Free Republic

The George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles Behold, the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Exposition Park, Los Angeles. Of course the darn thing had to look like a space ship, because George Lucas made the very $5.3-billion fortune that enabled him to aggrandize himself in this museum on the space movie franchise Star Wars. The 300,000 square-foot building contains 35 galleries and two movie theaters. Note the “environmental” roof-scape! What’s that narrative? Answer: The “green” roof is there simply to mollify the climate zealots on the LA planning board and allow Hollywood bigshots to enjoy their...

"Imagine if the US and EU were still aligned on the censorship-by-proxy strategy. Few people realize how close we were to global totalitarianism." —Michael Shellenberger. Norm Eisen, Lawfare Ninja Supreme Western Civ is choking itself to death with lawfare in the name of “democracy.” If you think just a little bit past the sale, you will realize that few will say what they mean by “democracy,” including the most ardent “democracy” cultists. What it supposedly means is legal outcomes that the political left wants, not what the law, or the truth, or justice requires. On the surface, the left pretends...

“This isn’t just about Maduro. This is the final nail in the coffin for the CIA-black-budget narco pipeline that’s been running since the 80s.” —The Ghost of Ezra on “X”. CIA Headquarters, Langley, Va. You must wonder: what exactly has CIA Director John Ratcliffe been doing over in Langley, VA, lo these many months since things changed bigly in Swamptopia? Does he wander the hallways of that giant black box howling ineffectually. . . sit barricaded in his office playing sudoku. . . or is he doing what needs to be done: methodically uncovering and disassembling the diabolical racketeering operation...

“Literally everything the left did, every line they crossed and rule they broke, all came back to slap them in the face.” —Insurrection Barbie on “X”. Fulton County, GA, Election HQ, Nov 3, 2020 — the Night of the Broken Toilet. Indeed, you have a lot to be thankful for this week of humble national gratitude — for instance, the explosive new revelations as to just exactly how US elections have been rigged, and how, it now appears, Mr. Trump and his people, are prepared to go mad-dog on the sinister forces behind it. It all unspooled this Thanksgiving week,...

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak." —Sun Tzu. CIA Director John Ratcliffe in a pensive momentYou understand, don’t you, what the aim was of the “Seditious Six” politicians who made last week’s now-notorious video suggesting that US military personnel should refuse the president’s orders if they deemed them to be “illegal?” This was the old Lefty game of provoking the authorities to react intemperately so they can be labeled “fascist.” It’s like the old schoolyard game of the kid who goes I’m touching you. . . I’m touching you. . . until the touched...

"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...