Free Republic

A Pennsylvania county has become the example of how Trump took the nation by storm with a conservative rhetoric that reached the forgotten corners of America in the 2016 cycle. Ben Bradlee Jr., a former Boston Globe reporter who led the Pulitzer-Prize winning team featured in the movie "Spotlight," sat down with ABC’s Political Director Rick Klein this week for the Powerhouse Politics Podcast to discuss his book, “The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania Country Elected Donald Trump and Changed America.” His book takes a deep dive, through the lives of 12 characters, into how Luzerne County became...

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton drew a comparison Tuesday between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, saying that in both cases, a foreign power had attacked the United States, but that in the latter, the president had “done nothing.” Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, also said she thinks Russian interference and other factors “certainly altered the outcome” in several parts of the country during the last campaign. She criticized President Trump’s response to last year’s violence in Charlottesville, saying he “has thrown his lot in” with white nationalists. Clinton made...

I’m responding to David White’s letter: Well done! Delightful letter! I’m so glad to hear from a kindred spirit. In January 2015, I had one of my prophetic dreams: Donald Trump would be our next president. When I related it to my husband, he laughed and said, “Why would Donald Trump care about people like us?” Evidently he really did. On election night, after assuring my husband that Pennsylvania would go for Trump (I grew up in a small town north of Harrisburg so I knew my people), I went off to bed. Less than 15 minutes later, David came...

Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyers said Wednesday they have given the Senate sworn affidavits from four people who say she told them well before Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination that she had been sexually assaulted when she was much younger. And according to all four, she either named Kavanaugh as the assailant or described the attacker as a “federal judge.” At the U.N., meanwhile, President Donald Trump said on the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Kavanaugh and Ford that Republicans have been “nice” and “respectful” in their treatment of Ford. He described his nominee as “a real gem”...

PIKEVILLE, Ky. — On Election Day 2016, Jonathan Webb found himself on a lavish cruise liner with America‘s elite, gliding along the Atlantic outside of Miami. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was there, and so were Quentin Tarantino, Erin Brockovich, TV legend Norman Lear and singer will.i.am. Celebrity chefs were stationed at different eateries; yoga gurus offered spiritual talks and meditations. Webb, who was working with the Obama White House at the time, was used to being in rarefied company. But still, he found the experience surreal — and it was about to get even weirder. On TV screens...

Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has said that Hillary Clinton was “robbed” in the 2016 presidential election, describing herself as a “co-conspirator” in what happened. In an interview with The View on Monday, the ex-Apprentice contestant spoke about her time in the White House and the recordings she made of President Donald Trump while she worked with him. “You know, Hillary Clinton was robbed,” Manigault Newman told The View’s panel, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Abby Huntsman. “And I was…a co-conspirator in that robbery.” Speaking about Clinton, Manigault played a recording she said was...

A video posted to right-wing media site Breitbart showed Google executives bemoaning the election of President Trump at a company meeting in 2016. Wednesday’s release of the leaked video is the latest volley in an expanding campaign by Republicans and allies in the media to demonstrate that Google and other Silicon Valley firms are biased against conservatives. Last week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he will meet with Republican state attorneys general this month to discuss whether social media companies are stifling conservative voices. Google has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks since Trump accused the company of...

Transgender model Mia Isabella, who was involved in the reputed Tyga and Kylie Jenner cheating scandal, said she and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick were once in a romantic relationship. Isabella originally remained quiet about her love for Kaepernick to “protect” him. “I loved him very much and he cared for me greatly, but in order to protect his brand I made him walk away from me,” she told International Business Times via email Monday. “Knowing the persecution he would face because I’m a Trans woman.” They have not spoken since late September, she added.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday won dismissal of a lawsuit in which three protesters accused him of “inciting to riot,” after they were roughed up at a March 2016 campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky during Trump’s White House run. By a 3-0 vote, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the protesters did not state a valid claim under Kentucky law against Trump or his campaign, and Trump’s speech was protected by the First Amendment because he did not specifically advocate violence. Henry Brousseau, Kashiya Nwanguma and Molly Shah said they had planned a peaceful protest at the March...

