Free Republic

<p>To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.</p>

NBC News’s recent hiring of Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, has baffled Democrats, journalists, and pretty much all of MSNBC’s star anchors. But to those who remain deep in the thrall of MAGA—and those, like me, who escaped it—it was utterly unsurprising that a mainstream (i.e., “fake”) news organization would shell out $300,000 a year for McDaniel’s point of view. I became a MAGA activist in 2015, shortly after Donald Trump famously descended that golden escalator. For the next half-decade, I not only vociferously supported Trump and those who pledged fealty to him, like Ron...

The function of the RNC changes again if Trump becomes president. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, weaponizes government agencies, and becomes a dictator on “Day One,” the RNC is likely to become a tool for some epic-level shakedowns of individuals and corporations, reminiscent of Trump’s mob-like past. “Nice corporation you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it. So, how much can we put you down for in contributions this year?” Corporations are likely to comply as long as they think paying the extortion is less of a hassle than fighting it. The RNC, for its...

Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six...

The case against Ron DeSantis from a Democrat’s perspective is straightforward and uncomplicated. For one thing, he’s a Republican. And not just any Republican: DeSantis has been one of the most odious and destructive governors in America since January 2019. He has been a vocal opponent not just of efforts to end the Covid-19 pandemic but of the vaccine that did more to control it than anything else; his anti-vaccine advocacy has also spurred on anti-vaccine activists’ assault on safe, protective measures to control diseases like mumps and polio. He has relentlessly attacked his state’s LGBTQ population, signing draconian bills...

Former Trump Justice Department head William Barr, in the course of reiterating his strong preference that his party nominate a less deranged presidential candidate next time, expressed a fear that has been in wide circulation: If defeated in the primary, Donald Trump “will burn the whole house down by leading ‘his people’ out of the GOP.” One version of this is that Trump will either form a third party or simply refuse to endorse another Republican, thereby dooming his party’s chances. Those of us considering the question from a less friendly standpoint than Barr — I consider the Republican Party...

The right’s culture-war excesses have suddenly put Democrats on the front foot going into the midterm elections. Is an unseen army of women and young voters about to rescue the Democrats? It’s risky to predict outcomes, but it sure looks like the troops are in formation. Item: News5 Cleveland reported in late August that Ohio has seen some 90,000 new registrants since the Dobbs decision. Item: KDKA Pittsburgh reported recently that the voter registration gender gap in Pennsylvania is 12 points, three times the normal gap. More than 60 percent of these registrants are under 25. Item: Over the weekend,...

Wyoming is a very conservative state. Forty-six percent of its adults self-identify as conservative, as opposed to moderate or liberal; only Mississippi claims a higher percentage. But in sending incumbent Liz Cheney to her premature retirement in Tuesday’s primary, Wyoming struck a blow against conservatism. Cheney’s defeat is just the latest demonstration that Trumpism now eclipses conservatism as the reigning faith of the Republican party. Compare the 46 percent of Wyoming’s adults who self-identify as conservative to the 57 percent of its adults who are Republican or lean Republican, according to Pew. That makes Wyoming more Republican than conservative; indeed,...

In October 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new class of civil servant that would no longer enjoy civil service protections from firing. The stated reason was to remove incompetents, who can be difficult to fire. The real reason was to eliminate government employees who were insufficiently loyal to Trump’s policies. Snip Trump was especially blunt about the executive order’s intent. Here’s what The Washington Post reported him saying shortly after the executive order was issued: You have a lot of people from past administrations, and they’re civil service. I fired some. I say some, just...

The totalitarian-minded education establishment and its extreme left-wing allies are starting to freak out as conservatives abandon futile efforts to “reform” government schools in favor of a mass-exodus strategy. Even powerful union bosses are starting to panic. The trend has been building quietly for years. But it has accelerated rapidly in recent months as a trickle of families fleeing the system became a tidal wave amid face-mask edicts, vaccine mandates, Critical Race Theory, Marxist indoctrination, extreme “sex education,” and other controversies. The first major shoe to drop in response came on September 30, when the fringe left-wing magazine New Republic...

Are the Democrats ready for grotesque attacks about the senator’s ex-boyfriend Willie Brown?

