Free Republic

White Tucker Carlson Guest Says African-Americans ‘Need to Move on’ From Slavery (Video) Tucker Carlson guest Mark Steyn offered his thoughts and slavery and the issue of reparations to the descendants of U.S. slaves, telling viewers of Carlson’s Fox News show Thursday that nobody living today knew anyone who had been a slave and that people just needed to move on from the whole issue. “Slavery was abolished a century and a half ago. Nobody alive today had a grandparent who was a slave and in that sense I think you reach a point where, you know, you need to...

These are strange times in America, with Andrew McCabe and the senior leadership of the FBI and Department of Justice living out their own Seven Days in May fantasy, except that in the Deputy Director's cut it's already halfway to Seven Years in May. We shall leave that disturbing convergence of Tinseltown and the Swamp for another day, but on this Presidents Day weekend I thought we'd take a look at the kind of president Hollywood lefties come up with when they're given free rein to design their ideal. There was a fashion for such films during the Clinton years,...

There was some modest activity yesterday in the Mann vs Steyn climate-change hockey-stick case, which will shortly be entering its eighth year. As that ludicrous fact testifies, it has been procedurally bollocksed by the District of Columbia courts, which is why it will almost certainly be headed to the Supreme Court. When it gets there, it will be the most consequential free-speech case since New York Times vs Sullivan fifty-five years ago. Lest you doubt that, consider yesterday's request by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press and various other parties to file an amicus brief on the...

Two contrasting approaches to population growth: ~First, the American policy, per the Census Bureau: The Census Bureau is projecting that the population of the United States will hit 404 million by 2060, and nearly all of the net growth will be from immigrants and their families. A new analysis of the figures shows that of the 79 million more in 2060, 75 million will be legal and illegal immigrants and their families, a population the size of France and Belgium combined. Without immigration, according to the Census analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies, the U.S. population would increase by...

Michel Legrand died a fortnight ago, of sepsis after contracting a pulmonary infection. He was 86, which is a grand age, but he was very active and had a full concert schedule booked for the spring. So one resents somewhat, as I mentioned re Albert Finney yesterday, the randomness of fatal affliction in otherwise healthy old men. Sometimes with the advancing years a writer starts to sound written out - as if everything he has to say has already been said. Legrand didn't sound like that to me. My pal Jessica Martin was in his last show, Marguerite, in the...

Albert Finney died on Thursday, apparently from one of those sudden infections generally harmless to youth but swiftly lethal to otherwise healthy old men. His last film was in 2012 - Skyfall, one of the best of all 007 outings, in which he played the Bond family's ancient Scottish retainer at James' crumbling childhood home. In that diamond jubilee year of Cubby Broccoli's lucrative franchise, it was a role fairly obviously intended for Sean Connery, but which Sir Sean, after Never Say Never Again, decided to say never again to, perhaps wisely. Finney was hairy, game, and, in his scenes...

Albert Finney died on Thursday, apparently from one of those sudden infections generally harmless to youth but swiftly lethal to otherwise healthy old men. His last film was in 2012 - Skyfall, one of the best of all 007 outings, in which he played the Bond family's ancient Scottish retainer at James' crumbling childhood home. In that diamond jubilee year of Cubby Broccoli's lucrative franchise, it was a role fairly obviously intended for Sean Connery, but which Sir Sean, after Never Say Never Again, decided to say never again to, perhaps wisely. Finney was hairy, game, and, in his scenes...

I more or less lost interest in newspapers when my old boss Conrad Black stopped running them. His flagship Daily Telegraph in London is a pale shadow of its former self, and The Chicago Sun-Times is even more diminished, a pale shadow of a pale shadow. Lord Black's career as a publisher ended with a multi-count conviction in US federal court in the Northern District of Illinois for a "corporate governance" "crime" that none of his enemies can even explain. He was imprisoned, and, either because he's Canadian or a member of the House of Lords, was deemed ineligible for...

Over the weekend Paris was rocked by demonstrations from a new protest group that has sprung up in oppositions to les gilets jaunes - the Yellow Vests. The new movement is called les foulards rouges - the Red Scarves. For some reason, this passage from The Code of the Woosters (1938) sprang to mind: 'Don't you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts ...' 'By the way, when you say 'shorts', you mean 'shirts', of course.' 'No. By the time Spode formed...

The big news across America this morning is that Nancy Pelosi appears to have pulled off the cancellation of the State of the Union - by refusing the President an invite to "the people's house". I have mixed feelings about this, as longtime readers will know - first, because ersatz monarchism does not become a republic: Strange how the monarchical urge persists even in a republic two-and-a-third centuries old. Many commentators have pointed out that the modern State of the Union is in fairly obvious mimicry of the Speech from the Throne that precedes a new legislative session in British...

