Free Republic

Reprinted from City Journal. Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also...

The Trump family is no doubt canny about the dog-eat-dog landscapes of the Manhattan real estate lagoon. But when the Trumps arrived in Washington, as political novices they entered an entirely new swampland, with which so far they remain unfamiliar. Their transition down the coastal corridor is sort of like leaving a Florida bog of alligators and water moccasins and thereby assuming one is de facto prepared to enter the far deadlier Amazon jungle of caimans, piranhas, and Bushmasters. Here, then, are some Beltway Swamp rules: 1) Improper Meetings. Always meet in his/hers jets, “accidentally” nose to nose on the...

North Korea recently test-launched a long-range missile capable of reaching Alaska. When North Korea eventually builds a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, it will double down on its well-known shakedown of feigning indifference to American deterrence while promising to take out Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle unless massive aid is delivered to Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un rightly assumes that wealthy Western nations would prefer to pay bribe money than suffer the loss of a city -- and that they have plenty of cash for such concessions. He is right that the medicine of taking out Kim's missiles...

Celebrities, academics, and journalists have publicly threatened or imagined decapitating Donald Trump, blowing him up in the White House, shooting him, hanging him, clubbing him, and battering his face. They have compared him to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. And some have variously accused him of incestuous relations with his daughter and committing sex acts with Vladimir Putin, while engaging in some sort urination-sex in a hotel in Moscow. Yet all this and more is often alleged to be the singular dividend of Trump’s own crudity, as if his own punching back at critics created the proverbial progressive “climate of fear”...

(excerpt) We do not know whether there is a saturation point at which Trump’s base will tire of the occasional ad hominem crude tweets, but so far we clearly have not reached it. Why? So far, for three reasons. First, half the country despises the mainstream media and sees it as arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, and in need of comeuppance. Trump is not running against a centrist populist Democrat like John Kennedy or Harry Truman, but a crude Resistance of foul mouths like Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), unhinged celebrities like Maher and Colbert,...

The progressive strategy of investigating President Donald Trump nonstop for Russian collusion or obstruction of justice or witness tampering so far has produced no substantial evidence of wrongdoing. The alternate strategy of derailing the new administration before it really gets started hasn’t succeeded either, despite serial efforts to sue over election results, alter the Electoral College vote, boycott the inauguration, delay the confirmation of appointments, demand recusals, promise Trump’s impeachment or removal through the 25th Amendment, and file suit under the Emoluments Clause. A third strategy of portraying Trump as a veritable monster likewise so far has failed in four...

Donald Trump earned respect from the Washington establishment for appointing three of the nation's most accomplished generals to direct his national security policy: James Mattis (secretary of defense), H.R. McMaster (national security adviser) and John Kelly (secretary of homeland security). In the first five months of the Trump administration, the three generals -- along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO -- have already recalibrated America's defenses. At home, illegal immigration is down by some 70 percent. Abroad, a new policy of principled realism seeks to re-establish deterrence through credible threats of retaliation. The generals are...

The Roman Emperor Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54 AD, was never supposed to be emperor. He came to office at age 50, an old man in Roman times. Claudius succeeded the charismatic, youthful heartthrob Caligula—son of the beloved Germanicus and the “little boot” who turned out to be a narcissist monster before being assassinated in office. Claudius was an unusual emperor, the first to be born outside Italy, in Roman Gaul. Under the Augustan Principate, new Caesars—who claimed direct lineage from the “divine” Augustus—were usually rubber-stamped by the toadyish Senate. However, the outsider Claudius (who had no political...

Germans do not seem too friendly to Americans these days. According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School study of global media, 98 percent of German public television news portrays President Donald Trump negatively, making it by far the most anti-Trump media in the world. Yet the disdain predates the election of Trump, who is roundly despised here for his unapologetic anti-European Union views. In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey of European countries, Germany had the least favorable impression of America. Only about 50 percent of Germans expressed positive feelings toward the U.S. Former President Barack Obama, who visited here...

The Democrats are following the lead of the progressive media — together, they now form the anti-Trump brigade. Is there a Democratic-party alternative to President Trump’s tax plan? Is there a Democratic congressional proposal to stop the hemorrhaging and impending implosion of Obamacare? Do Democrats have some sort of comprehensive package to help the economy grow or to deal with the recent doubling of the national debt? What is the Democratic alternative to Trump’s apparent foreign policy of pragmatic realism or his neglect of entitlement reform? The answers are all no, because for all practical purposes there is no Democratic...

The West that birthed globalization is now in an open revolt over its own offspring, from here in Eastern Europe to southern Ohio. About half of the population in Europe and the United States seems to want to go back to the world that existed before the 1980s, when local communities had more control of their own destinies and traditions. The Czech Republic, to take one example, joined the European Union in 2004. But it has not yet adopted the euro and cannot decide whether the EU wisely prevents wars of the past from being repeated or recklessly strangles freedom...

Election machines in three states were not hacked to give Donald Trump the election. There was never a serious post-election movement of electors to defy their constitutional duties and vote for Hillary Clinton. Nor, once Trump was elected, did transgendered people begin killing themselves in alarming numbers. Nor were there mass resignations at the State Department upon his inauguration. Nor did Donald Trump seek an order to “ban all Muslims” from entering the U.S. Instead, he temporarily sought a suspension in visas for everyone, regardless of religion, from seven Middle Eastern states that the Obama administration had earlier identified as...

<p>Scholar Victor Davis Hanson says there’s a “big lie” surrounding the “boogeyman of Russian collusion” that Democrats and the media rally around, according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.</p>

<p>If a FBI director is doing his job, we probably should neither see nor hear of him much on television.</p> <p>The FBI director by his very office holds enormous power. And like the IRS director, by definition he or she must show restraint given the vast resources at his discretion and thus the potential for abuse. In other words, we want a FBI director to exude coolness, stay dispassionate, and remain professional. I don’t think that has ever been a description that fit Director James Comey.</p>

College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life. But increasingly, their spires, quads and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous. The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education. Take free speech. Without freedom of expression, there can be no university. But if the recent examples...

Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obama's soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." He elaborated: "What I mean by that (is) it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." Disasters, such as the September 2008 financial crisis, were thus seen as opportunities. Out of the chaos, a shell-shocked public might at last be ready to accept more state regulation of the economy and far greater deficit spending. Indeed, the national debt doubled in the eight years following the 2008 crisis. During the 2008 campaign,...

Leftists deride the “bad” populism of angry and misdirected grievances lodged clumsily against educated and enlightened “elites,” often by the unsophisticated and the undereducated. Bad populism is fueled by ethnic, religious, or racial chauvinism, and typified by a purportedly “dark” tradition from Huey Long and Father Coughlin to George Wallace and Ross Perot. Such retrograde populism to the liberal mind is to be contrasted with a “good” progressive populism of early-twentieth-century and liberal Minnesota or Wisconsin—solidarity through unions, redistributionist taxes, cooperatives, granges, and credit unions to protect against banks and corporations—now kept alive by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Good...

Last year, President Obama assured the world that "we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous and progressive era in human history," and that "the world has never been less violent." Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama's watch. Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin's last tenure (1935-1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian and Japanese fascism. Baldwin was a...

The most dangerous moments in foreign affairs often come after a major power seeks to reassert its lost deterrence. The United States may be entering just such a perilous transitional period. Rightly or wrongly, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Middle East-based terrorists concluded after 2009 that the U.S. saw itself in decline and preferred a recession from world affairs. In that void, rival states were emboldened, assuming that America thought it could not -- or should not -- any longer exercise the sort of political and military leadership it had demonstrated in the past. Enemies thought the U.S. was...

If anyone were in Nunes’s position, he or she might doubt that the new Trump administration could fully trust Director Comey or others in the intelligence agencies to provide disinterested appraisals of such information, given that a number of intelligence officials may themselves, in theory, have been involved in the intercepts and their dissemination. He might advise that any possible sources connected even remotely to the White House should have disclosed the existence of such information to his boss. Nor would he necessarily believe that Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) would be a reliable partner on the intelligence committee. Would...