Free Republic

I almost feel sorry for the anti-Trump-but-more-anti-anti-Trump conservatives. I know—you had to read that sentence twice. I’ll explain. These are right-wingers who oppose Donald Trump—because of his efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, or his often-incoherent policies, or his utter lack of decency, or his destructive influence on the right, or all of the above—but who devote more energy to decrying liberals for overreacting to and for persecuting Trump. I’m not referring here to Never Trumpers like neocon Bill Kristol or the gang at the Lincoln Project—those onetime Republicans who have readily joined forces with Democrats and progressives to oppose...

The cataract of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses has been shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It is the poisoned fruit of teaching a generation of college students to despise their own civilization. Jesse Jackson famously led a chant at Stanford University in 1987: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” He was talking about the college course, but he might as well have been talking about the thing itself. Jackson and his allies had extraordinary success in extinguishing the teaching of Western Civ. Not only have we largely stopped transmitting the story of our own civilization,...

Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday directed the Florida Department of Education to suspend four schools from the state’s school-choice scholarship program because of their alleged “direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.” “Through a thorough investigation, FDOE has determined that Lower and Upper Sagemont Preparatory Schools in Weston, Parke House Academy in Winter Park, and Park Maitland School in Winter Park have direct ties to the CCP and their connections constitute an imminent threat to the health, safety, and welfare of these school’s students and the public,” the DeSantis administration said in a statement. The Florida DOE is working with...

There’s being fortunate in your enemies, and then there’s having enemies who are helping you take the first step in your political comeback. Donald Trump and his adversaries want profoundly different things in the long run — Trump wants to be back in the White House; Democrats want him in an orange jumpsuit. Yet in the shorter term, they both are seeking the same thing — Trump as the Republican nominee, either so he can sweep to victory (Trump’s view) or be beaten again and pay the price for his crimes (the Democrats’ view). The serial indictments of Trump, even...

Donald Trump hasn’t been known for his scrupulously correct use of language, but he now wants to police the use of “woke.” “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘woke, woke, woke,’” he said the other day. “It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.” Of course, Trump wasn’t randomly volunteering his equivalent of an elementary rule of usage from Strunk & White. His newfound disdain for the term “woke” has everything to do with his contest with Ron DeSantis for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. ***...

Divorce usually isn’t a good idea, and that’s especially true of a nearly 250-year-old continental nation. The notion of a national breakup has long simmered as a fringe argument, but it is increasingly popular in certain precincts of the political right and has gained at least some traction with partisans of both sides. A recent survey by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia found that about 50 percent of Donald Trump voters and 40 percent of Joe Biden voters agreed to some extent with the proposition that the country should split up, with either red or blue...

Perhaps the most moderate candidate in the field as of this moment is Donald Trump. If you want a Republican who won’t cut spending or start foreign wars, Trump is still your man. Added to this now is clearly a discomfort with the fight over abortion in the post-Roe environment. Trump’s main line of attack against Ron DeSantis is from the left. He’s hitting the Florida governor hard for his past support for reining in Social Security and Medicare. He’s also called the governor’s culture-war clash with Disney “so unnecessary” and “a political stunt,” while not entering the fray in...

The Twitter Files released by Elon Musk give us a more fine-grained understanding of how and why the social media company decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. This was a woefully stupid decision. The New York Post’s account was suspended for two weeks for the offense of coming up with a scoop that we are still talking about and that will surely play a large role in upcoming GOP investigations into Biden family corruption. That’s the kind of thing that newspapers should get awards for; Twitter thought it should get punished for it. But the Twitter officials caught...

Kinzinger, a fervent Trump critic, was responding to claims Lowry made in a recent New York Times guest essay in which he argued that the various investigations into Trump, including the probe into his conduct on January 6, are unlikely to produce clear-cut evidence of the kind necessary to responsibly undertake the destabilizing exercise of prosecuting a former president. [cut] Kinzinger responded by arguing that existing law is surely broad enough to implicate Trump in criminal behavior on January 6, and even suggested passing new legislation targeting Trump if existing statues weren’t sufficient to prosecute. "Look, I had a lot...

