Free Republic

Amid doubts about Biden's ability to effectively lead the U.S. in his remaining months as president, our enemies abroad might see an opportunity to alter the global balance of power. There are three current hot or cold wars: on the Ukrainian border, in the regions surrounding Israel, and in the strategic space between Taiwan and mainland China. All three conflicts could not only expand within their respective theaters but also escalate to draw in the United States. And all three involve nuclear powers. Various Russian megaphones routinely threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Some boast about sending strategic...

Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College, Pepperdine professor, syndicated columnist, bestselling author, and fifth-generation California farmer, argues in his July 29, 2024 article that American society is treating its citizens like lab rats, resulting in harmful outcomes. Read the article here: https://victorhanson.com/americas-lab... Transcript link below the video.

Have those who lectured us about democracy in danger now decided to save it by destroying it? The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic. Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic. That allegation subsequently justified a variety of anti-democratic means to neuter his first two presidential candidacies, his presidency, and now his third and final run for the White House. A near decade ago, we witnessed the 2015-2016 Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee/FBI-assisted effort to plant...

The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history. Here are 10 unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world: 1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now? 2. Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her last three decades of leftist...

ProjectionismProjection is a Freudian psychological term. It describes a particular defensive mechanism, when people, often unconsciously, attribute their own (usually undesirable) behaviors to others who do not have them. These mental gymnastics are intended to alleviate one’s own guilt or sense of inadequacy at the expense of another. Sound familiar? But in the political sphere, projection involves more overt dissimulation. It is increasingly common for leftist candidates or political parties to falsely accuse their opponents of the very destructive behaviors and unpopular agendas that they themselves embrace, but out of political necessity must deny. Rather than an unconscious Freudian defense...

This warped election violates every prior precedent and is not just creepy but dangerous—even before the campaign was supposed to formally begin. The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history. Here are ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world: 1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now? 2. Would the media prefer to...

The president, the Democratic presidential candidate, and the vice presidential nominee all either cannot or will not speak casually and publicly to elected representatives, reporters, or the people. BidenPresident Biden was forced, unceremoniously and unwillingly, to abdicate from his impending reelection nomination. Since then, we have neither seen nor heard much from our sitting President. He has vanished, poof, gone. This is quite unusual if not alarming. Unlike prior to the June 27 debate, the left now makes no effort to hide Biden’s debility. Indeed, it accepts the reality that an infirm Biden might not be able to finish out...

Joe Biden won in 2020 on the premise that until the November election, he would pose as good ol’ Joe from Scranton and not scare voters. So Biden talked about “unity” and “competency.” He erased his prior wild primary pandering to left-wing voters about shutting down fracking and opening the border. But as soon as he was elected in 2020, Biden became the leftist veneer for a hyper-radical Obama third term. Fooled and naïve voters were shocked that their supposedly moderate candidate turned into a veritable neo-socialist president. In general, the left acknowledges that its spread-the-wealth, high taxes, big government,...

Moving forward, Donald Trump needs to focus his attack on the disastrous Biden governance of the last four years. Make Harris own it. And contrast it with 2017-21 and what will follow in 2025. The Good NewsThe good news for the Trump campaign is that the sure Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is a lifelong California hard leftist at a time when the state is emblematic of progressive nihilism. Her extremist advocacies as a San Francisco county and city attorney, state Attorney General, and senator are on record. And they are consistent with what has virtually destroyed the state. Harris was...

Kamala Harris will struggle to replicate Joe Biden's 2020 election strategy in 2024 due to her inability to project a moderate image and her radical political history. Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election through a successful tripartite subterfuge. One, Biden never really campaigned. His handlers rightly assumed that the more the public and the media saw a debilitated Biden in the flesh, the less they would want him as president. So, the Biden campaign used the COVID lockdowns to ensure that Biden stayed safe in his basement office. Biden strategically distanced himself from disinterested journalists, using COVID as an...

Many Americans feel that the country has become unrecognizable due to decades of globalization and a technological revolution that has eroded middle-class livelihoods and deepened social divides. Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up. Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace? Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory...

**SNIP** In sum, at the 11th hour of a two-year reelection effort, a cabal arbitrarily decided that Biden might well lose the Democrats the White House and the Congress. So they reversed course, now claiming his dementia was so acute as to destroy their November prospects. But, mysteriously, his decline was not severe enough to imperil the American people, whom Biden must continue to lead until January 20, 2025. Furthermore, the bosses’ replacement choice, Harris, had entered no primary. She never won a single delegate. Harris also never captured a single delegate in her first and only presidential run back...

In 2020, covert actors manipulated the Democratic primary to ensure Joe Biden's nomination and later controlled his presidential agenda, ultimately forcing him to step down in favor of Kamala Harris. In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden. Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina. Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply...

When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton. What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump. The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it. In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent. Hillary...

Can we cease the charge of Trump the fascist since it has not only been proven false but has revealed far more about the authoritarian and conspiratorial nature of the accusers than their target? Who has most peddled conspiracy allegations the last nine years—all of them false and nearly all of them influencing national elections and public policies? Once a target is constructed as Hitlerian, almost any means necessary to quash that perceived existential threat become justified. And we have seen a lot of them in the last nine years. Russian collusion did not work. Christopher Steele was a fraud....

Why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president? When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton. What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump. The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it. In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher...

Removing Biden is wise and needed for the country’s sake, but it will not solve the growing public anger at the left. Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems. Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of...

If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way: We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence. But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book is a macabre warning to an aging America as it closes in on its 250th birthday. The warning comes in the form of a graphic depiction of the hideousness of war and the terrifying state of those who suffer ignominious defeat. However different the four societies described in the book were, be they Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, or Aztecs, each was blinded by the illusion of invincibility. Hanson shows that such an illusion is so persistent that even as the conquered were being slaughtered, they continued to think: “It cannot happen here.” Thebes, the 4th century...

Leonid Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1982. But like most Russian apparatchiks who excessively smoked, drank, and gained weight, he aged prematurely. Also like them, his disabilities never led to his abdication. By Brezhnev’s late sixties and early seventies, he was too ill to travel abroad or make public appearances. Indeed, his debility left the Soviet Union without a real leader for the final six or seven years of his tenure. Brezhnev got away with it because the Soviet state-controlled media doctored photos and videos to attest to his supposedly vigorous...