Free Republic

Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids—even when they insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent effort to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy beyond the bounds of “normal” politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to abort his presidency. After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in an American election would immediately dub itself the “Resistance”—channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of France? Or that the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of liberationist patriots fighting a Nazi-like Trump’s occupation...

Nothing quite gets to the root of an issue like a James Woods tweet. The fate of 800,000 to upwards of 3 million (now we’re told) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, or so-called “DREAMers,” has the American political landscape on fire of late. The fact that most Americans want to protect DACA recipients but also want border security and are generally conservative on immigration hasn’t fazed Democrats intent on obstructing and even holding the government hostage over DACA without offering or even considering anything meaningful in return. So, what drives Democrats who clearly lack a mandate, not to mention...

Given North Korea's nuclear lunacy, what exactly are the rules, formal or implicit, about which nations can have nuclear weapons and which cannot? It is complicated. In the free-for-all environment of the 1940s and 1950s, the original nuclear club included only those countries with the technological know-how, size and money to build nukes. Those realities meant that up until the early 1960s, only Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States had nuclear capabilities. Members of this small club did not worry that many other nations would make such weapons because it seemed far too expensive and difficult for...

The president’s fiercest critics still do not grasp that Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the GOP’s internal strife. For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican party over Donald Trump, 90 percent of Republicans ended up voting for him.   Bitterness Over the 2016 Election? So a vocal Never Trump Republican establishment had not much effect on the 2016 election. Voters do not carry conservative magazines to the polls. They are not swayed much by talking heads, and on Election Day they do not they print out conservative congressional talking points from their emails....

Almost a half-century ago, in 1968, the United States seemed to be falling apart. The Vietnam War, a bitter and close presidential election, antiwar protests, racial riots, political assassinations, terrorism and a recession looming on the horizon left the country divided between a loud radical minority and a silent conservative majority. The United States avoided a civil war. But America suffered a collective psychological depression, civil unrest, defeat in Vietnam and assorted disasters for the next decade -- until the election of a once-polarizing Ronald Reagan ushered in five consecutive presidential terms of relative bipartisan calm and prosperity from 1981...

Think of the Korean Peninsula turned upside down. Imagine if there were a South Korean dictatorship that had been in power, as a client of the United States since 1953. Imagine also that contemporary South Korea was not the rich, democratic home of Kia and Samsung. Instead, envision it as an unfree, pre-industrialized and impoverished failed state, much like North Korea. Further envision that the U.S. had delivered financial aid and military assistance to this outlaw regime, which led to Seoul possessing several nuclear weapons and a fleet of long-range missiles. Next, picture this rogue South Korean dictatorship serially threatening...

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers. During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal "outsourcer in chief" for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor. Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad -- to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs. In the case of the cobalt mining that is necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, thousands of...

(excerpt) We do not know whether there is a saturation point at which Trump’s base will tire of the occasional ad hominem crude tweets, but so far we clearly have not reached it. Why? So far, for three reasons. First, half the country despises the mainstream media and sees it as arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, and in need of comeuppance. Trump is not running against a centrist populist Democrat like John Kennedy or Harry Truman, but a crude Resistance of foul mouths like Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), unhinged celebrities like Maher and Colbert,...

Donald Trump earned respect from the Washington establishment for appointing three of the nation's most accomplished generals to direct his national security policy: James Mattis (secretary of defense), H.R. McMaster (national security adviser) and John Kelly (secretary of homeland security). In the first five months of the Trump administration, the three generals -- along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO -- have already recalibrated America's defenses. At home, illegal immigration is down by some 70 percent. Abroad, a new policy of principled realism seeks to re-establish deterrence through credible threats of retaliation. The generals are...

Germans do not seem too friendly to Americans these days. According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School study of global media, 98 percent of German public television news portrays President Donald Trump negatively, making it by far the most anti-Trump media in the world. Yet the disdain predates the election of Trump, who is roundly despised here for his unapologetic anti-European Union views. In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey of European countries, Germany had the least favorable impression of America. Only about 50 percent of Germans expressed positive feelings toward the U.S. Former President Barack Obama, who visited here...

