Free Republic

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a...

How to Defeat the Name-Calling Left This is a little tome on how to handle the liberal/progressive's most powerful weapon, name calling. Whenever they are being defeated in a debate or conversation, (which is perpetual) they will fall back on the cries of “That’s Racist.” I’m using racism here but I could just as easily include any of their other charges. “That’s racist, that’s sexist, that’s homophobic, that’s anti-midget,” whatever happens to be their current manic obsession. And I’m not talking about real harm here as in real harm, just the usual nutty attacks by the narcissistic, politically-correct scolds who...

May 17, 2016 Abby Jackson Responding to criticism about dismal diversity metrics, Chris Patten, the chancellor of the University of Oxford, disparaged the concept of racial quotas, as Quartz reported. In an interview with The Telegraph, Patten said that quotas lower standards: I am in favor of universities recognizing their responsibilities for promoting social inclusion. But I don’t think that if you want high-class universities, you should expect them to lower their standards in order to make up for some inadequacies in our secondary education system. Nobody will explain to me how you can make a system of quotas work...

On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Washington Post columnist George Will questioned Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s pro-life stance. Will said, “Well, there’s a policy dimension and a process dimension to running for president. On the policy side, on abortion, he was asked a question that every novice Republican candidate knows he’s going to be asked. And he didn’t have an answer. Now, that’s partly because he’s only been pro-life for about 15 minutes.

If you look beyond Donald Trump’s comprehensive unpleasantness -- is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have? -- you might see this: He is a fundamentally sad figure. His compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others’ approval to ratify his self-admiration. His incessant announcements of his self-esteem indicate that he is not self-persuaded. Now, panting with a puppy's insatiable eagerness to be petted, Trump has reveled in the approval of Vladimir Putin, murderer and war criminal. Putin slyly stirred America's politics by saying Trump is "very ... talented," adding that...

Give thanks this day for some indirect blessings of liberty, including the behavior-beyond-satire of what are generously called institutions of higher education. People who are imprecisely called educators have taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not. Melissa Click is the University of Missouri academic who shouted “I need some muscle over here” to prevent a photojournalist from informing the public about a public demonstration intended to influence the public. Click’s academic credentials include a University of Massachusetts doctoral dissertation titled “It’s ‘a good thing’: The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon.” Her curriculum...

In my post yesterday about the #NROrevolt Twitter rebellion by restrictionist Donald Trump fans against the pro-restrictionism National Review, I mentioned that there was a rich stream of apoplectically anti-Donald Trump commentary emanating from within the conservative media. I thought it might be useful to catalogue some of the vituperative and often entertaining arguments thus far into one place. (For a previous post on Trump's conservative-media supporters, click here.) The following list, encompassing neoconservatives, social cons, and libertarian-leaners, includes Bret Stephens, George Will, Glenn Beck, Michael Gerson, Charles C.W. Cooke, Karl Rove, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Kevin D. Williamson, Mona...

Donald Trump, Counterfeit Republican By GEORGE WILL August 12, 2015 In every town large enough to have two traffic lights there is a bar at the back of which sits the local Donald Trump, nursing his fifth beer and innumerable delusions. Because the actual Donald Trump is wealthy, he can turn himself into an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate. It is his right to use his riches as he pleases. His squalid performance and its coarsening of civic life are costs of freedom that an open society must be prepared to pay. When, however, Trump decided that his next...

America's loopy left is enamored of someone who becomes cranky about bobblehead figurines. Sober Democrats are queasy about nominating Hillary Clinton, who has much to apologize for but no aptitude for apologies. Those Republicans who hope she is denied the nomination are perhaps imprudent. And even Republicans who recoil from Donald Trump's repulsiveness might want to defer the delicious pleasure of witnessing his apoplexy when he joins, as surely he will, the ranks of those he most despises -- "losers." In 2011, Bernie Sanders said "we've got some very, very serious problems" because the Founding Fathers bobbleheads sold at the...

America’s loopy Left is enamored of someone who becomes cranky about bobblehead figurines. Sober Democrats are queasy about nominating Hillary Clinton, who has much to apologize for but no aptitude for apologies. Those Republicans who hope she is denied the nomination are perhaps imprudent. And even Republicans who recoil from Donald Trump’s repulsiveness might want to defer the delicious pleasure of witnessing his apoplexy when he joins, as surely he will, the ranks of those he most despises — “losers.” In 2011, Bernie Sanders said “we’ve got some very, very serious problems” because the Founding Fathers bobbleheads sold at the...

