Free Republic

...As a young man, I was struck by how masterfully Buckley built an entire movement and kept it going by force of personality. Even then, however, I was increasingly turned off by Buckley’s crusading anti-Communism—and that was long before he wandered off in a neoconservative direction. I also became concerned with how Buckley lavished favors on his buddies on the left and the manner in which he inserted them into National Review, and then on his TV interview program, Firing Line. By the 1990s, Buckley made only feeble attempts to defend longtime friends and loyal employees who came under assault...

Gilbert Gottfried, a comedian and film and television actor with a distinctly memorable voice, has died after a long illness, his family announced on Tuesday. He was 67.

For years I’ve been listening to the hot air produced by Conservative Inc. about the political conservatism of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was dedicated to “self-government based on absolute truth and moral law.” Supposedly King was also a proud member of the GOP. This last claim is not even remotely true, as Alveda King, MLK’s niece and a fan of Donald Trump, revealed to Newsmax in 2013. The closest to a show of bipartisanship from King came when he condemned both parties for being too reactionary, the Democrats for harboring segregationists and “Northern Republicans” for promoting grasping capitalists. The...

Having forced myself to listen to most of the Republican National Convention (RNC) orations in late August, I was struck by what my daughter, who had done such work professionally, characterized as the program’s “underlying marketing strategy.” The GOP’s advisers seem to have pitched their message at the demographics among whom Trump has had the least support in the polls, namely suburban, college-educated women, and blacks. Trump, according to the polls, was losing the former group until recently by about 20 percentage points, and may be winning the votes of no more than 8 percent of blacks. The overall size...

The antifascist left, about which I have just finished writing a book, resembles the Nazis in a striking way, particularly when these earlier advocates of violence were on their way to power. I am drawing this parallel while being fully aware of the qualifications that I am constrained to offer. I am aware that, unlike the Nazis, American Antifa loathe their own race and nation and are doing everything possible to weaken them. They also favor filling their country with third world immigrants, preferably non-Christian, to change its inherited cultural and ethnic character. Further, these rioters and subversives are working...

In 2012, I came across a scholarly article in a journal on rhetoric on "The Conservative Canon and Its Uses." The author, Michael J. Lee, undertook to explain why the American conservative movement had put together a "secular canon" featuring its leading thinkers. According to Lee, this selection of books and seminal authors has been designed to forge a "spiritual bond" among groups that otherwise have exhibited sharp disagreement. Conventional libertarians, social traditionalists, and anarcho-capitalists, to name just three such groups, have been able to cooperate on common purposes because a canon has been created that embraces figures from all...

Full title: New Homeland Security Records Reveal Top Officials Were Exempted from Strict Ban Placed on Web-Based Personal Email Accounts Despite Heightened Security Concerns Jeh Johnson granted special waiver on first day of official ban. Practice Continued Even After Clinton Email Revelations. (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced it obtained 693 pages of Department of Homeland Security records revealing that Secretary Jeh Johnson and 28 other agency officials used government computers to access personal web-based email accounts despite an agency-wide ban due to heightened security concerns. The documents also reveal that Homeland Security officials misled Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA)...

Wrath of God or natural disaster? When it comes to Japan, Glenn Beck won't claim it's the former, but can't tell you it's the latter. "I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes," Beck told his radio listeners on Monday, before throwing in, "I'm not not saying that either." "What God does is God's business. But I'll tell you this -- there's a message being sent," Beck continued. "And that is, 'Hey you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.' I'm just saying." Beck's comments, which led...

In a recent syndicated column, National Review editor Richard Lowry informs us that “liberals” are guilty of identifying healthcare reform with a “victory as transcendent as that of the civil rights movement.” Lowry considers this movement to be a “rare and marvelous thing.” He extols the “genius of Martin Luther King,” who spent his life teaching us to love each other. Lowry ends his encomium by contrasting the healthcare bill with the Christ-like purity of the civil rights protestors, who were concerned with “freedom and securing the most basic rights — to vote and to gain equal access to public...

Picking Apart Washington’s Scumby Paul Gottfried on January 12, 2010 As everyone and his cousin know, the neocons are my least favorite “Washington insiders” and they divide generally into two categories, the ill-mannered, touchy Jews and their groveling or adulatory Christian assistants. David Frum, the Kagan boys, Norman and John Podhoretz, and Michael Ledeen are the house-owners; while Bill Bennett, Fred Barnes, Michael Novak, Cal Thomas, Linda Chavez, and Rich Lowry all live in the servants’ quarters. Although I’ve suffered more at the hands of the Podhoretz-types than from the machinations of their servants, I’ve always felt a grudging admiration...

By Michael Ventre MSNBC contributor updated 2:25 p.m. CT, Tues., Sept. 9, 2008 At a Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, comedian Gilbert Gottfried not only pushed the envelope, he set it on fire. He was at the podium, about to launch into the abundantly filthy “Aristocrats” joke that inspired an entire documentary film, when he mentioned that he had tried to get a direct flight “but they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

The voice of the AFLAC duck has been named the Unsexiest Man in the World. Comedian Gilbert Gottfried tops the list compiled by the Boston Phoenix's Web site. The list is a mix of entertainers, sports stars, even terrorists. Osama bin Laden is number eight on the list. Of Gottfried, the Phoenix says "The parrot-voiced, pickled-face comic is to sexy what Kryptonite is to Superman."

Adorno: A Political Biography, Lorenz Jäger, trans. by Stewart Spencer, Yale University Press, 235 pages Lorenz Jäger’s biography of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) is a useful study of an unpleasant but influential figure. From the 1920s until his death, Adorno was the prime mover behind the aggregation of cultural and social iconoclasts known as the Frankfurt School. Together with his more down-to-earth co-organizer Max Horkheimer, who contributed family wealth to their enterprise, Adorno took his socially radical think tank, the Institute for Social Research, in 1934 from its interwar home in Frankfurt to New York and later Los Angeles. In 1949,...

My Dogs Watch FoxNewsby Paul Gottfried This morning, when I turned on FoxNews for our three dogs, who seem to like the staccato sounds on Rupert Murdoch Central, I caught sight of the well-publicized visage of David Frum. Apparently Frum was being asked to comment on the Christian faith of George W. Bush, a spiritual disposition that had just received high grades from an Evangelical Republican who was particularly struck by the Prez's remarks about everyone having the potential for democracy. Frum, who was in agreement with the Evangelical, spoke about how effusively Bush's faith had come out in his...

Straussians vs. Paleoconservatives by Paul Gottfried Having received a note from an inquiring graduate student, Mitchell Young, who is "banging out a Master’s thesis" at San Diego State, and cannot comprehend why I have insisted that Straussians and paleos are irreconcilably divided, I wish to offer the following friendly clarification. At the very least my explanation may be help to relieve the "cognitive dissonance" that Mitch has complained about, and which has been produced by my apparent inability to distinguish the disciples of Leo Strauss and neoconservatives. A German-Jewish classicist who fled to the US in 1938, Strauss (1899-1973) drew...