Free Republic

The ancient Greeks created new words like "paradox" and "irony" to describe the wide gap between what people profess and assume, and what they actually do and suffer.[snip]The lockdowns were politically weaponized during this election year. Blue states thought the sinking economy would hurt President Trump's reelection bid. Red states wanted to open up as quickly as possible to get the economy back and running before November. Yet the mass progressive protests and violence forced an unplanned end to mass quarantining -- and thereby inadvertently helped jump-start the country back to business. Those who despise Trump may have done the...

The Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits active generals from disparaging their commander in chief. Article 88 of the UCMJ makes it a crime to voice “contemptuous words against the president” and other senior civilian officials. But no one quite knows whether such codified prohibitions on free expression apply to retired generals receiving military pensions. And lately, there has been a spate of “contemptuous words” against President Trump, leveled by retired generals, including some who under other presidents condemned just such conduct among their brethren. Given the lack of legal clarity, a confused public could at least expect four rules...

<p>In a time of crisis, their synchronized chorus of complaints, falsehoods, and partisan appeals to resistance threaten the very constitutional order they claim to revere. Sometimes retired generals are deified. Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower won two presidential terms in landslide elections.</p>

<p>Each day that the Obama administration fades into the past, its wrongdoings manage to wander back into the present.</p> <p>After years of suppression, all sorts of strange events keep popping up to remind us of what little is left of the Obama years — the Susan Rice memo, Christopher Steele deleting his computer records, FBI-doctored and lost 302s, text messages wiped clean, the bizarre Obama January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, the ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the unmasking and leaking of redacted names swept up in reverse-targeting surveillance operations, the administration fraud perpetrated on the FISA courts. The list is so overwhelming and bizarre that it ensures that anything at any time can now appear. And the result keeps reminding Americans of how corrupt were the years between 2009 and 2017 and how untruthful was the coverage of such institutionalized wrongdoing.</p>

The current U.S. budget deficit could soon exceed a record $4 trillion. The massive borrowing is being driven both by prior budget profligacy and a hurried effort by the Donald Trump administration to pump liquidity into a quarantined America. The shutdown has left the country on the cusp of a self-inflicted economic collapse not seen since the Great Depression. Americans may soon have to service a staggering national debt of about $30 trillion -- nearly $100,000 of debt for every American. Democrats and Republicans can blame each other, either for spending too much or for too little taxation, or both....

Face coverings will be required inside public establishments starting Friday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Tuesday. He also addressed photos of him without a face covering interacting with well-wishers in Virginia Beach over the weekend. At a briefing, Northam said that anywhere people can congregate in groups — including but not limited to stores, restaurants, barbershops, government buildings and public transportation — must wear face coverings, with a few exceptions for people: Eating or drinking at a restaurant Exercising Who have a health condition that prohibits a face covering Who are under the age of 10, although Northam strongly recommended...

<p>Red- and blue-state America was already divided before the coronavirus epidemic hit. Globalization had enriched the East Coast and West Coast corridors but hollowed out much in between.</p> <p>The traditional values of small towns and rural counties were increasingly at odds with postmodern lifestyles in the cities.</p>

Most people today assume that our understanding of WWII is largely complete, thanks to the enormous quantity of books, TV series such as ITV’s classic 1970s documentary The World at War, the myriad of documentaries that aired in the early days of the History Channel cable TV network, and the unending series of movies produced by Hollywood, particularly when compared to its predecessor, WWI. But classicist historian and fellow PJM columnist Victor Davis Hanson does yeoman’s work unpacking the events of 1939-1945. Starting with the plurality in the title, Hanson’s 2017 book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global...

Sometimes the truth is like mythical kryptonite. It radiates power and yet promises great destruction. And so reality is to be left alone, encased in lead, and kept at bay. Take the Chinese genesis of the COVID-19 epidemic. We started in February with the usual Chinese deceptions about their role in the birth, transmission, and worldwide spread of the virus. No one, apparently except Mike Bloomberg and Bill Gates, was surprised by the accustomed politically correct prevarications of the Chinese-purchased World Health Organization, whose transparent lies were passed off as truth—and led to tens of thousands of deaths. On cue,...

Historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told "The Story" Friday that Democratic governors of states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois are creating an "untenable situation" by being slow to lift lockdowns instituted to counter coronavirus. "We don’t think more people will die because of the lockdown versus exposure to the virus," Hanson said, mimicking the thought process of some Democratic governors, "We have to be absolutely certain that nobody gets the virus and dies." As a result, he said, residents of those states are prevented from paying into the system with tax money, which...

