Free Republic

The right shouldn't be taking a victory lap. They should be asking why media and Big Tech were allowed to smear everyone who believed in the possibility of a lab leak as crazy conspiracy theorists.A clip of Jon Stewart on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” has blown up on the internet, and for good reason. It’s amazing. In it, Stewart, in a hilarious fake dialogue with a Chinese lab researcher, makes the case for why the theory that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology is way less insane than all the other origin hypotheses.People owe a...

I’ve always felt that the Civil Rights Acts were a Good Thing, but that the rot set in with the first executive orders mandating quotas and affirmative action. Now comes Richard Hanania (H/T John Derbyshire) who writes that “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law.” In other words, the woke phenomenon was already coded in the Civil Rights laws and the ruling class just responded to the moral imperative coded in the laws: racial discrimination is evil and we must fight against it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race and gender. While most at the...

Until Lambs Become LionsRight now, we are 80 million couch potatoes and keyboard warriors with rifles in our bedroom closets. This is not a force to be reckoned with.We are locked in a zero-sum game rebellion of the elites, who are intent on fundamentally transforming America into an authoritarian state with a single ideology and ruling class. In order to defeat this rebellion, we need to understand the terrain we are operating on and the strategy and tactics of our enemy. Even more important, we need a strategy of our own to guide our struggle and return to a functional...

What people want from politicians is not to put on the same tired show they have been watching for years. They want them to get things done.The extreme disconnect between the political class and the people they ostensibly serve is by now extremely clear. It was the primary factor behind Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency, as the left largely abandoned the working class in favor of woke ideologies and their special interests. At a certain point, the lip service politicians pay to the working class’s needs and concerns was not enough, and they lost their votes. Naturally, it was...

There is indeed a fight underway for the future of the Republican Party, but it's not about QAnon conspiracy theories or crackpot lawmakers.There’s a big push right now among corporate media, Democrats, and NeverTrumpers to establish a narrative that the Republican Party is being torn apart in a bitter civil war between its establishment wing and its supposed QAnon wing. It’s about as true as your garden-variety QAnon conspiracy theory, but it’s politically useful, which is why you’re seeing it crop up all over the media right now.According to this narrative, dangerous right-wing conspiracy theorists and QAnon acolytes make up...

In each party, the donors and managers and professionals have far more in common with those of the other party—in terms of education, lifestyle, and values—than they do with most of their own party’s non-elite voters, whom party elites manipulate...The consolidation of almost all political, social, and economic power in a single national ruling class whose members congregate in a few major cities is unprecedented in American history, though not in the history of Latin America or France or Britain.

New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks ignited a wave of backlash after insulting rural Americans who have no contact with the “expert class.” SNIP “Look at how much more Republicans are affected by conspiracy theories than the Democrats, so it can’t just be the internet, there must be some demand,” Brooks said, pointing out the “two core problems.” “A lot of people in the expert class live in blue cities who are thriving,” he claimed. “And a lot of people left behind in the rural parts of America, they feel threatened economically, culturally, socially and they have no contact...

President Trump leaving office will not make America more decent if it just returns power to those whose garb of civility covers corrupt hearts. There is honor among thieves. There has to be, if they are to be successful. Even lawbreakers require some sort of law, both in reality, where organized crime requires organization, and in fiction, where it is a standard trope that the Guild of Assassins (or whatever) has rules. The wicked still need some virtue to be effective, although it must be severed from the whole of virtue. This explains a lot about politics. The rules and...

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.. One thing should be abundantly clear by now, after ten months of this pandemic: our political leaders hate us and they think we’re stupid. Nothing else can explain the blatant hypocrisy we’ve seen, mostly from Democrat governors and mayors who are eager to impose harsh lockdowns and strict rules for the public at large but then turn around and do whatever they please with their own families, friends, and cronies. Examples abound, but this week brought a fresh spectacle of hypocrisy in the form of a nervous, patently disingenuous apology from California Gov. Gavin Newsom,...

No matter how the presidential election ends, one of President Donald Trump’s myriad achievements stands above all others: he has exposed the unprecedented degree of rot and corruption that pervades the American system. More specifically, Trump has exposed the ruling class: the bipartisan political establishment and its adjuncts in Big Tech, the corporate media, Big Business and Woke Capital, the academy, and across the commanding heights of American society. Trump’s manners engender hatred in the ruling class. Even more significantly, his tenacity in confronting the ruling class’s members with their failures—and the fact he has threatened to rectify those failures—discredits...

