Free Republic

This morning I received a text from someone I have never met. It read: Hello Dr Gorka, I’m a reporter at the Washington Post and we are working on an article about how Donald Trump‘s messages on TruthSocial are communicated outside that particular platform by a key group of his like-minded supporters. You are one of the people whom our data team identified as a key individual (in addition to Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, and Gen Michael Flynn, among others) who helps DJT spread his messages to the wider world. We wanted to ask for your comment about that role...

When President Biden proposed an additional $24 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine in August, Moscow spin doctors working for the Kremlin were ready to try to undermine public support for the bill, internal Kremlin documents show. In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions, according to a trove of internal Kremlin documents...

Washington Post staffers walked off the job last week to protest their salaries failing to keep up with record inflation - despite the outlet repeatedly celebrating President Biden's 'miracle' economy. The strike on December 7 came after 18-months of negotiations failed to deliver a 'living wage' in that keeps pace with soaring prices, the paper's union said. Staffers released a much-criticized video explaining their reasons for going on strike, feeling they are 'worth raises that keep up with inflation' because they covered issues including the pandemic, climate change and the Ukraine war. But just days before the strike, the Post...

When Sean Youra was 26 years old and working as an engineer, he started watching documentaries about climate change. Youra, who was struggling with depression and the loss of a family member, was horrified by what he learned about melting ice and rising extreme weather. He started spending hours on YouTube, watching videos made by fringe scientists who warned that the world was teetering on the edge of societal collapse — or even near-term human extinction. Youra started telling his friends and family that he was convinced that climate change couldn’t be stopped, and humanity was doomed. In short, he...

The Washington Post issued a correction after conservative activist Chris Rufo slammed the paper for publishing what he called "flat-out lies" in an article about how Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) appointed him and five other people to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees. Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow, said Post reporter Valerie Strauss included "distortions, inaccuracies, and flat-out lies" in her article Saturday titled, "DeSantis moves to turn a progressive Fla. college into a conservative one." In a Twitter thread early Sunday morning, Rufo debunked five claims the paper made, including allegations that he has insisted systemic racism...

Adults who received the updated coronavirus booster shots are better protected against severe disease than those who haven’t, cutting their risk of having to visit an emergency room or being hospitalized with covid-19 by 50 percent or more, according to new federal data.Two reports released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give the first detailed look at how well the updated boosters from Pfizer and Moderna protect against serious illness. But uptake of the “bivalent” boosters rolled out in September has been low among vaccine-weary Americans, with only about 14 percent of those eligible — ages 5...

Get Woke, Go Broke: Washington Post Staff Meeting Erupts Into Chaos As Layoffs Announced After losing more than half a million subscribers in the past two years, did the far-left writers and employees at the Washington Post really think they would avoid any consequences? It would appear that they are exactly as oblivious as many people suspected. A recent hidden camera video has surfaced of the latest Washington Post employee “town hall” meeting, in which CEO Fredrick Ryan delivers the bad news that the company will be executing worker layoffs after subscription revenues plummeted. Not surprisingly, the employees (presumably made...

Several internet safety experts said that Musk’s comments put Roth at grave risk. Roth, who is openly gay, worked past Musk’s October takeover. He then resigned and said Musk’s hands-off approach to moderation was increasing danger to users. “He’s putting Yoel’s life in danger and he knows it,” tweeted Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at Harvard Law School. Roth did not respond to a request for comment. In imputing nefarious motives to Twitter’s former managers and saying a crime had been committed, Musk adopted techniques used by the QAnon conspiracy movement, which falsely claims that Democrats and elites are running child...

As he made his final pitch to voters in western Wisconsin last week, Sen. Ron Johnson told a story about a truck driver who got stuck while navigating a tricky road. The senator said he was driving through Portage when he encountered a traffic snarl caused by the immobile truck. Johnson said he is typically impatient but was not in this case because he witnessed something “heartwarming”: The people of the small community in central Wisconsin sprang into action to help the truck driver get going again. He ended the story with this reveal: “You know, one little point really...

