Free Republic

Now, along comes Ryszard Legutko, a Polish professor of philosophy and leading politician, with a better answer. His book, translated by Teresa Adelson, “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies” (Encounter), methodically shows the surprising but substantial similarities between Soviet-style communism and modern liberalism as defined by Sweden or the European Union or Barack Obama. First, the ideologues retreat into fantasy which they fervently try to impose on unwilling subjects. Communists make colossal efforts to convince their vassals that they prosper far more than those wretches living in capitalist countries; liberals turn two genders into 71 or make...

(Skip) The primary threat to this nation is not Donald Trump nor his supporters but an evolving autocratic oligarchy made up of the hierarchy of American Left, which includes elements of the political class, the mainstream media, the education establishment and, most recently, the titans of Silicon Valley. (Skip) The common mindset of all those determined to seize power in perpetuity, either by force of arms or the ballot box, is a profound contempt for the dignity and sanctity of human life. (Skip) Additionally, over the past 90 years virtually all potential oligarchs or tyrants have utilized the following six...

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s election and the “yellow vests” protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives? Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists. What are the popular gripes against them?

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump's election and the "yellow vests" protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives? Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists. What are the popular gripes against them? One, illegal immigration and open borders have led to chaos. Lax immigration policies...

While speaking at a meeting of Japanese business leaders in Tokyo, Trump said the stock market would be anywhere between 7,000 to 10,000 points higher if the U.S. central bank had chosen to keep interest rates steady. He also suggested that the growth rate in the U.S. would have exceeded 3 percent. "But they wanted to raise interest rates," he said. "You’ll explain that to me." Trump, despite hand-picking Chairman Jerome Powell more than a year ago, has been a frequent critic of the Fed, often urging policymakers to cut interest rates from the current target range of 2.25 percent...

The actor Jeff Daniels is now the toast of Broadway for his leading role in the Southern civil rights tale "To Kill a Mockingbird," adapted for the stage by leftist screed-writer Aaron Sorkin. Harper Lee's book has been recalibrated for the Trump era. Time magazine explains it's allegedly less about racism than about white liberals and black people assembled against a resentful Southern power structure. Daniels imagines the tale differently. He told Time that Attorney General William Barr's press conference on the Mueller report is somehow "exactly" what the play is about now. "It's about, where's goodness and decency? It's...

Astronaut Mark Kelly, the husband of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and current Senate candidate in Arizona, released the full transcript of the speech he gives during paid speaking engagements. The idea was to be open and transparent with voters. But here's the catch: his campaign refuses to say exactly how much Kelly makes every time he delivers his speech. They are, however, quick to tout that Kelly refuses to take money from Political Action Committees (PACs).

Cook County state's attorney Kim Foxx inadvertently gave away the game — what's really behind the bizarre dropping of charges and sealing of court records of the slam-dunk case put together by Chicago police on Jussie Smollett's fake hate crime report — when she explained to two reporters for Chicago public radio station WBEZ in an interview: I don't believe it is in the interest of the people of Cook County to engage in a narrative that is anything other than all of us working collectively for the public safety of the people of Cook County. The dominant factions of...

This is a compilation of the many, many things that American Democrats (often radical totalitarian communists wearing the mantle of “progressive liberals”) want to ban. This is a running tabulated list that originated from an earlier post about busybodies. There, I argued that Social Justice Warriors (SJW) was just another name for a busybody. This is a set aside list tabulated by request. It supersedes the extensive list on an earlier post about busybodies. Remember, boys and girls, all bans are a restriction on freedom. Go ahead and shake your head in disbelief. These people are friggin’ lunatics. The List...

"We are changing the size of the workforce to align with the revenue," says Jeanne Segal, McClatchy's director of public relations and communications.

So the political, financial and media elites have taken beatings at the ballot box -- Brexit, Trump, anti-establishment European rebellion parties. The 1990s elite projects and policies were not crazy, but their failures to make course corrections and their lack of respect for decent nationalism have been costly. Something to talk about if they slink back to Davos next year.

Democrats have had all of the opportunity in the world to win and win big in this year's midterm election cycle. The conservative populist coalition that placed Donald Trump in the White House two years ago hadn't wavered in their support for the president, but they weren't all exactly fans of Republicans in Congress, whom they saw as part of the Swamp. Trump, they believed, had their back and was just mean enough to be that guy who stood up to Washington for them. At the same time, enthusiasm is sky-high among Democrats, who look extra likely to get...

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...

A Gates Foundation report warning that Africans are having too many kids prefaced more pointed anti-fertility remarks this week from France's president, Emmanuel Macron. The poorest people tend to have the highest birth rates, which threatens to reverse historic progress in reducing world poverty, says the world’s largest philanthropy in a recent report.“[D]ecades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling,” write Bill and Melinda Gates in their foundation’s latest “Goalkeepers” report. “This is because the poorest parts of the world are growing faster than everywhere else; more babies are being...

Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor for The Atlantic and senior political analyst at CNN, recently issued a bleak tweet: “Today felt very much like an update of the 1850s: 2 very distinct parts of US that no longer care to even fake that they respect or value the other. Like Trump, #Kavanaugh built his strategy on rallying 1 side of that divide vs the other. Seams are unraveling-not just on #SCOTUS” Slappy acknowledges there’s a national schism but says that she and her neighbors see Washington as divided, not their communities. James Butler, a local mayor and vice president of...

McCONNELLS MILL, Pa. — Darcelle Slappy says Democrats and Republicans who live in places like this part of Western Pennsylvania are a lot closer than how they’re portrayed on TV. “Unlike Washington, we are all just a few notches from each other in either direction. We have much more that draws us together than divides us,” Slappy says. In fact, she says the divide in this country isn’t Republican versus Democrat. “The real division is between the elites and us.” In a New York Times column last weekentitled “The American Civil War, Part II,” Thomas L. Friedman stated that “he...

Since high school keg parties at the elite prep schools attended by Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey are now a matter of consuming interest to the Democrat-media complex, it is perhaps telling that the high school yearbooks of Holton-Arms, the school attended by Blasey, have been scrubbed from the web. The blog Cult of the First Amendment says: Those who are interested can examine the many pages that are claimed to come from the yearbooks and make their own judgments. I am not familiar with the blog or blogger, but the veracity of the pages is certainly subject to investigation...

“Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe had some choice words Tuesday night in response to a question he got accusing him of harboring “white nationalist” sympathies. Rowe posted a question submitted to him on his Facebook page that accused the TV host’s advocacy for the skilled trades of amounting to anti-intellectualism, and therefore racism. A man named Chuck Adkins asked, “One of the tenants of white nationalism is that college educated people are academic elitests. Comment? No? I’m not surprised. You never take a political stand because you don’t want to alienate anybody. Its bad for business. I get it. But...

ecently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”[snip] Again, demonizing the Trump voter as beyond cultural redemption is nothing new. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables” who were “irredeemable” and were “not America.” After her defeat, Clinton proved her early smears were no accident. Speaking in India, she again slurred Trump supporters as being racist, sexist, and xenophobic for their...

President Trump on Saturday renewed his jab at the "elite," saying that his election to the presidency was "driving them crazy." "You are the elite. You're smarter than they are … you've got everything going … the elite? They're more elite than me?" Trump said while addressing a campaign rally crowd in Ohio, where he is seeking to help Republican Troy Balderson ahead of a special election for the House on Tuesday."I have better everything than they have," Trump said to roars from the crowd. "I became president and they didn't," he said to more cheers and applause, for which...