Free Republic

“It’s dark on the Left now. They’ve reached that predictable moment where inflicting pain is all they have left.“ — Sasha Stone. Theories on the Epstein mess fly around like a murmuration of starlings wheeling across an angry summer sky. The birds are just birds. They are not the storm clouds in the background. Mark the difference. You can rightly say that Mr. Trump has handled this Epstein business rather awkwardly — especially last Wednesday’s little show of vexation in the cabinet meeting, barking, nothing to see. . . just move along. What? You’ve been watching the Epstein psychodrama unspool...

We're trapped in a structure. We named the Structure 'Jeffrey Epstein'." — Eric Weinstein No one in America — not even the most deranged, spike-faced, pink-haired transtifas — believes the latest Epstein story as played out by Mr. Trump and AG Bondi in this week’s cabinet parlay: nuthin to see, just a bunch of pointless child porn, fuggeddabowdit. . . But stay! Much is moving, flowing unseen. The world is yugely in flux, large events in human affairs are in motion, many things are breaking, rotating, dissolving and re-forming, while others wind into giant hairballs. . . so many players...

“. . . [W}e are closing in on more disclosures and fixing past wrongs to personnel. We’re making sure this is done correctly. But it’s absolutely getting done.” Dan Bongino, Deputy Director, FBI. Elon, as he is currently imagining himselfWho knows what to believe these days? Well, what would you expect after years, even decades, of anti-reality operations by everyone from the CIA to The New York Times to Harvard U? Is it any wonder that reality-optionality is making the people both apathetic and insane? We are told now by the FBI that there is no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein...

"I can negotiate with a man who wants to make money. I can't negotiate with a communist who wants to kill me." — Josh Lippincott on "X" O, Norman Rockwell, where are you when we really need you? Forgive us, Emma Lazarus, our second thoughts about those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shore(s). That was then and this is now. O, beautiful for spacious skies (but, why so many contrails criss-crossing overhead from the New York Island to the gulf stream waters?). O, land of tattooed grandmas, hostages of the tiny...

"In eight days, the United States and Israel eliminated Iran’s nuclear capabilities with minimal civilian casualties. One of the greatest military achievements ever." — Bill Ackman. Of course, you must expect a whole lot of deranged thinking after the USA’s Saturday night “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” (MOP) attack on Iran’s three nuke sites — because derangement drives the spirit of our time in Western Civ. France, Germany, the UK, Sweden still can’t wrap their brains around the jihad they have fecklessly invited inside their countries — and they prosecute anyone who suggests as much. Over here, the Oregon state legislature brought...

"Realize where we are." — Oilfield Rando on "X". Saturday morning, we toodled over to the next town, Salem, New York, (pop. 2,612, per capita income $19,499) fifty miles northeast of Albany, to catch one of the hundreds of “No Kings” demos across the nation sponsored by Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal partner (and Linked-in founder) Reid Hoffman, and father-and son team, George and Alex Soros. Speaking of Alex Soros, Saturday also happened to be his wedding day, to Huma Abedin, former Hillary Clinton sidekick and BFF (and ex-wife of disgraced congressman and convicted...

“MAGA is developing “tech right” fatigue.” — Cernovich on “X”. In this age of info overload, when everybody’s brain has become a memory hole, we’ll see how long anyone remembers Elon Musk’s epic tantrum. The latest news is that Mr. Trump and Wonderboy have scheduled a phone convo for today, Friday, supposedly to “make-up.” The whole psychodrama looks like an episode out of the Batman movie that America has become. You could see the current plot twist from a thousand miles away. Even back in the summer, Elon’s spastic cavortings on the campaign trail looked suspiciously drug-edged. He’s reported to...

“The Caliphate looms; it is inevitable, and the road to its gates is paved with the skulls of English children.” —Peachy Keenan Do you hear those alarm bells ringing? Looks like June is bustin’ out all over, as the old Broadway ditty goes. Bedlam is in the air, and in more varieties than Heinz has pickles. Take your pick: civil war blooming in France and the UK, maybe even Germany — if it can shake off its psychotic stupor. World War III flutters over the continent like an answered prayer coming in for a landing. And here in the USA,...

“The modern politics of division have become a banally hectoring faux morality play put on by the theater kids for the other theater kids.” —El Gato Malo on X. President Trump Alone While Jake Tapper leads the Mea Culpa Chorus singing Kumbaya in a minor key, absolutely nobody is fooled that the grotesque psychotic deformities of US politics can be reduced to a few White House factotums lying to the news media about “Joe Biden’s” cognitive abilities. For one thing, the news media was not lied to. The news media (including Jake) lied to the nation, consistently, flagrantly, mendaciously, for...

“Is the Blue Party really only the customer service desk for the administrative state?” —Jeff Childers It’s pretty universally acknowledged that America’s recent wars — say, starting with Vietnam — have been stupid, pointless, and fake in instigation. And yet the soldiers we sent into these fiascos acted bravely and honorably for the most part. So, it has felt a little weird to celebrate their sacrifices minus any sense of political justice, victory, or meaning in the endeavors they sacrificed for. Ergo, the holiday is lately reduced to a celebration of grilled meat. This Memorial Day, for a change, the...

