Free Republic

What many political observers initially expected to be a titanic clash between Georgia's incumbent Republican governor and the former president of the United States turned out to be a lopsided fight. Brian Kemp thumped Donald Trump's hand-picked challenger in the GOP primary, advancing to a gubernatorial re-match with Democrat Stacey Abrams in November. Abrams starts the general election campaign in a defensive crouch, engaged in damage control over her "worst state" self-inflicted blunder – while spinning incoherently about how "increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression," as her "Jim Crow 2.0" demagoguery goes up in smoke. Her opponent is...

Right now, the fight for control of Ukraine is taking place in the skies above Kyiv and in the streets of Mariupol. However while the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the sky and on the land has ground to a stalemate, Vladimir Putin and his virtual war machine dedicated to sowing disinformation are decidedly losing the information war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine marks the first major conflict in Europe to take place in the age of social media, an online space that Vladimir Putin has spent decades working to dominate. Over the years, Putin has carefully constructed...

The war in Ukraine is still in its early stages, but Russia has likely already lost. The famous war theorist Carl von Clausewitz told us that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” The key word here is “means.” In other words, wars should have a clear political objective on what the use of force is supposed to achieve. Vladimir Putin’s war aims seem muddled. Similarly, the West’s retaliatory economic sanctions attempt to use economic coercion to achieve a political end (Russian policy change). However, in applying violence or economic coercion, humans, even though the stakes are usually...

After the end of the Cold War, foreign policy experts across the spectrum assured us that things had changed. Wars of pure border conquest were over. Wars over oil would soon be a thing of the past. Instead, the increasingly intertwined world would move toward peace. Thomas Friedman suggested in his massive 1999 bestseller "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" that no two countries with McDonald's would go to war with each other; Francis Fukuyama stated in "The End of History and the Last Man" that we had reached the "end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western...

Commentators have assumed that the Ukraine stands little chance of fending off an overwhelming onslaught from Russia because of Russia’s vastly superior troop and weapons strength. But history proves an inferior force dedicated to unconventional warfare can so damage a superior one as to compel its withdrawal or cause its defeat. The American Revolution proved that point in the Eighteenth Century. Consider Russia’s horrendous losses in Afghanistan before it was forced to withdraw. We ourselves experienced a comparable disaster in Vietnam and many would argue in Afghanistan. Based on those and other examples, the Ukrainians’ fate is indeed very much...

Have you noticed how many on the right have changed from being for vaccine choice to becoming anti-vaccine regarding COVID-19? It’s so subtle that most of us haven’t noticed, but there is definitely a shift taking place. This is worrisome, because a lot of elderly people with susceptible conditions are placing themselves at risk of dying without getting the vaccine. Now, what if this is because there is a secret effort on the left to push this shift, since it will result in fewer voters on the right? A look at the data across the U.S. in counties with the...

During Donald Trump's second impeachment trial last February, his lawyers argued that he bore no responsibility for the riot that interrupted the congressional tally of Joe Biden's electoral votes on Jan. 6 because "the breach at the Capitol was planned several days in advance." In their view, that meant the violence had nothing to do with the inflammatory speech that Trump gave that day, during which he urged his supporters to "fight like hell" and "stop the steal." That defense elided the months that Trump spent promoting the fantasy that systematic election fraud had deprived him of his rightful victory,...

Donald Trump’s greatest accomplishment as president may not have been the policies he enacted or the justices he appointed. Instead, as important as those accomplishments were and are, it is possible that the most important thing he did as president was to say to the political world, “I will not play your games. I am the champion of the people, not a member of the good old boys club.” But now that he has broken the mold, thrown out the old rule book, and forged a new path of leadership, it will be best in 2024 for another conservative leader...

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is drowning in red ink, having lost $9.2 billion in 2020 alone. Things weren’t looking rosy before the pandemic, either. In fact, America’s mail carrier has shed more than $80 billion over the past 15 years. When faced with such gargantuan losses, many businesses swiftly introduce far-reaching changes to pivot back to profitability. But owing to the strange, tangled status of the USPS as a government-managed enterprise, key decisions to get the agency back into the black are undermined by the actions of other branches of government. In recent years, the judicial branch has played...

It is very possible that Donald Trump will continue to have great political influence in the years to come. It is also possible that he will have the health and vitality to run for president again in 2024. It is even possible that he will win. But one thing is sure: Donald Trump will not be reinstated as president this year or, for that matter, any year before 2024. Sorry, but facts are facts.

