Free Republic

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists. What we know as "the media" never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged... ...the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives. Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to...

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists. What we know as "the media" never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency. No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup -- and becoming irrelevant even among progressives. Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent...

The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct and operates from cunning — and we will soon see whether we should redefine “wisdom.”

<p>He grasped that what voters cared about were the very issues politicos were disdainfully ignoring.</p> <p>The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct and operates from cunning — and we will soon see whether we should redefine “wisdom.” But for now, for example, we have never heard a presidential candidate say such a thing as “We love our miners” — not “we like” miners, but “we love” them. And not just any miners, but “our” miners, as if, like “our vets,” the working people of our moribund economic regions were unique and exceptional people, neither clingers nor irredeemables. In Trump’s gut formulation, miners certainly did not deserve “to be put out of business” by Hillary Clinton, as if they were little more than the necessary casualties of the war against global warming. For Trump, miners were not the human equivalent of the 4,200 bald eagles that the Obama administration recently assured the wind turbine industry can be shredded for the greater good of alternate energy and green profiteering.</p>

President-elect Donald Trump is being faulted for supposedly appointing too many retired generals to Cabinet-level jobs and "militarizing" the government. Former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is slated to be national security adviser. Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis has been nominated as defense secretary. Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly is Trump's nominee for secretary of homeland security. High-ranking officers such as Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Michael Rogers have been rumored for other positions in the Trump administration. All are retired as well as seasoned veterans. They have been previously entrusted with the lives of thousands of soldiers, and they...

Victor Davis Hanson speaks about the 2016 election and the myths surrounding it at the David Horowitz Freedom Center held in Palm Beach two weeks ago. A truly outstanding talk that will have you standing on your chair and cheering. Click here.Running time approximately 45 minutes.

<p>What would happen if conservatives started to change the words we use for political ends?</p> <p>Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.</p> <p>And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.</p>

Reformulating the Republican message, Donald Trump was able to exploit political mistakes Democrats have made. The Democratic Party handed Donald Trump a rare opportunity to make radical changes in the electoral map that could last for years to come.

The Democratic Party handed Donald Trump a rare opportunity to make radical changes to the electoral map that could last for years to come. First, the Democrats gave Trump a great gift by completing the ongoing radicalization of their party under President Obama. After 2008, it was no longer a party of the working and middle classes, but a lopsided political pyramid. On top were the cynical elites who turned up in the WikiLeaks John Podesta email trove: self-important media members, Ivy League grandees, Silicon Valley billionaires, Wall Street plutocrats and coastal corridor snobs. They talk left-wing but live royally....

Donald Trump’s victory confounded elite pollsters, journalists, politicians, academic experts and captains of industry. They all wrote him off as a fading gasbag. By every conventional barometer, he should have lost big time. His own party largely abandoned him. Former Republican presidents and primary rivals refused to endorse him. Donors bailed on him. His campaign staff was ridiculed as amateurish. Trump became the worst nightmare of the establishment, both Democratic and Republican. But unnoticed during the last month of the campaigning was a growing realization among Americans that the supposedly sober and judicious Hillary Clinton was irreparably disconnected. On the...

<p>Throughout the course of the 2016 election, the conventional groupthink was that the renegade Donald Trump had irrevocably torn apart the Republican Party. His base populism supposedly sandbagged more experienced and electable Republican candidates, who were bewildered that a “conservative” would dare to pander to hoi polloi by promising deportations of illegal aliens, renegotiation of trade agreements that “ripped off” working people, and a messy attack on the reigning political correctness.</p>

There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves. From hacked email troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter resumes, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful -- and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat. Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about...

Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure. This time the scandal comes from disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop computer, bringing more suggestions of Clinton's sloppy attitude about U.S. intelligence law. Meanwhile, seemingly every day WikiLeaks produces more evidence of the Clinton Foundation leveraging the Clinton State Department for pay-for-play profiteering. At this point, Clinton has trumped former President Richard Nixon's skullduggery -- but without the offset of Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments. Even before the most recent scandals, Clinton's campaign had an eerie resemblance to the Nixon playbook. Compare the election of 2016 to the election of 1972. The favored...

Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling. What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation? Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell? For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be...

Epic greed, power, and pride : Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling. What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation? Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell? For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to...

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead, and hoping that the election was sooner than later. Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one. With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal: the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure; Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader; Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero. Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were...

California State Route 99 is the north-south highway that cuts through the great Central Valley. And it has changed little since the mid-1960s. A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million -- not nearly 40 million as it is today -- the 99 used to be a high-speed, four-lane marvel. It was a crown jewel in California's cutting-edge freeway system. Not now. The 99 was recently ranked by ValuePenguin (a private consumer research organization) as the deadliest major highway in the nation. Locals who live along its 400-plus miles often go to bed after seeing lurid...

Conservatives should vote for the Republican nominee. Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary...

Pessimists often compare today's troubled America to a tottering late Rome or an insolvent and descending British Empire. But medieval Europe (roughly A.D. 500 to 1450) is the more apt comparison. The medieval world was a nearly 1,000-year period of spectacular, if haphazard, human achievement -- along with endemic insecurity, superstition and two, rather than three, classes. The great medieval universities -- at Bologna, Paris and Oxford -- continued to make strides in science. They were not unlike the medical and engineering schools at Harvard and Stanford. But they were not centers of free thinking. Instead, medieval speech codes were...

This summer, President Obama was often golfing. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were promising to let the world be. The end of summer seemed sleepy, the world relatively calm. The summer of 1914 in Europe also seemed quiet. But on July 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip with help from his accomplices, fellow Serbian separatists. That isolated act sparked World War I. In the summer of 1939, most observers thought Adolf Hitler was finally through with his serial bullying. Appeasement supposedly had satiated his once enormous territorial appetites. But on Sept. 1, Nazi...