Free Republic

...Forget Trump and consider instead Trump’s constituencies. They are weary of being lectured that they deserve presidential rebuke for their supposed Islamophobia because they are angry about the terrorist killings of Americans. The middle classes are exhausted from being sermonized that they do not “pay their fair share,” when their state and federal tax bite is nearly 50 percent — especially when half the population pays no income tax, and massive federal entitlements have done little to address the pathologies of the underclasses. The contractor and the insurance salesman are furious at being scolded that “they didn’t build” their businesses,...

<p>I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants-and few in between. Or rather, as I gazed out on the California Aqueduct, the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Luis Reservoir, I realized we are like the hapless, squatter Greeks of the Dark Ages, who could not figure out who those mythical Mycenaean lords were that built huge projects still standing in their midst, long after Lord Ajax and King Odysseus disappeared into exaggeration and myth. Henry Huntington built the entire Big Creek Hydroelectric Project in the time it took our generation to go to three hearings on a proposed dam.</p>

<p>Western culture is deservedly exceptional. No other tradition has given the individual such security, freedom, and prosperity.</p> <p>The Athens-Jerusalem mixture of Christian humility (and guilt) and the classical Socratic introspection combined in the West to make it a particularly self-reflective and self-critical society, in a way completely untrue of other traditions.</p>

<p>One, Barack Obama is the Dr. Frankenstein of the supposed Trump monster.</p> <p>If a charismatic, Ivy League-educated, landmark president who entered office with unprecedented goodwill and both houses of Congress on his side could manage to wreck the Democratic Party while turning off 52 percent of the country, then many voters feel that a billionaire New York dealmaker could hardly do worse.</p>

Three truths fuel Donald Trump. One, Barack Obama is the Dr. Frankenstein of the supposed Trump monster. If a charismatic, Ivy League-educated, landmark president who entered office with unprecedented goodwill and both houses of Congress on his side could manage to wreck the Democratic Party while turning off 52 percent of the country, then many voters feel that a billionaire New York dealmaker could hardly do worse.

Western elites and Third World critics both enjoy Western largesse. Professing dislike of the West and its culture and legacy is an industry on campus. The subtext of “white privilege” is that it consists of unearned status accorded those of European background. To listen to the anti-Westerners, you would think that the inventors of electrical generation, indoor plumbing, and vaccinations were enemies of the planet. Multiculturalism, the orthodoxy of popular culture, and the current bite of the media and the arts are all predicated on the idea that Western civilization is more toxic than admirable. Citing the evils of the...

California has given us three new truths about government. One, the higher that taxes rise, the worst state services become. Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc. And three, the more existential the problem, the more the state ignores it. California somehow has managed to have the fourth-highest gas taxes in the nation, yet its roads are rated 44th among the 50 states. Nearly 70 percent of California roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition by the state Senate. In response, the state Legislature naturally wants to raise gas...

Barack Obama in the final stretch of his 2008 primary campaign explained away-off the record in an unguarded moment-his unpopularity in Pennsylvania. The problem then was a biased "them"-not so much the hard-left policies and principles of Barack Obama. These narrow-minded clingers were supposedly not fond of Obama and similar others "who aren't like them." Thus, because of their parochialism, nativism, and fundamentalism, the unenlightened voters of Pennsylvania were unable to appreciate Obama's message of "hope and change" and vero possumus-much less his landmark promises to return the Presidency to constitutional restraint, radically improve American health care, end the role...

Black Lives Matter and other, related groups are still demanding that Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel step down well before his term expires. It appears that Emanuel did not release for over a year a police video showing the possibly unjustified shooting of criminal suspect Laquan McDonald. He apparently was too afraid of losing his reelection bid to another liberal--and expected that, as a former Obama confidant, he would be granted immunity from inner-city anger. Is liberal anger at the liberal Emanuel a new trend? Will populists one of these days go after the newly declared populist Hillary Clinton for her...

American elites take a perverse view of what ISIS is really after. "Playing into the hands of ISIS" is the new Beltway mantra. The finger-shaking by the administration and its supporters warns Americans not to give in to their supposedly natural biases against Muslims. Never mind that FBI statistics show that Jews in this country are the objects of hate crimes at nearly four times the rate of Muslims. It is mysteriously never reported who are the main perpetrators of hate crimes against Jews. In any case, when the administration alleges Islamophobia, it assumes that if it did not, ISIS...

