Free Republic

If you want to determine what people believe, don’t listen to what they say. Rather, closely watch what they actually do. In recent days, the stock market has been hovering near all-time record highs and business leaders have been assuring us that good days are ahead. But meanwhile many of our most famous billionaires have been doing things that indicate that they are extremely concerned about what is coming in the future. For example, during the first two months of this year Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg “have all sold big chunks of shares in their own companies”…...

New York Times columnist and pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson is saying that Donald Trump is now seen as the ‘return to normalcy’ candidate. This is a shocking turn of events for anyone who has been following political news for the last several years. When Trump won in 2016, liberals all over the country started saying “this is not normal.” It became a common talking point. Then in 2020, Democrats claimed that Biden would be the ‘return to normalcy’ candidate. Everyone can see how that worked out. Breitbart News reports: NYT Pollster: Donald Trump Seen as the Return to Normalcy Candidate...

Voters perceive former President Donald Trump as the return to normalcy candidate after President Joe Biden failed to “put things back in order,” pollster and New York Times columnist Kristen Soltis Anderson recently wrote. Anderson’s observation highlights Biden’s failure to restore America to a state of predictable stability following three years of his chaotic policies: Draconian pandemic mandates Deadly Afghan withdrawal Soaring cost of living Growing instability in Ukraine and the Middle East Record high invasion on the southern border “The 2024 election will not be fought along the conventional axis of left and right or even change and more...

The radical left are desperate that we all believe two things.They want us all to believe America is divided — half woke, half not. It’s why Anderson Cooper called Trump supporters, “…that audience that upset you, that’s a sampling of about half the country.” It’s why, in his red speech, Biden claimed half of America is MAGA. It’s why TV news would report a 2022 UC Davis survey where half the subjects saw democracy as imperiled and expected civil war.Placing the divide at 50-50 makes their side look bigger than it is; and ours, smaller. The illusion there’s no clear...

Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began and authoritarianism strengthened around the world, nearly half of U.S. adults (47 percent) say they do not expect their lives to “return to pre-pandemic normalcy,” a Gallup News poll found. That percentage was the same in October 2022 and is slightly down from July and August 2022 when 53 percent of U.S. adults said they do not expect their lives to return to the way they were before the pandemic. Results of the poll are based on self-administered web surveys conducted February 21-28 with 5,167 adults. The margin of error is ±2 percentage...

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci this week failed to provide a timeline for a when the U.S. will reach a state of pre-pandemic normalcy, stating that they will have to “always be prepared for the possibility that there may be a variant that will make that timetable turn around.” AP White House reporter Zeke Miller asked on Wednesday if the public health experts believed that “this is the last disruptive surge of COVID-19, given all of the tools — you know, vaccines, boosters, antibodies, and the like?”

SHARE | PRINT | EMAILIs that the sound of normalcy I’m hearing out there? Ever more authors and sources admitting that the virus is a medical problem that cannot be addressed or solved through politicized “mitigation measures.” This is what I’m reading between the lines of such news stories as this one:Early in the pandemic, many people seized on the hope that Covid-19 could be stopped in its tracks and buried for good once vaccines rolled out. But hope for a zero-Covid country fizzled for most scientists long ago. Writer Karol Markowicz has a theory that the we are seeing...

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), issued a warning Thursday, effectively blaming unvaccinated individuals for the rapid spread of the delta variant but admitting that officials expected it to become the dominant strain in the U.S. She also suggested the U.S. turning the corner on the pandemic is contingent upon everyone doing their “part” and getting vaccinated, regardless of their reservations. Speaking virtually at the White House COVID-19 Response Team’s Thursday briefing, Walensky spoke about the current Chinese coronavirus numbers in the U.S., noting the 7-day average of cases has increased 11 percent from...

The Biden administration is spreading the message far and wide this holiday weekend that the United States is getting back to normal after a grueling 16 months from the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 600,00 Americans. President Biden, Vice President Harris and other top officials are fanning out across the country for the Fourth of July for what the White House has dubbed the "America is Back Together" tour. The travel, paired with a large celebration at the White House on Sunday for first responders and military families, amounts to a victory lap for the administration as coronavirus...

A sizeable portion of Americans do not believe their lives will completely return to pre-pandemic normalcy, a Gallup survey released Monday found. The survey, taken June 14-20, among 4,843 American adults, asked respondents if they believe their lives will ever “get completely back to the ‘normal’ that existed before the coronavirus pandemic.”

