Free Republic

Do a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on The New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story titled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of...

In her first speech since Joe Biden selected her as his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris told multiple lies. To wit: “The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Harris said. False. The pandemic and its associated lockdowns, not the president, are responsible for the economic contraction. Donald Trump is not the president of the euro zone, which suffered through an even more dire economic contraction in the second quarter: minus 40.3 percent, on an annualized basis, as against minus 32.9 percent in the US. The U.K. suffered a contraction...

[W]hat’s easy, when it comes to race, is pretending to be outraged about commonly used words. At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word “looters,” which has been used many times in the paper, now has “a pejorative and racist connotation” and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should “talk to your immediate supervisor.” Translation: Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed. In Houston, a Realtors association announced it would no longer use terms such as “master bedroom” or “master bathroom” not because any sane person...

Hollywood's a bit inconsistent when the topic is the press. It was a righteous guardian of the truth against the Catholic Church in "Spotlight" and against Richard Nixon in "The Post." But now, in the new movie "The Front Runner," it is painted as the villain -- when its target was Gary Hart. He was expected to be the Democratic nominee in 1988 before those photos surfaced of him on the yacht Monkey Business with Donna Rice sitting on his lap. They surfaced after he challenged reporters to tail him and see he wasn't cheating on his wife. No matter....

I was transfixed by the Gary Hart movie The Front Runner: It has a lot of levels, and it’s a failure on every one of them. Mistake gets piled atop error atop cliché atop banality. It’s a skyscraper of wrong, an hour-and-53-minute lesson in how not to make a movie. Vigorously borrowing from The Candidate, Nashville, and The West Wing, The Front Runner covers the three weeks of Colorado Senator Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, which ended in humiliation shortly after reporters staking out his D.C. apartment discovered a mistress, who turned out to be Donna Rice. Watching the co-writer and...

So how is CNN approaching the two most important elected officials in the country in these days of crisis? At Elected Official One, CNN directs a nonstop barrage of antagonistic questions, along with hostile commentary disguised as questions, plus additional hostile commentary not disguised as questions, for the sole purpose of creating gotcha moments that serve no public-information purpose whatsoever. It’s dog meets fire hydrant. When dealing with Elected Official Two, CNN brings in . . . his brother. For a nonstop massage of gentle questioning, family banter and general fawning. It’s dog meets other dog’s butt.

The strongest indicator yet that Hillary’s mulling a 2020 run? She appeared Wednesday, for the first time ever, on Howard Stern. There was hardly a pretense she was there to promote the book she co-wrote with daughter Chelsea, long ago a bestseller. As those who listen to the show know, Stern publicly begged Hillary to appear during the 2016 campaign. After Donald Trump won, Stern said one guest shot could have moved the needle her way. “If she had come on the show …,” Stern mused in May. “The way I helped Donald was I let him come on and...

My friend Maureen Callahan (who, like me, is a longtime fan of Howard Stern’s celebrity interviews, which elicit more frankness than anybody’s) says Hillary Clinton’s appearance on the Stern show amounts to her “biggest hint yet that she’s mulling a 2020 presidential run.” Clinton is ostensibly on tour to promote one of those “book projects” — I didn’t say “books” — slapped together by ghostwriters that she and her daughter keep putting their names on for the apparent sole purpose of giving them a hook for television appearances. As Callahan notes, on the Stern show Clinton more or less dropped...

My friend Maureen Callahan (who, like me, is a longtime fan of Howard Stern’s celebrity interviews, which elicit more frankness than anybody’s) says Hillary Clinton’s appearance on the Stern show amounts to her “biggest hint yet that she’s mulling a 2020 presidential run.” Clinton is ostensibly on tour to promote one of those “book projects” — I didn’t say “books” — slapped together by ghostwriters that she and her daughter keep putting their names on for the apparent sole purpose of giving them a hook for television appearances. As Callahan notes, on the Stern show Clinton more or less dropped...

The tuckered-out performance of Robert Mueller in Congress last week had President Trump in full gloat. Democrats were hoping for Eliot Ness. Instead, Robert Mueller was their Grandpa Simpson — feeble, forgetful, confused. Far from hurling thunderbolts at the White House, he seemed like a guy who would need to pause for a few seconds if called upon to distinguish his ass from his elbow. As James Freeman, resident wit of The Wall Street Journal, asked, “Did Robert Mueller read the Mueller Report?” Hopes could hardly have been higher for Mueller, the mighty matinee idol of justice who was going...

