Free Republic

Although much of the mainstream media such as The New York Times and CNN has recently gone ga-ga over the candidacy of Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke (D) who currently is running for the U.S. Senate from that state, Vox wasn't quite so kind in analyzing how he did in Tuesday's Democrat primary. In fact they called him a "Loser (sort of)" since he underperformed despite running against nonentities in his primary. Vox's loser label for O'Rourke came in their politics reporter's, Andrew Prokop's, assessment of the Texas primary election:

Rep. Devin Nunes’s infamous memo — the document numerous House Republicans claimed would demonstrate fundamental anti-Trump corruption at the FBI — was released early Friday afternoon. The entire thing is three and a half pages and only takes a few minutes to read closely and carefully. After doing that, there is only one conclusion a fair reader could draw: There is absolutely nothing here. There is no proof in the memo that the FBI is biased against Trump, no proof of abuse of surveillance powers by the FBI, and no proof that the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to...

...But Democrats weren’t about to let facts get in the way of advancing their collusion narrative. The House Intelligence Committee released their cherry-picked examples of “Russian Facebook ads” in November. [....] The media didn’t let facts get in the way of fueling the collusion narrative, either. After receiving their marching orders from CNN, the media swung into action: This includes Vanity Fair, Natasha Bertrand at Business Insider, The Daily Mail, Fortune, The Hill, Reuters, and CNBC. Far-left sites like the Daily Kos, Vox, Salon, and Talking Points Memo joined the fray to falsely characterize all the ads as targeting swing...

Yale psychiatry professor Bandy Lee has been raising concerns about President Trump’s mental health for over a year and suggested in a new interview that Trump should be physically contained for an “urgent evaluation” to determine his mental state. In a Vox interview published Saturday, reporter Eliza Barclay asks Lee, “Okay, so you’re calling for an evaluation; you’re serious about that. How could he possibly be evaluated, since it seems like he wouldn’t voluntarily do it?” Lee responded, “We encounter this often in mental health. Those who most require an evaluation are the least likely to submit to one. That...

Oh Great Pumpkin! Where were you in 2017? You were supposed to bring us evidence of Trump-Russia collusion but you never showed up. Oh well, perhaps we will see you in 2018. Please! Pretty please, Great Pumpkin! Andrew Prokop of Vox wrote a rather dispirited December 28 article about how no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion has yet appeared despite the mainstream media early this year loudly hyping the reality of such collusion. In fact, it seemed that finding evidence of such collusion was a mere formality since the MSM guaranteed it happened. The only problem is, despite nearly eight months of...

Congressional Republicans may not celebrate the passage of the tax bill at the inside-the-Beltway equivalent of the Bada Bing, but Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall nonetheless likens them to some notable patrons of that fictional North Jersey strip club. "The absolute need to pass something and to pass it fast led to a legislative process which was akin to driving the truck up to the loading bay and just taking everything. Looting. Or perhaps a mob bust-out," wrote Marshall on Tuesday. "One episode of The Sopranos…was based on the 'bust out' idea. A guy got into debt...

In less than a month, Alabama voters will decide whether to send to the United States Senate a man accused of abusing and romantically pursuing teenage girls. If Roy Moore wins, it will mean his constituents either don’t believe or don’t care about the woman who says Moore assaulted her when she was 16, or the woman who says Moore kissed and touched her when she was 14, or the women who say Moore kept approaching them at the mall when they were teenagers. And a Moore victory will set the standard that someone who is the subject of multiple...

The Satanic Temple might be the religion for 2017. On a quiet New England street, just steps from a yoga studio, a giant wicker sculpture of Baphomet — a demonic entity often associated with Satan — looked down on passersby. The statue is perched upon a historic colonial-style house, filled with occult and diabolical-themed art. And that house is the national headquarters of The Satanic Temple, a national organization that’s equal parts performance art group, leftist activist organization, and anti-religion religious movement. The house, which opened to the public in 2016, doubles as an art gallery. Each room is filled...

With the revelation yesterday in the Washington Post that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for the research that resulted in the infamous Steele (aka "Golden Showers") dossier that contained allegations of supposed ties between Donald Trump's campaign and the Kremlin, it will be interesting to see what the reaction will be from liberal media outlets. In the case of Vox, we didn't have to wait very long. Just a little over an hour after the October 24 Washington Post report, Andrew Prokop of Vox had already decided that Hillary Clinton has become toxic and has thrown her under...

