Free Republic

Much has been written about former CIA and FBI official Philip Mudd’s recent unhinged outburst on CNN against Paris Dennard for the latter’s credible suggestion that many ex-officials have monetized the fact that they have retained their security clearances.[snip] In August 2017, Mudd warned a stunned Jake Tapper on CNN that “the government is going to kill this guy [President Trump].”[snip]Mudd further preened about his assassination allusions as “a former government official”: “What I’m saying is government — people talk about the deep state — when you disrespect government officials who’ve done 30 years, they’re going to say, ‘Really?’”[snip]Mudd seems...

Michael Wolff and his media-hyped blockbuster—that supposedly game-changing landmark of a book Fire and Fury—are now ancient history. Fading similarly is Karen McDougal, Playboy‘s 1998 Playmate of the Year, and her National Enquirer grifter lawsuit that was also supposed to destroy the Trump presidency.

Victor Davis Hanson, as he so often does, gives us an excellent and concise bird’s-eye view of where we stand with the intelligence community: [T]hose who are warning of Russian collusion efforts to warp an election now work for agencies that in the recent past were doing precisely what they now rightly accuse the Russians of doing. The damage that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others have done to the reputations of the agencies they ran will live on well after their tenures are over. For once, I think he underestimates the duration and intensity of the rottenness. It isn’t just...

The New York Times recently hired as a writer and board member Sarah Jeong. The Times knew that in recent years Jeong had posted a series of unapologetically racist anti-white tweets. She had offered wisdom such as #CancelWhitePeople" and expressed hatred for males. Yet when the Times discovered less graphic versions of such tweets from newly hired technology writer Quinn Norton earlier this year, the newspaper immediately fired Norton. The message of disparate treatment was that what bothers the New York Times is not racism per se, but who is the racist and who are her targets. Over at The...

ecently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”[snip] Again, demonizing the Trump voter as beyond cultural redemption is nothing new. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables” who were “irredeemable” and were “not America.” After her defeat, Clinton proved her early smears were no accident. Speaking in India, she again slurred Trump supporters as being racist, sexist, and xenophobic for their...

The media are furious that President Trump serially decries "fake news." He often rants that journalists who traffic in it are "enemies of the people." Reporters have compared Trump to mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler because of his dislike of the press. Trump may be crude to reporters, but journalists are also not so innocent. They have brought much of the present calumny upon themselves in a variety of ways. The media seem to have little concern that their coverage is biased even though polls show that the vast majority of Americans believe the media intentionally reports fake...

How can Americans now trust the intelligence agencies shown to be corrupt in the very recent past? . . . snip For some reason, many still in the current FBI, CIA, DOJ, NSC, and State Deprtment are incapable of accepting that their agencies in the Obama years were weaponized to alter a U.S. election and were directed to do so by many top dogs in their Washington hierarchies. Until we get the truth, an accounting, and some sort of justice, we will not quite become galvanized by those who rightly warn us of real Russian interference.

After John noted the suppression of Elizabeth Heng’s Facebook ad for her congressional campaign yesterday (video embedded below), Victor Davis Hanson wrote us to enlist the support of Power Line readers for Ms. Heng. Alexandra DeSanctis profiled her here for NR and Jack Fowler updated the story with the Facebook angle yesterday here. Heng’s campaign site is here; contribute to her campaign here. Dr. Hanson writes: Elizabeth Heng is the Republican challenger seeking to represent California’s 16th congressional district. She just had a Facebook ad blocked, apparently because the genocide practiced by the former communist regime of Cambodia is either...

As Europe wanes, the distance between it and America grows According to Pew International polls, Trump is now intensely disliked in Europe. His endless spats over European trade, the costs of NATO, and differing approaches to Vladimir Putin’s Russia acerbated already tense U.S.–European relations. But Trump neither created European or transatlantic crises nor can be of much help in solving them. In part, they are Western in origin and to a degree shared by all Western allies, but mostly they are innate to Europe and self-induced. We often refer to the “West” of nearly 1.5 billion people without really defining...

