Free Republic

<p>1) When in control of the Senate, demand the end of the filibuster; when not, don’t.</p><p>2) Call for the end of the Electoral College–but only if it appears to recently favor the candidate of the opposition.</p><p>3) In an election year, change any state balloting laws deemed unhelpful through administrative fiat or court order to favor your political candidate.</p>

The Biden apparat has tried to present the construct of a dynamic president promoting a traditional Democratic agenda, which has succeeded brilliantly. Sustaining that lie requires constant deception. Hunter Biden has a train of a dozen lawyers defending him on felony indictments ranging from several counts of tax fraud to gun violations. From time to time, the contents of his laptop come up, both in these criminal trials and in civil suits. The information on the laptop is, of course, incriminating and useful to various prosecutors and litigants. Yet Hunter himself is suing the computer repairman with whom he dropped...

Most of Europe, the U.S., and the West understandably supported arming Ukraine to repel Vladimir Putin’s Russian aggression. By contrast, such support for democratic Israel was strangely mixed. The Ukrainian and Israeli wars are similar and yet also different conflicts—but in more ways than we can imagine. Ukraine was invaded by a huge Russian state, with a population three-and-a-half times greater, a gross national product ten times larger, and an area thirty times its size. Hamas, by contrast, is a terrorist clique of about 50,000-70,000 gunmen and terrorist kingpins who run Gaza. It is dwarfed by the Israeli population (20...

In 2024—an election year—the left is trying to undo what it created without explaining why and what they did to us and themselves as well. It is hard to destroy a naturally beautiful city like San Francisco, with ideal weather and stunning infrastructure inherited from far better earlier generations. Yet San Francisco continues its much-publicized and self-inflicted doom loop. The productive classes still flee the increasingly crime-ridden city and its self-induced pathologies. The city is eroding not because of the doomsayers and not because of what people say about San Francisco, but because of what San Franciscans have done to...

It remains unclear why Biden and Homeland Security Chief Alejandro Mayorkas destroyed what Trump had achieved. Why would they ensure such misery for both Americans and millions of illegal migrants? In 2021, Joe Biden opened wide an inherited, secure southern border that had finally stopped mass illegal immigration. When he overturned Donald Trump’s efforts, a planned flood of over 8 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. Almost all arrived without background checks, health screening, or vaccination certificates—but with massive needs for free housing, education, healthcare, and food entitlements and subsidies. For four years, Donald Trump battled the courts, his Democratic...

Things are so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters. What Excites Biden? Things are becoming so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters we now daily witness that are nearly destroying the country. When the ailing and non-compos-mentis president now speaks, he rarely becomes excited about Iranian or terrorist provocations. Biden seems restrained even at Russia’s outlawry in Ukraine....

<p>Is what’s happening all a bad dream? The wage of utter incompetence? A bad joke? Nefariousness?</p><p>Did New York offer an answer by not incarcerating arrested foreign thugs, illegally residing in the U.S., who had swarmed New York City police and kicked the heads of officers while on the ground?</p>

When serially attacked, loudly responding that we will only proportionally strike back and wish no wider war will only ensure a big, ugly one. Iranian-backed militias have attacked American installations and forces in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan some 170 times. Ostensibly, these terrorist groups claim they are hitting US forces to coerce America into dropping its support of Israel and demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza war. In reality, these satellite terrorists are being directed in a larger effort by Iran to pry the US. out of the Middle East, in the manner of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing. That...

Trump must concentrate on the disaster of the Biden administration and reiterate nonstop the agendas of 2025 that will save us from tottering on the brink. Donald Trump gave one of his best and most conciliatory speeches of his political career after his win in the recent Iowa primaries—that might explain why the media would not cover it. Later, to answer an ad hoc ambush reporter’s question whether he would hold grudges, he emphatically said he did not. Yet after his win in New Hampshire, Trump went ballistic at Nikki Haley’s earlier charges that he, rather than Joe Biden, was...

<p>Donald Trump in furor stormed out of a New York courtroom for a while, in the defamation suit brought by author and dating/boyfriend/sex-advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.</p><p>It was just settled against Trump for $83.3 million. The Carroll suit was largely subsidized by Reid Hoffman the billionaire capitalist, and mega-donor to the Democratic Party and leftwing causes.</p>

In the short term, Haley will cede to Trump the Nevada caucuses and focus on her home state of South Carolina. But then what? Nikki Haley just lost the New Hampshire primary by 11 percent. She had earlier come in third in the recent Iowa caucuses behind Ron DeSantis. But DeSantis, not she, dropped out of the race. He then endorsed front-runner Donald Trump. By contrast, Haley confidently announced that at last there was a two-person, head-to-head race. So she confidently headed to New Hampshire. Her subtext was that if she did not win the upcoming two-person primaries, she would...

Add it all up, and the world abroad agrees America is in rapid decline and will not or cannot defend its interests, or for that matter itself. Lame-duck presidencies, especially in the last six months of their final term, in general can offer opportunities for America’s enemies to take advantage of a perceived vacuum as one government transitions to the next. But these normal changeover months are especially dangerous when a perceived weak or appeasing lame-duck president is likely to be replaced by a strong deterrent successor that will likely serve as a corrective to his disastrous policies. James Buchannan...

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism. But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage. Or, in the immortal words of Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” The 2008 economic emergency crested on September 7, with the near collapse of the home mortgage industry. Obama took office on January 20, 2009, more than...

Prosecutors are discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these proceedings, the more he rises in the polls. We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024. The prosecutors began accelerating their indictments only once Trump started to lead incumbent Joe Biden by...

The Left is creating historic, anti-democratic precedents that will someday boomerang should Republicans win the November election and follow the new Democrat model of extra-legal politics. When faced with the possible return of President Donald Trump, the current agenda of the Democratic Party is summed up simply as “We had to destroy democracy to save it.” The effort shares a common theme: any means necessary are justified to prevent the people from choosing their own president, given the fear that a majority might vote to elect Donald Trump. Sometimes the anti-democratic paranoia has been outsourced to state and local officials...

American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable. In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture. The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes. Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not...

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their...

Gay’s removal is not the end of Harvard’s dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning. Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure. Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism—without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly anti-Semitic in speech and action. But Gay’s removal is not the end of Harvard’s dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning. In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a...

If the amorality of illegal immigration were not so deleterious to Americans, its absurdity would be laughable. There have been more than 8 million illegal entries into the United States since Joe Biden was elected president. He appointed Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, whose apparent prime directive was to destroy the southern border. That task is precisely what Mayorkas has now accomplished. The result is that the border is neither “porous” nor “problematic,” but nonexistent, kaput, vanished—and by design. In one of the most surreal experiences in the history of the United States, each night Americans see video...

For weeks, the American people have been relatively silent as they digested these ongoing catastrophes. But at some point, their patience will run out. At the end of the year, we are on the razor’s edge of many things that soon may blow up. Americans are far beyond President Joe Biden’s serial untruths of some eight years that he never discussed Hunter Biden’s various get-rich-quick schemes. All were predicated on the perception of foreign interests purchasing from the Biden family the influence of then-senator, vice president, and possibly soon-to-be President Joe Biden. The Bidens now risk exposure to criminal charges...