Free Republic

The Civics Secures Democracy Act making its way through Congress threatens to create a national curriculum that would virtually compel teens to plunge into politics. It’s a horrible idea.Ever since the “don’t-trust-anyone-over-30” countercultural movements of the 1960s, we have been living in a culture that increasingly valorizes youth. In the view of the noted Harvard University cognitive scientist and author Steven Pinker, a technological change — the advent of television — is what propelled this social change.The baby boomers of the 1960s, the first generation to grow up en masse with a TV at home, received unprecedented access to each...

Kamala Harris knows that big business and big government can get along quite well—there is money to be made off of big government, and big business is often best positioned to make it. Wall Street loves Kamala Harris. According to the Wall Street Journal, which ought to know, “Much of Wall Street cheered” her selection as Joe Biden’s running mate. No surprise there. Despite Bernie Sanders and his followers, Wall Street and big business are at home in the Democratic Party. Big Tech in particular has reason to celebrate Harris’s selection, as she has close ties to Silicon Valley.There will,...

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” – ConfuciusDemocrats in Washington, and throughout the country, appear to have adopted a relatively new strategy of distortion. Not merely the usual politics of one-sided presentation, but a semi-concerted effort to refer to anything and everything as something which, by definition, they are not, a mostly deliberate attempt to change public opinion and political discourse, not by changing minds, but by changing words. This is a dangerous and counter-productive move, because, as Confucius correctly observed more than 2,000 years ago, “If names be not correct, language is not...

I just finished watching the amazing HBO miniseries "Chernobyl." It's one of the finest series ever produced. The biggest takeaway is how socialists and communists lie. It's in their DNA. They lie about everything. And those lies are often so absurd they get themselves in trouble. When it came to Chernobyl, the Soviet communist propaganda machine lied about everything. Officials denied there was any problem in the first place. Then they denied it was a complete meltdown. They denied nearby towns had to be evacuated. They denied the KGB knew there was a potential problem long before it happened but...

The only thing that should keep you roaring in laughter as Nancy Pelosi freaks out trying to keep a lid on the freak show that is the Democratic caucus is the knowledge that the freshmen freakettes giving her fits would impose an ideology of tyranny and murder if given the chance. But you can still allow yourself a good giggle as you watch Nancy’s dreams of a Democrat majority die on the altar of anti-Semitism, taking away your health insurance, and banning cheeseburgers.This was on display as the Democrats struggled to find a way to publicly pretend to condemn their...

The 2018 midterms were a disaster for House Republicans. Democrats gained 40 seats, retook the majority, and, to our horror, Nancy Pelosi is speaker again. They were elected to stop Trump, to block him at every turn, and lead the effort for his impeachment and removal from office. Any Democrat who says otherwise is lying. The base demands Trump go at all costs. The younger, feistier Democrats say that openly. The older crew tries to downplay it, but ultimately that’s their goal. They’re banking heavily that the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the DOJ’s Russia probe,...

Donald Trump requires an opposition to keep him in check, but also gives them plenty of ammunition to work with. So how did they still manage to blow it?The beginning of this year presented Democrats and their sympathizers in the media with both an important job and a big opportunity. Donald Trump governs in a style that somehow manages to combine authoritarian bluster with a total lack of self-discipline. He requires an effective political opposition to keep him in check, which also gives the opposition plenty of ammunition to work with.So how is that the Left spent most of 2017...

Democrats may be hoping to gain a midterm wave. They may be hoping even more to boot Donald J. Trump from the White House in 2020. The president’s response to the Charlottesville violence, the rolling back of the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals, Russian collusion hysteria, the slow pace of enacting his agenda—all of these things have Democrats grinning, expect that they shouldn’t. The party’s own operatives and data crunchers have run through the numbers based on focus groups, and Democrats are still heading for the electoral ditch. They still have yet to mount an effective attack against the...

Are the exit polls, on which just about every elections analyst has relied, wrong? That's a question raised by New York Times Upshot writer Nate Cohn -- a question whose answers have serious implications for how you look at the 2016 general election. Standard analysis is that Democrats have a built-in advantage because the electorate is increasingly non-white. The exit polls say the white percentage of the electorate declined from 77 percent in 2004 to 74 percent in 2008 and 72 percent in 2012. In that year, they said, 13 percent of voters were black, 10 percent Hispanics, 3 percent...

The media narrative for the last six months has been about how the Republican convention in Cleveland was going to be a fight, a mess, a second “mistake by the lake.” Journalists reveled in the prospect of a GOP floor fight and protests in the streets. What was missed, or more likely ignored, was the brawl happening on the left and the mess that could be the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. Yes, Cleveland will have protests. Republicans, conservatives, or even average Americans who simply want to be left alone cannot get together without the prospect of a mob of angry...

