Free Republic

Two months after memory-holing the first near-successful assassination of an American president in four decades, the Secret Service figures it's safe to start letting the gunmen near Trump again: Trump rushed to safety as Secret Service opens fire on man with AK-47 near golf course Ryan Wesley Routh got to within three-to-five hundred yards of Trump. From the corrupt G-men of the FBI: The FBI has responded to West Palm Beach Florida and is investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination of former President Trump. The alleged perp is said to have been "known" to the FBI, and, even...

~Half of America gets its news from respectable "mainstream" "journalists" such as ABC's David Muir, a man who "fact-checks" Donald Trump by citing a press release from the city manager of Springfield, Ohio that there's nothing to see here. Being a most solicitous court eunuch, Mr Muir - like his fellow mainstreamers - sees no reason to listen to those who actually live in Springfield. In the last four years, so many Haitians have descended on this Ohio town that they now constitute one-in-four of the population. And, whether it be the right to decapitate and eat waterfowl from municipal...

~That bollocks about America being "a nation of immigrants" is an early example of what we now call "virtue-signalling" - and one the US has, alas, exported to other countries where it has even less application. A lot of it derives from that torch-bearing lady in the harbour. As I said at the Munk Debate in 2016, the French gave the Americans a great Statue of Liberty, and the Americans stapled a truly lousy poem to it and turned it into a Statue of Immigration: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be human traffickers, jihadists,...

~~The Democrat convention featured a full set of the party's presidents, save for Jimmy Carter, who turns one hundred next month. But, otherwise, there were present not only both Obamas but both Clintons, and even both Bidens, even though almost every one in that sextet loathes the other five, and certainly all six despise Kamala. But they're Democrats first, so they suck it up. How's it going over on the Republican side? Well, former president George W Bush has announced he won't be endorsing anyone in this election. On the other hand, over two hundred Bush, McCain and Romney staffers...

~Last week, à propos America's presently presidentless republic, I remarked: Meanwhile, the Ukrainians say Moscow is 'threatening the world with nuclear catastrophe'. Given that an American client state has spent the last month bombing Russia daily, it would be unusual if they were not. But that's no reason to divert the dead husk from another week at his beach house in Delaware. To which Roy Koczela responds: "Given that an American client state has spent the last month bombing Russia daily, it would be unusual if they were not." Steyn goes full-on Putinist, literally more submissive to the Kremlin than...

~Tradition holds that most Americans don't start paying attention to the presidential election until after Labor Day. So on Tuesday morning millions of people are going to be discovering that the one candidate got shot in the head and the other was more effectively dispatched and whoever's actually running the United States no longer feels the need to pretend that the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet is the chief executive of the global superpower. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians say Moscow is "threatening the world with nuclear catastrophe". Given that an American client state has spent the last month bombing...

~THE POST-DEMOCRATIC ERA (1): Since they took the tyre iron to him, whoever's really running the United States government has given up the time-consuming pretence that Joe Biden has anything at all to do with it. After his farewell address to the DNC, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet flew Air Force One for a week's vacation with some California billionaire. When that was done, he flew it again from the Golden State back to his beach house in Delaware for a second, week-and-a-half-long vacation: Biden's schedule is absolutely blank. Meanwhile, Emily Goodin reports Biden was "visibly shaking"...

~LITERAL DIVERSITY STABBING OF THE DAY: On Friday a "knifeman", as they now say, fatally stabbed three people and badly wounded eight others in the German town of Solingen. The police have arrested a - go on, take a wild guess - yes, a 26-year-old Muslim from Syria who is reported to have yelled - time for another wild guess - bingo, "Allahu Akbar!" Just to add to the black comedy of civilisational implosion, he killed his victims at a "Festival of Diversity" - a Festival der Vielfalt - yeah, that's the actual stupid name they gave it, as if...

~No, I'm not going to analyse the alleged "nominee"'s speech. This précis of what's going on is hard to beat: Kamala got zero votes, has given zero press conferences, has given zero interviews, and had to stage buying a bag of Doritos. This is the most ridiculous, anti-democratic, laughable joke I've ever seen in politics. If you treat this as "politics", you're part of the problem. And, given that American elections have degraded to the point where the opposition candidate is now being indicted, convicted and shot at, I find myself more interested in the disturbing abandonment by key US...

~The third-rate vaudeville being mounted in Chicago this week is irrelevant to anything that matters - except for the bleak fact that half the American people are minded to go along with it, which helps explains why meaningful course-correction is all but impossible. This grim vignette, however, struck me as almost poignant: Protesters in Chicago who are marching against the DNC chant "F*ck the courts, f*ck the state, you can't make us procreate." People dressed as abortion pills take part in the march. pic.twitter.com/xwmRAAjW8w — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 19, 2024 Almost two decades ago, I began my demographic...

