Free Republic

Neither the president nor his would-be successors talk much about the fact that we are now nearing $20 trillion in debt-in an ossified economy of near-zero interest rates, little if any GDP growth, and record numbers of able-bodied but non-working adults. (The most frequent complaint I hear in my hometown is that the government lags behind in their cost-of-living raises in Social Security disability payments.) No one can figure out how and why America's youth have borrowed a collective $1 trillion for college tuition, and yet received so little education and skills in the bargain. Today's campuses have become as...

<p>World War II broke out when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. A once preventable war had become inevitable -- and would soon become global -- due to three fatal decisions.</p> <p>Most infamously, the Western European democracies had appeased Hitler during the late 1930s in hopes that he would quit gobbling up his neighbors. Unfortunately, the Nazis considered Western appeasement as weakness to be manipulated rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated.</p>

Somehow, having an Enemies List is all right if you're Barack Obama and not Richard Nixon. It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chavez–like deterrent landscape, intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he is perfectly willing to use the federal government's vast power to go after those he finds politically inconvenient, while exempting those he understands to be sympathetic to his agendas. In Freudian fashion, Obama has long joked about using the power of government in a personal way. As early as 2009, when he had...

Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination -- if she is not indicted. After all, it is hard for a New England spread-the-wealth socialist like rival Bernie Sanders to appeal to working-class southern whites, minorities, or the wealthy Democratic establishment. It is still likely that the Democratic Party will find a way to aid an ailing and scandal-plagued Mrs. Clinton, rather than turn over its future to a 74-year-old scold, who for most of his voting life was not a Democrat and whose redistributionist agendas and Woodstock fables about the 1960s make Obama seem centrist in comparison. All that...

<p>The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015.</p> <p>While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent. More than 90 million able-bodied adults are either not currently in the labor force or have stopped looking for work altogether.</p>

White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society. The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites. One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak in a particular progressive manner, in dutiful obeisance to those who set up and perpetuate the racial spoils system. And three, racialism must remain defined as a one-way bias... Much of the liberal press has ridiculed Rubio and Cruz, either because their appearances and Cuban ancestry do not quite make them authentic "Latinos"...

<p>What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have to do with higher learning?</p> <p>American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.</p>

...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...