Free Republic

Michael Kelly, the legendary journalist who died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, once wrote that the “animating impulse” of modern liberalism was to “marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible.” “If it were a person,” he added, “it would pierce its tongue.” [snip] t pierced its tongue on CNN this week, when Hillary Clinton told Christiane Amanpour that “you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” And when former Attorney General Eric Holder said...

President Trump’s fight for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is breaking up the “Never Trump” coalition of GOP leaders and pundits, many who are now uniting behind the president in advance of Saturday’s Senate confirmation vote. Rocked by the wall of Democratic opposition no matter what evidence supporting Kavanaugh is presented and impressed with Trump’s solid backing amid a brutal media attack, Never Trumpers are abandoning their opposition in a show of support for the man they once mocked. One famous Never Trumper even told Secrets that Trump’s unwavering support for Kavanaugh, a long-time public servant who worked for former...

New York Times columnist and Never Trump conservative Bret Stephens felt the wrath of Twitter Thursday after he penned a column in appreciation of the president for standing up to the Democrats’ “sly moral bullying” of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. “For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it,” Mr. Stephens wrote. “I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” he continued. Mr. Stephens even criticized...

For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it. I’m reluctant to admit it and astonished to say it, especially since the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford in his ugly and gratuitous way at a rally on Tuesday. Perhaps it’s worth unpacking this admission for those who might be equally astonished to read it.

Murphy Brown creator Diane English says she may need to get security protection as she works on the return to CBS of the biting political comedy series. “I might have to have some protection,” English told reporters in a scrum after her show’s Q&A panel at TCA. “I’m not kidding.” English referenced the “scary times” in which the show is coming back with original episodes after two decades. The very first episode, which takes place on November 8, 2016, “really sticks our head into the lion’s mouth,” said star Candice Bergen, boasting, “This show has no fear of anyone.” These...

A sneak peek at the Times’s news analysis from Nov. 4, 2020. Nov. 4, 2020 In the end, a bitterly fought election came down to the old political aphorism, popularized during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 run against George H.W. Bush: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This time, however, it was the Republican incumbent, not his Democratic challenger, who benefited from that truism. Donald J. Trump has been decisively re-elected as president of the United States, winning every state he carried in 2016 and adding Nevada, even as he once again failed, albeit narrowly, to gain a majority of the popular vote....

When people think of the liberal venom coming from MSNBC, many would single out Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell. But the 9am hour has quietly become another home on the network for angry rants. On Wednesday, guests compared Donald Trump to a dictator and somehow linked Trump’s White House speech on Tuesday to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Talking about Trump’s patriotism event in the wake of cancelling the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles' appearance at the White House, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens linked: “This reminds me of certain regimes around the world. The Maduro regime...

On Saturday I took my family to have a closer look at Syria. This was on the Golan Heights, from a roadside promontory overlooking the abandoned Syrian town of Quneitra. The border is very green at this time of year, a serene patchwork of orchards and grassland, and it was hard to impress on our kids that hell on earth was visible in the quiet distance. But I wanted them to see it — to know that Syria is a place, not an abstraction; that the agonies of its people are near, not far; that we should not look away....

Smug self-congratulation and groveling delight in being praised by progressives. Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. President Trump in his first year has succeeded at realizing many long-time conservative goals like tax reform and deregulation, to name a few. But for NeverTrump grumps, these achievements seem to intensify their bitter-ender anger at a political parvenu. Puffed up with self-regard about the purity of their “principles,” many have doubled-down on their criticisms of Trump’s brash, vulgar demeanor, coming off like the pompous Judge Smails sputtering over Al Czervik’s trashing of the Bushwood Country Club....

Tax cuts. Deregulation. More for the military; less for the United Nations. The Islamic State crushed in its heartland. Assad hit with cruise missiles. Troops to Afghanistan. Arms for Ukraine. A tougher approach to North Korea. Jerusalem recognized as Israel’s capital. The Iran deal decertified. Title IX kangaroo courts on campus condemned. Yes to Keystone. No to Paris. Wall Street roaring and consumer confidence high. And, of course, Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. What, for a conservative, is there to dislike about this policy record as the Trump administration rounds out its first year in office? That’s the question...

