Free Republic

A leitmotif in Putin’s remarks to Tucker in that marathon interview was, as he saw it, the serial betrayal of Russia by the West. I wonder if there is a central clearing office that issues regular updates about what nasty dictators one is allowed to engage with and which ones, for this week anyway, one must avoid. It was okay for Gavin Newsom to remove the feces and the homeless from the streets of San Francisco in order to fête Xi Jinping. Likewise, it was just fine for CNN and the BBC to interview the leader of Hamas. And of...

We don’t acknowledge that we promulgate bills of attainder in this country, but that is essentially the judgment that has been pronounced against the former president. The funniest thing I have read in, well, at least the last several hours, comes from Manhattan’s George Soros-funded affirmative-action district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Responding to the uproar that greeted Donald Trump’s all-caps Truth Social warning that he would be “arrested” on Tuesday, Bragg sent ’round a memo to his staff informing them, and the world, that “This office is full of the finest public servants in the country.” The comedy didn’t end there,...

I sense a disturbance in the force. In fact, I’ve been feeling the tremors for a while. Back in January, I wrote a column for American Greatness called “The Coming Dethronement of Joe Biden.” In it, I noted that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the ostentatious nature of his multifaceted failure—lead to his removal as president. I should have added that it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall. The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky,...

Biden’s situation presents the unnamed committee who actually runs the presidency with a huge and delicate problem. It can’t last.It’s not often that I agree with Joe Biden, but he said something in his nasty, brutish, and long press conference last week with which, if properly understood, I agree. Don’t get me wrong. The press conference as a whole was a “total disaster.” Notwithstanding the sycophantic performance of the court eunuchs in the regime media, everybody understands this. (But speaking of “court eunuchs,” what’s the female equivalent? It was Jennifer Rubin, who actually gave Biden an “A-” for the presser,...

A couple of years ago, I had the honor of publishing American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by Frank Buckley, a prolific author and law professor at George Mason University. Buckley began by noting the obvious: that we in America are more divided now than at any time since the 1850s. We know how that Disunited States of America worked out, and the horror of the Civil War—what Buckley calls Secession 1.0—has led many of us to conclude that we’d put up with almost anything rather than risk a repeat of that disaster. “Almost” anything. Buckley does...

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington. Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton. Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election. The Fox...

with an observation from Hilaire Belloc and an admonition from Friedrich Hayek A robust challenge to Obama's health care plan appears ... in the Times. Written by a Harvard professor. Let me start with the observation from Hilaire Belloc. In his book The Servile State, Belloc writes that “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.”I rather doubt that President Obama or any of his inner circle is a student of Hilaire Belloc. But they have demonstrated again and again their intuitive grasp of Belloc’s insight. If only, they reason, they can turn over...

"What sorts of garbage have proliferated in the past twenty-five years? To alter Shakespeare, Let me count the scraps. If the garbage had to be segregated..."