Free Republic

Acclaimed playwright David Mamet has added his distinctive voice to the growing chorus of dissenters who are questioning the effectiveness of government-mandated masks and lockdowns to combat the coronavirus. In a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, the Glengarry Glen Ross playwright slams the so-called “experts” and advisers whose counsel has led to the destruction of large swaths of the U.S. economy. These people will likely never pay the price for their errors, but everyone else will, he noted.

David Mamet’s latest play Bitter Wheat opened in London’s West End in June to largely negative reviews, which is somewhat surprising, because it’s terrific. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising. Most theatre critics are bleeding-heart leftists, and following his embrace of a more conservative attitude, they simply regard David Mamet as a traitor. It’s petty, but it really is that simple. What Mamet has accomplished with this play — ostensibly a theatrical treatment of the birth of the #MeToo movement — is to present the liberal elite mindset for what it is: self-centred virtue signalling coupled with a complete...

David Mamet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, once noted “I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder – as another exercise in self-involvement – rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe” At the age of 60 he meet first conservative thinker. Upon closer examination he discovered that most conservative thoughts were based on real-world facts while “Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.” Sadly, he captures the reality and emotional allure of...

David Mamet has written a new play, and, unlike his last three new ones produced in New York, it is not offensively bad. It is merely not at all good. That’s not quite true. It is potentially, slightly, maybe a little bit good. It is centered on a kernel of a good and interesting idea: What is it like to be the psychiatrist of a man who commits a heinous crime? And what effect will that crime have on the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist’s family, the psychiatrist’s life? That is the crux of “The Penitent,” which opened last night at the...

If you're looking for a good laugh this week, you probably can't do better than Tuesday's White House press conference. Reporters asked spokesman Josh Earnest about the confirmation of two Obama-appointed ambassadors whose confirmation was only possible because Democrats manipulated Senate rules earlier this year to make it easier to approve executive-branch nominees. By the narrowest of margins, two people completely unqualified to represent U.S. interests abroad were confirmed to serve in relatively important countries they know nothing about. Colleen Bell, the new U.S. ambassador to Hungary, is a former soap opera producer who couldn't name a single strategic interest...

Very good interview of him explaining his conversion from liberal to conservative. 35 minutes long.

To those Jews planning to vote for Obama: Are you prepared to explain to your children not the principles upon which your vote is cast, but its probable effects upon them? Irrespective of your endorsement of liberal sentiments, of fairness and “more equal distribution,” will you explain to your children that top-down economic policies will increasingly limit their ability to find challenging and well-paid work, and that the diminution in employment and income will decrease their opportunity to marry and raise children? Will you explain (as you have observed) that a large part of their incomes will be used to...

In case you haven't seen it, Bristol Palin was verbally accosted in a bar by a big mouth she correctly identified as a homosexual. (The video is embedded in the link.) He didn't seem gay, happy. In fact, he was the rudest kind of boor you'd never hope to meet. The gist of his magisterial disquisition is that Sarah Palin is evil, will go to hell if there is one, and is a woman of easy virtue. That's funny because Sarah Palin married the first boy she ever kissed, has five children in wedlock--including one she was advised to kill,...

Tendentious? You bet it is. That's the point. Potemkin messiahs never face a televised engagement against narrowly-focused and background supplied opposition, to people aiming at dissecting their fundamental beliefs in order to prove them wrong in public and ruin their candidacies. In fact, Liberals are protected form it, which is why their governing notions are so stale, unimaginative and out of touch with reality. Hilary Clinton was subjected to a simulacrum of it in the run up to 2008 when the media ditched her for Barack Obama, and she cried publicly. Only conservatives and Republicans face these lions as they...

In his new book "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture." Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet gives a voice to one of America’s most openly oppressed minorities, the entertainment-industry conservative. He frames the discussion of the current culture war with his journey from being a “brain-dead liberal” to being a true believer on the right. Mr. Mamet is part of a growing resistance movement among entertainers, artists and musicians who are bold enough to buck the hard-left Hollywood orthodoxy and think for themselves. A few years ago actor Gary Sinise helped organize an informal salon of centrists and...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

Renowned playwright, writer, director David Mamet talks with Sean Hannity about his transformation from "brain-dead Liberal" to Conservative, and discusses his new book about Leftist politics in Hollywood, The Secret Knowledge. Mamet, who happens to be Jewish, also shares his thoughts about Netanyahu and Israel. Very good interview.

What does he think of Barack Obama? "The question is can he run on his record in 2012 and the answer is no, because it's abysmal. He took a trillion dollars and where it went, nobody knows. He dismantled health care, he weakened America around the world, he sold out the state of Israel. All he's got to run on is being a Democrat So who would he prefer as president? He replies that he is "not current" with the Republican contenders until I mention Sarah Palin. "I am crazy about her," he answers immediately. "Would she make a good...

Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet. No longer, he declares, is he a "brain-dead liberal." Now he's a wide-awake conservative. Some time after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. He had a dramatic political conversion. Mamet re-evaluated his own heroes, starting with the playwright Bertolt...

At the risk of biting the hand that feeds him, acclaimed playwright David Mamet has written a new book likely to enflame the liberal audience that has embraced him since his rise to fame with 1984's "Glengarry Glen Ross." On the cover of "The Secret Knowledge On the Dismantling of American Culture," Mamet proclaims: "The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal." Mamet, 63, who grew up the son of liberal Jewish immigrants in Chicago, came to his conversion late in life -- he says he spoke to...

The Pulitzer-winning playwright explains his turn to the political right People of the statist left—and to some extent the statist right—will find much to decry in David Mamet’s new book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, a token of his late-life conversion to conservative political views. In fact, the sound of heads exploding is already being heard throughout the Liberal Village. Libertarians, on the other hand, may find the book to be an unexceptional checklist of familiar positions—curious, perhaps, in its shout-outs to Glenn Beck and Jon Voight, but admirable in its championing of Friedrich Hayek. Personally,...

I would have to do a little research to discover what really happened, but for the sake of argument let’s just assume that David Mamet for the most part got it right in his movie The Untouchables. From memory now, so be kind- At a crucial point in the movie Malone (Sean Connery) asks Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), whom he could trust. The answer? No one. Not quite the answer Eliot was hoping for, but it was exactly what he needed to hear to appreciate just how corrupt the Police of Chicago were. Of course by that time Ness was...

Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing… […] And then Mamet thought some more, and looked in the mirror. “I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad,” he writes now, “although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings.” He was always happy to cash a royalty check and made sure to insist on a licensing fee. “I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.” He saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the...

David Mamet is the accomplished playwright, screenwriter, novelist, author, essayist, and filmmaker. In 1984 Mamet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, his utterly harrowing update of Death of a Salesman. The new issue of the Weekly Standard carries Andrew Ferguson's moving cover story on Mamet's turn to conservatism. It is an intensely interesting and thought-provoking piece. As Ferguson recalls, the Village Voice published Mamet's quirky "goodbye to all that" essay "Why I am no longer a brain-dead liberal" in 2008. Mamet described himself in the essay as a decades-long liberal. He recounted a moment of illumination listening...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - Plans to close Guantanamo are not sitting well with the Sept. 11 victims' relatives who sat stunned while two alleged terrorists declared they were proud of their role in the plot.