Free Republic

"How do empires fall? Not by war, but by unbalanced minds disconnected from reality." — The Vigilant Fox on “X" By now, whenever you hear anyone invoke the phrase “saving our democracy,” that should be a signal that they are intent on destroying this republic, and with that, your natural rights to free speech, economic liberty, and public order. What began in 2016 as a simple, high-level plot to take out Donald Trump and squash Trumpism — a grassroots revolt against those very high-level DC insiders —turned sharply in 2017 into a long-running cover-up operation that spawned a multiplying cycle...

Behold, the “Sky Stadium” announced by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the latest jazzy edition to their utopian “smart city” project known as The Line or NEOM — an $8-trillion, 105-mile-long megastructure composed of two 1640-foot-high mirrored slabs that enclose a creamy nougat center of jungly foliage and water features integrated with apartments, offices, schools, and (of course) shopping. It’s completely insane, you understand. The Line was first featured on this site in August 2022. Three years on, the project is buckling under the weight of its psychotic grandiosity. Here’s a cross-section of the The Line’s beginning at the...

“We live in the dumbest of times and Democrats are truly led by the dumbest of all of us.” —Sean Davis, The Federalist. You can suppose the government will re-open this week, and then what? It could close back down in January when the latest funding patch runs out. And then what? Another shut-down and another continuing resolution? The nation hopscotches toward insolvency and breakdown. The sorrows of Mr. Trump mount as his enemies devise ever-novel punishments for the people of this land. The mutual animus of the two parties spirals upward like the vortex of a developing superstorm. It’s...

"Socialism is a wonderful idea. It's only as a reality that it has been disastrous." —Thomas Sowell. Brothers in Arms: Alex Soros (L), Zohran (R)Does Zohran’s radiant smile put you in mind of a labradoodle puppy? The guy was just that soft and fluffy during the mayoral election campaign, beaming remorselessly for the cameras, summoning a cushy nirvana of give-aways that would deliver an “affordable” life to the moiling masses of under-employed latte-clutchers doomed by their unpayable college loans and the gender-study diplomas they innocently bought with all that money. Under Zohran, New York City will soon be one colossal...

". . . the fake news isn’t reporting on Operation Arctic Frost. It’s not that they’re trying to cover it up. . . but that they actually think it was totally normal and legitimate." — Hans Mahncke. Surely you’ve noticed in recent years just how gruesome the Halloween townscape has become with our competitive yard displays of giant skeletons, shrieking ghouls, corpses seeming to emerge from the crabgrass, and miscellaneous body parts strewn about the property. The symbolism seems pretty overt: America yearns to become a death cult. The world has seen this before and it generally doesn’t end well....

“Protests are meant to be the voices of the unheard. Yet these protests are the voices of those who never shut up.” — Unnamed Observer of No Kings, reported by Roger Kimball. Over the weekend, you might have noticed, the Portland, OR, police cleared out the Antifa encampments down around the city’s ICE facility, carted away their lavish riot supplies, and warned them not to congregate on the street there. For now, anyway. Hmmmm. . . . Why do you suppose that happened? Antifa has been rioting freely around federal buildings in Portland since the Summer of Floyd, 2020. Did...

"The business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations." —The Singularity Hub on "X" Which is to say, there is Reality, and then there is every other cockamamie aggregate of simulation pretending to represent Reality, i.e. garbage. How many millions among us already subscribe to the latter? Apparently, lots, and they are not evenly distributed these days. You surely know where to look for the un-Reality. The party of men can get pregnant, and all the rest. . . . Enter A-I to make things worse. Probably a lot worse. We have failed to learn the...

"[S]omebody once observed that so much of leftism is pretending not to understand things that everyone understands." — Kurt Schlichter on "X" Of the 251 hostages seized in the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas raid on Southern Israel, 20 came out alive today, all men. None of the captured 76 women and girls made it out alive. This should tell you something about the moral disposition of Hamas, on top of the shockingly low number of survivors altogether. World opinion has not processed this in the heat of this moment, with the Gaza War ostensibly resolved, for now. . . or...

“Ordinary judicial proceedings become impracticable when the people paid to execute federal law coordinate to prevent its execution.” —EKO on “X”. Now, try to imagine Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (Jabba the Pritzker) as a Confederate general, his juddering bulk astride a panting war-horse, as he gallops into battle against federal positions in Millennium Park, Chicago. . . . Yeah, in the immortal words of Homey D. Clown, I don’t think so. Yet these seem to be the fantasies typically entertained in our times by the Big Dawgs of the Democratic Party: a confederacy of dweebs. While Mr. Trump uses presidential...

You probably can’t tell whether this is the alien itself or the ship it landed in. Possibly both at the same time. Hard to distinguish the tentacles from the portholes or the eye-sockets, while the salmon-pink folds and creases have a certain gynecologiocal feeling. In any case, this beast landed in Xalapa, capital of Veracruz state, Mexico. It is called Casa de los Milagros or House of Miracles by architect Danilo Veras Godoy and is a private residence, not an intergalactic freight transport vehicle / organism. As a technical matter, this is an extreme case of what you get when...