<p>Make America Great Again” is the oft-caricatured slogan of the Donald Trump presidency. When Trump was elected, he boasted of jump-starting the economy to achieve an annual economic growth rate of 4 percent.</p> <p>Experts laughed him off as a naïf who did not understand that structural changes in demography and technology made such growth impossible. Many economists predicted that Trump would crash the stock and job markets.</p>

<p>Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . Are they leading us toward an 1861? How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?</p> <p>Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.</p>

Donald Trump recently ignited yet another firestorm by hedging when asked whether protecting the newest NATO member, tiny Montenegro, might be worth risking a war. Of course, the keystone of NATO was always the idea that all members, strong and weak, are in theory equal. A military attack against one member, under Article V of the NATO charter, meant an attack on all members. Such mutual defense is the essence of collective deterrence. An aggressor backs off when he realizes his intended target has lots of powerful friends willing to defend it. But what happens when an alliance becomes...

There was no honeymoon for the unlikely winner of the 2016 election. Progressives have in succession tried to sue to overturn Trump’s victory using several different approaches. First on the bogus claim of fraudulent voting machines. Then they sought to subvert the Electoral College by bullying electors into renouncing their respective states’ votes.

Deport the Deplorables is a slogan of popular culture, found on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and internet postings. But now the mini-industry of deplorable/deportable sloganeering has made its way into more elite circles. With just three words, the phrase “deport the deplorables” sends two popular messages: one, get rid of undesirable American citizens who voted for Donald Trump and who were properly written off in 2016 as deplorables by Hillary Clinton. And, two, by implication, don’t deport the illegal aliens who broke U.S. immigration law. Or put more succinctly, foreign nationals who crash our borders are innately superior people to citizens...

<p>Leakers and lawbreakers rewarded with Clinton-administration jobs — and the American public none the wiser about deep-state corruption T here are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted.</p>

Critics of Donald Trump claim there is no rhyme or reason to his foreign policy. But if there is a consistency, it might be called reciprocity. President Trump tries to force other countries to treat the U.S. as it treats them. In “don’t tread on me” style, he also warns enemies that any aggressive act will be replied to in kind. The underlying principle of Trump commercial reciprocity is that the United States is no longer powerful or wealthy enough to alone underwrite the security of the West. It can no longer assume sole enforcement of the rules and protocols...

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Barack Obama got elected twice but he was an ungodly disaster for the Democratic party. They lost the supermajority, they lost the Senate, they lost the House, they lost 1,000 local state and local offices, they're going to lose the Supreme Court. And they can't come to grips with the fact that they control popular cultural -- sports, universities, the media -- but that turns into this type of street theater you referenced. It doesn't transfer into actual political power and they're very frustrated. The Never Trumpers told us that Trump would be a moderate or a...

Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . . Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that...

Victor Davis Hanson discussed the decline of the American academy, threats to Western civilization from within and without, “The Resistance” and its assault on the Trump presidency, and a great deal more with Encounter Books’ Ben Weingarten. Watch their interview here or read the full transcript of their discussion below, slightly modified for clarity. Ben Weingarten: As a classicist, you’ve lamented both the corruption of the academy within your own discipline and on the modern campus more broadly — in particular on its repudiation of the Western canon, its lack of adherence to principles of free inquiry and the overall...

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, an Obama administration appointee, is scheduled to deliver a report this week on DOJ and FBI abuses during the 2016 campaign cycle. Remember: His last investigation of FBI misconduct advised a criminal referral for fired former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who allegedly lied to federal investigators. McCabe and at least a half-dozen other FBI employees quit, retired, were fired or were reassigned as a result of fallout from the politicization of the FBI. Yet, as Barack Obama left office, his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, strangely boasted that the Obama administration "has...