reiterating his strong preference that his party nominate a less deranged presidential candidate next time, expressed a fear that has been in wide circulation: If defeated in the primary, Donald Trump “will burn the whole house down by leading ‘his people’ out of the GOP.” One version of this is that Trump will either form a third party or simply refuse to endorse another Republican, thereby dooming his party’s chances. Those of us considering the question from a less friendly standpoint than Barr — I consider the Republican Party...

Former Maine Governor Paul LePage has called people of color and “people of Hispanic origin” the “enemy right now” in his war on crime. He’s said drug dealers come from states like New York and Connecticut, sell heroin, and “impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.” He’s threatened a state Democratic lawmaker for whom he left a voicemail calling him a “socialist c*cksucker.” One of his first policy moves as governor was to dramatically weaken the state’s environmental laws. After leaving office, he opted to move to Florida. And it’s entirely possible that LePage could become governor again in...

There are two things a quarantined European will reliably find when he goes online for news in this age of the coronavirus: first, the clucking of local pundits at how the Trump administration has managed the epidemic in the United States; second, unmistakable evidence that every one of the major countries of Western Europe, with the exception of Angela Merkel’s Germany, is doing worse...

The newly rebellious senator has become an outspoken dissident in Trump’s Republican Party, just in time for the president’s impeachment trial..... Mitt Romney is leaning forward in his chair, his eyes flashing, his voice sharp. It’s a strange look for the 72-year-old senator, who typically affects a measured, somber tone when discussing Donald Trump’s various moral deficiencies. But after weeks of escalating combat with the president—over Ukraine, and China, and Syria, and impeachment—the gentleman from Utah suddenly appears ready to unload.

When Beto O’Rourke proclaimed, during the second round of Democratic presidential debates, that “there’s a new battleground state, Texas, and it has 38 Electoral College votes,” eyes rolled in unison across America. We’ve all heard that nonsense before! Pundits and progressives have been predicting that minority-white Texas would go blue for so long, it’s practically become a running joke. And while O’Rourke came tantalizingly close to knocking off Ted Cruz last fall, that race seemed to have all the hallmarks of a fluke—a Republican senator who even Republicans can’t stomach, running in a strong Democratic midterm cycle against a fresh-faced...

If the "Trump is doomed" narrative sounds familiar, it is because we have been hearing some version of this on an almost daily basis from the mainstream media since even before President Donald Trump entered the White House.  It is one thing to hear criticism of this type of anticipatory journalism from conservatives but in this case it is the New Republic's Jeet Heer, hardly a Trump supporter, who wrote the critique about the MSM  living in a fantasy world in which Trump is constantly on the verge of leaving office. We Are (Probably) Not in the “End Stages” of...

Publisher of The New Republic Resigns After Misconduct Claims By SYDNEY EMBERNOV. 3, 2017 Hamilton Fish, the president and publisher of The New Republic, has resigned from the magazine after allegations of inappropriate conduct. The move came less than a week after Mr. Fish was asked to take a leave of absence pending an investigation into recent complaints from women about their interactions with him. In a letter on Friday to Win McCormack, the owner of The New Republic, Mr. Fish wrote that he was submitting his resignation “after much reflection.” “As I understand it, some employees, to my deep...

Hamilton Fish, the president and publisher of The New Republic, is taking a leave of absence pending an investigation into complaints by female employees at the magazine, according to a letter sent to its staff on Sunday night. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/business/media/new-republic-hamilton-fish.html

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans there was a brief moment of shocked compassion before racial anxieties flooded the Internet. Victims of the disaster were quickly recast as looters, criminals, and layabouts. They were government “dependents” seeking even more entitlements now that they were bona fide survivors. Some of these hideous opinions drew on the physical “evidence” of the bad character of hurricane survivors: their size. The mostly black bodies crowding the Superdome, getting on rafts, and being carried away by helicopters, were too large for online critics. Obesity, while common in the US and over-represented in the South, was...

Danny JohnstonDecember 20, 2016 Clio Chang and Alex Shephard write in The New Republic about the organizational shake-up and shift in focus at the leftwing media watchdog Media Matters for America. The brainchild of its Clinton ally founder David Brock, Media Matters now seeks to reinvent itself in a post-Clinton world. Brock has recently stated that he hopes to transform his social media platform Shareblue into a “Breitbart of the left.” But Clinton’s electoral loss offers a unique challenge for Media Matters because, as Chang and Shephard report, “[t]he organization had long ceased to be a mere watchdog, having positioned...

In the months leading up to his historic upset election on an anti-establishment, anti-globalism platform, more than a few leftist and establishment media organs claimed that Donald Trump was really spouting the ideas of The John Birch Society. Indeed, Trumpism is Bircherism, some commentators claimed.The constitutionalist grassroots organization, which publishes this magazine and has chapters in all 50 states, has indeed been promoting many of the ideas and truths that Trump gave voice to during his unusual campaign. The purpose of the media’s attempt to link Trump with JBS was to demonize him, not give credit where credit was due....

One dollar! One dollar! Do I hear a bid for a dollar to buy the New Republic magazine? For the price it cost to buy Newsweek you can also own the New Republic as your personal liberal magazine toy. Ah! I see a bid out there but, sorry Stephen Glass, that fake play money you are waving is not acceptable. I see serial fabulist Scott Thomas Beauchamp is making a bid which we also can't accept because we already know he is lying.  Yes, the New Republic is now being put up for sale by comedy of errors owner Chris Hughes so, just like...

In Saturday's debate, the candidates made clear they don't share the GOP establishment's wishful thinking that the Donald will fade away. It’s intellectually shallow to pretend Donald Trump is vastly more reactionary than other candidates in the Republican primary. Trump lurks at the right-most edge of the field on the general question of how aggressively we should close American society, but only by an increment. Where most GOP candidates want to prohibit Muslim refugee settlement in the U.S., Trump wants to prohibit Muslim immigration more broadly. Where other candidates want to step up deportation of unauthorized immigrants quite a lot,...