Everything you need to know about the deep rift in American society can be summed up in this way: Disney’s C-suite, who happily pander to the intellectual-property-stealing, Uighur-jailing, Communist Chinese state, had a hard time imagining that they could film in the American state of Georgia because of their law banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected. Our ruling classes are so estranged from the country’s heartland, so hostile to the way of life practiced in rural America, that they find Chinese Communists easier to do business with than Georgian pro-lifers. Democrat politicians like Michael Bloomberg and California...

Social and political responses to the fears of the Corona-19 virus pandemic are news headlines, but do they deserve headlines? Of course, they are news, but they are not really new news. We have been repeatedly warned about the destructive power of fear. Making themselves virtually unassailable, at least initially, politicians embraced the pandemic and associated public health fears it has engendered, and assumed near dictatorial powers in the name of protecting the public health. Unmasked and unhindered, some politicians’ actions have validated the descriptive term of “the ruling class.” The 1972 cult film by the same name gave one...

midst of another coup frenzy that has the Left accusing him of being crazy. But he already took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test. It was a simple cognitive exam and he aced it, as would most people. The Left, remember, had called in a Yale psychiatrist to testify that Trump was demented, during the lulls between the first impeachment, the serial “Russian collusion” hoaxes, the emoluments clause psychodrama and Robert Mueller’s “walls-are-closing-in,” “turning-point,” and “bombshell” investigation. Perhaps the wrong public figures took the test. At times, former Vice President Joe Biden is unaware of which town, indeed which state, he...

The intellectual class across the West—encompassing its universities, media, and arts—is striving to dismantle the values that paced its ascendancy. Europe, the source of Western civilization, now faces a campaign, in academia and elite media, to replace its cultural and religious traditions with what one author describes as a “multicultural and post-racial republic” supportive of separate identities. “The European ‘we’ does not exist,” writes French philosopher Pierre Manent, assessing the damage. “European culture is in hiding, disappearing, without a soul.” The increasingly “woke” values of the educated upper classes reflect, as Alvin Toffler predicted almost half a century ago, the...

Increasingly, it looks like the political fight isn’t between Republicans and Democrats, but rather the American people against the Deep State. More and more often we are seeing bureaucrats, lobbyists, and elected officials of both parties circle the wagons so to say in an effort to prevent any true reforms of our government. While we the American people may believe the government isn’t working, for an elite group embedded throughout our government and media, the government is working quite well -- for them!

America doesn’t have a classic aristocracy. But, does it have an order set above the people? In Chapter IX of The Prince, Niccolo’ Machiavelli paused for a moment from advising kings who clawed their way to the crown through crimes and violence. Instead, in the constitutional principality, citizens elect one of their fellows to the kingship. Mentally replace the words aristocracy/nobility with Deep State when reading Chapter IX, and this lesson is as pertinent today as it was in the early 16th century. In the constitutional principality, Machiavelli observed that one of two groups of citizens make the new prince:...

Prosecutors say that [Mark] Riddell worked closely with [Rick] Singer, [founder of the Edge College & Career Network, also known as The Key — a for-profit college counseling and preparation company offering families help in getting students into competitive colleges and universities]. In conversations recorded by investigators, Singer called Riddell his “best test-taker.” The Bradenton Herald’s review of the federal complaint document revealed that Riddell earned at least $240,000 from his involvement in the scheme and Proctored [or corrected] at least 16 exams for students. “I would really appreciate the opportunity to Proctor the test because I’m applying to grad...

RUSH: All right. Will somebody explain something to me? Somebody explain to me how we have, apparently, for years and years and years been trying to get a criminal justice or prison reform bill, and it happened with bipartisan support, 87 votes in the Senate. Now it goes over to the House where it’s gonna pass. It’s not a big issue as far as the general public is concerned. Some special interests have made a big deal about it. It happens. It didn’t take much effort to get it passed. It didn’t take much debate whatsoever. It’s an important issue...

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether President Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record $107 million it raised from donations, people familiar with the matter said. The criminal probe by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, which is in its early stages, also is examining whether some of the committee’s top donors gave money in exchange for access to the incoming Trump administration, policy concessions or to influence official administration positions, some of the people said. Giving money in exchange for political favors could run afoul of federal corruption laws. Diverting funds from the organization, which was registered...

The elections may be over, but this doesn't make the California ruling clique any more credible or legitimate than the Soviet government was when Russia was the USSR. “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” ― Joseph Stalin In her recent column “Are CALIF Democrats Also Cheating Their Way to Power?, Katy Grimes described a series of elections “coincidences” that led the Democrat Party to their takeover of the US House of Representatives. As we have seen, many Republican candidates who were ahead of their Democrat rivals on the election day lost after the polls...