<p>Scholar Victor Davis Hanson says there’s a “big lie” surrounding the “boogeyman of Russian collusion” that Democrats and the media rally around, according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.</p>

Last year, President Obama assured the world that "we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous and progressive era in human history," and that "the world has never been less violent." Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama's watch. Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin's last tenure (1935-1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian and Japanese fascism. Baldwin was a...

The most dangerous moments in foreign affairs often come after a major power seeks to reassert its lost deterrence. The United States may be entering just such a perilous transitional period. Rightly or wrongly, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Middle East-based terrorists concluded after 2009 that the U.S. saw itself in decline and preferred a recession from world affairs. In that void, rival states were emboldened, assuming that America thought it could not -- or should not -- any longer exercise the sort of political and military leadership it had demonstrated in the past. Enemies thought the U.S. was...

It is now reported that the Obama administration during the campaign went to a FISA court to tap the communications of Trump-campaign officials and unofficial supporters. FISA applications are almost never rejected (and never leaked), but the court rebuffed this one in June 2016, ostensibly for insufficient cause. Ostensibly it is also unprecedented for a sitting president’s administration to order surveillance of campaign personnel of an opposite party before an upcoming election — a fact suggesting that Obama-administration officials may have assumed that a grateful shoo-in successor Clinton Justice Department would not worry greatly about such interference. News reports further...

<p>Outraged New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared Trump's victory to disasters in American history that killed and wounded thousands such as the Pearl Harbor surprise bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.</p> <p>The New Republic -- based on no evidence -- theorized that Trump could well be mentally unstable due to the effects of neurosyphilis.</p>

Paradox: How does a supposedly bad man appoint good people eager to advance a conservative agenda that supposedly more moral Republicans failed to realize? We variously read that Trump should be impeached, removed, neutralized — or worse. But until he is, are his appointments, executive orders, and impending legislative agenda equally abhorrent? General acclamation followed the Trump appointments of retired Generals H. R. McMaster as national-security adviser, James Mattis as defense secretary, and John Kelly to head Homeland Security. The brief celebration of Trump’s selections was almost as loud as the otherwise daily denunciations of Trump himself. Trump’s equally inspired...

Activists portray illegal immigration solely as a human story of the desperately poor from south of the border fleeing misery to start new, productive lives in the U.S. -- despite exploitation and America's nativist immigration laws. But the truth is always more complex -- and can reveal self-interested as well as idealistic parties. Employers have long sought to undercut the wages of the American underclass by preference for cheaper imported labor. The upper-middle classes have developed aristocratic ideas of hiring inexpensive "help" to relieve them of domestic chores. The Mexican government keeps taxes low on its elite in part by...

Trumps’ critics, left and right, aim to bring about the cataclysm they predicted. A 1964 political melodrama, Seven Days in May, envisioned a futuristic (1970s) failed military cabal that sought to sideline the president of the United States over his proposed nuclear-disarmament treaty with the Soviets. Something far less dramatic but perhaps as disturbing as Hollywood fiction played out this February... Currently, the political and media opponents of Donald Trump are seeking to subvert his presidency in a manner unprecedented in the recent history of American politics. The so-called resistance among EPA federal employees is trying to disrupt Trump administration...

This shift from the ideal of the melting pot to the triumph of salad-bowl separatism occurred, in part, because the Democratic Party found electoral resonance in big government’s generous entitlements and social programs tailored to particular groups. By then, immigration into the United States had radically shifted and become less diverse. Rather than including states in Europe and the former British Commonwealth, most immigrants were poorer and almost exclusively hailed from the nations of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, resulting in poorer immigrants who, upon arrival, needed more government help. Another reason for the shift was the general protest culture...

Oroville dam, the tallest in the nation, is currently in danger of structural failure. Thousands living downstream from its desperate cascading water releases are evacuating their homes in Hollywood disaster-film fashion. Something premodern and apocalyptic like this was not supposed to have happened in a postmodern California of Google, Hollywood, and Napa Valley wineries. California’s politicians and pundits in recent years of drought swore the state was entering a cycle of permanent drought (and thus saw no need to start construction on a single dam to store the rain and snow that supposedly would not return). Instead, they warned of...