Free Republic

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies. Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization. Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so. But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed...

After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.”No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks.But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement — and why now?Rarely has the global rhetoric of mass annihilation reached such a crescendo as the present, as existential wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza.In particular,...

Editor’s note: Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield has written a powerful new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left. Highly original and urgently relevant, Domestic Enemies unveils the hypocrisies and destructive schemes of the Left, revealing that it has been trying to destroy America from its very founding – using many of the same tactics that it employs today.Democrats claim Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were the fathers of their party. The truth is that their party started out as a radical leftist movement set up by supporters of the French Revolution to seize power in America.Learn why...

Trumpophobia (fright over Trump) is cresting with his polls. As Trump continues to show leads in critical swing states, as various lawfare-inspired cases against him seem to the public to be more persecutions than prosecutions, and as Joe Biden appears daily more incoherent and lost, the left on spec has resorted to warning the nation about all the supposedly catastrophic consequences of a future Trump presidency. Ironically, the left seems oblivious to the reality that one reason Trump leads Biden in the polls is precisely because voters can compare the four-year record of the prior Trump presidency to Biden’s last...

Posting to Truth Social account, President Trump shared a video with the background narration of Victor Davis Hanson last night.The outline as spoken eloquently by VDH, walks through the fear of the entire apparatus of the political left; a fear created by their inability to destroy everything that Donald J Trump represents. { REMEMBER: The need for control is a reaction to fear. Often people write the professional political leftists within the IC, Deep State and DOJ/FBI apparatus do not look fearful, act with fear, nor do they operate from an appearance of fearfulness. However, that counterpoint is wrong. It...

If the past is any guide to the present, we should take heed that what almost never happens in war can certainly still occur. After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.” No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks. But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement—and why...

To be a college president, you have to go through the faculty ranks with one fear: you do not want to get on the wrong side of left-wing students and left-wing faculty. They're not just Democrats; they're hard left now and are predominantly taking over the general education curriculum. It's a diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. You see the Columbia president, someone promoted not on merit but on the idea that they are acceptable to the hard left and will continue this drift. The problem they're having is that the nation hadn't seen this. The nation just thought, "Well, it's...

These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming. Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations. Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality. The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide...

Video is 8:36 in length Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. Victor discusses current political and social events and ideas, and current and past cultural trends.

Bidenites believe they can reelect an unhealthy, unpopular, and unsuccessful president by any means necessary. And they may be right. Joe Biden polls at or below 40 percent approval. Historically, such unpopularity has made it almost impossible for a president to be reelected. His age advances by the hour. His voice falters, his memory fades, and his gait is reduced to short steps, with his arms, winglike and in tandem, offering balance. Biden is not so much an octogenarian as an unhealthy and prematurely aging 80-year-old. It is America’s irony that he is fit for almost no other job in...

What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes? None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people. These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing...

Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed. Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protestors. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion after October 7 from the Biden administration. Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed. “Progressive Hamas”: Gay and transgendered student protestors in America would be in mortal danger in Gaza under a fascistic Hamas that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas or its allies would be arrested and severely punished. Women are segregated...

The one-eyed Jack American Left has been flipped over, and what turned up proved frightening. The current radical and often violent protests on mostly blue-state, supposedly elite campuses have exposed in toxic fashion what the left has become. And yet, in a paradoxical fashion, the campus insanity has offered the nation some moral clarity. What’s surprising is not that the demonstrators are violent and nihilist, but that they are, on the one hand, so openly and crudely anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American, and yet on the other hand, so passive-aggressive, narcissistic, and weepy. Nevertheless, the antics of the campus cry-bullies have...

Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges. Elite higher education in America—long unquestioned as globally preeminent—is facing a perfect storm. Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system. The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated. No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect...

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared. Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season. These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal...

The Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder. It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power. Details of the recent limited Israeli retaliatory strike against Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan are still sketchy. But nonetheless, we can draw some conclusions. Israel’s small volley of missiles hit their intended targets, to the point of zeroing in on the very launchers designed to stop such incoming ordnance. The target was near the Natanz enrichment facility. That proximity was by design. Israel showed...

In the American Left’s vision of contemporary war, the West brings too many advantages in science, technology, and wealth. Why does Biden play Iranian poker with American and Israeli lives? Answer? He envisions war sort of like affirmative action, in which the less accomplished belligerent is allowed all sorts of concessions for the sake of equity. Israeli and American military capability, and particularly their missile defenses, are seen as unfair, almost like high achievers’ top SAT scores that are seen as unearned and used to privilege some over others and therefore must be countered or dropped. Given Iran’s and its...

By unleashing war in the Middle East and targeting Israel, Iran may soon learn that Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression. The theocracy of Iran has been the world’s arch-embassy attacker over the last half century. So it has zero credibility in crying foul over Israel’s April 1 attacks on its “consulate” in Damascus and the killing of Iran’s kingpin terrorists of the Revolutionary Guard Corps there. Remember, the world was first introduced to the Iranian ayatollahs by their violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980. Iranian surrogates next...

For over six months, the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests have accelerated, and now are predictably incendiary and violent. Recently, they have jumped the shark with unapologetic chants of “Death to America”. Or so a cheering crowd in Michigan chanted in homage to the late king of all Western-hostage-takers, the murderous Ayatollah Khomeini. And the huckster speaker revved them up by quoting Malcolm X that America is “one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this Earth.” (Does such a condemnation of fellow Americans presage mass reverse migration of unhappy Middle Easterners back to the West Bank, Gaza, and Iran?)...

Will Biden’s feebleness still earn him sympathy? Or will it devolve to the point that the public concludes that Joe Biden would not be able to keep any job in America—except the U.S. Presidency? We have seen enough of the Biden-Trump race so far to predict what lies ahead over the next seven months of the campaign. Currently, the polls are about dead even. Trump, however, for now enjoys small leads in the majority of the fickle swing/purple states that will likely decide the election. So here is what we should expect: BidenBiden has three major vulnerabilities and three major...