Free Republic

A recent poll by the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) has shown that Republican James Bradley, an outsider to the political world, is almost tied with Democrat State Sen. Kevin de Leon in the race for the U.S. Senate in California in the 2018 midterm election. Compared to two years ago, more Americans today may believe that electing a political outsider to a public office is not a bad idea. The job approval rating for President Donald Trump, who had never been part of any political establishment before he was elected, recently hit 51 percent, according...

James Bradley’s incendiary new book about Theodore Roosevelt is not really packed with secrets. Much of the material it discusses has long been hidden in plain sight. But Roosevelt biographers often subscribe to certain orthodoxies, and one of them is this: When Roosevelt made noxiously racist and ethnocentric remarks about Anglo-Saxon greatness, so what? He was just voicing the tenets of his time. Mr. Bradley, the author of “Flags of Our Fathers,” does not simply cite Roosevelt’s egregious talk. He presents this much-ignored aspect of Roosevelt’s thinking with sharp specificity (“I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic...

SIXTY-EIGHT years ago tomorrow, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. In the brutal Pacific war that would follow, millions of soldiers and civilians were killed. My father — one of the famous flag raisers on Iwo Jima — was among the young men who went off to the Pacific to fight for his country. So the war naturally fascinated me. But I always wondered, why did we fight in the Pacific? Yes, there was Pearl Harbor, but why did the Japanese attack us in the first place? ... The one who had the greater effect on Japan’s...