A leaked email chain has revealed that senior executives at Google attempted to rig the 2016 US presidential election for Hillary Clinton. In the emails, a Google executive describes efforts to pay for free rides for a certain sect of the population to the polls–a get-out-the-vote for Hispanic voters operation–and how these efforts were because she thought it would help Hillary Clinton win the general election in 2016, according to Breitbart.

The study, published in the journal Leadership, suggests that the Republicans viewed Trump as strongly representing what they stand for creating party unity and success in the election. Hillary Clinton may have lost out to Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential elections because the Democrats were too willing to welcome others with differing views into their party, a study has found. The study, published in the journal Leadership, suggests that the Republicans viewed Trump as strongly representing what they stand for creating party unity and success in the election. However, Democrats' greater inclusiveness and willingness to integrate members of...

s Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish. Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the...

Actor-comedian Patton Oswalt has posted an essay urging readers to sign a petition to impeach Donald Trump. The Justified actor and stand-up wrote an article for McSweeney’s where he blasts the president and said it’s up to voters to rise up make their voices heard because “help isn’t coming.” “Cooler heads do not prevail,” Oswalt wrote of what he dubbed “Trump’s Casino-Buffet Presidency” in the wake of rising impeachment chatter. “There is no firm, guiding hand on the tiller of statecraft, the economy, diplomacy, or infrastructure,” he continued. “There is puerile, adolescent emotion and momentary libidinal pleasure. And the rest...

**SNIP** Those eight people range in age from 39 to 71 and are from European countries such as Germany, Poland and Italy as well as countries such as El Salvador, Mexico, Haiti and Korea. The department did not specify if the individual was from North Korea or South Korea. The Justice Department stated that a grand jury also charged a 26-year old from Mexico “with fraud and misuse of visas, permits, and other documents, and voting by an alien.” A 58-year-old from the Dominican Republic pleaded guilty to “passport fraud and voting by an alien,” according to the release. The...

You’ve never heard Colin Powell talk like this. The former secretary of state and four-star Army general who has been in the national spotlight since he was Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor let loose on Hillary Clinton (“greedy, not transformational”), her husband Bill (still “dicking bimbos”), and Donald Trump (a “national disgrace”). The frank, biting version of Powell made public is thanks to private emails that appeared on dcleaks.com, a mysterious repository for hacked information suspected to be of Russian origin. Powell’s office confirmed to The New York Times that the emails were genuine.

The first inkling I got that a lot more blacks liked Trump than they dared let on was during a dinner table discussion with a relative a couple of days before the 2016 presidential election. He flatly said that he was voting for Trump. There was dead silence, shock, and then loud outbursts of “no” followed by non-stop pillorying of him. He stuck to his guns and said Trump appealed to him because he represented change and he thought he’d be good for small business and would cut taxes. It was a textbook Horatio Alger, laissez faire rationalization that would...

Rick Wilson is a long-time Republican strategist and the architect of all manner of knives-out campaign ads, including one particularly vicious spot from the 2008 presidential campaign that hammered Barack Obama’s connection to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright with the tag: “Barack Obama: Too Radical, Too Risky.” He helped start the Never Trump movement. It cost him friends and all manner of potential political work. It subjected him to the threats and fury of Trump’s troll army. He was labelled a Rino (Republican in name only) and a party traitor. And he didn’t care. Right is right, and Trump was clearly,...

A “feeling as though the world is going to end.” That could describe what millions of people could have experienced in the last 100 years. World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sept. 11, the ISIS rampage throughout the world, all not only understandably evoked fear of the world ending, but all revolved around madness, war and genocide. But today that feeling is brought to liberals simply because their favorite lost an election. And strangely enough, it seems compounded with every good piece of news about the economy and the national security of the...

An investigation by Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe concluded this week that high-profile astrophysicist and atheist Lawrence Krauss violated the university’s sexual harassment policy by grabbing a woman’s breast at a conference in Australia in late 2016. (Krauss is a prominent member of the skeptics movement, which disputes the existence of a god or supernatural powers.)

US President Barack Obama has said failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. Mr Obama was answering a series of questions on the highs and lows of his time in office on Fox News. He said, however, that intervening in Libya had been "the right thing to do". The US and other countries carried out strikes designed to protect civilians during the 2011 uprising. But after the former Libyan leader was killed, Libya plunged into chaos with militias taking over and two rival parliaments and...