Liberals are getting crushed by the right’s agitprop, and Verrit will not save them. Democrats, and the center-left more broadly, are obsessed with numbers games. They are animated more than anything by facts, by a consensus reached among themselves that they possess an exclusive monopoly on empirical reason. They blurt out facts and stats among one another, devoid of any context but the conviction that if God is not on their side, then reason is, and so long as that’s the case they’re bound to win. It is no surprise, then, that when the world’s most thankless Clinton hype man,...

If someone with a psych degree can add a new term to the list of disorders, I’d be much obliged. Let’s call it “Virtual Empathy Overload Syndrome” and define it as “Someone who can’t read another hot take and/or virtue signaling attempt, be it in the form of a solidarity avatar, hashtag, or asinine essay from mush-minded twits desperate for strangers to know Just How Much They Care(TM).” Because I’m suffering from it and need some kind of pill. Or a special bathroom. That’s how it works, right? Bake me a cake or I’ll sue. Not helping is Vox’s latest...

When Donald Trump used the phrase “alt-left” to describe the anti-neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville last week, most people had no idea what he meant. I’m actually not sure he knew what he meant. “What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the ‘alt-right’? Do they have any assemblage of guilt?” Trump said during a rambling press conference. If the alt-left exists, it’s probably best represented by “antifa” (short for “anti-fascist”) — a loose network of left-wing activists who physically resist people they consider fascists. These are often the scruffy, bandana-clad people who show up at alt-right...

"Kim Jong-un blinked and backed off some of his threats. So is it possible that some of the President’s amped up rhetoric worked?" That was John Berman today at CNN's Newsroom blurting out that perhaps President Donald Trump should get credit for North Korea backing down on its threat to hit Guam with a missile. Unfortunately for Berman, he broke an important taboo among the left that Trump should never be given credit for any positive achievements.So how to explain that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un apparently blinked? Well, Vox has come up with a highly creative, if laughable, solution. The...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is leading one of the biggest witch hunts in American political history. According to a new report by VOX, the witch hunt just got worse, as Mueller has notified former FBI Head James Comey and former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe that they should be prepared to testify against President Trump. VOX reports: Shortly after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May, Acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe told several of the highest-ranking managers of the bureau they should consider themselves possible witnesses in any investigation into whether President Donald Trump engaged in...

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen...

Surrender or antisemite Those are the options being presented by the Israeli ambassador to Hungary. I have no doubt that Hungary will rightly choose the latter. The Israeli ambassador in Budapest has called on the Hungarian government to end its campaign against Jewish billionaire George Soros, which he claims is stoking antisemitic sentiment. The Hungarian government has recently rolled out a nationwide billboard campaign, urging Hungarians to stand firm against the ruinous influence of the Jewish financial speculator.George Soros is well known for his involvement in the open borders campaign, with his Open Society organisation essentially acting as a front...

HOORAY! We lost again!!! A reliable source of humor after Democrats lose elections is Vox writer Matthew Yglesias. A month ago Yglesias was celebrating the loss of the democrat in the Montana special congressional election by declaring his loss to really mean a win for democrats. Yglesias continued mining this political comedy vein by declaring that the loss of Jon Ossoff in the George 6th Congressional District special election, after the party blew over $30 million on his campaign, really means that the "Republicans are in trouble."

HOORAY! We lost!!!That is becoming the laughable mainstream media theme about many special elections since President Donald Trump's victory last November. We saw this happen in early March when Politico hailed Democrat performances in special elections despite the fact that there was no net change. The latest iteration of celebrating participation trophies, and likely to be repeated by MSM sources,  comes by way of the May 26 edition of Vox in which Matthew Yglesias declared that the loss by the Democrat candidate in the congressional special election was beyond mere good news for the Democrats. In fact the Vox headline acclaimed that Republicans'...

Do you remember the time not so very long ago when, according to Democrats and liberals, big money in politics was the most evil thing about our political system? Well that was then. Starting most noticeably during the presidential campaign last Fall when Hillary Clinton outspent the Donald Trump campaign by about two-to-one, Democrats and liberals have developed newfound respect for big money in politics to the extent they now actually brag about it. The latest example is Vox hyping big campaign spending in a March 27 article by Jeff Stein whose very title positively exults that Georgia Dems normally raise...

The story of Milo Yiannopoulos’s fall from conservative grace ended when a conservative blog posted video footage of him making comments that seemed to rationalize pedophilia. But it started when a 16-year-old high school student in Canada decided Yiannopoulos was embraced much too closely by mainstream conservatives. The teen was moved to dig up footage on Yiannopoulos when she heard that he’d been invited to speak at the highest profile gathering of conservatives each year in America, the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). She defines herself as “very socially liberal,” but leans right on economics and foreign policy. Yiannopoulos,...