Free Republic

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” — Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. After last Thursday’s debate, Biden himself laid to rest the Democratic lie that he was robust and in control of his faculties. In truth, he demonstrated to the nation that he is a sad, failing octogenarian who could not perform any job in America other than apparently the easy task of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief in charge of our...

There is a growing movement to surrender American sovereignty to international bodies. This effort—championed by a global elite—excludes the participation of the American people and threatens our national security. Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. Victor...

The only practicable way to avoid another near-one million dead and wounded would be a settlement, however unpopular. Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War. Both Russia and Ukraine underreport their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting. In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would...

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. Victor discusses current political and social events and ideas, and current and past cultural trends.

The Biden administration's agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought. Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens? Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every...

How and why did California end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism? California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly. How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism? The symptoms of the state’s suicide...

When we hear such things in the months to come, remember that these mythologies are usually a warning: what the left is alleging is, quite often, precisely what the left is already doing. Since 2016, there has been a clear pattern to left-wing conspiracies—beyond the obvious fact that they traffic in lies, stereotypes, and paranoia to serve precise political agendas. We now know that the conspiracy to cook up the Russian-collusion hoax—Donald Trump allegedly conniving with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 vote—was perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its funding was hidden by the Democratic National Committee, the law...

Are America’s cultural institutions in decline? In this insightful interview, Victor Davis Hanson explores how the left's dominance in Hollywood, professional sports, and media has led to significant disengagement from the public. With NBA ratings at record lows and Hollywood relying on Chinese markets, Americans are opting out of what they perceive as a socialist-dominated culture, creating a "monastery of the mind." Hanson discusses the broader implications of this shift, noting that traditional cultural monopolies are crumbling as people reject network news, blockbuster movies, and even major sports events. This disengagement poses a dilemma for the left, which has leveraged...

The West Is Sick of the New Woke Jihadism By Victor Davis Hanson - RCP ContributorJune 14, 2024 The West Is Sick of the New Woke JihadismFR159526 AP What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting? What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about? Occupations? They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.

The more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent. What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting? What are the students at Stanford University vandalizing the president’s office really demonstrating against? What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about? Occupations? They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of...

Victor Davis Hanson delves into a critical topic: the worst thing any president has done in his lifetime. Drawing upon his vast expertise and deep knowledge of American history, Hanson offers thought-provoking insights and analysis on this significant subject. Through meticulous research and captivating storytelling, he uncovers the actions and decisions that he believes have had the most detrimental impact on our nation.

<p>Why Are They Destroying Us?</p><p>If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?</p>

Why Are They Destroying Us? If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves? Here are eleven now familiar steps to civilizational destruction: 1) Wipe out a 2,000 mile border. Allow 10-million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal immigration laws. Let toxic drugs in that kill 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support for those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as racists and xenophobes....

If Biden and his handlers have taught us anything, human nature cannot be fooled, and the current four-year experiment will have to end before it ends us—and soon. Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms. There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us. Still, leftists look...

In this short video, VDH discusses the lies that the Democrats are selling that are destroying the economy, the middle class, the military and the moral fabric of America.

It is past time for the media and Democrats to drop the ruse of Biden’s “neutrality and admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November and so are conniving to silence them. The five criminal and civil prosecutions of Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them. But Joe Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Donald Trump. Biden was upset because any delay might...

A single generation has broken apart the great chain of American civilizational continuance. Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1967 inaugural address, famously remarked, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.” Reagan today might have expanded on his theme by declaring that civilization itself is both fragile and can lost by a generation that recklessly spends its inheritance while neither appreciating nor replenishing it—if not ridiculing those who sacrificed so much to provide it. Such is the noxious epitaph of the Baby Boomer generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence...

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies. Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization. Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so. But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed...

After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.”No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks.But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement — and why now?Rarely has the global rhetoric of mass annihilation reached such a crescendo as the present, as existential wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza.In particular,...

Editor’s note: Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield has written a powerful new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left. Highly original and urgently relevant, Domestic Enemies unveils the hypocrisies and destructive schemes of the Left, revealing that it has been trying to destroy America from its very founding – using many of the same tactics that it employs today.Democrats claim Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were the fathers of their party. The truth is that their party started out as a radical leftist movement set up by supporters of the French Revolution to seize power in America.Learn why...