This Memorial Day, for a change, the USA is not actively at war in some distant land, only against ourselves. One faction in this as yet cold civil war seeks to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and the other side seeks what. . . ? To do the opposite of that? Make America Disintegrate (MAD). It’s hard to come to another conclusion. MAGA is led, of course, by Mr. Trump, president again after the strangest executive interregnum in our history. At its plainest, MAGA means returning to an economy based on producing things of value. To many, this might conjure...

"Every time I watch The View, I become even more misogynistic." — Laura Loomer. Saint Jake Tapper.Bad as it was, “Joe Biden,” the figment president, was merely one manifestation of a nation made mad by power-seeking demons, real-live, ill-intentioned human beings driving a runaway political machine, the party of hoaxes, hustles, and hatred. The country is just now struggling to exit a convulsion of mass mental illness. The demons are still there, though, and still hard at work trying to drag you all back into mass formation. A central mystery is how the news media made itself the enemy of...

“Don’t misunderstand me. I want Biden to get better and live many more years, so he can watch his family go broke from running out of influence to sell.” Oilfield Rando on X If the slithering denizens of Okefenokee-on-the-Potomac were nervous about their fates before Sunday — and I’d say they’ve been rather jumped-up since Nov. 4 — then Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning session with FBI top dawgs Patel and Bongino must have been a near-death experience for them. Something Roto-rooterish this way comes, officialdom must be thinking, if you can call utter hysteria “thinking.” Washington is nervous because there...

“I’m very concerned for [the president's] life. And James Comey, in my view, should be held accountable and put behind bars for this." — DNI Tulsi Gabbard “Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Jim Comey, former FBI Director wrote on Instagram about the message “86 47” laid out in seashells on the sand that he came across, innocently. You’d have to ask yourself: what was “cool” about that, exactly? Especially if, as Mr. Comey claimed on X soon after, that he didn’t know what it meant. Are things that you don’t understand “cool”? Is it just “cool” to learn...

It’s vain and futile to suppose that the disordered minds of Western Civ’s entrenched Wokester Jacobins might ever be subject to polite persuasion about anything they believe. They believe only in the power of pushing their fellow citizens around, and so, alas, the only persuasion that might conceivably work to stop their infantile assaults on liberty, truth, and decency is to push back harder until they suffer and break.This is something that most parents with young children instinctively understand. You don’t negotiate with two-year-olds. You tell them how things are and what sort of behavior is required of them, as...

“The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.” — Harmeet Dhillon, US Assistant AG for the Civil Rights Division. When a claque of deep state shills such as Norm Eisen, Chuck Schumer, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and Larry Summers holler about Mr. Trump’s attempt to reform a depraved political culture as “an assault on norms,” are you not prompted to wonder what, exactly, those norms might be? Looks like they are describing a colossal matrix of racketeering operations in concert with an epic program of crypto-Marxist mind-[****]ery, mountains of money purloined under color-of-law, swindles...

Where Things Stand "When the truth comes out, do not ask me how I knew. Ask yourself why you didn't." — "The Researcher" on X [Link at his site] Click photo of Norm Eisen to play video. “Fighting fascism,” for the American Jacobins who lead the Democratic Party, means opposing any attempt to flush the corruption out of the entrenched bureaucracy, just as their pet phrase “our democracy” actually refers to the matrix of grift and despotic activism that drives their political operating system. That is exactly how and why the USAID was so crucial to spread captured taxpayer spoils...

“Due process is when only one side has to follow the law and if you point out that this is a suicidal standard you’re a fascist” — Auron MacIntyre A great consternation boils and bubbles across the land as the sinister forces of Jacobin lawfare keep up their legalistic battery against the nation. You better believe that the country will not stand for much more of this lunatic judicial coup aimed at wrecking the authority of law itself, and with that, any chance for sane management of our affairs. On Saturday, the activist org Indivisible, sponsored by Linked-In billionaire Reid...

“Every western society is confronted by an internal cultural conflict between those who wish to distance society from its civilizational legacy and those who wish to renew it.” —Frank Furedi on Substack Whatever else you think is happening in our world, contraction is the reality-based order-of-the-day, and everything else is downstream of that. The world has to get by with less. Nothing is going to fix this for everybody, though any number of schemes for redistributing what’s left will preoccupy the political mojo. Right now, it’s tariffs, which are an attempt to restore industry ceded to the formerly left-behind people...

"No more government in the shadows." Mike Benz The decade-long treasonous hectoring of Mr. Trump keeps on coming, you understand, for the simple reason that there have been absolutely zero consequences for any of the vicious rogues behind it. Not so much as a rap on the knuckles for seeking to overthrow a president, steal elections, hide high crimes, rob the treasury, and recklessly frame the innocent. And suddenly this week, as startling as a mythic goddess of justice riding a spring zephyr, comes a brisk demonstration of exactly what-to-do. Days ago, Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey ordered his...