Free Republic

..... Episodes like this may be one reason the red wave didn’t materialize, why Republicans failed to usher in a new dawn of prosperity for the multiracial working class that Republican leaders from Senator Ted Cruz to the House policy honcho Jim Banks say they want to champion. When it came down to it, the Republican Party offered ordinary American workers little that might have bolstered their power or leveled the economic playing field. That failure helped dash conservative hopes for a clean Republican sweep. Mutual recriminations will ping-pong around right-wing circles in the coming days and weeks. Most will...

Donald Trump has made a courageous decision in backing the Hillbilly Elegy author in the Ohio GOP Senate primary. --------- Former President Donald Trump made the most courageous decision of his post-presidency so far by endorsing J.D. Vance for the GOP Senate Primary in Ohio. Vance is an authentic representative of America’s populist tradition, contending against a field of establishment phonies. For the discontent that propelled Trump to the White House in 2016 to be addressed, Vance must find his way into the halls of the Senate. And thanks to Don’s nod, he likely will. A disclosure: Vance and I...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a very big deal and a very bad thing. Permit me to stipulate that, before going on to observe that the event has also triggered the latest outbreak of mass hysteria among the Western ruling class, the severest yet. Just when sobriety, responsibility, probity, and diplomatic skill are most needful, our pundits and policymakers offer the opposite: trembling emotion, cheap propaganda, wild fantasies, a refusal to dialogue and de-escalate. And the worst part is: It’s all so damned familiar. Once more, we are falling—or rather, being driven—into structural information traps that hamper sound decision-making and...

One of the unfortunate vestiges of liberalism's lingering influence upon American conservatism, and by extension the Republican Party that is conservatism's default political vehicle, is the pervasive knee-jerk tendency to view government action as per se bad and private-sector action as per se good. This ideology, which might be called "market fundamentalism" or "private-sector fundamentalism," takes on differing forms: in its more benign variation, a principled commitment to unwavering laissez faire, but in its more malignant variation, a less principled commitment to corporate boosterism and outright cronyism. The realignment now unfolding before our eyes in American politics could finally retire...

French has slandered his Christian brothers and sisters by writing that 'millions of Trump-supporting white Evangelicals no longer care about character.' David French remains very disappointed that many of his fellow evangelicals support President Donald Trump. He has used the Wuhan virus pandemic to reiterate and expand his arguments against the president’s character and competence (spoiler: He still thinks Trump is too wicked and incompetent for Christians to vote for him).But he ignores that evangelical support for Trump, warts and all, is justified by principles French has urged on us — namely, that ours is not a Christian nation...

Even on its own terms, the media’s Get Trump project has proved a monumental failure. If the blob of blue-checkmark Twitterati wanted to help President Trump portray the latest impeachment push as a partisan witch hunt, they couldn’t have done a better job than they are now. Consider the latest example: On Sunday, CBS’ venerable “60 Minutes” program reported on Twitter that “the government whistleblower who set off the impeachment inquiry of President Trump is under federal protection because they fear for their safety.” The explosive news seemed to vindicate his opponents’ darkest fantasies about the president: Of course Trump...

Recently Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor of The New York Post, saw something online that left him shaken. “This is demonic,” he tweeted. “To hell with liberal order.” His moral indignation led him to write a much discussed essay in the religious journal First Things. Castigating conservatives who see a possibility of coexistence with the left, he called for a religious Reconquista of American politics. The right, he argued, should “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest...

Mike Pompeo doesn’t reckon himself a media critic, but the secretary of state can’t help but grin at the hysterical coverage that attends the Trump administration’s every move on the world stage. The latest example came last week, when reporters and liberal foreign-policy types managed to convince themselves that Team Trump was prepping a full-scale invasion of Iran. “White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War” screamed a New York Times headline. “When you see that headline, it’s flashy, but it doesn’t begin to reflect the depth of the work that’s been done,” Pompeo says as...

Over the past two days, nearly every major media outlet reported that the Trump administration either objected to or "diluted" a United Nations resolution condemning rape as a weapon of war. "US threatens to veto UN resolution on rape as weapon of war, officials say," a headline from The Guardian read. "UN waters down rape resolution to appease US's hardline abortion stance," read a second article in The Guardian. "United States dilutes UN rape-in-war resolution," read the headline from the BBC. "Trump administration forces UN to water down resolution opposing rape in war," was the headline from the Independent. "The...

The prestige press has some explaining to do — for subjecting the nation to a long, cruel ordeal named “collusion” and “obstruction.” Almost two years and millions of column inches later, special counsel Robert Mueller has revealed the theory that President Trump and his campaign conspired with Russia has been just that. All that remains of collusion and obstruction is the media’s shattered credibility. The errant reporters and pundits — the ones who peddled the most outrageous falsehoods — want nothing more than to move on. But not so fast: There has to be some accountability for the biggest foul-ups.