WASHINGTON -- Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency. After Donald Trump finishes plastering a snarling face on conservatism, any Republican nominee will face a dauntingly steep climb to reach even the paltry numbers that doomed Mitt Romney. It is perhaps quixotic to try to distract Trump's supporters with facts, which their leader, who is no stickler for dignity, considers beneath him. Still, consider these: The white percentage of the electorate has been shrinking for decades and will be about 2 points smaller in 2016 than in 2012....

The symptoms of the prion disease are beginning to become so obvious that even some of our more prominent pundits are beginning to notice them. For example, even former Karl Rove life-coach Ron Fournier has noticed the severe lack of Abraham Lincolns in the current GOP presidential candidates. And noted climate-denialist and baseball drone George Effing Will has staked out the bold position that many of these candidates have gone so far around the bend that they've crossed some kind of termination barrier. It is, therefore, especially disheartening that Cruz, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and who is...

Will, who once taught political philosophy at Michigan State, said he is “still a Spartan who takes equal pleasure from good MSU football seasons and dismal ones in Ann Arbor,” referring to the University of Michigan. Connie Rzemien, whose daughter, Katie, was among those graduating, told The Detroit News she thought Will was not the right choice. “I believe it is contradictory to what they are doing here to have somebody with such an insensitive view of rape to speak today,” she said. “I think it’s insulting to young women.” The U.S. Education Department this year revealed a list of...

George Will gave a surprisingly isolationist view on Fox News Sunday this morning when he said that if Iraq’s neighbors can’t take out ISIS with all their military might, then we shouldn’t either. Watch below: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO...

In the mid-1990s, when the collapse of the Mexican economy produced a wave of illegal immigration to Arizona, I did volunteer work at a Phoenix school that was struggling to meet the needs of a few hundred Mexican children who spoke only Spanish. Even as I sought to help ease the transition for both sides, I thought it would be better for everyone if the influx subsided. That explains my contradictory reactions of appreciation for and disagreement with George Will' s open-arms pronouncement on "Fox New Sunday" regarding Central Americans streaming across the Mexican border into Texas. It is burning...

On Fox News Sunday, Republican writer George Will said that America should let all of the illegal immigrant juveniles from Central America remain and ensure they are allowed to "go to school and get a job." "My view is that we have to say to these children, 'Welcome to America. You're going to go to school and get a job and become Americans,'" Will declared. "We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous." Will was asked to respond to Republicans...

George Will isn’t backing down, even as critics are “calling for [his] head.” Will’s Washington Post column on sexual assault stirred up a great deal of controversy, as he acknowledged in an interview with C-SPAN published Friday. “Today, for some reason … indignation is the default position of certain people in civic discourse,” he said. “They go from a standing start to fury in about 30 seconds.” The internet has “erased the barriers of entry to public discourse,” Will said, which is good because more people can be involved in conversations, but it’s bad because a lot of those people...

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Page Editor Tony Messenger writes that readers — both liberal and conservative ones — have lobbied the paper to change its lineup of conservative columnists. But apparently a bit of a push was necessary. That came from a recent controversial piece by Washington Post columnist George Will — the one about the “supposed campus epidemic of rape” and the way in which “victimhood” serves as a “coveted status that confers privileges.”

(RNN) – The St. Louis Post-Dispatch axed conservative thinker George Will's syndicated column Wednesday. Editor Tony Messenger apologized to his readers. He stated the change had been considered for months, but "a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. "The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it," Messenger said. The newspaper announced Will's column would be replaced by Michael Gerson, "former speechwriter and top aide to President George W. Bush." In Will's column, Colleges become the victims of progressivism, he...

Last week, George Will wrote a column about how progressive politics have fomented "rape culture" on college campuses. The column was not well received by some, or even, as a great many of the histrionic responses would indicate, well understood. I received the following press release yesterday, headlined: "87,000 Call on The Washington Post to Address Sexism, Fire George Will." A group called UltraViolet was touting the success of an online petition they'd whipped up over the controversy. From the release: