Free Republic

As the House Oversight Committee recently revealed, President Joe Biden used at least three aliases in his email correspondences. The major media, probably out of ignorance, missed the likely code embedded in those names. In Time magazine, for instance, Brian Bennett wrote, "Joe Biden used Gmail addresses with the name 'robinware456' and 'JRBWare' during his time as Vice President. He also used a government-issued pci.gov account with the name 'Robert.L.Peters.'" Bennett's article is titled "Here's What We Know About the Email Aliases Joe Biden Used While Vice President," but Bennett does not even guess at the meaning of the chosen...

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

First published nearly 70 years ago, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness provides relevant, instructive, and inspiring encouragement for those currently engaged in the fight against today’s ascendant Left. Although there is a wealth of useful insights within its covers, two stand out as central. First, Leftist ideologies are always and everywhere about acquiring power to wage an assault upon liberal (in the classical sense) values and institutions. Second, individual redemption after falling under the sway of these or any other malign influence is indeed possible by dint of reason, faith in a transcendent power, and the courage to follow those lights. Witness...

Among the multitudes that America used to contain were Whittaker Chambers and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. A few months ago I happened to reread both Chambers’ autobiography Witness and Schlesinger’s Journals 1952-2000 one after the other. These two men are of different generations: Chambers lived from 1901 to 1961 and Schlesinger 1917 to 2007. They are of completely different temperaments, milieus, politics, and tastes. But there are some fascinating overlaps that have some bearing on the difficult passage we are traversing today as a nation.

National security insiders are trying to claim treason for the fact that President Donald Trump’s transition team discussed potentially setting up a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States.Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin have met publicly on several occasions, and Russia maintains an active embassy in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.The Hill reported: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn spoke with a “senior official” in President Trump’s transition team at the Mar-a-Lago resort to discuss what he should communicate to the Russian ambassador in a highly-scrutinized series of phone calls in December of 2016,...

I've been doing a little before sleep reading of my old journals as I lay in my bed at night and I came upon this segment from the time of Watergate, that strikes me a relevant again, and perhaps more so, in these days... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Feb.04/74 'Read something in Plato's Gorgias that seems to apply to the current situation in the U.S.A.'... "When the state attempts to bring any of its public men to account as wrong-doers, I find that they take it very hard and raise a great outcry that they are being monstrously treated;their complaint is that after...

Whittaker Chambers’s Witness was published fifty years ago during the coldest days of the Cold War. It tells the story of a brilliant man driven by despair over the “crisis of our time” into the arms of the Communist Party. The most famous part of the book is Chambers’s gripping account of the two perjury trials of Alger Hiss in 1949 and 1950, which pitted the cerebral if somewhat disheveled Chambers against the worldly Hiss, a man who had been Chambers’s friend and protégé. But Chambers believed that his witness was about much more than an espionage case or the...

Steinbeck's myth of the Okies by Keith Windschuttle John Steinbeck performed a rare feat for a writer of fiction. He created a literary portrait that defined an era. His account of the “Okie Exodus” in The Grapes of Wrath became the principal story through which America defined the experience of the Great Depression. Even today, one of the enduring images for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the 1930s is that of Steinbeck’s fictional characters the Joads, an American farming family uprooted from its home by the twin disasters of dust storms and financial crisis to become refugees in...

A young American diplomat was the leading force in the designing of the United Nations. He was secretary of the Dumbarten Oaks Conversations from August to October of 1944 where most of the preliminary planning for the U.N. was done. He was Roosevelt's right-hand man in February of 1945 at Yalta where the postwar boundaries of Europe were drawn (Roosevelt was a dying man at the time. His death came only ten weeks later). At Yalta, it was agreed that the Soviet Union would have three votes (one each for Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia) in the U.N. General Assembly, even...

How a Soviet mole in FDR's inner circle triggered Pearl Harbor – and its dire relevancy to our conflict today. ... On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft delivered a shocking blow .. Nearly seven years later, Harry Dexter White, a senior official in the Roosevelt Administration, appeared to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities . Numerous witnesses, including Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, had implicated White in involvement with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. ... Harry Dexter White, a Harvard PhD and Assistant Treasury Secretary, had played a major role in creating the World Bank...

