Free Republic

Star Trek actor LeVar Burton threatens VIOLENCE against parental rights group Moms for Liberty “Moms for Liberty? No? Good. Then hands will not need to be thrown tonight.” The 66-year-old actor also discussed the group during a recent interview with Esquire, rejoicing that “hardly any candidates backed by Moms for Liberty won their races” during the 2023 election cycle. He added, “These are people who would rather children not know the truth. Those kids will never know what they’re missing, but it’s our job to stand up for them, to be their voices and their advocates. That’s what being an...

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard challenges to the draconian Texas anti-choice law, a proceeding that might well be the first tolling of the death knell for the reproductive freedom that ensued after the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. This is undoubtedly a momentous bit of business, especially in the context of how we came to this 6-3 conservative majority on the high bench. However, on Friday, when very few people were watching, the Court took another action that is equally terrifying. Remember when Steve Bannon was yammering about destroying “the administrative state”? Members of the Supreme Court do.

We have been following a slew of defamation lawsuits by political figures over the last few years. (See, e.g., here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). For torts scholars, it has been a bonanza of interesting issues touching on every element of defamation law. There is now an important ruling out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that could have enormous implications not just for the media but anyone who retweets stories or claims. The appellate panel ruled unanimously for Rep. Devin Nunes against journalist Ryan Lizza...

Now that Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is personally "reaching out" to members of a Michigan election board as part of a larger plot to simply throw out the results of an election he lost by a comfortable margin, maybe we can stop pretending this is just a public tantrum we can allow to burn out until he falls into a fevered nap. That his allies believe the president must be approached like a spoiled toddler is itself an indication of our national decline, and an indictment of all the lackeys who've worked so hard to make...

Dear Dave, My neighbor across the street just put a giant Trump/Pence flag in their front yard. A week later―the day after the Breonna Taylor grand jury came back—he added a Blue Lives Matter flag to the pole. These people are very kind, perhaps the kindest and most generous people on our suburban block. And yet ... they're Trump supporters? They reject the idea of Black Lives Matter? I don't know what to do about it. It's like a big middle finger, whether they know it or not. I'd like to put up a Biden sign, or a "Hate Has...

I am excessively neutral on the subject of Joe Biden as a candidate for president. History would indicate that giving him another shot at it would be rather like handing Joe Hazelwood another supertanker. Nonetheless, considering the alternative, I'd walk through fire to vote for him. However, this piece in The New York Times is a vivid reminder that a) Biden's skills as a campaigner remain dodgy, and b) that he also seems to have lost a step as well. For more than a week, President Trump had been hurling unfounded accusations about Mr. Biden, his son Hunter and their...

Esquire’s Ryan Lizza published a lengthy story alleging that Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has a “politically explosive secret,” that he’s a hypocrite on immigration policy, and that when Lizza went to a small town in Iowa to blow open the conspiracy, he was met by odd townspeople who treated him poorly. It turns out that Nunes doesn’t have a secret, that he’s not a hypocrite on immigration policy, and that the Iowans Lizza met were wary of him slowly driving around town while children were at play because they discovered Lizza had recently been fired from his job for sexual...

Democrats and left-wing media have demonized House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) for exposing the Clinton campaign’s role in funding the salacious and unverified “pee dossier” against President Donald Trump, and they are now trying to go after his parents too. Esquire.com published the latest Nunes hit piece on Sunday evening, which involved reporter Ryan Lizza going to Sibley, Iowa, to stalk Devin Nunes’ parents at their home and dairy farm and asking members of their community for dirt on his parents and whether they were employing undocumented workers.

A salute is due Adm. William Fallon, who tried to prevent a wider war with Iran. After serving one year as commander of U.S. Central Command, Fallon has resigned, saying he was quitting because his differences with official U.S. policy had become a “distraction.” But there is a widespread perception that he was pushed out by the neo-conservatives among President George W. Bush’s aides, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, because of Fallon’s reluctance to go along with the administration’s hawkish moves toward Iran. Cheney, who took five consecutive draft deferments to stay out of the Vietnam war, does not mind...

The Washington Post reported a story on Saturday investigating counselor to the president Steve Bannon's legal residence, since no one really knows where he lives. But in the course of that investigation, they uncovered something that is even more disturbing: a hot tub at a house where Bannon claimed to live looked like it was filled with acid. The Post started looking into Bannon because while he claimed residency in Florida, he was spending most of his time in Washington, D.C., but his address was listed as his business manager's office in California. In fact, prosecutors in Miami have opened...

