Free Republic

The Middle East surrounding democratic Israel is a nightmare. Half a million have died amid the moonscape ruins of Syria. A once-stable Iraq was overrun by the Islamic State. The Arab Spring, U.S. support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the coup of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to regain control of Egypt, and the bombing of Libya all have left North Africa in turmoil. Iran has been empowered by the U.S.-brokered deal and will still become nuclear. Russian President Vladimir Putin's bombers blast civilians not far from Israel's borders. Democrats are considering Rep. Keith Ellison as the next chairman of...

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists. What we know as "the media" never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged... ...the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives. Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to...

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists. What we know as "the media" never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency. No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup -- and becoming irrelevant even among progressives. Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent...

<p>What would happen if conservatives started to change the words we use for political ends?</p> <p>Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.</p> <p>And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.</p>

The Democratic Party handed Donald Trump a rare opportunity to make radical changes to the electoral map that could last for years to come. First, the Democrats gave Trump a great gift by completing the ongoing radicalization of their party under President Obama. After 2008, it was no longer a party of the working and middle classes, but a lopsided political pyramid. On top were the cynical elites who turned up in the WikiLeaks John Podesta email trove: self-important media members, Ivy League grandees, Silicon Valley billionaires, Wall Street plutocrats and coastal corridor snobs. They talk left-wing but live royally....

There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves. From hacked email troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter resumes, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful -- and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat. Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about...

Victor Davis Hanson: Russian spy? Who would have suspected that one of America's leading conservative intellectuals, a prominent historian who is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, was selling us out to the Russkies? Actually, no one would suspect it because it isn't true. But on today's AM Joy, MSNBC terrorism expert Malcolm Nance bragged: "I know some of the spy-catchers in FBI counter-intelligence, guys who have taken down big names, like Aldrich Ames and Victor Davis Hanson." Nance presumably had in mind Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI agent who was convicted in 2001 of spying for...

Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure. This time the scandal comes from disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop computer, bringing more suggestions of Clinton's sloppy attitude about U.S. intelligence law. Meanwhile, seemingly every day WikiLeaks produces more evidence of the Clinton Foundation leveraging the Clinton State Department for pay-for-play profiteering. At this point, Clinton has trumped former President Richard Nixon's skullduggery -- but without the offset of Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments. Even before the most recent scandals, Clinton's campaign had an eerie resemblance to the Nixon playbook. Compare the election of 2016 to the election of 1972. The favored...

Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling. What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation? Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell? For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be...

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead, and hoping that the election was sooner than later. Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one. With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal: the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure; Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader; Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero. Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were...

California State Route 99 is the north-south highway that cuts through the great Central Valley. And it has changed little since the mid-1960s. A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million -- not nearly 40 million as it is today -- the 99 used to be a high-speed, four-lane marvel. It was a crown jewel in California's cutting-edge freeway system. Not now. The 99 was recently ranked by ValuePenguin (a private consumer research organization) as the deadliest major highway in the nation. Locals who live along its 400-plus miles often go to bed after seeing lurid...

Conservatives should vote for the Republican nominee. Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary...

Pessimists often compare today's troubled America to a tottering late Rome or an insolvent and descending British Empire. But medieval Europe (roughly A.D. 500 to 1450) is the more apt comparison. The medieval world was a nearly 1,000-year period of spectacular, if haphazard, human achievement -- along with endemic insecurity, superstition and two, rather than three, classes. The great medieval universities -- at Bologna, Paris and Oxford -- continued to make strides in science. They were not unlike the medical and engineering schools at Harvard and Stanford. But they were not centers of free thinking. Instead, medieval speech codes were...

This summer, President Obama was often golfing. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were promising to let the world be. The end of summer seemed sleepy, the world relatively calm. The summer of 1914 in Europe also seemed quiet. But on July 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip with help from his accomplices, fellow Serbian separatists. That isolated act sparked World War I. In the summer of 1939, most observers thought Adolf Hitler was finally through with his serial bullying. Appeasement supposedly had satiated his once enormous territorial appetites. But on Sept. 1, Nazi...

The Republican dilemma ny Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views. In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were...

In most presidential elections, the two candidates spar over issues. The president campaigns for his party's nominee in hopes of continuing his legacy. Democrats champion liberalism, Republicans conservatism. In numerous press conferences, journalists try to force newsworthy and embarrassing admissions from the two candidates. Not this year. Barack Obama, who less than two years ago dipped to 40% in approval rating, is nowhere to be seen. He seems to know that the more he is absent and quiet, the more the public likes the idea rather than the reality of him as president -- and his approval rating has risen...

In today's technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much. Facebook and Google may have recalibrated our lifestyles, but human nature, geography and culture are nearly timeless. Even as ideologies and governments come and go, the same old, same old problems and challenges remain. Compare what dominated the news in 1966, 50 years ago. Abroad, Israel was constantly fighting on the West Bank against Palestinian guerrilla groups and in the air over Syria. It is likely that in another 50 years the story will remain about...

Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history. The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls and myriad other African, Asian and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability. Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish or Vandal identities. The propaganda of history's multicultural empires -- the...

A group of 50 conservative foreign policy elites and veteran national security officials of prior Republican administrations recently wrote an open letter denouncing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They cited especially his lack of character and moral authority -- and his "little understanding of America's national interests." Particularly bothersome, they wrote, is Trump's inability "to separate truth from falsehood." The letter stated that Trump's one-year campaign of blustery rhetoric suggests he could be as reckless in deed in the White House as he has been in word on the campaign trail. Is there a like group of past Democratic wise...

After nearly eight years of aiding and abetting Obama, leftists now fear the possible constitutional overreach of our next president. ...... I and many others, long ago in the pre-Trump age, cited the quite dangerous trajectory of Obama’s constitutional overreach. That worry is now shared apparently by the New York Times. Suddenly in year eight, its editors fear that someday another president, perhaps one less sensitive, more uncouth than Obama, might find his exemplar useful, but for less exalted progressive purposes. Thus the Times has characterized Obama’s overreach as “bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency.” And more ominously it notes,...