Netanyahu has ended his tenure in a less than respectable way on many levels. I've written about that a lot as one who voted Likud/Netanyahu every election the past 20 years except for two, most notably the last one. He's got so many truly great achievements for which he deservingly can take credit. But he made it way too clear that his politics was about him, not the country. The last number of days leading up to the vote this week, he tried every trick in the book, and then made up some more, to do anything to stay in...

I've been very open about my own decision to get vaccinated, while highlighting excellent news about the vaccines' efficacy. They work remarkably well and have worked wonders, unlike the Chinese Communist Party's less sophisticated and less effective versions. Two points, before proceeding further. We know that some "breakthrough cases" do occur among vaccinated people, hence news accounts about recent positive tests from comedian Bill Maher, several New York Yankees, and a pair of passengers on an all-vaxxed cruise ship. The incredibly reassuring news about these examples is that Maher "never was sick, I felt nothing," which was also the case...

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is out as Republican conference chair in the House of Representatives. The story has dominated American news outlets over the past week. Most Americans are probably hard-pressed to care about the story, but to the political press in the United States, the story has mattered deeply. This past Tuesday night, as rockets rained down on Tel Aviv from Gaza, the press was focused on Cheney's pending ouster, which happened Wednesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, while President Joe Biden was holding a press conference about the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, MSNBC was holding a panel discussion about Cheney...

Were you upset with the “You’re next” tweet of LeBron James, targeting police officer Nicholas Reardon? Did you find it irresponsible and potentially dangerous? Would you agree that a man of LeBron’s massive influence should be more careful in venting his frustration and anger? Is it possible that the tweet, which LeBron deleted (while blaming others for the hatred), could jeopardize Reardon’s safety, along with that of his loved ones? Could it potentially incite some unstable person to try to take “justice” into his own hands?If you answered “yes” to all these questions, then I’m with you, 100 percent. There...

Chicago holds its breath, awaiting release of a police video showing 13-year-old Adam Toledo, reportedly with a gun, shot dead by a cop.The city by the lake hasn't recovered from the waves of looting and other violence that grew out of last year's George Floyd protests. Just look at all the vacant storefronts on North Michigan Avenue, the "Magnificent Mile." And now Chicago looks north to a trembling Minneapolis, a city on edge with the murder trial of Floyd's alleged killer, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a white man. Floyd was Black.Just a short drive from Minneapolis, in Brooklyn...

Donald Trump's presidency provided a rich trove of examples for my annual review of the year's highlights in blame-shifting. The 2020 edition focuses on the question Trump has been trying to answer for nearly two months: Why did he lose the presidential election? By Trump's account, it was not because voters preferred Joe Biden. Rather, Trump was denied a second term by a long list of malefactors who delivered a phony victory to Biden or ratified that outcome. These criminal conspirators and after-the-fact accessories included:Dominion Voting SystemsVenezuela, Cuba and ChinaGeorge Soros and the Clinton Foundation (and more)

FORT WAYNE, Ind. — Sen. Elizabeth Warren said at an MSNBC town hall on Wednesday night that Joe Biden is wrong for supporting a ban on federal funding for abortion and that President Donald Trump "would be carried out in handcuffs" if he were anybody else.

America's biggest -- and scariest -- problem: Most Americans no longer know what America stands for. For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico. ... The left, unlike most Americans, has always understood that either the left is right, or America is right. America stands for small government, a free economy (and therefore, capitalism), liberty (which therefore allows for its inevitable consequence: inequality), the melting pot ideal and a God-centered population rooted in Judeo-Christian values (so that a moral society is created by citizens exercising self-control rather than relying on the state to...

I intend to vote for Donald Trump, and just typing those words makes me throw up a little. Make that a lot, and for distance. Yeah, I know Trump is a clown, but so is Hillary Clinton, and while he’s sort of an irascible and tacky Ronald McDonald, she is freaking Pennywise. Now, if you want to see my Trump-slamming bona fides, you can Google my CNN appearances where I was the go-to conservative who would reliably trash the loudmouth Republican nominee until I dared attack Hillary and mussed their carefully coiffed narrative. But I haven't changed my mind about...

Donald Trump has presented himself as a protector of conservative Christians and as the best friend Christians will ever have. He has held up his mother’s Bible and pledged to bring Christ back into Christmas. But when the rubber meets the road, he is anything but the defender of conservative Christians and their values. This became crystal clear yesterday morning (April 21), when Trump, appearing on the Today show, answered questions on abortion, North Carolina’s Bathroom Privacy Act, and transgender rights. When he was asked if he would like to change the Republican Party Platform on abortion, which allows no...