Free Republic

There have been many strange scenes in this era of coronavirus pandemic, anti-racism unrest, and woke recriminations, but perhaps none have been stranger than one that took place on Zoom late last month, when 115 people, appearing in little squares on computer screens, held a kind of trial, a somewhat secret one at that, closed to the press, its participants barred from talking about it to outsiders afterwards. The episode illustrates the tense workings of cancel culture preoccupying an American institution. In the dock, and visible in his own little square, was Carlin Romano, a writer, philosopher, book critic and,...

The marriage between Donald Trump and the Republican Establishment was born of convenience not love. The buttoned-up, Burke-quoting worshippers of Mammon (and/or white patriarchal Jesus) who occupy the commanding heights of American conservatism didn’t get into bed with a gauche, grimy Clinton donor until it saw no better way to move up in the world. In January 2016, National Review spoke for most of the GOP’s old guard when it declared Trump “a menace to American conservatism. But once in office, it enabled the Heritage Foundation and Koch Network to dictate the lion’s share of the administration regulatory policies and...

Watch this clip from New York City. Beware if you’re watching it at work — a few F-bombs dropped: Half of you don't even have a college education' I’m not saying that there should be violence. In fact, I’m saying there should not be. But if anybody needs his face slapped, it’s that fatmouthing punk. Such a powerful symbolic moment is caught in that short clip. It clarifies. This leftist loony shrieking curses at the police, telling a black cop that he’s a “traitor” to his race. Mocking the police for not being educated. Boy oh boy, the mask falls,...

Soldiers from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Drum in New York have been ordered to be ready to deploy within four hours if called, according to three people with direct knowledge of the orders. Soldiers in Fort Carson, in Colorado, and Fort Riley in Kansas have been told to be ready within 24 hours.

“Any quick history lesson about how owners in sports have acted over time, how they’ve interacted with communities and governments and public coffers and everything else will tell you that greed dictates basically whatever they try to do,” Bryant Gumbel bluntly says of the motivation behind leagues like the NFL, NBA, MLB and the NHL to get their players back in action from the coronavirus lockdown of the past two months. “I think they view athletes as commodities to get them to an end,” the host of HBO’s Real Sports added. Never one to play it safe over the 25-seasons...

Situated on mount Parnassus in central Greece lies the city of Delphi. While the city now is mostly ruins, for over a thousand years the ancient world referred to it as the Center of the World. Millions from around the ancient world would flock to the city to inquire of the Oracle. To a select few, the Oracle would sit in the temple of Apollo and give prophecies or answer questions of business, trade, and war. Alexander the Great was said to have visited the Oracle to inquire as to whether he would conquer the world. While modernity can scoff...

They’ve gone too far. “Donald Trump’s supporters are racist“, or “uneducated”, or “unenlightened”, or (fill_In_The_Blank).  This hate-filled sentiment is clear within the latest corrupt and targeted impeachment attack against the office of the President.Now the media narrative controllers are fully engaged, gleeful with impeachment blood-lust amid their broadcast brethren.  The raw political corruption is now extreme.Do not look away.As we bear witness, anyone trying to convince us this entire assembly of our union is headed in the right direction, well, they might want to revisit their proximity to the 2020 election ballpark. Because they’re not just out of the city...

Last November, Jack Dorsey, the brains behind Twitter, declared that he had gone on a 10-day silent retreat in Myanmar to practice Vipassana, considered the oldest form of Buddhist meditation. Sounding more like the Monk of Silicon Valley than the Disruptor of Wall Street, Dorsey explained that giving up “devices, reading, writing, physical exercise, music, intoxicants, meat, talking, or even eye contact with others” was a “detox of all the noise in the world.” Never mind that he conveniently forgot about Myanmar’s violence toward the Rohingya minority, and not to mention that much of that noise is amplified through the...

Photos of Jeffrey Epstein's body being wheeled into hospital moments before he was pronounced dead have emerged as it is revealed corrections officers had not checked on the pedophile for several hours before he hanged himself in his New York jail cell. .................................................. The 66-year-old should have had a cellmate but the inmate scheduled to move in with him was mysteriously transferred on Friday just hours before he killed himself.

First things first. We cannot approach the analysis of Robert Mueller or any of the officials within the closed-circle of the DC fiefdom from a reference drawn from our own personal experiences. The people we are discussing are not connected to a frame of reference carried by 99% of the American population. The DC elites are people born to live in a hierarchy of power and position disconnected from any external tribe. Their sense of self-importance is affirmed by perceived status and expressed through their daily conduct. A world of think-tanks, superiority training, traditions and policy-making enhances their sanctimonious self-importance...

