Free Republic

Khashoggi’s murder is only a symptom of a much bigger problem. The biggest mistake the Trump administration made in the Jamal Khashoggi case occurred while Khashoggi was still alive: letting Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, think he could get away with something so heinous — and so heinously stupid. But the bell was rung, as it were, and there is no way to unring it. The Saudis surely made everything worse by lying about it. But the aftermath is such a complicated mess because it illuminates decisions made long before Prince Mohammed’s goons brought a bone saw to...

Nineteen days after Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappeared in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, the Saudi regime has at last acknowledged the obvious, that Khashoggi is dead. After first insisting that he had left the consulate of his own accord despite video evidence to the contrary, and then slamming the allegations of his murder as “baseless” and threatening oil sanctions against those claiming otherwise, the kingdom has finally settled on its official story: Khashoggi was inadvertently killed inside the consulate during a fistfight that just happened to break out in the midst of an otherwise standard meeting with...

Going all in on attacking President Trump isn’t proving to be a particularly effective business strategy for media outlets.The Weekly Standard, a 28-year old neoconservative institution, is reportedly headed towards dissolution after its founder, Bill Kristol, devoted almost three years of work to attacking the President and his supporters.It’s not just Kristol. The entire world of clickbait Trump-hate seems to be in jeopardy, including sites that cater to the liberal base.The same week that The Weekly Standard’s troubles broke, Vanity Fair dropped a bombshell report about the struggles faced by those hip, millennial-targeted left-wing rags with the cool names...

New York (CNN Business)The Weekly Standard, the magazine that espouses traditional conservatism and which has remained deeply critical of President Donald Trump, will shutter after 23 years, its owner Clarity Media Group announced Friday morning. The magazine will publish its final issue on December 17. * * * Employees were told at an all staff meeting, which CNN obtained an audio recording of, that they would be paid through the end of the year, and that afterward they would receive severance which would range in scale depending on factors like seniority. To receive severance, however, employees would need to sign...

New York (CNN Business)The Weekly Standard, the magazine that espouses traditional conservatism and which has remained deeply critical of President Donald Trump, will shutter after 23 years, Clarity Media Group, the owner of its publisher announced Friday morning. It will publish its final issue on December 17. The announcement came after the magazine's editor-in-chief, Stephen Hayes, met privately with Ryan McKibben, the chairman of The Weekly Standard's publisher, MediaDC. "For more than twenty years The Weekly Standard has provided a valued and important perspective on political, literary and cultural issues of the day," McKibben said in a press release. "The...

“This is before and this is after. Before and after,” Cory Booker is saying on Snapchat. He’s just met a young fan with an Afro and is drawing the contrast to his own shiny bald head. It’s a routine he will repeat again later in the day and as he crisscrosses the country before the midterms. The New Jersey senator can’t say no to a selfie. If you are standing around looking idle, he’ll probably ask you to take one and upload the photo to his social media accounts for his millions of followers. Social media are Booker’s bread and...

Bill Kristol’s Never Trump magazine — The Weekly Standard — is facing its imminent demise. Perhaps hate didn’t sell too well with Conservatives and Republicans. The owners of the publication, Media DC, say they are going to concentrate on their other outlet instead, The Washington Examiner, Vox reports. A source told Vox reporter Joan Coaston, “This is not about dwindling subscribers. This is about strip-mining TWS for its assets” — namely, the magazine’s subscriber lists. That’s not likely 100 percent truthful. Founded in 1995 by Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard is best known as a publication aimed...

On Tuesday, Emerald Robinson, chief White House correspondent for One America News Network (OANN), unleashed a powerful rumor that The Weekly Standard is on its last legs. Sources confirmed to CNN that Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes warned staff the future of the paper is uncertain. One of the magazine's key editors, Bill Kristol, has adopted a firmly anti-Trump stance, becoming a well-known #NeverTrump leader.

New York (CNN Business)The fate of The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine that has staked out a position as a publication on the right still critical of President Donald Trump, is uncertain, Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes told staff in a series of phone calls Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The magazine's precarious position comes after its leadership spent months searching for a buyer, the people told CNN. The people explained that The Weekly Standard's leadership had butted heads with MediaDC, the current parent company of the magazine, and that the two parties had agreed to allow Hayes...

The fate of The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine that has staked out a position as a publication on the right still critical of President Donald Trump, is uncertain, Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes told staff in a series of phone calls Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The magazine's precarious position comes after its leadership spent months searching for a buyer, the people told CNN. The people explained that The Weekly Standard's leadership had butted heads with MediaDC, the current publisher of the magazine, and that the two parties had agreed to allow Hayes to search for a...

