Free Republic

In a culture where humorless leftists scolds seek to impose their rule upon us normals by sucking every drop of joy out of life, it is the conservative smartass who is the true subversive. Don’t look to Hollywood’s allegedly edgy comics to zing the zeitgeist – hacky proggy stand-ups and interchangeable liberal late-night hosts are the opposite of rebels, with their dreadfully generic opinions and lockstep jokes designed to get the herd of trained seals that makes up their fish-breathed audience beating their flippers. No, if you want someone who snarks truth to power instead of speaking consensus coastal truth...

The first time Donald Trump met Angela Merkel, pictures of their awkward non-handshake in the Oval Office went around the world — and the months that followed did little to break the ice. But if the 63-year-old chancellor sails her way — as widely predicted — to a fourth term in Sunday’s legislative elections, the leaders of the United States and Germany will have to figure out a way to work together in the long term. Pretty much everything about “Mutti,” as Europe’s most influential leader is known at home, sets her apart from the 71-year-old occupant of the White...

RUSH: It’s a sad day for the Limbaugh family. My Aunt Anne passed away very early this morning, natural causes, a long illness. She’s the wife of my Uncle Steve. They lived in St. Louis. He was, until his retirement, a federal district court judge, Eastern District of Missouri. His son, my cousin, is now that federal judge. But Anne, when I turned 16, it was a big deal to get your driver’s license, and you know what became of that? I became the official Limbaugh family deliverer of Meals on Wheels. She insisted on it. Aunt Anne with her...

RUSH: Now, Mr. Snerdley asked me an intriguing pregunta during the bottom-of-the-hour break. He wanted to know if I thought La Raza and the leftists showing up to basically shut down Nancy Pelosi’s press conference on DACA and the DREAMers — we played the sound bite for you yesterday, and it was brutal. These are people that you would think would love Pelosi and Schumer, Chuck and Nancy, ’cause they’re Democrats and they’re pro-amnesty, they’re pro-immigration. 'Dreamers' confront Pelosi over Trump negotiationsAnd yet the DREAMers and the DACA people show up, and they shut it down. They’re calling her a...

RUSH: “Manafort Calls On DOJ To Release His Intercepted Communications With Foreigner — Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is calling on the Justice Department to release transcripts of any intercepted communications he may have had with foreigners. ‘Mr. Manafort requests that the Department of Justice release any intercepts involving him and any non-Americans so interested parties can come to the same conclusion as the DOJ — there is nothing there.'” You know, this whole thing, the investigation of Flynn, the investigation into collusion with Russia, the special counsel now, as I mentioned earlier in the program, people that are...

RUSH: AP: “Trump Insists on America First. Who Will Follow?” Let me tell you something about this America first. What do you think Trump means by it? (interruption) Yeah, yeah, yeah, he does. But it’s not just that. I actually heard Trump explain this and some people in Trump’s administration explain this. Fox has this analyst that appears on some of the shows. She worked in the National Security Council. She’s on the staff I think for Obama. And she was talking about this, and she had heard exactly what I heard. And what Trump means by this, America first,...

RUSH: Grab audio sound bites 14 and 15 yesterday, 15 first. Wait a minute, now. Nope. Gotta do 14 first. I thought 15 was years ago. Hillary was on NPR Fresh Air yesterday afternoon and the host was Terry Gross. She said that she might contest the election. I mean, it’s lunatic, but here’s what she said. GROSS: Would you completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now? HILLARY: No. I would not. I would say — GROSS: You’re not gonna rule...

According to CBS, conversations between Manafort and Trump may have been scooped up in the surveillance: Long before the special counsel began investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. election — and whether anyone in the Trump campaign was involved — Paul Manafort was the target of an FBI investigation. It included electronic surveillance of the one-time Trump campaign chairman....the surveillance on Manafort occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to a former U.S. official, the intercepts picked up conversations between Manafort and Russian individuals about the campaign. The intercepts potentially include conversations between Manafort and President Trump.... If the Manafort...

Trump Derangement Syndrome at the Emmy Awards revealed that in Hollywood, as in the USSR or North Korea, it's dangerous to deviate from the party line. (A very surprised Dolly Parton, who didn't expect her Nine to Five co-stars to go all "Cultural Revolution" on her at the Emmy Awards.)I didn't watch the Emmy Awards. In fact, I haven't watched the Emmy Awards in at least 20 years.I don't watch the Emmy Awards in part because, with a very few exceptions, I don't watch television. Those exceptions are: Dancing With The Stars (I know, I know, but I do love...

Slavery is not a thing of the past. A report released Tuesday by the U.N.-affiliated International Labor Office (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation estimates that there were 40.3 million people in some form of modern slavery around the world on any given day last year. But by its very nature, the accuracy of that figure is hard to gauge. Slavery tends to be a hidden, illegal practice — one in which the victim's ability to speak out is limited. The authors of the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery study admit there are gaps in the available information: Although extensive...