As information was still coming in regarding Monday’s attempted terror attack in the New York City subway, an MSNBC panel discussing the news ridiculously shifted the topic to outrage over guns and gun crime in the U.S. And on top of that, they bemoaned how President Trump would try to make the attack an immigration issue to support his temporary travel ban.The person responsible for kicking off the gun discussion was former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. After commenting on how few terror attacks have hit the U.S. since 9/11 (missing a few as he rattled them off), he opined: We will continue to...

New York Times political reporter Jeremy Peters on Saturday joined the odd new trend in the mainstream press of attacking Fox News for actually covering political stories besides Donald Trump -- especially those involving Hillary Clinton’s and Russia. Fox and other right-leaning outlets were also mocked for not obsessing as much as the rest of the press on President Trump’s Russia controversies in “As Russia Inquiry Widens, an Alternative Narrative Emerges on the Right.” Another Times article accuses the network of “pushing its own version of reality,” as if that’s not what the Times does every day. It’s apparently easier to...

Bret Stephens devoted his New York Times column last week to admonishing me for my tweet from two weeks ago and critiquing my follow-up column last week explaining the tweet. The tweet reads, "The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does." Since he wrote the column as a "Dear Dennis" letter to me, I will respond in kind. Dear Bret: I'll try to respond to the most salient arguments you made. I'll begin with one of the most troubling. You wrote: "Wiser conservatives -- and I count you among them, Dennis...

On North Korea, Trump’s on the Right Track Bret Stephens JULY 7, 2017 /snip The good news is that the Trump administration has picked up the theme with a new round of sanctions on Chinese entities. It shouldn’t stop there. As Anthony Ruggiero of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes, the goal should be to push Chinese banks and businesses to make a fundamental choice between trading with Pyongyang and having access to dollars. The market will reach its own verdict. Last month’s billion-dollar United States arms sale to Taiwan, along with United States Navy challenges to Chinese maritime...

On the Fourth of July of all days, “Never Trump” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said President Donald Trump’s supporters are “idiots” who need to “admire” elites. The Times’ and MSNBC’s insufferably smug and out-of-touch useful idiot said Warren Buffett has a wonderful line: “First come the innovators, then come the imitators, and then come the idiots.”

On the subject of cycles, Warren Buffett likes to talk about “the natural progression, the three I’s.” As he put it to Charlie Rose in 2008, those I’s are “the innovators, the imitators and the idiots.” One creates, one enhances — and one screws it all up. Then, presumably, the cycle starts afresh. Buffett was describing the process that led to the 2008 housing and financial crises. But he might as well have been talking about the decline of the conservative movement in America. I was reminded of this again last week, on news that the Fox News host Sean...

n what appeared to be a rare display of actual diversity, MSNBC and NBC News have signed New York Times columnist Bret Stephens while betting that increasing the diversity of voices on their airwaves will ultimately lead to a better news and analysis product. The news was announced on Wednesday, June 28, and later confirmed by the company even though the Times had hired Stephens as an op-ed columnist back in April, which led to complaints that the liberal “Grey Lady” was “sullying its reputation as a purveyor of truth and facts.” According to an article by The Hollywood Reporter's Jeremy Barr: “Stephens is a...

Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future.

My first column, “Climate of Complete Certainty,” was published last week, and drew more than 1,800 comments on the column and on Facebook. I’m answering some of them here, edited lightly for length and clarity.

<p>Newest New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a conservative refugee from the increasingly Trumpist Wall Street Journal editorial page, uses his first column to imply, without quite stating outright, that somebody (the world? America? liberals?) overrates the certainty of climate science. Stephens concedes that the reality of global warming is “indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, [while] much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities.” He is completely right that the level of future warming is a matter of probabilities, and he is also right that the political debate treats that level of warming as far more knowable than it actually is. Where he’s wrong — catastrophically so — is in his implicit argument that the risk lies entirely on one side.</p>