Allen Weinstein, a historian of Cold War espionage whose 1978 book, “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” marshaled a mountain of new evidence to argue that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged in one of the most famous spy trials of the postwar era, and who served as the ninth national archivist of the United States, died on Thursday at a nursing home in Gaithersburg, Md. He was 77. The cause was pneumonia, his son Andrew said. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years. Making use of newly available F.B.I. documents totaling tens of thousands of pages, Mr. Weinstein...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be the perfect feminist hero. In theory, she fits the role on multiple levels: She’s an escapee from an abusive patriarchy. She’s an African immigrant who made her own way in a Western country, the Netherlands. She’s a fierce advocate for women’s rights. She’s a target for deadly violence by angry men who want to shut her up. She left her religion and became a scourge of its repressive practices. Except for the blemish on her record: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a dissident from the wrong religion. Raised a Muslim in Somalia, subjected to genital mutilation...

I mourned the untimely passing of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman for the very personal reason that I hoped he would one day get to play Whittaker Chambers in a film version of Chambers’ 1952 masterwork, Witness. Short, heavy set, permanently rumpled, Hoffman would have made a near perfect Chambers to George Clooney’s Alger Hiss, the smooth, handsome, establishment golden boy. Chambers’ 800-page story of his life and their encounter remains the great political book of the twentieth century. Chambers was a deep thinker, a dazzling writer, and a reluctant participant in the most riveting political drama of the era. No...

By AIMEE PICCHI December 12, 2014 Why Middle-Class Wealth Is Withering If the middle class is truly the backbone of America, the country's spine may be close to breaking. Middle America came out of the Great Recession in a precarious position, sinking into "dissavings" -- when spending is greater than income -- thanks to a nasty combination of stagnant wages and a hit to real estate and investment values, according to a new working paper from New York University economics professor Edward N. Wolff. That's led to a grim outcome, with virtually no change in the country's median wealth between...

Panelists talked about re-evaluating the lives, motivations, and legacies of American and Soviet Cold War era spies such as Whittaker Chambers, Morton Sobell, Morris Childs, and Julia Brown as new information has been declassified by the CIA and the FBI.  David Chambers presented “Whittaker Chambers and the Global Network of Great Illegals, 1932-1935.” Jason Roberts presented “An Examination of the Rosenberg Grand Jury Transcripts.” John Fox presented “The FBI’s Eyes on the Communist World: Morris Childs, Cold War Intelligence and the Sino-Soviet Spilt.” “The Dueling Loyalties of Cold War Era Spies of the U.S. Government and the Soviet Union” was...

How many times have we heard: “Never again”? (Or taken selfies at a concentration camp or Holocaust museum with those words?) How often have we quoted: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”? And yet: Do we do nothing? What do we actually say in the face of evil? “I don’t want to have on my conscience that I was complicit in something as horrendous as this simply by being quiet,” is how Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., reflected on the persecution being conducted against Christians and other...

I am very happy to reveal that at this year's gathering of the Pumpkins Papers Irregulars, a deluxe dinner held in Washington by intelligence experts and interested observers to honor the memory of Whittaker Chambers and his triumph over the traitor Alger Hiss, I was given the annual honor of lighting the pumpkin and later addressing the assembly about American Betrayal. Highlights of the evening included warm tributes to fallen Cold Warriors: M. Stanton Evans on the late Herbert Romerstein (1931-2013), and Paul Kengor on the late Judge William P. Clark (1931-2013). This year's "coveted" Victor Navasky Award, presented by...

We can start with the spoiler. At the end of his newly released and massive revised edition of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Allen Weinstein makes the following observation: "As for the conspiracy theories themselves, we may expect that newer and perhaps more ingenious defenses of [Alger] Hiss may emerge, if only because none of the theories raised during the past six decades has proved persuasive. There has yet to appear, however, from any source, a coherent body of evidence that seriously undermines the credibility of the evidence against Alger Hiss." There will never be produced such a body of evidence,...

Last week a Department of State retiree and his wife were arrested and charged with spying for Cuba for thirty years. In this article I will sort out what we know, don't know and need to explore about this matter. Walter Kendall Myers, Jr .and his wife Gwendolyn Steingarber Myers

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...