Guest-hosting for Rush on Friday, I mentioned the strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors - as in the stampede of Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times. Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay - which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a...

Australia Day looms on January 26th, which is a week from today New Hampshire time. But a week from today New Hampshire time Australia Day will have come and gone. In fact, it may already have come and gone: as the years go by, the Pacific time zones seem to gape and open up even vaster temporal space. So I thought we'd go a little Australian ahead of the big day, and pick a movie with the most prominent Aussie actress of our time. In private life Cate Blanchett is a near parodic limousine liberal ("Green before it was hip,...

Fifty years ago, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the most famous Siamese twins of the 20th century failed to report for their shift at the grocery store where they had worked for most of the previous decade. On January 4th 1969, the door was forced, and Violet and Daisy Hilton were found dead from the Hong Kong flu. Daisy died first, and for two to four days Violet, sharing the same circulatory system, lay next to her conjoined sister, until the influenza consumed her too. They were sixty years old, and had lived a helluva life.Fifty years ago, in Charlotte, North...

Here's my take on some of those who left us these last twelve months. It's not a comprehensive list, because, as the late Diana Mosley used to say to me with rueful weariness, "People die non-stop", which is very true. But here's some of the passings we noted, with more at the links - from furniture salesmen to superhero godfathers to make-believe presidents, first ladies to Bond girls to Pigeon sisters: CHARLES AZNAVOUR, troubadour On September 19th the 94-year-old Charles Aznavour was on stage at the NHK Hall in Osaka, Japan. After a triumphant concert he returned to his home...

A week before Christmas two young ladies from Scandinavia vacationing in Morocco - Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway - were brutally stabbed and decapitated and then had the final moments of their lives uploaded as triumphal snuff videos to Facebook, Twitter, 4Chan and Reddit, the Four Horsemen of the Social-Media Apocalypse. Fortunately, if you were thinking of getting a little nervous about your next holiday in the Maghreb, this bloody double-murder was the work of merely another "lone wolf": In a press conference in Rabat yesterday, police and domestic intelligence spokesman Boubker Sabik...

For almost the entirety of this century, I've been touched by the emails I receive this time of year from US, UK, Canadian, Australian and other troops spending Christmas in such unfestive climes as the Hindu Kush and the sands of Araby. Seasonal soldiering is tough on the warriors, and on their families back home - as Linda Purl notes on our Christmas Show just before her beautiful rendition of "I'll Be Home for Christmas". For our pre-Yuletide edition of Mark at the Movies, here are a few seasonal movie moments with a military theme: The best "White Christmas": The...

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse... At which point, Sylvester the cat looks up from his long fruitless vigil outside the mouse hole in the baseboard and sighs with feeling to the narrator, "You're not jutht whithlin' Dickthie, brother." "Gift Wrapped" is like every Looney Tune or Merry Melody - a mere six minutes long. But with Christmas movies that's a good thing. The western and the musical may be dead, but the charmless Xmas movie is now a genre all of its own and doing gangbusters....

Happy Hanukkah to all our Jewish readers around the world. On this penultimate "crazy night", I thought it appropriate to look out a slab of Hanukkah Hollywood, but the pickings are thin, save for this 2002 offering from my sometime fellow Granite Stater Adam Sandler. Born in Brooklyn, Sandler grew up in New Hampshire and was discovered in an LA comedy club by Dennis Miller, who recommended him to "Saturday Night Live". Eight Crazy Nights was a flop on its first release but has become something of a cult film, and is in its way a significant cultural artifact: a...

Bernardo Bertolucci made many films, but only once in a long career was his art perfectly in tune with the cultural moment. The early Seventies was the heyday of cinema porn. Not porn films, which is (or was) a specialized genre. But films about sex and with extensive nudity that played your local fleapit as if they were no different from Herbie Gets Rear-Ended or whatever Disney was making back then. The breakout title was the Swedish hit I Am Curious (Yellow), in the wake of which came more films for the curious - Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss...

First they came for "Baby, It's Cold Outside", and I did nothing because I was too busy watching her put some records on while I pour. Then they came for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". Following my appearance with Tucker on Thursday, mein host spoke to Dave Rubin about the usual tosspots taking umbrage over "Rudolph" because it's "seriously problematic". As Dave said, it's easier to destroy than to create. But the quivering pearl-clutching cries of "Seriously problematic!" suggest even destruction requires a creativity of which our moribund age is increasingly incapable. My general line on "Rudolph" comes from a Life...