Free Republic

I was not going to write about Oliver Anthony’s brilliant song, Rich Men North of Richmond, because I have nothing worthy to add. The video puts all other commentary to shame. North of Richmond refers to the federal government, which is too large, too powerful and too uncaring. But Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor of the Never Trump National Review, butted in with a Learn-to-Code column attacking Anthony for daring to complain about DC’s treatment of the working class. It lectured Anthony to be more like Woody Guthrie, the Nazi apologist and communist. Anthony’s song says: I’ve been sellin’ my...

You guys know he lost, right? Representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) is (probably) being pushed out of her leadership position, most likely in favor of Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), because Representative Cheney is insufficiently Trump-loving and Stefanik is superabundantly Trump-loving. It’s that familiar Republican strategy: a purge for unity. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and other like-minded Republicans complain that it will be difficult for Cheney to do her job effectively in the current political environment, meaning the infantile emotional climate in which some number of Republicans stamp their feet and hold their breath like Veruca Salt...

Opinion writer Bari Weiss got chased out of The New York Times for her political views — not because she’s an uncompromising conservative, but because she is a moderate. In our team-sports era of politics as tribal warfare, we’re expected to be all-in for one side or the other. Figures such as Weiss or slightly nonconforming public figures such as author J. K. Rowling (a liberal feminist who expresses some reservations about transgender orthodoxy) or Goya CEO Robert Unanue (whose firm is being boycotted because he said something nice about Donald Trump) are a problem for the cheap moralists and...

Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism. American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them. Harris was a leader in the junta of Democratic state attorneys general that attempted to criminalize dissent in the matter of global warming, using her office’s investigatory powers to target and harass non-profit policy groups while she and her counterpart in New York attempted to shake down Exxon on phony fraud cases. Until she was stopped by a federal court, Harris was...

One particularly tough and indigestible nugget of talk-radio stupidity afflicting the guts of conservatism is the idea that there is some sort of fundamental difference between bribing a business with tax cuts and bribing it with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The Trump-Pence bailout of Carrier’s operations in Indiana provides an illustrative case... Republicans might have had a little bit of a point in the question of general tax cuts: A tax cut and spending are different things, even if the budgetary effects are exactly the same. But in the matter of industry-specific or firm-specific tax benefits of the sort...

A pattern emerges. Donald Trump is a habitual liar, and the thing about habitual liars is that they lie habitually. In a testy exchange with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump insisted that he’d never gone bankrupt, and that claims to the contrary are a lie. That’s the Trump magic right there: Lying about your business history is one thing, lying that your critics are lying about it is another. Trump has a peculiar way of speaking about bankruptcy: He has a deep aversion to the word itself. He speaks of “putting a company into a chapter” without ever answering...

Democrats have sown the wind and could reap the windbag - or a Texas tornado Celebrity is a funny thing: Donald Trump, reptilian cretin and current Republican presidential front-runner, has been roundly denounced as a Nazi thug for suggesting that the United States should curtail Muslim immigration until such a time as the efforts of the Islamic State and its allies to infiltrate refugee populations and other sources of immigration have been more fully understood. All the best people got righteous ants in their pants and declared that the rise of Trump announces the birth of fascism in the United...

Conservatives love a faction. Among my friends here at National Review, we have conservatarians (Charles C. W. Cooke), reform conservatives (Ramesh Ponnuru), the secular Right (Andrew Stuttaford), etc. The distinctive features of those camps are, respectively, being comfortable with gay marriage, favoring tax credits for children, and favoring tax credits for the children of gay marriages so long as the money doesn’t end up in the offering plate. ((snip)) Whatever Trump’s appeal is to the Right’s populist elements, it isn’t policy. He is a tax-happy crony capitalist who is hostile to free trade but very enthusiastic about using state violence...

A national-security investigation may "not [be] conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution." That clause, and others similar to it, are found throughout the Patriot Act and other provisions of federal law. They protect Americans from being subjected to surveillance based on nothing except their religious beliefs. There's an obvious reason for that at least, I thought it was obvious until Donald Trump reportedly embraced the idea of forcing Muslims to register in a database. I say "reportedly" because it is not clear to me, after hearing a recording of Trump's hectic...

