Free Republic

This weekend I re-read 1984, a book I tend to reach for when I get Defcon-1 depressed about the state of the world. Deep in the novel, Winston ponders the intricacies of doublethink: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that...

After the Biden administration and the press wrongly predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 16th, they kept compounding the error in spectacular fashion.

Several honest leftists have been red-pilled—that is, their eyes have been opened politically—because of the Democrats’ tyrannical moves in 2020/2021, That list includes Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolf, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Maher. They’re not Republicans, by any means, but their disgust with their party is growing. The most recent addition to this cavalcade of honest leftists may be British comedian Russell Brand, who just discovered the truth about Russiagate. Brand started as a stand-up comedian and then moved into TV and movie stints in both Britain and America. Many Americans came to know about him because of his...

A potential Covid-19 treatment has become hostage to a larger global fight between populists and anti-populists On December 31st of last year, an 80 year-old Buffalo-area woman named Judith Smentkiewicz fell ill with Covid-19. She was rushed by ambulance to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Williamsville, New York, where she was put on a ventilator. Her son Michael and his wife flew up from Georgia, and were given grim news. Judith, doctors said, had a 20% chance at survival, and even if she made it, she’d be on a ventilator for a month. As December passed into the New Year,...

On Thursday, August 27th, the same day Donald Trump formally accepted the Republican nomination, National Public Radio aired an interview with Vicky Osterweil, author of a book called In Defense of Looting. The white trans daughter of a science professor, Osterweil told a credulous NPR interviewer that looting was justified because it “strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police,” and also “provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure.” She added riots reveal how “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” I was so sure the Osterweil book...

Global scandals now labeled Russiagate, Spygate, and what President Trump calls “Obamagate” shook the political world, but hit me closer to home. I’m the reason the so-called FBI “spy” at the center of Spygate, Stefan Halper, met Carter Page, the alleged “Russian Asset” in Russiagate’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. On May 19, 2018, this realization blindsided me in London as I was about to fly out for my wedding. The New York Times, NBC News and other sources had outed my PhD supervisor, Stefan Halper, as a spy known to the UK’s MI6 intelligence service as “The Walrus.” It didn’t seem...

<p>"... Yet a few weeks ago, I asked to speak to the DOJ lead investigator John Durham to give his team a heads up. I would continue to offer help, but my time for waiting for government to act was over. Recently, I had discovered and flagged for Durham disturbing recordings. One involved one of the Cambridge Four, Halper, and raised serious questions about the origins of what has been called the “kill shot” against Trump’s first national security advisor, General Michael Flynn.</p>

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism...

If there is one non-conservative writer who you should read right now, it's Matt Taibbi. The Rolling Stone editor has been a surgeon in dissecting the Left's uncontrollable descent into insanity. Even if you disagree with most of his work, which I'm sure you will, his analysis of the Left's "woke" awakening is spot on and devastating. Taibbi torched these clowns for their historically illiterate and unhinged tantrum over Independence Day. Now, he's going off on the institutional Left's latest craze: fawning over Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility," a cacophony of intersectionality nonsense that appears to have driven Taibbi crazy just...

Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters. Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from...

“It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind,” Taibbi wrote. “It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.” “The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation,” Taibbi continued. They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established...

I’d never thought that some liberals would actually take a stand and call out their colleagues for being totally unspooled for caving to the progressive mob. For some, the liberal agenda they grew up with is now considered right-wing in some circles. Why? Well, it doesn’t go far enough. It has to be far left and quasi-Marxist. The woke clowns we used to mock on The College Fix and Campus Reform have graduated. And now, their toxic agenda is spreading like a brush fire. No dissent is permitted. Just one slip-up or differing opinion from that of the far-left mob...

Has the pursuit of moral triumphalism on the Left led them to abandon their moral compass altogether? Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi makes that argument on his own eponymous site in a lengthy condemnation of the abandonment of civil rights by Democrats and progressives. From Russiagate to COVID-19 all the way into Judge Emmet Sullivan’s courtroom, Taibbi accuses the Left of becoming the authoritarians — perhaps even the fascists, although Taibbi doesn’t use that term — the Left claims to abhor. Of course, one has to ask whether that was the point all along, but Taibbi starts with the presumption...

CNN debate moderator Abby Phillip asked Bernie Sanders in the Tuesday debate in Des Moines: “CNN reported yesterday — and Senator Sanders, Senator Warren confirmed in a statement — that, in 2018, you told her you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?” Not “did you say that,” but “why did you say that?” Sanders denied it, then listed the many reasons the story makes no sense: He urged Warren herself to run in 2016, campaigned for a female candidate who won the popular vote by 3 million votes, and has been...

When the CNN moderators gave Sanders the Trump treatment, the outraged ululations of the Left could be heard from sea to shining sea. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi tweeted, “This is an unusually vile performance by CNN.” The Nation’s Elie Mystal raged, “Jesus Christ I hate these biased questions from the moderators. ‘How would you keep your plan from bankrupting the country?’ JUST ASK THE KOCH BROTHERS TO MODERATE NEXT TIME!” HuffPost’s Zach Carter griped about CNN’s post-debate panel discussion, “CNN’s crew is just straight bashing Sanders post-debate.” The New Republic’s Libby Watson whined, “CNN is truly a terrible influence on...

Hunter Biden's only qualification for obtaining a seat on the Amtrak board of directors in 2006 was that he often rode trains. That's according to his father Joe Biden's Delaware colleague in the Senate, Tom Carper, who offered the sole nomination speech for the younger Biden when his name was presented in the Senate Commerce Committee. In his prepared remarks, Carper said Biden would be an "excellent addition" to the board, but was unable to list any reason beyond his frequent use of trains. "More significantly, Hunter has spent a lot of time on Amtrak trains," Carper said after listing...

Rolling Stone magazine recently published an article titled "Trump 2020: Be Very Afraid," which carries the following subtitle: "America is the first country to ever elect a Mad King, and the way things are going, we may be dumb enough to do it twice." The author, Matt Taibbi, sat down with CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday morning. Among other things, Taibbi said the enthusiasm at Trump's campaign events this year is even greater than it was in 2016, and reporters who cover Trump are not explaining that. "What is the magic that he doles out?" CNN's Alisyn Camerota, not a...

In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Fifty years later, anti-Trump journalists have been experiencing the first four simultaneously since Wednesday, when former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before two House committees. The Trump-hating media can’t come to terms with the final stage – acceptance of their grief. And that will elude them even if President Trump is reelected and stays in the White House until 2025. Journalists wrote and broadcast countless stories saying Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Many have never been...

All this week, NewsBusters is recounting the most obnoxious liberal bias of 2017. Yesterday, we presented the most outrageous examples of journalists fawning over liberal or left-wing icons; today’s installment showcases some of this year’s most rancid quotes attacking Republicans or conservatives, NOT named Donald Trump. (The media’s attacks on the President will be featured on Wednesday.) The shootings in Las Vegas of country music fans and Republican Congressman Steve Scalise on a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia brought out the media’s hatred for the NRA and gun-owners. Esquire columnist Charles Pierce disgustingly called the Vegas attack a “blood sacrifice”...

There’s more than one way to harass women. A raft of men in recent weeks have paid for accusations of sexual harassment with their companies, their jobs, their plum political posts. But one point has been overlooked in the scandals: Men can be belittling, cruel and deeply damaging without demanding sex. (Try sloughing off heaps of contempt with your self-esteem intact.) We have no consensus — and hardly any discussion — about how we should treat behaviors that are misogynist and bullying but fall short of breaking the law. Twenty years ago, when I was a Moscow correspondent for the...