Why is John Kasich still in the campaign? Ted Cruz has to get 87% of the remaining delegates to win the nomination. Donald Trump will never get enough delegates to stop a brokered (read that contested) convention. Controversy everywhere. If it bleeds it leads. But the real story is how the Democratic bosses have stolen the nominating process for Hillary Clinton from the vastly more popular Bernie Sanders, everyone’s favorite socialist running for president. Sanders captured three states (Hawaii, Alaska and Washington) -- and by substantial margins --and the next day the talk was about him getting out of the...

I am so sick of these progressive Democrats waiting to pounce on death and exploit it to their advantage. It takes a special kind of person to do it, to see something awful unfolding on television and think, "How can I use this to my advantage?" That's the modern American left, and it has to be destroyed. While the San Bernardino terrorists were still at large, all three Democrats running for president took the opportunity to call for gun control. That's the sort of sociopathic disconnect from human decency we expect from serial killers, not someone who seeks to become...

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Matthew Dowd identified four factions that make up the Republican Party: the Tea Party, libertarians, social conservatives and establishment Republicans. Note that three of these groups are identified almost exclusively by how they think. Arguably the fourth is as well. The Republican Party definitely attracts people who take ideas seriously.What about the Democratic Party? It’s tempting to say that Democrats are liberal. But did you know that the base of the party – those that are the most reliable supporters of Democratic candidates – are not particularly liberal at all?According to Pew research,...

"Those who cannot remember the past," the philosopher George Santayana reminded us, "are condemned to repeat it." The young, particularly the young voters of 2016, have no memory of Bill Clinton, and we're all about to be treated to "a little deja vu all over again." The many sexual misadventures of Bill, who was the Bill Cosby of his day, and the excuses and enabling behavior of Hillary Clinton on his behalf, will come not as old news but as the newest of scandals. William Faulkner observed that the past is not dead because it is not even past --...

America's two major political parties have a difficult task: amassing a 51 percent coalition in a nation that has always been -- not just now, but from the beginning -- regionally, religiously, racially and ethnically diverse. George W. Bush's Republicans in 2006 and 2008 were not able to hold together the 51 percent coalition that re-elected him in 2004. Barack Obama's Democrats in 2014 were not able to hold together the 51 percent coalition that re-elected him in 2012. And, while the media and the voters are transfixed by the antics of Donald Trump, and speculating on possible damage to...

Tactics are important. History is replete with examples of superior forces being defeated by smaller armies with a better battle plan. Conservatives lose for the same reason: We have no battle plan. For years conservatives were content to be correct. Socialism doesn’t work. Fascism was a horrendous failure. Communism collapsed under its own weight. Each time conservatives were vindicated in their opposition to these failed branches of the progressive ideological tree. But at the end of each battle we made the mistake of assuming the war was over. It wasn’t and never will be. Every progressive victory was preceded by...

Nearly 10,000 people turned out to hear Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin. Why? Apparently, many Democrats want socialism. Sanders is the Vermont senator who is running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Sanders calls himself a "democratic socialist," not to be confused with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio's preferred label, "social democrat," but both believe that more power and wealth in the hands of government (less in the hands of free people and the free market) is a good thing. They just don't want you to think they're dictators like Stalin. They may institute terrible economic policies, but they'll...

I don't get depressed too often, but I feel the blues coming on. Many moons ago, if memory serves, I tweeted my skepticism that Hillary Clinton would even get the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, much less win the general election. I'm afraid I probably was right about her not getting the nomination, but I'm concerned that her implosion appears to be happening too soon -- with way too much time for Democrats to regroup. I realize that all of this is speculative and I could have egg all over my face if Hillary were to smoothly sail to the nomination...

Hillary Clinton is in a pickle. She's a shoe-in for her party's presidential nomination because of Barack Obama's failures. But those failures might keep her from getting the job. Her husband's "law of politics" is that elections are always about the future, but she's stuck in the past. In 2008, Obama pandered to liberal hopes while Clinton appealed to their good sense. Obama promised miracles and magic. Clinton promised more homework. "Cynicism" was Obama's real opponent, he explained. And he used Clinton as a stand-in for it. She played her part, pointing out that the Civil Rights Act got through...

If you walk along the quaint, cobblestoned streets of Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., you can see ads for newly renovated townhomes “starting at $3.945 million.” That’s not surprising for this famously liberal enclave. Something else jumps at you, the number of bumper stickers on Mercedes and Audi automobiles that say: “I’m ready for Hillary.” These are surely head-scratchers. Are they simply folks who backed the former Sec. of State in `08 who defiantly maintained their allegiance? Or, are they among the glitterati like Barbara Walters, who are crestfallen at President Obama’s failure to be their new “messiah.” If the latter,...