Free Republic

The European Union is good at coming up with inoffensive-sounding terminology to talk about unpleasant things. For example, the phrase “strategic autonomy” is a nice way of saying, “We don’t trust the Americans” — and, with Donald Trump leading the polls and boasting about encouraging Vladimir Putin to invade European countries, it is impossible to blame them. It is important to get the context of Trump’s remarks straight: Trump says he told an unidentified NATO counterpart whose country hadn’t met the organization’s target for defense spending, “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do...

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

The unending COVID regime isn't a nightmare scenario, it's an existential threat to our liberties, a possible and unexamined risk to our health, and right here among us.A plastic recycler in Louisville, Kentucky. A guide at a hiking camp in Alaska. A waitress at a restaurant in Houston, Texas. What do these companies have in common, besides being featured in a Monday Wall Street Journal story? Two things, both of which should worry anyone skeptical of injecting a novel vaccine with little-to-no long-term testing for possibly serious negative effects. For one, all three of these businesses require all of their...

Memo to MAGA and all its myriad fellow-travelers: Maybe Death of a Salesman as presented by Leni Riefenstahl just wasn’t the show Americans were dying to tune into this season. And, while we’re at it, maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy. Think on it, Cletus. I know this whole thing still sounds like your idea of a good time — how’s that working out for you? Let me refresh your memory: On the day Donald Trump was sworn...

Last week, National Review published an appalling article by Zachary Evans about the recent wave of antisemitic violence against ultra-Orthodox Jews in and around New York City. It claimed to provide context for these attacks but was inadvertently (I hope) an exercise in victim blaming. In response to many readersÂ’ outraged replies, both the ReviewÂ’s editors and several staff members made matters worse by refusing to acknowledge any problem with the article. The worst was this screed by Kevin Williamson accusing critics of reading the article in bad faith simply to attack National Review, as if the only thing at...

Trump to American Workers: Drop Dead by MARK KRIKORIAN March 4, 2016 Any time Donald Trump has to talk about any aspect of immigration other than his border wall – the one Mexico’s going to pay for, in case you hadn’t heard – he falls back on his donor-class, crony-corporatist instincts. In the October CNBC debate, he essentially embraced Marco Rubio’s support for increased “skilled” worker visas and praised Mark Zuckerberg, both positions diametrically opposed to his published immigration platform. Then in the debate late last month, he embraced the Chuck Schumer/Marco Rubio position that there are Jobs Americans Won’t...

Here is a sentence one does not often get the opportunity to write: Bill de Blasio is right. Sen. Cory Booker demands an apology, because apologies under duress are an important part of the political ritual of 2019, and to be able to command an apology signals that a politician is a real player. But Booker isn’t... The Al Gores and John Kerrys of the world enjoy rubbing elbows with Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t find Davos on a labeled map, doesn’t want to and doesn’t need to. Democrats may not be ready to comfort...

media outlets ranging from Vice to the Daily Beast to, just today, the New York Times have employed the term “brainwashing,” almost entirely uncritically. The problem with that, which apparently has occurred to none of these outlets whose writers from time to time advertise their reverence for “science,” is that there is no such thing as brainwashing. It is a concept with no scientific basis, generally regarded as pseudoscience. It is mainly a literary device, one popularized by The Manchurian Candidate. “Brainwashing” is right up there with “recovered memories,” “multiple-personality disorder,” homeopathy, chiropractic, reiki, the anti-vaccine movement, and the terror...

Stop spending money you don’t have, dummy. Can we conservatives agree — at least among ourselves — on that much? Maybe not. Confession: I am not much of an ideologue. And I don’t think “Stop spending money you don’t have, dummy!” is an ideological position, exactly. And there’s no need to be fanatical about it: Running a deficit during a serious economic downturn, a war, or a national emergency? I’m flexible. You show me Hitler invading Poland and my response is not going to be: Stop spending money you don’t have, dummy. Whip those Nazis. And, then: Stop spending money...

The ad is here. Only after sustained complaint from conservatives has FaceBook relented and admitted, Whoops, look like we jumped the gun and banned another conservative message by "accident." Boy, is our face red. Funny how these mistakes only tend in a single direction. And note that without the social pressure applied against FaceBook, they would have remained firm in their initial decision to censor. And note that David French, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Shapiro et al. all criticize conservatives when they apply such social pressure to reverse the censorial decisions provoked by leftwing social pressure. All these fine defenders of...