It’s no exaggeration to say that American politics has operated in Herbert Croly’s and FDR’s shadow ever since the Great Depression—nearly a century. What’s striking about this election cycle’s Democratic presidential primary debates is how much they’ve been absolutely dominated by a man who’s been dead for 90 years. That man is Herbert Croly, the intellectual godfather of the progressive movement and the first editor of The New Republic. Croly’s most influential work, The Promise of American Life (which would have been even more wildly influential had Croly only had a halfway decent editor to cut down his meandering, ponderous...

Former Pentagon aide Guy Snodgrass would neither confirm nor deny Monday that he is the anonymous administration official who wrote "A Warning" during an evasive appearance on Fox News amid speculation that he was indeed the writer of the controversial anti-Trump book. Gallagher then asked if he was denying writing “A Warning” or simply declining to make the announcement at this time and Snodgrass – who sent a cryptic message “the swirl continues” earlier in the day – continued to sidestep the question. Gallagher asked, “Why not just deny it outright?" Snodgrass offered a vague response that it was “the...

When Beto O’Rourke proclaimed, during the second round of Democratic presidential debates, that “there’s a new battleground state, Texas, and it has 38 Electoral College votes,” eyes rolled in unison across America. We’ve all heard that nonsense before! Pundits and progressives have been predicting that minority-white Texas would go blue for so long, it’s practically become a running joke. And while O’Rourke came tantalizingly close to knocking off Ted Cruz last fall, that race seemed to have all the hallmarks of a fluke—a Republican senator who even Republicans can’t stomach, running in a strong Democratic midterm cycle against a fresh-faced...

By JEET HEER June 8, 2014 The science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein once described himself as “a preacher with no church.” More accurately, he was a preacher with too many churches. Rare among the many intellectual gurus whose fame mushroomed in the 1960s, Heinlein was a beacon for hippies and hawks, libertarians and authoritarians, and many other contending faiths—but rarely at the same time. While America became increasingly liberal, he became increasingly right wing, and it hobbled his once-formidable imagination. His career, as a new biography inadvertently proves, is a case study in the literary perils of political extremism. MOST...

Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right nationalist who on Sunday was elected Brazil’s new president, has been called the “Brazilian Trump.” But he’s more extreme than that. His rhetoric is more explicitly violent and bigoted, and his rule threatens more than just the fourth-largest democracy in the world. The livability of the entire planet is at stake. The Amazon rainforest, more than half of which is within Brazil’s borders, covers 4 percent of the earth’s surface and is a major regulator of the world’s climate. Its trees act as a sponge for carbon dioxide, absorbing the planet-warming gas from the atmosphere and...

The other storyline is simply fantastical. Congressional Republicans have uniformly run away from Trump's Obama-wiretap accusation. Clapper denies it. FBI Director James Comey denies it. Not a single member of Trump's own administration is willing to say it's true. Loopier still is to demand that Congress find the truth when the president could just pick up the phone and instruct the FBI, CIA and DNI to declare on the record whether this ever occurred. And if there really was an October 2016 FISA court order to wiretap Trump, the president could unilaterally declassify the information yesterday. The bugging story is...

Hamilton Fish, the president and publisher of The New Republic, is taking a leave of absence pending an investigation into complaints by female employees at the magazine, according to a letter sent to its staff on Sunday night. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/business/media/new-republic-hamilton-fish.html

<p>Yes, the press secretary is better at her job. But that is bad news for the rest of us.</p> <p>The face of the White House press operation has already undergone several iterations, with each embodying the administration in their own special way. First was Sean Spicer, who exemplified the administration’s comfort with telling bald lies and being openly hostile toward the news media. Then came Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, who was Donald Trump’s vulgarity incarnate. Now we have Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose style as press secretary is less shrill than Spicer, and less pelvic-thrusting bravado a la The Mooch. But that’s what makes her the most insidious of them all.</p>

Danny JohnstonDecember 20, 2016 Clio Chang and Alex Shephard write in The New Republic about the organizational shake-up and shift in focus at the leftwing media watchdog Media Matters for America. The brainchild of its Clinton ally founder David Brock, Media Matters now seeks to reinvent itself in a post-Clinton world. Brock has recently stated that he hopes to transform his social media platform Shareblue into a “Breitbart of the left.” But Clinton’s electoral loss offers a unique challenge for Media Matters because, as Chang and Shephard report, “[t]he organization had long ceased to be a mere watchdog, having positioned...