Free Republic

Divorce usually isn’t a good idea, and that’s especially true of a nearly 250-year-old continental nation. The notion of a national breakup has long simmered as a fringe argument, but it is increasingly popular in certain precincts of the political right and has gained at least some traction with partisans of both sides. A recent survey by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia found that about 50 percent of Donald Trump voters and 40 percent of Joe Biden voters agreed to some extent with the proposition that the country should split up, with either red or blue...

There’s simply no market for this among Republicans. On top of it, Cheney’s alienation from her party is likely to build on itself. Already, she has said that she’d “find it very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis, the leading Republican alternative to Trump. In so doing, she is identifying herself with a fraction of a fraction of the party that is so small it is all but nonexistent. If she ran in a primary, she’d be firmly in the Larry Hogan lane, which might constitute about 5 percent of the Republican electorate total. It’s quite possible that those voters are...

The past and current master of the GOP sees a future threat arising. [cut] “It was a mistake to ever embrace Donald Trump, and now we want to be the party of Adam Kinzinger.” [cut] Would DeSantis be audacious enough to run against Trump in 2024? The case against waiting is that it’s extremely unlikely that the governor can maintain his exalted status in the party until 2028. On the other hand, the case against running in 2024 is that it involves the enormous risk of encountering the business end of the Trump buzz saw, which could change DeSantis’s image...

Lin Wood has seen and raised his fellow conspiracy-theorist Sidney Powell in a series of tweets that would make Q blush:My information from reliable source is that Roberts arranged an illegal adoption of two young children from Wales through Jeffrey Epstein. I think we can all agree that Epstein knows pedophilia.If only Jeffrey Epstein was still alive . . . Wouldn’t that be something? https://t.co/DwhgKO3gMp— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 31, 2020A couple of more questions for Chief Justice John Roberts:(1) You are recorded discussing Justice Scalia’s successor before date of his sudden death. How did you know Scalia was going...

The polling aggregator on the website RealClearPolitic shows the margin in polls led by Joe Biden in a blue font and the ones led by Donald Trump in red. For a while, the battleground states have tended to be uniformly blue, except for polls conducted by the Trafalgar Group. If you are a firm believer only in polling averages, this isn’t particularly meaningful, but if you are familiar with Trafalgar’s successes in 2016, when (unlike other pollsters) it had Trump leading in Michigan and Pennsylvania and, in 2018, Ron DeSantis winning his gubernatorial race, it is notable. Regardless, it’s worth...

President Trump pulled an inside straight to win in 2016, and now he needs another one. The good news for Trump is that his approval rating has stopped falling recently. The bad news is that it has stabilized in the low 40s. Election-watcher Harry Enten points out that no president since Harry Truman has won with anything like Trump’s negative net approval rating. Truman won at –6, while incumbents who lost (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush) averaged out at about –13, roughly where Trump’s number is. The presidents who won reelection averaged an approval rating of...

The sources of the Russia investigation should, as a matter of basic accountability, be established and disclosed. But no one who is not already a Trump voter cares about dubious investigatory decisions from four years ago. Nor is anyone as exercised as the president about critical things said about him on cable-TV programs. Trump has waged a low-intensity campaign against masks, for no good reason. By setting himself against them, largely on aesthetic grounds, Trump further opened himself up to charges that he doesn’t take the virus seriously — even before his illness and the White House outbreak.

In the wave of cancellations sweeping America, Confederate statues have been particularly hard hit. They have been graffitied, assaulted, and torn down, while authorities rush to remove them. For his part, President Donald Trump has been a steadfast defender of the statues and other forms of recognition of the Confederacy. He has come out in favor of preserving the names of military bases named after Confederate generals and pointedly said that we should build on our heritage rather than tear it down. Conservatives tend to think the same way. They reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense....

California is staying true to its reputation as the land of innovation — it is making blackouts, heretofore the signature of impoverished and war-torn lands, a routine feature of 21st-century American life. More than 2 million people are going without power in Northern and Central California, in the latest and biggest of the intentional blackouts that are, astonishingly, California’s best answer to the risk of runaway wildfires. Power — and all the goods it makes possible — is synonymous with modern civilization. It shouldn’t be a negotiable for anyone living in a well-functioning society, or even in California, which, despite...

