Free Republic

Will 2022 turn out be a hinge year, as a moment when long-standing trends in geopolitics suddenly shifted in a different direction? This week, two important writers, one a long-established and prolific historian, the other a provocative presence on the internet, have argued persuasively that the answer is yes. But there's one other interesting point in common: Neither sees the United States as having played a decisive role in the sudden shift. Over the years, Niall Ferguson has written admiringly about the 19th-century Rothschilds and the 20th century’s Henry Kissinger and has highlighted the positive achievements of Britain’s empire and...

I asked over the weekend if there has ever been an administration with a less impressive cabinet than President Biden’s and posited that Michael Barone might be able to come up with one. It occurred to me to ask him. For background he cites his column on the Harding administration here (September 2, 2015). Mr. Barone writes:Here’s my take, based in part on a recent visit to the Warren G. Harding Museum and Home in Marion, Ohio. Harding is often rated one of the poorest presidents — quite wrongly in my view, as I have written on other occasions.He did...

Is it Donald Trump's Republican Party? You can make the case it is, as partisan Democrats do, from the victories of various candidates endorsed by the former president in Republican primaries. But it's not an airtight case, and Trump's batting average is inflated by the dozens of endorsements he has made of incumbents with no significant primary opposition. Thus Trump endorsed Gov. Greg Abbott and many other easy winners in Texas's Tuesday primary. But incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton, endorsed by Trump last July, was forced into a runoff by George P. Bush. Paxton leads in runoff polling, but one...

By now you may have forgotten resident Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address last week. On Monday, Biden walked across the White House lawn alone and in a mask. On Tuesday, he walked into a crowd of House members rejoicing that no more masks were needed. It was the perfect metaphor for Biden at governance and Biden at speech. First, forgive Biden for his flubs and twisted words. He is almost 80 and has a stuttering problem. As someone who grew up with a stuttering problem, I'm sympathetic. He is neither Cicero nor Churchill, King nor Kennedy....

When public policies have produced disastrous results, and when alternative policies have resulted in immediate, seemingly miraculous improvement, why would anyone want to go back to the earlier policies? Is there any reason to suppose that this time will be different? Not that I can see. The earlier policies -- a pullback from active policing and certain punishment, an open-handed welfare system providing income for single mothers -- were put in place in the 1960s, within living memory of some of us. The intentions were good. It was a time of high hopefulness that America's shameful history of racial discrimination...

Were lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes. Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I’ve noted, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans, between 0.04 percent and 0.07 percent of the nation’s population. The 1968-70 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05 percent of the population. The US coronavirus death toll of 186,000 is 0.055 percent of the current population. It will go higher, but it’s about the same magnitude as those two...

You hear it said and see it written that Bernie Sanders will be another George McGovern -- that is, a left-wing nominee who lost a presidential election in a landslide. I'm here to tell you that's wrong. Because the times are different. And because Sen. Sanders is, or ought to be, a scarier candidate and a further departure from historic American norms than George McGovern ever was. I speak perhaps from a position of prejudice. I supported George McGovern in 1972, in the primaries and in the general election. And though my views on issues have changed since then --...

There's an old political saying that presidential candidates appeal to their parties' wings -- left for Democrats, right for Republicans -- in the race for the nomination and then appeal to the center in the general election campaign. It was put in canonical form by Richard Nixon, one of only two Americans our major parties nominated for national office five times (the other was Franklin Roosevelt). The dozen or so already announced Democratic candidates seem to be following Nixon's rule, and with more reckless abandon than Nixon ever did. Maybe they figure that whoever gets the Democratic nomination will inevitably...

On Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans will compete for the 42nd time in a nonpresidential-year contest -- a rivalry that goes back to 1854. That's the oldest such partisan competition in the world. And despite the complaints of today's Democrats that the Constitution is biased against them, Democrats have won Senate majorities 16 times -- versus 10 times for Republicans -- since senators started being elected by popular vote in 1914. Similarly, in the 164 years of midterm Republican-Democratic House contests, Democrats have won control of the House 24 times, compared with 17 for Republicans. In other words, over the...