An overriding theme of the historian Thucydides’ monumental history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) is the fragility of civilization. In extremis, when both the elites and masses lose their thin veneer of culture, society can turn feral quickly. During a horrific war, plague, or revolution, even a wealthy and sophisticated civilization such as that of the classical Greek city-states regresses in a second to its innate state. And what follows from these natural and man-made disasters is not pretty. Still, these calamities can be tragically instructional. Hypocrisies arise. Pretexts vanish. Fundamental but forgotten truths, easily masked in times of...

Victor Davis Hanson is a scholar of the history of ancient Greek warfare, he is a frequent writer and commentator, and a 4th generation farmer in California's central valley. At Professor Hanson's chair as the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, his focus is classics and military history. His podcast, updated several times per month, is The Classicist | Hoover Institution. Eric Metaxas is an Evangelical Christian with a cordial relationship with the Greek Orthodox Church. His show is at MetaxasTalk.com.

In this current crisis, the longest if not the first complete shutdown in U.S. history, the freedoms of American democracy are being tested in ways we scarcely ever imagined. Out of nowhere little Napoleonic governors arise to enact decrees prohibiting gardening or strolling on an empty beach — decrees that seem to have little purpose other than to reflect that they can do so. Snitches volunteer to out felonious social deviants who are seen cooking in the backyard with a neighbor. A little horned-devil virus seems to be trying to do what those Russkies never could. Experts with all sorts...

In A. A. Milne’s classic Winne-the-Pooh children’s tales, Eeyore, the old gray donkey, is perennially pessimistic and gloomy. He always expects the worst to happen. Milne understood that Eeyore’s outbursts of depression could at first be salutatory but then become monotonous. The outlook of the pessimist (“if you think it’s bad now, just wait”) always enjoys advantages over both the realist (“so what, life goes on”) and the optimist (“oh, come on, it can’t be that bad”).When the pessimist frequently errs in his gloomy prognostications, he can plead that they were intended to be didactic, if not therapeutic. Only by...

Victor Davis Hanson Is the bad and self-negating behavior of so many of Trump’s enemies setting him up for an even more impressive victory in the fall? As the coronavirus outbreak begins to reach its zenith, it remains unclear whether the measures taken to stem its tide will prove sufficient, insufficient, or an overreaction. What is certain, however, is that a number of individuals and entities have behaved shamefully and demonstrated no capacity for leadership or usefulness in this moment. Nancy Pelosi: Gone are the mythologies that Nancy Pelosi was a pragmatic liberal voice of reason among the otherwise polarizing...

I think one of the strangest of all sequelae to the virus... might be the millions of high-paid Americans whose absences were hardly missed either by the public or count much in subsequent economic analyses of damage to the economy. In a sophisticated society under lockdown, is it more existentially valuable to know how to fix a toilet, replace a circuit breaker, or change a tire, or to be a New York fashion designer, a Hollywood actor, or a corporate merger lawyer? At 9 p.m., when you go downtown in need of a critical prescription, are you really all that...

Sometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously given the similar Chinese origins of the prior toxic SARS coronavirus and the resources of a Level 4 virology lab nearby. Yet the government initially hid all that knowledge from its own people in particular and in general from the world at large. Translated into American terms, that disingenuousness ensured...

... In our current hours of COVID-19 despair, we must fight both the virus and the panic that the disease instills, given that the two can be equally deadly. All sorts of scary statistics about the coronavirus infection and lethality rates are being publicized, often to show contrasts with annual influenza strains and other viral epidemics. Some make the legitimate point that if the coronavirus has a lethality rate of over 1 percent to 3 percent in the United States, then perhaps 97 percent to 99 percent of those infected will survive the illness, albeit with varying degrees of seriousness....

Try this thought experiment. Envision the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, as a living, breathing enemy -- which, of course, is exactly what it is. But imagine for a moment that we are in real war with a cognizant, thinking and clever enemy whose sole reason to live is to hurt, maim or kill as many of us as it can. COVID-19 may not have jets, tanks or nukes, like our past enemies. But its arsenal, numbers, cunning and willpower are said to be formidable. To win its war against Americans, COVID-19 must infect and sicken lots of Americans each...

<p>Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue—and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats.</p> <p>Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions—closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair trade policies, restoring assembly and manufacturing jobs to the hollowed-out interior, avoiding optional wars abroad, and trying to drain the proverbial federal swamp of its careerist bureaucrats and revolving-door apparatchiks.</p>