The college admissions scandal that has swept up celebrities and CEOs largely leaves out the children who benefited from their parents' bribes - except for one. Documents reveal that Isabelle Henriquez gloated about cheating on the SATs after her parents paid more than $1 million dollars to get her into Georgetown University. Isabelle is the daughter of Manuel Henriquez, chairman and CEO of Hercules Technology Growth Capital, and Elizabeth Henriquez. The couple were among the 50 people, including Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who have been accused of paying bribes to get their children into America's top colleges.

Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin and a slew of chief executives are among 50 wealthy people charged in the largest college cheating scam ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice, federal officials said Tuesday. Those indicted in the investigation, dubbed "Operation Varsity Blues," allegedly paid bribes of up to $6.5 million to get their children into elite colleges, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Southern California, federal prosecutors said.

A reader who is, shall we say, intimately familiar with elite prep schools in the imperial capital, draws my attention to this web page for the “Colloquium for the Common Good,” a day of activism education at St. Stephen’s St. Agnes, an Episcopal school in Alexandria, Va. Here’s the current tuition rate: So, what kind of activism does the Ruling Class consider it proper for its children to embrace? What initiatives count as working for the “common good,” according to the Ruling Class? Check out the very revealing Colloquium. It is like reading a menu at Social Justice Warrior Day...

The turn of the year and the return of class warfare—spearheaded by the telegenic class warrior Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—brings to mind that timeless tract, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Superficially, of course, The Time Machine, published in 1895, is a work of science fiction. After all, it’s about the adventures of a man who time travels to the year 802,701. Most Americans are probably familiar with the novella only through various movie versions, as well as other pop culture exploitations. Not surprisingly, these riffs on Wells don’t have much to do with what he actually wrote. Of course, Wells did...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's about to become the youngest Congresswoman ever this January, is taking some time for self-care. The Congresswoman-elect took to her Instagram stories on Monday to let her followers known she'd be starting a week of self-care, though she admitted she doesn't really know how to do that or what it entails. After describing some of the self-care tips she's heard in the past (drink wine and watch Netflix, go to Cancun), she showed a photo of Amnesty International's signs for burning out, writing, "Self-care is important for activists because without we WILL burn out and walk away."...

The Yellow Vests are planning protests with specific sites given in Paris as the Champs-Elysees at 930am tomorrow (330 am Eastern US). Protesters are set to be at the Palace de l'Opera between 1030am and 1230pm. Another gathering for protest set at the Port Maillot-Gare Saint Lazare at 10am. Protests are set in other cities like Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Nantes. A protest is set for the Mont-Blanc tunnel and there are other locations listed. BFM-TV in France reports that fewer buses have been chartered to bring protesters to Paris tomorrow. 24 journalists in France have filed complaints against police...

BRUSSELS - Belgian police detained more than 400 people on Saturday after “yellow vest” protesters inspired by riots in France threw rocks and firecrackers and damaged shops and cars as they tried to reach official buildings in Brussels. In the second violence of its kind in the capital in eight days, a crowd which police estimated at around 1,000 faced riot squads who used water cannon and tear gas to keep people away from the European Union headquarters and the nearby Belgian government quarter. Calm was restored after about five hours. The movement in Belgium, inspired by the “gilets jaunes”,...

Early in September, international news was awash with the claim that 87 elephants had been “killed by poachers” in Botswana. The story originated from the NGO Elephants Without Borders, which received massive publicity – and presumably donations – as a result. Even the beleaguered UK Prime Minister tweeted the story, while a petition calling for wildlife guards to be re-armed surpassed 150,000 signatures. I know a little of Botswana. A few years ago, I was declared “public enemy number one”, threatened by a government spokesman on television, and banned from the country. This was because Survival International was instrumental in...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — With an unassuming air and a black Toyota Tundra he says was "the first new vehicle I've ever purchased," Beto O'Rourke has campaigned thousands of miles across Texas and risen to national prominence on a workaday image that aligns with his politics, but not his personal finances. The son of a onetime Republican county judge and a longtime furniture store owner, the Democratic congressman from El Paso married into the family of one of his hometown's most prominent developers and has assembled real estate investments worth millions.

Help, I’m being oppressed! My freedom of speech was been utterly stripped from me because when I retired from the Army those fascist monsters took away my TOP SECRET security clearance. See, a security clearance is a special privilege I should be entitled to exploit for as long as I want to because… well, shut up peasant, that’s why. I learned this in my Con Law class, right after we studied the Constitution’s text enumerating the rights to abortion, wedding cake baking servitude, and to be called by the bizarre pronoun of your – I mean “xir” – choice.Oh wait,...