There’s simply no market for this among Republicans. On top of it, Cheney’s alienation from her party is likely to build on itself. Already, she has said that she’d “find it very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis, the leading Republican alternative to Trump. In so doing, she is identifying herself with a fraction of a fraction of the party that is so small it is all but nonexistent. If she ran in a primary, she’d be firmly in the Larry Hogan lane, which might constitute about 5 percent of the Republican electorate total. It’s quite possible that those voters are...

In 2015, Donald Trump burst on the scene with a megaphone, a populist message, an army of grassroots supporters — and not much else. If he runs for the Republican nomination again, as seems likely, it will be different. Early in his first presidential campaign, he had to be grateful for every small crumb of support from Republican officialdom — an endorsement from then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, or former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Now, Trump is a former president of United States who looms incredibly large over his party. He and his loyalists have forged a new establishment —...

President Trump annihilates RINOs, “losers” and backstabbers in a Save America StatementIn a statement put out today by President Trump, he identifies and absolutely crushes 5 RINOs and backstabbers whom he describes as “shortsighted ‘losers'” who spend their time criticizing him and the America First movement, while providing nothing positive to the Republican Party or to this nation.President Trump’s statement reads:I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about...

p>Former President Donald Trump criticized three nominally conservative pundits as well as National Review magazine on Sunday following their recent dismissive pieces of the former president. Trump excoriated Peggy Noonan, columnist for The Wall Street Journal and former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan; Rich Lowry, editor of National Review; and George Will, columnist for the Washington Post."I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about him and his...

Former President Donald Trump issued a severe smackdown to his Republican haters in a statement on Sunday, characterizing them as talentless fools.Calling out George Will, Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, and others by name, the former president said that nobody should listen to such “foolish (stupid!) people”:I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about him and his ability to speak, or Rich Lowry, who has destroyed the once wonderful...

It’s understandable that Democrats would want to constantly revisit Jan. 6 — to invoke it, investigate it and sacralize it even. It’s a mystery, at least from a certain level of abstraction, why Republicans would want to have anything to do with that day or want to fixate on the 2020 election. The party is on the cusp of a midterm triumph, has enormous openings on the economy and education thanks to Biden administration stumbles and left-wing overreach, is making inroads among Hispanic voters and has a well-stocked political bench that Democrats should envy. Yet the GOP is stuck litigating...

On Ukraine, the neo-isolationists of the right are fighting the last war. [cut] It is certainly true that Bush administration foreign policy became much too idealistic, bordering on otherworldly, over time. That doesn’t mean that, in reaction, we need to jettison all moral discernment in foreign affairs. Yes, Ukraine is a corrupt and ramshackle democracy, but there can be no doubt about its superiority to Vladimir Putin’s venal dictatorship, or about Russia’s culpability for launching a hideous war of aggression. To say otherwise is to ignore all the relevant distinctions in this conflict — between who is the aggressor and...

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

Same old war pig TDS from the legacy media

On the cusp of Vladimir Putin’s act of naked aggression against the sovereign country of Ukraine, the most important Republican in the country praised the Russian autocrat for his “genius.” Former President Donald Trump’s comments were another instance of his shockingly favorable and morally bankrupt statements about Vladimir Putin over the years. Asked in a radio interview what had gone wrong that Putin recognized the independence of two Ukrainian breakaway regions on President Biden’s watch, Trump couldn’t muster one remotely appropriate sentiment. He immediately cited “the rigged election” of 2020, an obsession of his that is so all-consuming, it makes...

The past and current master of the GOP sees a future threat arising. [cut] “It was a mistake to ever embrace Donald Trump, and now we want to be the party of Adam Kinzinger.” [cut] Would DeSantis be audacious enough to run against Trump in 2024? The case against waiting is that it’s extremely unlikely that the governor can maintain his exalted status in the party until 2028. On the other hand, the case against running in 2024 is that it involves the enormous risk of encountering the business end of the Trump buzz saw, which could change DeSantis’s image...