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Cuomo Primetime,” former Biden transition team COVID adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel stated that “by the end of September or October,” we can “have a real return to normalcy.” Emanuel said that “we should not let up. … We should not ease up, allow indoor dining, big groups of more than 25, getting rid of mask mandates. We have to hold on for another two or three months in this condition.”

Much of the Biden/Harris election campaign this year was base on the prospect that the elevation of their planned co-presidency would represent a return to the “normalcy” Americans and America experienced during the four presidencies that preceded the presidency of Donald J. Trump. This prospect was of course echoed in the corrupt news media and presented as a positive thing to America’s voters. But what did this longed-for “normalcy” look like for the 28 years before Donald Trump took office in January, 2017? – It looked like the U.S. becoming involved in all manner of needless and deadly wars in...

"A normal life — that's all we want, a normal life." That was President Trump's message one Monday evening in Sanford, and the following Friday in Ocala, Florida. He repeated the idea in Carson City, Nevada: "Normal life, that's all we want. We want normal life." Normalcy may seem an unlikely theme for a re-election campaign, but it's one that strikes a chord in 2020, which has clearly not been a normal year. The fallout from the coronavirus has killed 220,000 Americans; locked down our economy; and forced people around the world to practice social distancing, wear masks, and work...

Every time I hear someone say, "the new normal," I cringe. Like fingernails on a chalkboard, it sets my teeth on edge. That's because I know from sad experience how abusers have carte blanche in the absence of normalcy - the stick in the spokes of their abuse. Abusers and narcissists hate normalcy because it puts a cramp in their style. The first thing cults make new members jettison is their old normalcy. As Todd bragged on Chrisley Knows Best, "There ain't no normal here." My point. The events of 2020 have given certain people "dressed in a little brief...

“They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (vv. 29–31). - Romans 1:24–31 Surely, we must rank the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector among the most well known of all of the parables of Jesus (Luke 18:9–14). Our Savior told this parable in order to illustrate the means by which we are declared righteous before God. We are not justified by appealing to our own...

In May, Jack Peterson went on a Tinder date. With a woman. They ate at an Italian restaurant in downtown Chicago, and made casual chitchat about themselves. It was an ordinary date in every way. But for 19-year-old Peterson, it was an achievement of epic proportions. Until recently, Peterson identified as an “incel,” or involuntarily celibate. Incels believe that, due to reasons entirely beyond their control ― too short, too bald, too weak a jawline ― they cannot attract a female partner. They believe they’re doomed to remain alone, forever. For many incels, this fatalistic worldview is paired with a...

The spark that ignites populist movements is not so much disparities in wealth and status (they are not always French Revolution or Bolshevik-like class-driven attempts to grab power) as rank hypocrisies: Elites condescendingly prescribe nostrums to hoi polloi, but always on the dual premise that those who are dictating will be immune from the ramifications of their own sometimes burdensome edicts, and those who are dictated to are supposedly too dense to know what is good for them. (Think Steven Chu, the former energy secretary, who either did not commute by car or had a short drive to work, while...

RUSH: Now, I want to correct something you said toward the end of the previous hour. I said that Trump is the first president… I actually quoted Roger Kimball at PJ Media saying that Trump with this speech in Poland today, stands a good chance of going down in history as one of America’s great presidents. And he makes the point that what Trump said today, in the specific way Trump said it, is the first time it’s been said by an American president since Ronald Reagan. Now, I think that needs a little qualification, because George W. Bush was...

The Trump administration has dropped the federal government’s challenge to a nationwide injunction issued last year that blocked the fulfillment of Obama administration guidelines stating that transgender students’ access to bathrooms and other gender-segregated school facilities was protected under existing federal civil rights law. The injunction was issued in August by Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas as part of a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen states over the Obama administration’s position that Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination in schools, protects transgender students. Under that interpretation,...

For all the hysteria over the bluntness of the mercurial Trump, his agenda marks a return to what used to be seen as fairly normal, as the U.S. goes from hard left back to the populist center. Trump promises not just to reverse almost immediately all of Obama's policies, but to do so in a pragmatic fashion that does not seem to be guided by any orthodox or consistently conservative ideology. Trade deals and jobs are Trump's obsessions -- mostly for the benefit of blue-collar America. He calls for full-bore gas and oil development, a common culture in lieu of...