~As I wrote almost two decades ago in my international bestseller America Alone: Contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them... 'Celebrate diversity' with a uniformity of ignorance. But even so, short of going to the "Free Palestine" demo and reading out your Israeli Independence Day speech, this is kind of impressive: NEWS New York City Mayor Eric Adams referred to India and its diaspora community as "Pakistan" multiple times during an Indian Independence Day celebration in Queens. The crowd repeatedly corrected Adams, but he continued to confuse...

~As far as I can tell, no one who knows her likes Kamala Harris. Other than Willie Brown, that is. But the fellows who decided Joe Biden had outlived his uselessness did not wish to open up a free-for-all race for the succession. They were not willing to entertain a pseudo-primary ding-dong between Newsom, Buttigeig, whoever - and the only person available to be simply announced as de facto nominee was Kamala. So the swift surgical liquidation of Biden and the installation of Harris was accomplished. And the plan then became to keep the un-nominated nominee under wraps so that...

~The latest stabbing of an English girl - eleven years old - is being reported mostly because the heroic figure on hand who stepped in to disarm the "knifeman" (a recent coinage but now routine in Fleet Street) was a plucky Muslim fellow called Abdullah. Good for him - even if the not-so-subtle sub-text of the reports was: You get it yet, you lousy Islamophobes? We need immigrants to come here to do the jobs Britons won't do - like saving the little girl from being stabbed by some of the other immigrants we let in. You'd better hope there's...

~As you know, I loathe writing about the so-called presidential "election" "campaign" - because I regard its leaden rituals as one of the biggest structural defects of American self-government. At least other countries manage to produce their dismal wanker "leaders" without two years and a bazillion dollars of exploratory committees and caucuses and the faux-folksiness of Iowa state fairs and New Hampshire pancake breakfasts and all the rest. So in theory this last month should have been right up my alley - as huge holes were blasted into the stately unhurried calendar on both sides: In one party, the presidential...

~A headline to ponder from my old newspaper The Independent: Labour councillor suspended after video emerges of him urging crowd to cut people's throats Party says speech in Walthamstow 'completely unacceptable' The elected representative's name is not Ahmed bin Jihad but Ricky Jones. Our leaders have done a splendid job in transforming our societies into irredeemably unpeaceable kingdoms. The good news is that, in California, masks are back. As you know, the biggest story of our time is that half-a-millennium of western dominance is coming to an end, and the future will be built elsewhere. So, as this week ends,...

We are, of course, disappointed with today's decision - but not entirely surprised given the narrow parameters we were fighting within. (click above for Dr Naomi Wolf's witness statement - delivered outside the court as she was not allowed to deliver it orally in court. Plus, my statement and Mark's - which were given in support of specific grounds in the case.) This started as a battle between GB News and Ofcom. GB News sacrificed Mark whilst he was recovering from two heart attacks in an attempt to appease Ofcom. As noted in the court's decision, Ofcom was able to...

~It's difficult to improve upon this Tweeter's summation of the present state of the United Kingdom: #UK the British police wasted hours interrogating #TommyRobinson under the "terror act" while someone actually planned a terror attack and was able to carry it out ‼️🙄#Southport pic.twitter.com/795lO17zlr — Lilly inLondon (@Lillyin_London) July 29, 2024 However, just for the record, from the BBC: The attack was not terror-related, police said. Well, it certainly struck terror into the heart of Southport. But presumably Merseyside Constabulary meant that the perp was not a card-carrying member of a recognised terrorist organisation acting on instructions from a renowned...

If you missed last week's Serenade Radio edition of Steyn's Song of the Week, we are airing it here at SteynOnline for the very first time: As an alternative to the Sunday Kamalanche, here is Steyn's account of one of the most beautiful melodies ever written. Andrew Lloyd Webber joins Mark to sing its praises, and Einzi Stolz, widow of Robert Stolz, recalls dinner with Franz Lehár, who always ordered the set menu. Click above to listen.

Now that Kamala is unburdened by that has-been and before whoever's holding Joe Biden releases another not-quite-proof-of-life audio recording, let's go back less than a month to when this started - the June 27th debate and the formerly loyal press corps' amazing synchronised-shivving routine. As I wrote back then about the sudden outbreak of "third-rate dinner theatre":So why weren't they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago...

~The so-called New Hampshire Seacoast, which is actually a New Hampshire Oceancoast, is about as far as you can go from my corner of the state and still be in NH. So I don't get there terribly often. But maybe I'm missing out... (video of whale falling on a boat) Is it a metaphor? Is the whale Trump? And the fishermen the Deep State? Or is the whale the Deep State? And the fishermen Joe and Jill? Or is it just another of Fauci's gain-of-function projects? ~I dissent somewhat from the notion that what befell Joe Biden just five days...