Why is it considered "liberal" to compel others to say or fund things they don't believe? That's a question raised by three Supreme Court decisions this year. And it's a puzzling development for those of us old enough to remember when liberals championed free speech -- even advocacy of sedition or sodomy -- and conservatives wanted government to restrain or limit it. The three cases dealt with quite different issues. In National Institute of Family Life Advocates v. Becerra, a 5-4 majority of the court overturned a California statute that required anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to inform clients where they...

“F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18. “The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” read a story in the May 21 edition of The Wall Street Journal. So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was...

Clinton ignored people who live outside the trendy urban areas and also played fast and loose with the truth.

Earthquakes seldom hit the British Isles. But one did late Thursday night and early Friday morning, as the constituency returns started pouring in on the referendum to decide whether the United Kingdom would remain in or leave the European Union. Most polls had shown a small margin for remain, and betting markets made it an odds-on favorite. Hedge funds went long on the assumption "Remain" would win. It had the support, after all, of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, the leftist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Bank of England President Mark Carney and the financial leaders of the City of London....

Levin might cry and whine about Trump's tactics but here's the thing, there are no rules in politics. The only rule is winning. Trump is making that clear this cycle by breaking all the rules and winning so far. If Cruz can't beat Trump, he doesn't deserve to be the nominee. Hillary and the democrats would use the same "tactics" and more to pulverize him. This is what primaries are about. They are tests for the strongest nominee. They make the eventual nominee stronger. Cry baby whining about Trump does not make Cruz stronger. It's what losers do when they...

So... I heard straight from the great one's mouth. Mark Levin's fiancee's son works for Ted Cruz.

Mark Levin opened his radio show with the disclosure a political campaign was attempt to intimidate him by disclosing his fiancee's son works in Ted Cruz's DC office. He said he is going to find out and identify who it is. He doesn't believe it is the Trump group.

There is an expression: “I will leave you naked before your enemies”… A proactive assertion essentially stating: if you chose to engage in war with me – not only do I promise your defeat against my interests, but I will lay you open to exposure from all adversaries – who will then take advantage of your new vulnerability. Presidential Candidate Donald Trump is doing a remarkable job filling the role behind this proclamation. In a seismic political shift Trump has gone far beyond drawing a line in the sand. He has openly dug a trench on his pre-selected battle space...

By now almost everyone has acknowledged that Donald Trump has ripped the masks from most of the modern professional punditry who espoused to be conservatives yet showed their hidden ideological colors as elite globalists. Most notably this was evidenced in June as millions of Fox News viewers saw FOX’s entire line-up of professional pundits proclaim borders shouldn’t matter; border walls won’t work; illegal alien amnesty was the only viable solution to decades of unenforced immigration law; and, heck, this was only in week #1 of Donald Trump’s campaign Since June ’15, on almost every issue those same pundits have now...

By now almost everyone has acknowledged that Donald Trump has ripped the masks from most of the modern professional punditry who espoused to be conservatives yet showed their hidden ideological colors as elite globalists. Most notably this was evidenced in June as millions of Fox News viewers saw FOX's entire line-up of professional pundits proclaim borders shouldn’t matter; border walls won’t work; illegal alien amnesty was the only viable solution to decades of unenforced immigration law; and, heck, this was only in week #1 of Donald Trump's campaign. Since June '15, on almost every issue those same pundits have now...

By now almost everyone has acknowledged that Donald Trump has ripped the masks from most of the modern professional punditry who espoused to be conservatives yet showed their hidden ideological colors as elite globalists.Most notably this was evidenced in June as millions of Fox News viewers saw FOX’s entire line-up of professional pundits proclaim borders shouldn’t matter; border walls won’t work; illegal alien amnesty was the only viable solution to decades of unenforced immigration law; and, heck, this was only in week #1 of Donald Trump’s campaign. Since June ’15, on almost every issue those same pundits have now openly...