Several weeks ago, acerbic conservative writer Kevin Williamson was fired from the job he'd just accepted at The Atlantic, a prestigious mainstream publication.  The supposed iniquity for which he was dismissed was a years-old exploration of potential policy consequences related to his views on the criminalization of abortion -- an outcome he supports.  The braying jackals who applied heavy pressure on The Atlantic's editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to kick Williamson to the curb homed in on the columnist's ostensible stance that women who obtain abortions should be hanged.  This is a gross distortion, for reasons we'll get to shortly.  Some of...

The Atlantic‘s firing of Kevin Williamson over his views on abortion sent political Twitter abuzz this week. Conservatives and libertarians generally condemned the cowardice involved, and the swarming pushback from progressives captured the pitch-perfect drone of the hive mind.Perhaps there is a lesson here. Despite having achieved their goal, progressives felt it necessary with a torrent of widely-varying but equally flimsy rationales in support of the firing. Here is a handy guide to the seven most common (and dumbest) attempted defenses of the firing.1. National Review Doesn’t Hire Progressives. This response is based on the faulty premise that The...

While running for president the first time, Hillary Clinton , “I am sick and tired of those who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. And we should stand up and say, ‘We are Americans, and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.’” Not long after, once Barack Obama won the election, it became racist to debate and disagree with that administration. This is just one of many examples of liberals setting the rules, then changing them when it suits their needs. There is only one set of...

Let’s start with the basic premise that the GOP establishment is terrible, and as its defining characteristic, its cowardice is only overshadowed by its sheer incompetence. But even those hacks might be able to win the midterms and keep hope alive for the resurrection of the America we love. It’s all thanks to the aggressive scumminess of our leftist enemies – and yeah, anyone proposing to take my God-given rights to speak, worship, and defend myself, and/or my life, all of which they have recently told me they seek to take, is my enemy. After the groveling cave that was the...

Apparently Kevin Williamson at National Review has jumped over that deadly lemming cliff, along with millions of Trump-maddened New York liberals. Williamson writes in NR today that "My own view is that Donald and Ivanka and Uday and Qusay are genuinely bad human beings and that the American public has made a grave error in entrusting its highest office to this cast of American Psycho extras. That a major political party was captured by these cretins suggests that its members are not worthy of the blessings of this republic ..." ​Apparently NR editors didn't read this piece, or worse, they...

I wonder when the Trump backers will realize they’ve been had. The 2016 GOP campaign has been overwhelmed by Donald Trump’s celebrity persona, by the can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it appearances where he might say or do anything — and “anything” includes expletives, incitements, and assorted idiocies that would have been disqualifying in the bygone times of, oh, five or ten minutes ago. But Trump is not the real story of the campaign. The real story is the Republican base’s rejection of the Republican establishment — i.e., the party leaders, prominent pols, lobbyists, and donors who make up the GOP component of the Washington...

By:John Seiler | March 28, 2016 National Review’s jihad against Donald Trump turned against Americans themselves with Kevin Williamson’s screed, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction.” He writes about such working-class cities as Wayne, Mich., where I grew up after I was born in 1955. To this day, one-sixth of the city is the Michigan Assembly Plant. It’s a shot-and-beer town. Up until the 1974 Depression, the only way you could avoid providing for your family—your wife staying home with the kids and a cottage up North on a lake—was if you...

While Donald Trump has called on the GOP to become a “worker’s party”— a development Sen. Jeff Sessions called for two years ago, ironically, in the pages of the National Review— French has defended the idea that white working-class communities “deserve to die.”

While movement conservatives would like to blame the Republican establishment for the rise of Donald Trump and the attendant political problems he has created for the national Republican Party, as our friend Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government, pointed out in a recent article for Breitbart, those whom we call “establishment conservatives” bear just as much responsibility for Trump’s rise.  And there is no better example of how DC’s snide elitist “conservatives” have helped create Trump than a recent cover article in National Review by one Kevin D. Williamson.   Mr. Williamson, who has apparently never done anything in conservative politics except pontificate for various elite journals, took to...

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need...