Free Republic

Get along? Apparently no—at least until after 2020. Two examples summarize why. “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice,” said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), one-quarter of “the squad” sowing havoc among Democrats in the House. “ We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.” Of the Republican Party, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes said the other day: “It must be peacefully, nonviolently, politically...

The Democratic Party bears little resemblance to the themes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton embraced in the 2008 primaries. The parameters of marriage — “between a man and woman,” in Obama’s words — have now transmogrified beyond gay civil unions to legal gay marriage to transgendered fixations. Obama once protested that he was no king who could open the border and grant amnesties by fiat. Yet his view of immigration has metamorphosed well beyond Dreamers into Democratic candidates going into Mexico to escort aliens unlawfully into our country — and 500 sanctuary jurisdictions in which federal immigration law is all...

Lessons of the War by Victor Davis HansonJune 2003 THE GENERAL facts about the recent war are not in much dispute. In a span of about three weeks, the United States military overran a country the size of California. It utterly obliterated Saddam Hussein’s military hardware—tanks, heavy artillery, transport—and tore apart his armies. Of the approximately 110 American deaths in the course of the hostilities, fully a fourth occurred as a result of accidents, friendly fire, or peacekeeping mishaps rather than at the hands of enemy soldiers. The extraordinarily low ratio of total American casualties per number of U.S. soldiers...

President Trump recently ordered and then called off a retaliatory strike against Iran for destroying a U.S. surveillance drone. The United States asserts that the drone was operating in international space. Iran claims it was in Iranian airspace. Antiwar critics of Trump's Jacksonian rhetoric turned on a dime to blast him as a weak, vacillating leader afraid to call Iran to account. Trump supporters countered that the president had shown Iran a final gesture of patience — and cleared the way for a stronger retaliation should Iran foolishly interpret his one-time forbearance as a weakness to be exploited rather than...

P rogressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole—each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus Unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many innately different and separate peoples. Progressivism’s signature brand is now tribalism: all of us in different ways are victims of a white male Christian heterosexual patriarchy—or a current 20 percent hierarchy that past and present has supposedly oppressed anyone not like themselves. In contrast, our differences define who...

<p>‘Third World” is now an anachronistic geographical term of the old Cold War. But after 1989, “Third World” was reinvented from a political noun into an adjective to mean more than just Asian, African, and Latin American nations nonaligned with either the West or the Soviet bloc.</p>

Historian Victor Davis Hanson described why he feels his home state of California is America’s first “Third World state” during a Monday night appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Hanson’s comments came after the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said that national Republicans will go “into the waste bin of history, the way Republicans of the ’90s [in California] have gone.” Responding to host Tucker Carlson’s question about why he considers California a “Third World state,” Hanson pointed to “symptoms” we typically “associate with failed states” such as high taxes, poor schools, a super-rich class, and a significant percentage...

<p>Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.</p>

The Case for Trump, Victor Davis Hanson. Basic Books, 2019. 372 pp. As the title suggests, The Case for Trump, balances a clinical approach to our currently incendiary politics alongside a brief for Donald Trump’s presidency. Of course, the success or failure of this attempt is a subjective matter though it seems to me that any reader of this book of whatever political stripe would concede that, for its length, it is thorough if not encyclopedic in its presentation of facts and its historical depth. All of which is not surprising in that Victor Davis Hanson, occupies a unique position...

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump's election and the "yellow vests" protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives? Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists. What are the popular gripes against them? One, illegal immigration and open borders have led to chaos. Lax immigration policies...

After decades in the FBI, the top brass came to believe they could flout the law and pursue their own political agendas. One of the media and beltway orthodoxies we constantly hear is that just a few bad apples under James Comey at the FBI explain why so many FBI elites have been fired, resigned, reassigned, demoted, or retired — or just left for unexplained reasons. The list is long and includes director James Comey himself, deputy director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, attorney Lisa Page, chief of staff James Rybicki, general counsel James Baker, assistant director for public...

The more things change, well, the more they . . . So it is with the perpetual German resentments of the U.S. Recently German chancellor Angela Merkel reminded us of that German fixation, when she made some astounding statements to the German media that revealed what many Americans had long ago surmised. Merkel all but announced that Germany, or for that matter Europe itself, is no longer really an ally of the United States: “There is no doubt that Europe needs to reposition itself in a changed world. . . . The old certainties of the post-war order no longer...

The more things change, well, the more they . . . So it is with the perpetual German resentments of the U.S. Recently German chancellor Angela Merkel reminded us of that German fixation, when she made some astounding statements to the German media that revealed what many Americans had long ago surmised. Merkel all but announced that Germany, or for that matter Europe itself, is no longer really an ally of the United States: “There is no doubt that Europe needs to reposition itself in a changed world. . . . The old certainties of the post-war order no longer...

<p>One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax returns; and the psychodramas involving Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels. Relentless progressives have needed a new Get Trump fix about every two months.</p>

...Trump inherited a superficially stable world from Barack Obama that, in fact, was quite volatile. There had been no tense standoffs with North Korea, but also apparent intercontinental ballistic missiles with possible nuclear warheads now pointed at the United States. Obama more or less punted on North Korea, by declaring it a problem — and hoping that Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear testing did not get too out of hand before 2017. Then there was the “Iran deal.” It was an appeasing agreement that almost surely guaranteed that Iran would soon have nuclear weapons, along with a revived economy liberated from...

The end of the Mueller melodrama has marked the beginning of real fear in Washington. The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible. One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump. Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions, and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian “reset” or get caught on a hot mic offering...

The United States is at a crossroads with an increasingly aggressive China, which could define America’s security and the international order for decades to come, Hoover scholar Victor Davis Hanson says.   Hanson, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, studies military history and the classics. Last year, Hanson won the Edmund Burke Award, which honors people who have made major contributions to the defense of Western civilization. He is the author of the 2019 book The Case for Trump, and 2017's The Second World Wars. He was recently interviewed on US policy toward China:  What is the Trump strategy behind these tariffs, short term...

Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower. The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the “Judge of Elegance,” was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region...

Slowly but steadily they build up their economic, military, and technological superiority at our expense The Chinese Communist government does not have so much a strategy to translate its economic ascendance into global hegemony as several strategies. All of them are brilliantly insidious.On matters of trade, China is always flexible in responding to critics of its asymmetrical, 30-year mercantilism. In the initial stages of Westernization, China was exempted from criticism over serial copyright and patent infringement, dumping, and espionage. Western elites assumed that these improprieties were just speed bumps on the eventual Chinese freeway to liberalism. Supposedly the richer China...

Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, “The Case for Trump,” chronicles the successes of America’s 45th president as only the prolific Hoover Institution scholar could. A columnist for The Daily Signal, Hanson recently spoke to me about the book, his concerns about California’s future, and the demise of the Never Trump movement. Our full interview is available on The Daily Signal Podcast or on video. A lightly edited transcript is below. Rob Bluey: Let’s start with your book. It’s a fascinating read. I want you to tell us why you chose to write it. Victor Davis Hanson: I’ve asked myself that....