A White House petition gathering force calls for citizenship to be stripped and exile for anyone who signs a petition in favor of a state's secession. "Mr. President, please sign an executive order such that each American citizen who signed a petition from any state to secede from the USA shall have their citizenship stripped and be peacefully deported," the full petition reads. The title of the petition is, "WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: Strip the Citizenship from Everyone who Signed a Petition to Secede and Exile Them." As of this writing, 2,205 have signed the petition; 22,795 more...

In his online appeal for money after being fired this week, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok credited an unlikely source to vouch for his victim status: The Weekly Standard. At one time a leading conservative magazine, the Standard declared last month that Strzok’s plight was merely an “overwrought tale of bias” and the case against him is “just sound and fury.” The article brushed off Strzok’s actions as “several bad judgment calls” and blasted Congressional Republicans for continuing a criminal investigation into the now-unemployed G-man. Strzok is following only 32 people on his newly-verified Twitter account. Bill Kristol, the...

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Bill Kristol, from the Weekly Standard, went from a leading conservative voice and Obama critic to a Trump hater who worked with Obama to derail the Trump Campaign. Kristol fell so far that he started pushing the Trump – Russia dossier at the same time as John Brennan and the Obama team. Kristol went from leading conservative voice to being the leader of the anti-Trump “conservative” movement in a matter of a few years. Kristol and The Weekly Standard published articles smearing The Gateway Pundit for supporting the Republican Presidential candidate.

Pity the poor Never Trumpets at the Weekly Standard! All they wanted was a bit of creative instability in the Middle East and Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or David French or just about anyone in the White House other than Donald J Trump. And yet here we are two years into the Trump administration and they are still fighting the good fight and getting voicemails from readers like this

So it all comes down to, who are the fact-checkers? A Facebook employee stated at the press conference that approved fact checkers will be those who have signed on to Poynter’s international fact checking network principles. You can see the list of signatories at the link; the only one that I recognize as more or less conservative is the Weekly Standard. Facebook has already said that it will use Politifact and Snopes, both left-leaning, as fact checkers. At the press conference, it got even worse: In the US, we recently announced a partnership with The Associated Press to use their...

Editor-at-Large of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol accused President Donald Trump of trying to “shut down” the Russia investigation Tuesday, despite the White House’s continued cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller. “The president hates the investigation. He fears it, and he wants to shut it down or curb it as much as he can,” Kristol said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” “It may be that he intends to fire Mueller,” Kristol added. “Trump is trying systematically to discredit the FBI … and he’s doing so by attacking individuals, by attacking the whole organization, by saying the whole thing is a...

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol said that President Trump and Senate candidate Roy Moore (R-Ala.) are bringing out his "inner liberal." In a tweet Tuesday afternoon, the founder and editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard suggested that his long-held views are being tested by Trump and Moore, as well as a growing number of sexual allegations and the Republican Party's tax-reform effort. 

The journalist Joe Klein, a leading Bill Clinton chronicler in the 1990s, said Tuesday that he was an “enabler” for defending the then-president. Klein said in an interview with the NPR show On Point that he didn’t think Democrats today would stand by Clinton the way they did in the 1990s as the cultural landscape has shifted on sexual misconduct. “I must confess to having been a Clinton enabler during that time,” Klein told guest host Jane Clayson. “In that I defended him, and we all knew that he was a cad. There's no question about that. But it was...

The May 1 issue of The Weekly Standard led its “Scrapbook” section with a nice dig at Politico for a story last September touting the strategic genius who mined data for the er, President Hillary campaign. The headline was "Clinton's Towering Fiasco." Elan Kriegel’s “erasable marker scribblings reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind that amount to some of the earliest drafts of the computer algorithms that underlie nearly all of the Clinton campaign’s most important strategic decisions.” They didn’t mock Politico’s Shane Goldmacher by name, but did enjoy the sound of his beautiful-mind gush back then: To understand Kriegel’s role is...

Kristol announced that he would become The Weekly Standard’s editor-at-large, “continuing to write weekly editorials and contribute to the website.” Steve Hayes and Richard Starr would take over the day-to-day operations of the website, Kristol wrote. Under Kristol’s editorship, The Weekly Standard has been the central publication for neoconservatives, including Kristol’s father, the so-called “godfather” of neoconservativism, Irving Kristol. During the election season, Kristol was a leading voice in the #NeverTrump camp and searched publicly for months for a conservative alternative to Trump