Free Republic

An "anonymous source" says Trump... Where have we heard this sort of thing before?

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party's aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP's heartland base, the river valley-dwelling "Somewheres" from David Goodhart's 2017 book, "The Road to Somewhere," and the party's bicoastal "Anywhere" rulers. The foot-soldier Republican "Somewheres," disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican "Anywheres." Donald Trump, lifelong conservative "outsider" and populist dissenter from bicoastal "Anywhere" orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to...

Democrats in Washington are still pushing ahead with plans for their historically astronomical $3.5 trillion spending bill. The massive regulatory and social changes included would push America further to the left than ever before. The reconciliation spending bill, which can be passed with no Republican votes in the House or Senate, includes a ton of tax increases along with the huge new spending increases. The proposal will reportedly raise the individual income tax rates and the corporate income tax rates. According to the most recent news reporting, however, one tax policy is going to make it through the huge left-wing...

SNIP Rodrigo Duterte told a national address on Wednesday: "For those who do not want it, well, for all I care, you can die anytime." He also said he wants the police to restrict the movement of people who refuse coronavirus vaccines: "To those people who do not want to be vaccinated, I am telling you, don't go out of your house." "If you go out of your house, I will tell the police to return you to your home. You will be escorted back to your house because you are a walking spreader."

Get ready for Strong Man Populism. The bad guys - the soft elite who think it can hold onto the societal power it inherited, but did not earn, through petty oppressions - will call it “authoritarianism.” Of course, they like authoritarianism when they are the authority - that’s why they feel no compunction about remaking our country and culture without bothering with obtaining our buy-in. But history teaches - not that they would know it, because they have never been taught it - that a backlash is inevitable. We’re going to turn to someone who won’t be deterred by cultural...

On December 31st of last year, an 80 year-old Buffalo-area woman named Judith Smentkiewicz fell ill with Covid-19. She was rushed by ambulance to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Williamsville, New York, where she was put on a ventilator. Her son Michael and his wife flew up from Georgia, and were given grim news. Judith, doctors said, had a 20% chance at survival, and even if she made it, she’d be on a ventilator for a month.As December passed into the New Year, Judith’s health declined. Her family members, increasingly desperate, had been doing what people in the Internet age...

PITTSBURGH -- They're still there, planted in front of stately homes in wealthy suburban neighborhoods, on flagpoles in middle-class communities, and along the front stoops of inner-city row houses. Whether they say "Trump 2020" or simply "Trump," there are plenty of people who have left their sentiments planted on their own personal hill. It is not just here in Pennsylvania. The signs are not hard to spot as you travel to the Great Lakes, the Midwest, and Appalachia. The reason is complex. People who come from a variety of socioeconomic, religious, and political experiences formed a conservative populist coalition long...

They're still there, planted in front of stately homes in wealthy suburban neighborhoods, on flag poles in middle-class communities, and along the front stoops of inner-city row houses. Whether they say "Trump 2020" or simply "Trump," there are plenty of people who have left their sentiments planted on their own personal hill. It is not just here in Pennsylvania. The signs are not hard to spot as you travel to the Great Lakes, the Midwest, and Appalachia. The reason is complex. People who come from a variety of socioeconomic, religious, and political experiences formed a conservative populist coalition long before...

Even people at establishment conservative rags such as the National Review recognize what Trumpism actually is. Michael Brendan Dougherty was correct in observing that Trumpisim “is a populist-nationalist politics.” He added some salients points about Trumpism: “[Trumpism] It is populist because it preaches political doctrines largely rejected by the incumbent political class: an America-first foreign policy, revision of the aims of our trade policy, and a halt to mass migration. It is a nationalist project whose ultimate aim is to restore the democratic link between the citizenry and government — a link that has been threatened by a class of...

Not financial advice by any means, but this has been a fun roller coaster. If feels like a push against the system. It is definitely historic. One of many GME pages that have popped up

The Trump administration forced a lot of conservatives to rethink issues. For me, I had to revisit the topic of tariffs. Initially, I was knee-jerk hostile to tariff schedules. We should support free trade at all costs, right? That was what Milton Friedman told us, and that is what we should be fighting for. After four years of Trump, I realized that Pat Buchanan and other economic nationalists had a good point about tariffs. Indeed, every nation needs to take steps to ensure that essential industries remain strong and thrive in the home country. In times of war or a...