“Instead of winning on issues, the left resorts to melodramas that no one believes in anymore.” —Victor Davis Hanson. Welcome to the first Monday in October. Know what that means? It means, by federal statute (28 U.S.C. § 2), that the Supreme Court convenes for its new term. Thank goodness, because it’s pretty obvious by now that the Party of Chaos seeks to hogtie and paralyze the executive branch of the government in order to promote the chaos that the Party of Chaos has deftly created for our country. Something must be done. Chaos is now the Democrats’ preferred milieu...

"There are so many disgusting animals in public life that we have allowed to fraternize with the rest of society to our absolute peril." Aimee Terese on "X". Drag Queen LaWhore Vagistan a.k.a. Kareem Khubchandani. Harvard, apparently, can never learn. It has made itself the poster-child for all the failures of contemporary education, including the racketeering around endowments, government grant grifts, race and gender hustles, and intellectual surrender to ideas that would make medieval astrologasters burst out laughing. Case in point: the university lately announced the hiring of a Boston-area drag-queen to teach a course in the spring semester of...

When the newly-formed Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, April 1861, they ignited the Civil War. They, at least, had a clearcut goal: to maintain an economy (and society) based on slavery. It was patently evil, but it was firmly established and it was their engine for daily life, and they didn’t want it to end. When Charlie Kirk was murdered in 2025, Civil War 2.0 kicked off. The enemy this time are not Confederates with a coherent command structure and a goal. They are an army of nihilists like the gang in The Big Lebowski, who, for one...

“If you want a friend in DC, get a dog. We're coming for you.” —Dan Bongino, Deputy Director, FBI. You better believe Martha Stewart baked a cake last night — the lovely Gâteau Opéra perhaps? — when she got the news that the ham sandwich known as James Comey got indicted by a federal grand jury twenty-two years after that same ham sandwich indicted the goddess of hearth and home for lying to the FBI and the SEC over a trumped-up insider-trading rap, and sent her to federal prison for a five-month stretch plus five additional months of confined home-making...

"I’ve never talked to a Democrat who ever wanted to listen. They start to glitch out if you try.” — Sasha Stone. This past summer, I tried to open a line of communication with a West Coast relative. We exchanged a few letters. I tactically steered the conversation away from the political. Here was the closer salvo from my relative: Jimmy, on a completely personal level, and in different times, I think we could have been very good friends. At this point in our history, I find what you say in your blogs and Kunstlercast to be outrageous, deceptive, and...

He was about as fine a young man as you could have dreamed up in a country so busy disgracing itself, Jesus-like in quality, if not in exact manner. Jesus, after all, was not a family man. But then there was nothing supernatural about Charlie Kirk. He was vividly of this time and place on earth. Now, in death, you can imagine him up on a mural in the post office. They’ve gone and turned him into legend, like Davy Crockett, Joseph Smith, Abe Lincoln. Yeah, it goes that deep. The Woke-Jacobin Left broke into a happy-dance when they heard...

"You currently have one side willing to talk and extend a microphone to anyone, and one side that shoots to kill when they do." —Aimee Terese on X. When Brian De Palma’s movie, Dressed to Kill, came out in 1980, this was a different country. Like Hitchcock’s Psycho before it (1960), both films depicted men seeking to become women who are murderously deranged by their wishful fantasies. Now, our country has become murderously deranged by the same fantasy writ large. These derangements are acted out now by a segment of the population that calls itself “the trans community.” This is...

“The point I was trying to make is how peaceful the left was. . . right before he got shot.” —Hunter Kozak, Question-Asker at Charlie Kirk Utah Event, Sept 10 It’s been a tough week for our demon-haunted nation. First, video surfaces of the young Ukrainian woman, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, slaughtered by a homeless psychopath, one Decarlos Brown, Jr., on the Charlotte, NC, light rail — weeks after the crime happened, because Charlotte police suppressed the CC video and the legacy news media barely reported the story. Suddenly, the country is shocked by what they see: wanton murder witnessed at...

"If we hadn’t won this election we would have all been vaxxed to death and censored so no one could hear our dying screams" — Mike Benz on "X". That reckoning you’ve heard about lo these many years? It’s here now. We’re in it. You just can’t see all the moving parts, and if you did, you might not understand how or where they are moving, and what they are fixing to do next. Aside from certain US senators playing their pre-scripted mad scenes for the cameras, a disquieting quiet blankets the swamp like a miasma. It feels like a...

"We are the sickest country in the world. That's why we have to fire people at the CDC ... They did not do their job! This was their job to keep us healthy!" —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. What a gruesome spectacle it was to see HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. take on a conclave of vicious grifters on the Senate Finance Committee straining to warp reality in defense of their mighty patron, the nation-wrecking pharmaceutical companies. Do you understand how deep, convoluted, and grave the political sickness is? Over the years, the public health agencies and “big pharma” had...