Donald Trump may be the man America needs. Having been through four bankruptcies, the ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula is uniquely positioned to lead the most indebted organization in the history of the human race.The Trump conglomerate is the Argentina of limited-liability companies,having been in bankruptcy as recently as 2009. To be sure,a lot of companies went bankrupt around then. The Trump gang went bankrupt in 2004,too,and in 2001. Before that, Trump was in bankruptcy court back in 1991 when his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City—the nation’s first casino-cum-strip-club, an aesthetic crime against humanity that is...

Kevin Williamson of National Review Online attacks the conservative base of the Republican Party in his latest column, “WHINOS: On the Martyrdom of the Holy, Holy Base.” His critique makes the valid point that conservatives who favor ideological purity or populist venting over electability are going to lose a lot of elections. He is as irritated as his colleague Jonah Goldberg is worried about the Donald Trump insurgency in the Republican presidential primary. However, both he and Goldberg fail to note the reason for Trump’s ascendancy. Trump is surging for the same reason that Newt Gingrich enjoyed a brief bubble...

Paris Hilton Could Out-Trump Trump in 2016 by Kevin D. Williamson August 20, 2015 Donald Trump’s admirers, like those of Ross Perot in an earlier epoch, cite his business success as his main qualification and believe that the acumen that he has demonstrated in making himself rich enough to do incredibly vulgar things like gold-plating the seatbelt buckles in his airplane is a skill that’s transferable to things like trade policy and immigration law. There may be something to that line of thinking, but Ross Perot is not the entrepreneur whom Trump most closely resembles. You heard it here first:...

Oh, you’re goddamned right this is Vegas, baby! because the Planet Hollywood Las Vegas Resort and Casino is the only truly appropriate venue for a show like the one we have right here. For your consideration: the carefully coiffed golden mane, the vast inherited fortune, the splendid real-estate portfolio, the family name on buildings from Manhattan to the Strip, the reality-television superstardom, the room-temperature-on-a-brisk-November-day IQ. The only thing distinguishing that great spackled misshapen lump of unredeemed American id known as Donald Trump from his spiritual soul mate, that slender lightning rod of unredeemed American id known as Paris Hilton, is...

When Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus "suspended" the party's agreement to hold a debate with NBC on February 26, he took care to say that whether or not NBC was involved, the debate, which was set to include questions from partner National Review, would go on as scheduled. "While we are suspending our partnership with NBC News and its properties, we still fully intend to have a debate on that day, and will ensure that National Review remains part of it," Priebus wrote in a letter to NBC. As the debate approaches, however, it's likely that critics will raise...

For example, on June 16, when Trump announced his candidacy, NR roving correspondent Kevin D. Williamson analyzed the event in a piece headlined "Witless Ape Rides Escalator." Williamson called Trump "the most ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula." Also: 'a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country's 'brand' and his own vast wealth." And: "not just an ass, but an ass of exceptionally intense asininity." And, of course, a "witless ape." In August, NR writer Charles C.W. Cooke called Trump a "virus." "A plague is sweeping the land, gathering victims of all...

Americans are funny about taxes: When we complain about them, we don’t moan that we are paying too much — we lament that others are paying too little. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, only 27 percent of Americans cited their own tax liabilities among their complaints about the tax code, while 64 percent complained that other taxpayers — the wicked 1 percenters, the dreaded corporations — were getting off too easy. If you’ve ever met anybody who believes that we can balance the budget by cutting foreign aid, that the Social Security “trust fund” is a real...

In my post yesterday about the #NROrevolt Twitter rebellion by restrictionist Donald Trump fans against the pro-restrictionism National Review, I mentioned that there was a rich stream of apoplectically anti-Donald Trump commentary emanating from within the conservative media. I thought it might be useful to catalogue some of the vituperative and often entertaining arguments thus far into one place. (For a previous post on Trump's conservative-media supporters, click here.) The following list, encompassing neoconservatives, social cons, and libertarian-leaners, includes Bret Stephens, George Will, Glenn Beck, Michael Gerson, Charles C.W. Cooke, Karl Rove, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Kevin D. Williamson, Mona...

Cornel West is a very smart man who has some very dumb opinions, but when he’s feeling froggy he can be a hoot. In a recent interview, Professor West mocked Al Sharpton for playing the odalisque in President Obama’s media seraglio, calling him the embodiment of the “rent-a-Negro phenomenon on MSNBC.” The Reverend Sharpton, he said, is constrained because “he’s still on the Obama plantation.” The use of the word “plantation” to describe the relationship between black Americans and their political patrons is an unfortunate staple of contemporary rhetoric. Professor West’s remark is unusual in that “plantation” rhetoric usually comes...