Long before the hooded, masked, and dressed-in-black Antifa thugs marauded across campuses such as Berkeley, other supposed progressive campus activists had been raging an ideological war against ideas with which they disagreed. They are, as former Yale President, A. Bartlett Giamatti, once called people intolerant of others’ views, “terrorists of the mind,” individuals whose toxic views and on-campus behavior help to create a disruptive environment and promote incivility and acrimony. One of those groups is the notorious Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), purportedly a pro-Palestinian campus organization but which actually in practice is strictly an anti-Israel group with the...

For all the talk in California about leading the world in fighting global warming and resisting President Trump’s climate-denial agenda, the state faces one powerful obstacle that limits its environmental activism: Touch their cars and Californians will revolt. Any effort that limits, constrains or makes driving one’s car more expensive or inconvenient — no matter how civic-minded the proposal — is immediately controversial in California, and often a nonstarter. Getting between Californians and their cars can spell the end of a political career. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council have committed to help slow climate change and...

So far, the Trump administration’s trade policy has seen an internal division among economic nationalists and “globalists” on the president’s senior staff. The economic nationalists, and the president himself, believe protectionism will strengthen the American economy. “Look at the 19th century,” said former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in his recent “60 Minutes” interview. “What built America’s so called ‘American system,’ from Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts? A system of protection of our manufacturing, financial system that lends to manufacturers, OK, and the control of our borders.” In the nationalists’ narrative, high tariffs...

The numbers don't lie. Across the entertainment industry, viewers and fans are tuning out. It's no coincidence ratings are cratering as unhinged celebrities crank up their anti-Trump and anti-American antics. Pro tip, Tinseltownies: Swapping your jazz hands for middle fingers and waving resistance fists at your customer base is bad for business. Let us count the waning ways. Emmy emetics. Who wanted to see smirking Stephen Colbert lead a cast of Botoxed starlets and men in hot pants, handing out TV industry awards to diamond-draped elites hoisting up their gilt statues as emblems of victory on behalf of the hegemonically...

When it comes to the future, an overwhelming majority of Americans have adopted a mindset that is a variation of Isiah 22:12: “Let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow does not matter.” Recently, federal debt surpassed the $20 Trillion mark (additional state and local debt amount to another $2.9 Trillion). That milestone was greeted by the Ruling Class and a vast preponderance of the citizenry with a yawn and a shrug of the shoulder. As the ongoing determination to promote new entitlement spending and the refusal to rein in, but instead to expand, existing programs continues unabated. Any...

Last week, I visited the University of California, Berkeley. The preparations for the visit were patently insane. First, the school charged the sponsor group, Young America's Foundation, a $15,000 security fee. Then, the school blocked off the upper level of the auditorium, fearful that radicals from the violent far-left-leaning group Antifa would infiltrate the speech and begin hurling objects from the balcony onto the crowd below. Finally, the school ended up spending some $600,000 on additional policing, including the creation of cement barriers and hiring of hundreds of armed police officers for a prospective riot. All this so that I...

Well, well, well. Hope the "destroy Trump" media enjoys the taste of crow now that it has been revealed that, yes, Virginia, Trump Tower and its occupants who were in contact with both candidate and President-elect Trump, including one Paul Manafort, were in fact wiretapped as Trump claimed. Obama’s DOJ and James Comey were both liars in denying the wiretapping for which Trump was widely mocked: Department of Justice lawyers say that the department has no evidence for President Trump’s controversial claim that President Obama ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower during last year’s presidential campaign. In a filing made public...

"Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.” And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr. Justice Holmes writing: “I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing...

RUSH: Folks, there’s something new happening in the climate change world. A couple of pieces here and one of them at the U.K. Telegraph. You know what? Headline: “Climate Change Not As Threatening to Planet as Previously Thought, Says New Research.” And this is from climate change scientists. This is not from the, quote, unquote, deniers. It’s fascinating. It’s not warming, folks, and in fact in some places it’s cooling, and so the climate change fascists have to have an explanation. And wait ’til you hear what it is. BREAK TRANSCRIPTRUSH: On the global warming story, I don’t need to...

President Donald Trump spoke his version of truth-to-power -- or powers, all 193 member nations of the United Nations. His first address to the General Assembly was vintage Trump – a 40-minute mixture of bombast, insults, threats, praise for the ideals of the UN, and a declaration of his belief that America’s pursuit of its own interests was in America’s best interests and the world’s. The speech, which Mr. Trump read from a teleprompter, was also long on contradictions and short on proposals for solving the threats he denounced. Making headlines was Mr. Trump’s most explicit warning to date to...