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network Thursday, raising fears of how his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate. Twitter has struggled to enforce its rules against harassment and extremism, and the company has not yet published any broad-scale changes to its content-moderation policies. But Musk, a self-described "free speech absolutist," has fiercely criticized the company's previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive and said he would work to overturn some of the...

Officials in Kyiv and several Western countries rejected claims made without evidence by the Kremlin that Ukraine is planning to use a “dirty bomb” — an explosive weapon designed to scatter radioactive material — on its own territory, characterizing them as an attempt by Russia to create a pretext for escalating the conflict. “We all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory,” foreign ministers from the United States, France and the United Kingdom said in a Sunday joint statement, after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made the unfounded claim...

“There’s just a lament for what’s happened to the party and a real sense of disgust at election denialism, the lies, and the extent to which these candidates ape Trump,” Longwell said. “As the party has changed, there’s a group of Republicans who feel alienated despite being Republican voters their whole lives.” Trump plots aggressive midterm strategy seen in GOP as a double-edged sword This group may be relatively small: Surveys show Trump continues to command overwhelming support among Republican voters. But in closely contested elections, even a small number of Republicans who cross over, split tickets or stay home...

A hail of shrapnel from kamikaze drones ripped through the tent where off-duty Ukrainian border guards were sleeping near a crossing with Belarus, three hours north of Ukraine’s capital. Viktor Derevyanko woke to scalding pain, his body burning. Blood spilled from his hand as he tried to wipe his face. A piece of metal had traveled through his arm and stomach and into the muscle around his heart. “I couldn’t get my bearings,” said Derevyanko, the deputy head of the unit. “Only on the third explosion did I manage to fall out of bed and try to find at least...

KYIV, Ukraine — A powerful attack on a Russian air base in occupied Crimea was the work of Ukrainian special forces, a Ukrainian government official told The Washington Post on Wednesday, suggesting an increasingly important role for covert forces operating deep behind enemy lines as the country expands efforts to expel Russian troops. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, did not disclose details of how Tuesday’s attack was carried out. The attack marks a significant escalation in the nearly six-month-old war, demonstrating a new ability by...

Russia is scrambling to recruit men to fight in Ukraine after major losses in the early months of the war left the army stretched thin and some soldiers disenchanted. The Kremlin has so far declined to order a general mobilization of draft-age soldiers, because this could signal that the war is not proceeding as well as depicted in the Russian media and threaten to stir grass-roots resistance to the military campaign.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is potentially poised to take down one of the nation’s oldest and most restrictive gun-control laws this summer. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen will be the court’s first major Second Amendment case in more than a decade and happens to be coming amid rising national gun violence and an uptick in gun sales in recent years. What the justices decide could unravel laws across the nation restricting who can carry guns in public. Here’s what’s happening. The case: Can New York place severe restrictions on who can carry a...

Sometimes news is newsworthy not because it is particularly revelatory but because it confirms something obvious that lacked confirmation or because it provides something broadly understood with a sense of scale. This certainly applies to the revelation — uncovered by the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns and reported by CNN’s Brian Stelter — that President Biden views Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world.” Obvious in broad strokes but now confirmed and with a sense of scale. But this top-line assessment of the face most associated with the right-wing cable...

Sarah Longwell serves on the Leadership Council for Conservatives Against Discrimination and is the chief executive of Longwell Partners. Last week, when I picked up my 3- and 5-year-old from school, I found myself drawn to the family pictures that adorn their classroom walls. The teachers asked us to send these photographs along with our children on the first day of school, as both a comfort measure as well as to help the kids get to know each other better. There’s me and my wife, smiling along with our two boys — all of us wearing helmets as we paused...

U.S. judges including those appointed by Republican presidents are increasingly sentencing defendants who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol to three-year terms of court supervision, fearing they could be misled into committing political violence in the 2024 presidential election.

You can always tell how insular a person has become in their politics when a term that has been used regularly regarding a topic that has been in the news for years strikes them as something "new."Of course, people who don't share columnist Monica Hesse's Bryn Mawr value system have actually been using the word for some time.Okay, I shouldn't be so hard on Bryn Mawr. After all, it has a politically diverse student body with only around 42% identifying as "liberal" and the rest identifying as Marxists.