It's still a Trump party, but it's more than that.In February 2017, I attended my first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Donald Trump was fresh off a stunning victory in the 2016 presidential election and it was very easy to tell he had all the energy, vim, and support of the attendees. What was less certain at the time was how Trump would govern and whether his control of the Republican Party would be a longstanding feature, or just some weird detour. This weekend I attended CPAC again. This time, it was held outside of the Washington DC region for...

American politics used to be stuck in the 1930s, with the Republicans always sure that a military buildup was necessitated by the ascendancy of some new Hitler in some distant land and the Democrats always convinced that we are on the verge — or in the midst — of a New Great Depression that can be countered only by a New New Deal. We haven’t quite got out of the 1930s yet — see, e.g., the “Green New Deal” — but perhaps it is time to look around for some other points of comparison.

The rules here are simple: Heads Wall Street wins, tails you lose.For those who haven’t heard, there’s a bit of a brouhaha brewing with the video game retailer GameStop, which is publicly traded. Much of Wall Street soured on the company, believing it to be the next Blockbuster or Radio Shack: a dinosaur from a bygone era that has no hope of succeeding in the increasingly internet-run future. As a result, a major Wall Street hedge fund worth billions decided to make a bet that the company’s already low stock price would just keep going lower. The traditional way to...

In the aftermath of the disgraceful Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the American ruling class has flexed its muscles like never before. Big Tech oligarchs moved in unison to kneecap upstart Parler, a would-be Twitter competitor, and ban former President Donald Trump and scores of other conservatives. Simon & Schuster, one of the nation's most reputable book publishers, canceled a book deal that it had commissioned with the conservative Sen. Josh Hawley. President Joe Biden, in direct defiance of his campaign-season vows to unify the country, oversaw a deeply divisive and ideological first week in office. And just...

Against the surreal backdrop of sometimes violent nationwide protests, one alarming story as reported by The New York Times seems to have slipped under the radar. Law enforcement arrested a 21-year-old Idaho man on suspicion of firing a semi-automatic rifle at the White House. Several days prior to the arrest, the Secret Service had responded to reports of shots fired near the National Mall and pursued a vehicle departing the area on Constitution Avenue. They found the vehicle abandoned with an AK-47 and spent casings inside, and soon afterward extracted several bullets that had struck the White House. The suspect’s...

... In the 1960s, the liberal-progressive establishment successfully managed black anger, which became explosive in major cities, by accommodating demands for civil rights and allocating vast sums for economic uplift while preserving America’s existing hierarchies of wealth and power.... Ronald Reagan’s uncompromising clarity about the moral evil of the Soviet Empire helped bring the Cold War to a successful conclusion. Nonetheless, the end of communism strengthened the liberal-progressive establishment. In the cultural mythology of the twentieth century, the moderation of the volatile class resentments of the modern era is credited entirely to managerial liberalism. The same is assumed when it...

ill Trumpism survive President Donald Trump? For many observers, the answer is obvious: no. Trumpism is about Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump, and it has no substance beyond that. It is a rhetoric and an affect, in service to him, and that’s on its best days. On most others, it is a gibbering cult and series of baroque conspiracy theories. Trumpism is just is a giant sucking sound around the black hole of the man’s own vanity. It will eventually disappear, as he has, up his own backside.

The ignominious events in the nation's capital on Wednesday, January 6 will not soon be forgotten. Images of an enraged mob overpowering police and breaching the walls of the U.S. Capitol, the West's preeminent citadel of republican self-governance, will hinder Americans' already-cratering faith in their government's institutional integrity and tarnish their belief in American exceptionalism. These are the sort of sordid deeds, and the sort of searing images, that one normally associates with malefactors in a developing nation or a banana republic—not what Abraham Lincoln once called the "last best hope of earth." Hypocrisy, of course, abounds. It is more...

Former Secretary of State John Kerry attended a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum during which he asserted that a great reset was urgently needed to stop the rise of populism. Kerry vowed that under a Biden administration, America would rejoin the job-killing Paris Climate Agreement but that this was “not enough.” “The notion of a reset is more important than ever before,” Kerry said. “I personally believe … we’re at the dawn of an extremely exciting time.” The former Senator made it clear that this “reset,” which is merely a re-branding of the same new world order that...