Free Republic

In “Blueprint for Collapse of Joe Biden’s White House,” Michael Goodwin offers an engrossing sketch of the imminent breakdown of Biden’s presidency. Biden’s sagging poll numbers, his widely perceived mishandling of the economy, and his signs of dementia would all seem to indicate that his presidency is collapsing. Biden’s other “predicament,” according to Goodwin, is the “gathering storm related to his son.” “The obvious fact that Hunter is getting favored treatment from his father’s Department of Justice has broken through the media’s Praetorian Guard and the public doesn’t like the smell of it,” he wrote. Goodwin believes the congressional testimony...

In a critical assessment of the Rittenhouse trial, Conrad Black denies that the outcome of the case vindicated the American justice system. Because of the confluence of a competent and determined judge, courageous and diligent jurors, ludicrously incompetent and dishonest prosecutors, and enough intelligent media attention to counter the 15 months of biased reporting that could easily poison the jury pool, justice was clearly done, to peals of horror of the Americophobic riffraff that infects most of America’s media. It would be a tragedy if this exemplary outcome were to whitewash what is in large measure an evil justice system....

The claim of a unified America, and not a war against a modern-day version of Southern secessionists, is what links the Republican Party to its past. In a commentary about present-day Democrats and the secessionists whom Lincoln battled, Jeremy Carl offers the following observation: Today’s Republicans, like Lincoln, find themselves in a regime-level conflict with the Democrats. The Democrats are firing again and again on our Constitutional order, our history, and our traditions—our metaphorical Fort Sumter, if you will—but unlike our forebear Lincoln, our elected leadership seems either to be aiding the insurgent Left or, at best, feebly invoking constitutional...

It never ceases to amaze me how the populist Right, or what speaks in its name, overestimates its strength both here and in Western Europe. One needn’t be an enemy of these activists to recognize the exaggerated nature of their claims. Those in the media who now demand a border wall insist that the “people” want this goal achieved immediately if not sooner. In fact, according to Ann Coulter, Trump “scammed the American people” by not giving them the wall they’re clamoring for. But according a nationwide poll by The Hill, 51 percent of American voters oppose Trump’s project, while...

The idea that Bolton will help Trump beat back official Washington is absurd. Recently I was asked to donate money to the senatorial campaign of a young Republican who had served honorably as a military officer in Iraq. The ad said that I should vote for him because John Bolton had endorsed his candidacy. Indeed Bolton is certain that this man, if elected, will advocate for his foreign policy in the Senate and is therefore passionately on his side. Brian Kilmeade, the co-host of Fox and Friends, also wants me to vote for said candidate for the same reason. And...

I’m a hustler baby, I’m a hustlerI just want you to know, wanna let you knowIt ain’t where I been, it ain’t where I beenBut where I’m ’bout to go, top of the world!—Jay Z The race hustlers can almost taste it now—Obama at the top of the world. And now Spike Lee, Maxine Waters, Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al. are joined by a new hustler-wannabe—Howard Dean. Yes, the Dean of scream. Yaaaaaaaaaaah! Whether he made a Freudian slip or not last week, Dean reminded me of the pathetic, race-confused “Raji” as played by Vince Vaughn in the...

Having read (almost daily in the New York Post) that Israel is a “democracy like the United States,” it might be useful to examine this proposition. Note there is nothing wrong, in my opinion, if Israel does not fit the regnant U.S. model, a managerial regime that holds periodic elections, has a mixed economy, and, perhaps most importantly, makes a fetish of diversity. In fact it is not clear that the U.S. has always been what it is now. Up until well into the twentieth century, wide popular support and even Supreme Court decisions favored the view that the U.S....

On April 23, central Pennsylvania TV news stations were buzzing with indignation about an interview that the state's junior senator, Republican Rick Santorum, recently had given to the Associated Press. News commentators announced that the National Gay and Lesbian Alliance and Vermont governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, a leading advocate of gay rights, had called for Santorum to resign from the Senate because of insensitive remarks. Santorum had let it be known that he had a "problem with homosexual acts." He also criticized the Supreme Court for taking away the power of the states to enforce traditional family...

From the January 2001 issue of Chronicles: Distrusting John Lockeby Paul Gottfried John Locke has been interpreted in various ways that appeal to conservatives—e.g., as a Christian, albeit a materialist and anti-Trinitarian, or as a qualified defender of private property—but there is a general drift to his thought that should offend traditionalists.  His view of human beings as thinking matter without the capacity for innate ideas, his unmistakable faith in sexual egalitarianism, and his constructivist theory of civil society are all fundamentally anti-conservative.  The point is not whether any of these positions is theoretically defensible but whether conservatives (or historically...

How can something exist and not exist both at the same time? The answer: by being neoconservative. Since last winter, neoconservative columnists David Frum, Jonah Goldberg, Max Boot, and John Podhoretz have been insisting that the word "neoconservative" is either a tautologous term for a right-winger or an anti-Semitic slur aimed at pro-Israeli conservative Jews. On April 22, Republican booster and talk show host Rush Limbaugh entered the fray. He denounced"these media people speaking in their own code language. A case in point is their use of the term 'neoconservative.' Whether they choose to hyphenate the label or not, it's...

Now that Taki has said it, perhaps it should be said again. The Western world could not have done worse, and might have done better, if the Central Powers had triumphed in World War One. The suspicion that I had really meant that when in some articles in the 1970s I had blamed both sides equally for the recklessness in 1914 leading into the Great War, produced a neocon hostility that has continued to grow. Academics at Catholic University of America and their neocon confreres elsewhere, who had openly resented what they perceived as my insufficiently Germanophobic outlook, went after...