The two things everyone knows about Ty Cobb are that he was a phenomenal baseball player and that he was the worst racist ever to play the game. But one of these things is mostly wrong. Cobb, the first player voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the holder of more than 90 records upon his retirement and still the pace-setter with a .366 lifetime batting average, could be rude, but not nearly as nasty as you think. And far from being the most notorious racist in baseball history, he was an early and vocal supporter of integrating the big...

Mary Magdalene suffers from a miscast Joaquin Phoenix, drab visuals, and a muddled message. Actors love to think they can play anything, but the job of any half-decent filmmaker is to tell them when they’re not right for a part. If the Rock wants to play Kurt Cobain, try to talk him out of it. Adam Sandler as King Lear is not a great match. And then there’s Joaquin Phoenix. He’s playing Jesus Christ in the new film Mary Magdalene. In certain situations, Phoenix is a capable actor. I believe he would excel as a meth head, or as a...

The Highwaymen, Netflix’s new manhunt film starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, is a suspenseful and morally fraught take on the story of the ex–Texas Rangers who tracked down the most famous bank robbers of 1934. But this movie about chasing Bonnie and Clyde is also a movie about Bonnie and Clyde. It’s a pleasing tale of resourceful, hard-nosed cops that’s also something of an essay on cinema and society. Arthur Penn’s 1967 cinematic landmark (which is also streaming on Netflix) launched an American New Wave of counterculture films about anti-heroes and misfits contesting a nefarious system. Penn’s successors painted...

A lot of explosive material can get defused with nine little letters: “I was wrong.” It works wonders with your significant other. Try it. Frequently. This week, now that the Chicago Police Department has “shifted the trajectory of the investigation” and now believes Jussie Smollett may have faked his own bias attack, we’ll be hearing apologies from a lot of progressive activists, celebrities and politicians. With three simple words, they’ll disarm their detractors, pour oil on troubled waters. They’ll help to reunify a culture by admitting that sometimes their ideological opponents are correct. Just kidding. Don’t hold your breath waiting...

It wasn’t all bad news at the box office this past year. The movie industry as a whole may be boringly left-wing, but occasionally a conservative message breaks through, sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally or because filmmakers simply applied themselves to telling the truth. Here are ten films that brought conservative concepts to the multiplex in 2018, ranked according to conservative firepower:

The initial warning is given before Vice even starts, in an onscreen note: It’s a “true story,” we’re told. But it’s hard to be strictly factually accurate, the note adds, because Dick Cheney is such a secretive bastard. So it’s really Cheney’s fault if anything in the movie happens to be wrong. Yet at the end a character will break the fourth wall to assert that the whole thing is factual and say, sarcastically, “Because I have the ability to understand facts, that makes me a liberal?” That sounds like an invitation to consider the facts and logic of Vice....

Consider two Americans. One is named Mike. Mike is a straight white Christian male from a decaying industrial city in Ohio or Michigan. He never knew his father. His mother is hooked on painkillers. His home life isn’t great. Mom’s various boyfriends enjoy smacking him in the face. He gets passed around to a variety of family members. He gets into drugs early. Crime too. He drifts around high school and doesn’t graduate. He has no skills and no prospects. The other American is Malia Obama. Who has the privilege here? Which one of these citizens is going to have...

Michael Moore set the record for the highest-grossing documentary of all time (1989’s “Roger & Me”). Then he broke his own record (2002’s “Bowling for Columbine”). Then he broke it again, with what remains the highest-grossing doc in US history, 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Along the way he won an Oscar and predicted Donald Trump’s presidential victory when no one else saw it coming. That was then. These days Moore’s IRS-reported income is (according to legal papers filed by his ex-wife, Kathleen Glynn) negative-$350,862 (in 2014) and negative-$221,025 (in 2016). He’s still making movies, but America is yawning. Already there have...

In a bid which further delayed a vote on Judge Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford's associates claimed earlier this week that Ford's too afraid to fly to Washington DC from California and instead needs to drive. As ABC News reported on Friday: [L]awyers for Ford are asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule a hearing for her to be heard on Thursday, allowing time for Ford to make the drive from California to Washington D.C. Ford's friend, Kate Devarney, told CNN this week that Ford's fear of flying is directly related to her allegation of assault, and that an airplane is...

Statement from Debra Katz: "As Dr. Ford has said, she did not share her story publicly or with anyone for years following the incident with Judge Kavanaugh. It’s not surprising that Ms. Keyser has no recollection of the evening as they did not discuss it....” 1/2 .. It’s also unremarkable that Ms. Keyser does not remember attending a specific gathering 30 years ago at which nothing of consequence happened to her. Dr. Ford of course will never forget this gathering because of what happened to her there.” 2/2