Victor Davis Hanson, whose family has lived in California for generations, has written a new book. Jarrett Stepman of Breitbart reviewed The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction, where Hanson paints a stark picture of California’s decline from a state that exemplified the American dream to one crushed under the weight of its utopian vision. …Clearly modeled on famous British historian Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hanson’s book makes it clear that the increasingly dystopian California has been the author of its own decline. A half-century of bad policy and failed ideology...

College football players are gladiators of sorts. On the one hand, they are vastly underpaid for the risks they take as well as the profits they generate for the university and the scores of jobs they subsidize. On the other, in terms of college protocols, they are pampered and exempt from rules that other students follow. Being exploited and privileged is a bad combination. For half a century, liberals have pointed out that football players should drop the amateur pretense, join a semi-pro club, and make the money they deserve -- given that their admissions, grades, and class attendance are...

Too many Muslim immigrants are angry rather than grateful toward their new country. Why would Ms. Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan but lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia, want to come to the United States? She obviously hated the United States and its values, at least enough to help stockpile an arsenal and to kill 14 people and wound another 21 in San Bernardino. Or for that matter, why did her husband and co-mass-murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, if he was unhappy with his native America, not return to his parents' Pakistan, where he might, in greater...

Turkey often appeals to the West for support, given its longtime membership in NATO. Now, Turkish leadership is in a shouting match with Russia's provocative president, Vladimir Putin, over Turkey's downing of a Russian jet in probable Turkish airspace. Each country has accused the other of helping terrorists in Syria. The problem with Turkey and the West, however, is that their relationship is decades out of date. What was once an alliance is now nothing special at all. Barack Obama used to lecture reluctant Europeans about why they should accept Turkey into the European Union as its first Islamic...

A few hours before the catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now “contained,” a recalibration of his earlier assessments of “on the run” and “Jayvees” from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide bombers and mass murderers in Paris, the Western press talked of the “scourge of terrorism” and “extremist violence”. Who were these terrorists and generic extremists who slaughtered the innocent in Paris — anti-abortionists, Klansmen, Tea-party zealots? This sickness in the West manifests itself in a variety of creepy ways — to hide bothersome reality by inventing...

Republicans should be upbeat. They control by large margins the state legislatures and governorships. The Supreme Court is a bit more conservative than liberal. The House and Senate are both run by Republicans. President Obama, after veritably wrecking his party, has for some time scarcely polled above 45 percent in approval ratings — even after borrowing $8 trillion to spread the wealth, pandering to spec ial interests, echoing nonstop the assertions of his iconic status, and blaming all his failures on his predecessors and opponents. In addition, parties usually do not succeed in winning the presidency for three consecutive terms....

Truck drivers, trappers, farmers don't rate in the eyes of our elites. A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by a Nobel laureate, revealed a spiraling death rate since 1999 of Americans described as middle-aged (45 to 54), middle/working-class (without a college degree) whites (apparently self-identified as such). That is not supposed to happen to sizable demographic groups in our postmodern societies. The regression to shortened lifespans is more akin to the trend in the old Soviet Union than in the United States. The supposed culprits are inordinate use of alcohol and drugs (both legal and...

The establishment needs to stop patronizing the grass-roots and listen to their concerns. Republicans should be upbeat. They control by large margins the state legislatures and governorships. The Supreme Court is a bit more conservative than liberal. The House and Senate are both run by Republicans. President Obama, after veritably wrecking his party, has for some time scarcely polled above 45 percent in approval ratings - even after borrowing $8 trillion to spread the wealth, pandering to special interests, echoing nonstop the assertions of his iconic status, and blaming all his failures on his predecessors and opponents. In addition, parties...

(snip) Long after Barack Obama is gone and ensconced in warm-weather golf-course mansions, the country will remain divided. The them/us splits are the real Obama legacy that tops even his $20 trillion in debt, chronic zero interest rates, a wrecked Middle East, stagnant growth, a hemorrhaging medical system, and record labor non-participation rates. A shattered Humpty Dumpty could not be put back together again. The question is not just whether America's shards can be re-glued into a whole, but whether Obama and those who have profited from breaking apart the body politic even wish it ever to be whole again.

Germany's political stability and economic sway have until recently earned Chancellor Angela Merkel unprecedented global influence and power. Postwar Germany has become the financial powerhouse of Europe and a model nation. Give credit to German hard work and competency for the country's continuing economic miracle. Less appreciated is how Germany also brilliantly exploited the lucrative in-house trade framework of the European Union market — along with nearly seven decades of subsidized defense from an American-led NATO. The result is that Germany alone now determines the fiscal future of the nearly insolvent southern European Union nations on the Mediterranean. Germany was...