For years, Jorge Ramos has been the face of Univision, America's most influential Spanish-language news channel. Although seen by millions of people, for a time he was largely unknown to just as many. But then he stood up to Donald Trump, further solidifying himself as the voice of Latino voters. He also does a show for millennial viewers on Fusion, which broadens his base. It's been a long journey for the fifty-eight-year-old, who came to America as an immigrant and, as he says here, is inspired by de Tocqueville. I learned very early on that I had to question everything,...

Of all the predictable political responses to the mass murder in Orlando, the immediate impulse of non-Trumpian Republicans to dive for the handiest authoritarian solution is the most predictable of all. Here, among the Fox News electric teevee machine mannequins, is He, Trump's future Attorney General, explaining why the Bill of Rights now has to stop at only two amendments, and the first one doesn't count. Via Mediate: "There's no minister, there's no rabbi in this city — nor are there some imams — that object to having police officers in their congregation," he argued. "In fact, they want them...

Holy hell, even I didn't know that He, Trump was dumb enough to cancel the credentials of The Washington Post. But Tiger Beat On The Potomac was all over it. "Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post," Trump posted on Facebook. Trump had posted to Facebook nearly 20 minutes earlier "to show you how dishonest the phony Washington Post is." "I am no fan of President Obama, but to show you how dishonest the phony Washington Post is, they...

Donald Trump, the most prominent Republican right now, suggested on national TV on Monday that President Obama is possibly complicit in Sunday's horrific terror attack in Orlando. And maybe, Trump hinted, the president is even somehow involved. On Fox & Friends, the presumptive GOP presidential candidate said, "He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands—it's one or the other and either one is unacceptable." "Look," he continued, "we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind. And the something else in mind—you know, people can't believe...

Esquire magazine writer Charles Pierce must be in a state of panic after the events following yesterday's Donald Trump rally in San Jose, California when anti-Trump protesters violently attacked Trump supporters. Last week Pierce wrote that such attacks only help Trump and that has him extremely worried. Unfortunately for him, even some his fellow liberal journalists such as Emmett Rensin, who was today suspended from Vox, still haven't got a clue on just how incredibly counter-productive such riots are. 

After undercutting John McCain's war hero status and brushing his own Vietnam deferments under the rug, Donald Trump has once again mythologized his own time in the military in hopes of bolstering his presidential campaign. The funniest part: someone out there buys it. According to a new report from ​The New York Times, Trump recently told biographer Michael D'Antonio that he "always felt that I was in the military" because of his education at a military-themed boarding school. As the ​Times ​writes: According to the book, Mr. Trump attended the New York Military Academy after years of rowdy and rebellious...

LET'S BEGIN WITH THE BIG REVEALS: Half of all Americans are angrier today than they were a year ago. White Americans are the angriest of all. And black Americans are more optimistic about the future of the country and the existence of the American dream. There are depths and dimensions, dark corners and subtle contours to our national mood, and setting aside the issue of who actually has a right to be angry and about what - these pages are neutral territory; everyone is allowed their beef - we found three main factors shaping American rage:

"If three years ago any person had told me that at this day, I should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of our own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite—a fit subject for a mad house." —George Washington to Henry Knox, on the subject of Shays Rebellion, February 3, 1787 You have to give Captain Daniel Shays this: When he launched his armed sedition against lawful authority, he at least was invited in. Overnight on Saturday, in an obscure corner of the Oregon wilderness, and contrary to the law, and in...

Revelations 33:15—Yea, though it came to pass that those refusing to believe in the word of the Lord grew in number, and the fatted calves were slaughtered less frequently thanks to the Mark Of The Beast (a.k.a Weight Watchers), it did happen that shepherds keeping watch o’er the network television landscape did espy a need for new content. And so, in the year of our Lord 2015, it did transpire that Deadline reports Alcide Bava, a production company founded by Big Bang Theory’s Johnny Galecki, is developing a sitcom based on bestselling 2007 book The Year Of Living Biblically. Said...

The symptoms of the prion disease are beginning to become so obvious that even some of our more prominent pundits are beginning to notice them. For example, even former Karl Rove life-coach Ron Fournier has noticed the severe lack of Abraham Lincolns in the current GOP presidential candidates. And noted climate-denialist and baseball drone George Effing Will has staked out the bold position that many of these candidates have gone so far around the bend that they've crossed some kind of termination barrier. It is, therefore, especially disheartening that Cruz, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and who is...