They risked everything for it, not for some idea or abstraction but for the piece of fabric itself. The American flag’s place in our culture is beginning to look less unassailable. The symbol itself is under attack, as we’ve seen with Nike dumping a shoe design featuring an early American flag, Megan Rapinoe defending her national-anthem protests (she says she will never sing the song again), and protesters storming an ICE facility in Aurora, Colo., and replacing the U.S. flag with a Mexican flag. U.S. soccer had a pretty good statement a while back setting out, in response to Rapinoe,...

I decided to finally cancel my subscription to National Review. Below is the letter I sent to them requesting my cancellation. I also worked in Customer Service jobs enough to know he will never look at this. Chances are this will get passed around by a few entry level reps who will get a good laugh out if this. The smart ones will take it as a wake up call to look for another job. I sent this via snail mail, so obviously the links below do not appear in my letter to Editor in Chief, Rich Lowry. Mr. Lowry:...

Five reasons why baseball is the best sport.

The fundamental offense of the Covington Catholic High School kids wasn’t so much allegedly mobbing, mocking, or getting in the face of an American Indian drummer at the Lincoln Memorial. It was wearing red Make America Great Again hats. That was the actual, incontestable conduct that created the predicate for the presumption of guilt and all the rest of the grief they’ve been subjected to since. For much of progressive America, if you are wearing the hat, you are suiting up for Team Racist. You are marking yourself out as a bigot and a goon. Your individuality doesn’t matter anymore,...

National Review has always had a liberal problem. It will surprise many to learn that at least three effective spokesmen for liberalism emerged from N.R. back in the '60s, when it was firmly under William F. Buckley's leadership. Garry Wills, dominant liberal spokesman for decades; John Leonard, later editor of no less than the New York Times Book Review; and Joan Didion, a great writer of fiction whether working on novels or journalism, all had their start at N.R. I don't know how this could possibly have happened – perhaps Daddy was a friend, or they went to the right...

The North Carolina State Board of Elections has refused to certify a Republican's slim victory, given credible allegations of cheating. M aybe ballot security isn’t such a bad thing after all. Democrats, who the day before yesterday were insisting that voter fraud didn’t exist, now believe that it was used to steal a North Carolina congressional seat from them — and they may well be right. Republican Mark Harris has a 905-vote lead over Democrat Dan McCready in the state’s 9th Congressional District, a slender victory that the State Board of Elections has refused to certify given credible allegations of...

Brett Kavanugh is on the Supreme Court and the biggest reason is Donald Trump. When he won the nomination in 2016, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that Trump wouldn’t win the general election, he wouldn’t be true to his promise on judges even if he won, and even if he nominated the right people, he wouldn’t care enough about the Court to see through a difficult, high-stakes confirmation fight. We can now say of these presumptions, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The Kavanugh confirmation was clarifying in another way. Brett Kavanugh is not a loudmouth. He never insulted anyone or said...

The president should confess his affairs, admit he wanted to keep them quiet and apologize to the public for his deception. If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be now: President Donald Trump is in an impeachment fight. It hasn’t fully ripened yet. That won’t happen unless Democrats take the House and do so with a healthy margin in the fall. But Michael Cohen’s statement that he committed campaign-finance violations at the behest of Trump makes it that much more likely Democrats will impeach him once they have the power and the votes to do it... The American public has...

Wednesday’s retirement announcement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy sparked strong reactions from both right and left, but the takes from so-called #NeverTrumpers, or ideological conservatives who opposed President Trump in 2016, ranged from “crickets” to eating some much-deserved crow.

It’s not exactly Donald Trump’s Reykjavik, but he has done the right thing by calling off the misconceived summit with Kim Jong-un.The North Koreans have been yanking our chain over the last week or so, presumably trying to establish their leverage and begin a negotiation over the negotiation. They seemed to make some progress, with Trump saying the other day that maybe we could settle for something short of complete, verifiable denuclearization, which is supposed to be our core demand. The president may have tempted the North Koreans into the gamesmanship by occasionally seeming over-eager to take credit for a...

One of the chief arguments against Donald Trump is the very fact that so many of us on the Right spend so much time arguing with each other about him. “The Right” has always been a broad ideological coalition, and any president is going to lean toward one part of that coalition at the expense of others, leaving some people disgruntled. But in my experience, that usually led right-leaning writers to debate their differences on the issues, rather than just arguing about the man. Yet that’s what we’re doing with Trump. He has a remarkable talent for needlessly pitting former...