Free Republic

There’s been a lot of conversation about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes lately, but everyone should spare a thought for Candace Owens. On her eponymous podcast, Candace, the crackpot influencer has been conducting an “investigation” into what happened to Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University that is another symptom of how far off the rails a segment of the right-wing media ecosystem has gone. (Owens is too foolish even for Fuentes, who says she defines “low-IQ antisemitism,” although Carlson has her on his podcast for friendly interviews.) The Owens probe is about as serious and likely to bear fruit as...

We have met the enemy of civilization, and it’s women. Not individual women, mind you. Because any given individual woman can possess masculine characteristics. And certainly not homemakers — those are the women who are doing the job they’ve done for millenniums, taking care of the family. No, the challenge to civilization is presented, in the view of Helen Andrews, a writer and editor who served as a senior editor at The American Conservative, by the women who are entering the workplace in such great numbers that they now make up large portions or majorities of their professions. In that...

On the menu today: It’s an off-year election, and Republicans lived up to it by having an off year. A really off year — read on. We’re going to take yesterday’s elections in ascending order of importance, but first, the big picture. We’ve all heard President Donald Trump offering his usual spiel — “I’m the greatest, I’m the most popular, everybody loves me,” etc. Well, as of this writing, the president’s job approval in the RealClearPolitics average is 43 percent. If you’re wondering about the range, CNN has it at 39 percent, Rasmussen Reports has it at 47 percent. On...

On Friday at Steyn HQ, we received an inquiry from a reporter seeking a comment on "the agreement between Mann and NRO." Unfortunately, having had no communication from our "co-defendants" National Review (NR), we had to scramble around a bit to figure out what the reporter was talking about. A different publication, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reports: Penn professor Michael Mann has reached an agreement with the National Review that releases him from paying the company's remaining legal fees from his defamation case in exchange for dropping ongoing litigation against the magazine. It turns out, in classic National Review fashion, they...

In the publication’s 70th anniversary issue, the magazine undercut its own important legacy by attacking one of the right’s biggest icons.National Review is turning 70. The legacy of that publication is hard to sum up, but suffice it to say, its impact on American politics has been enormous, and it’s one I certainly feel personally. I worked there for a couple of years, and I was very grateful for the job and the experience it gave me. My tenure at NR only overlapped with the last few months of William F. Buckley’s life, though I had met him once earlier...

The first sentence of my intellectual biography of National Review’s co-founder read: “James Burnham began his intellectual career in the 1930s as one of Leon Trotsky’s leading American exponents and ended it as a senior editor for America’s preeminent conservative magazine, National Review.” At least it did until an editor changed “American exponents” to “U.S. exponents.” The clearest explanation for the change comes from an Atlantic journalist who decries using the term “America” as a synonym for the United States of America. Her article declares, “America is a region, not a country.” It even notes that people from Latin America...

I expressed my reservations about the indictment of James Comey here. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy takes a deep dive into the facts relevant to the indictment, and concludes that it should be thrown out of court. This is what the indictment says: On or about September 30, 2020, in the Eastern District of Virginia, the defendant, JAMES B. COMEY JR., did willfully and knowingly make a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement…by falsely stating to a U.S. Senator during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he, JAMES B. COMEY JR., had not “authorized someone else at the FBI to...

James Burnham began his intellectual odyssey as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, but he became disillusioned with Marxism in the late 1930s. The Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 especially drew Burnham’s ire. Trotsky rationalized the invasion using Marxist ideology: Soviet socialism was spreading; therefore, it must be good. Burnham disagreed, arguing that the invasion was simply Soviet imperialism — a confiscation of land by Stalin. After seven years as one of its leading American thinkers, Burnham left the Marxist movement. Burnham’s experiences with Marxism scarred him. He began to recognize that “only by renouncing all ideology can we begin...

Paul Craig Roberts and the Certifiable Right By Ben Johnson FrontPageMagazine.com | March 17, 2006 Quick – what columnist alleged in an article Thursday that President “Bush intends to attack Iran and that he will use every means to bring war about?” That Bush has used “bribery and coercion” to block “every effort to bring the dispute to a peaceful end”? That “in order to gain a pretext for attacking Iran,” he and a “’black opts’ [sic.] group will orchestrate [an] attack” on U.S. soil? One would never expect to hear the author is “chairman of the Institute for Political...

The recently published New York Times list of “The 100 Best Films of the 21st Century” is that paper’s most significant cultural diktat since the 1619 Project, and it’s equally fallacious. Compiled from votes by more than 500 influential filmmakers, actors, and other film-industry “professionals,” these Times rankings pretend to reflect the films that have left a significant artistic, cultural, or emotional impact since January 1, 2000.

Since he was sworn in four months ago after an airtight confirmation vote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to be at the center of controversy. We have seen Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app on an unsecure personal phone to discuss sensitive military operations, his firing of three senior aides, and a Pentagon chock-full of internal turmoil. ince he was sworn in four months ago after an airtight confirmation vote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to be at the center of controversy. We have seen Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app on an unsecure personal phone...

We have been frequent critics of Donald Trump’s tariffs, but we understand that there is a case to be made for reconsidering some of our trade policies. The place to make that case is Congress — not by unilateral presidential declaration of open-ended worldwide “emergencies.” The Founders rebelled against taxation without representation; they did not mean for the executive to control the duties on all imports by daily whim. It is Congress that was granted power by the Constitution to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” and for good reason. It...

William F. Buckley Jr.’s centenary arrives as free speech falters and truth-telling grows perilous—a reminder that every generation must fight anew for civilization’s soul. William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in February 2008, would have been 100 years old in November of this year. There are many tributes planned to celebrate his centenary. The huge, authorized biography by Sam Tanenhaus will be out in just a few weeks. I will not say anything about that book apart from noting that its subtitle—“The Life and the Revolution That Changed America”— is apt. For five or six years at the end of...

When Americans were experiencing inflation and shortages during the Biden presidency, there was an internet meme going around that juxtaposed a paltry egg with the iconic 2019 image of a grinning Donald Trump, welcoming the national championship–winning Clemson Tigers to the White House, spreading his arms to display a massive bounty of burgers piled in front of him. The underlying message behind that joke became a central part of the 2024 campaign: Under Trump, Americans had plenty; under Biden-Harris, they had less. Yet bizarrely, the man who for decades has been a symbol of unapologetic American excess is now defending...

New York Magazine’s Ben Terris saved the most important part of his extensive profile of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman for last: “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired,” he wrote in its concluding paragraphs. That is not the impression that a reader would have gathered from the worried former Fetterman staffers, jilted progressive activists, and anecdotes detailing the senator’s declining mental health that preceded this observation. The piece paints a portrait of a broken man, a shadow of his former self, plagued by depression and demented episodes. None of that was especially apparent to...

... In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Garcia to America from El Salvador so that his claims can be adjudicated. (He currently sits there under an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for the use of his notoriously brutal mega-prisons to house potential deportees.) This weekend the Trump administration refused, claiming, on stunningly disingenuous logic, that because Garcia had been dumped quickly into El Salvador he was now beyond American jurisdiction. (“He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”) Why not...

What a difference a year makes. A year ago, Michael Mann was riding high after winning his 12-year-old lawsuit against journalist and pundit Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg over comments sharply critical of Mann’s famed “hockey stick” graph. That graph purported to demonstrate a sharp rise in global temperature following industrialization, supposedly caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The offending comments were by Steyn in a National Review blog post and by Simberg in a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog post. Mann brought suit against all four, but in 2021 National Review and CEI won “summary judgment” (a peculiar term...

What’s a good analogy for Signal, the commercial, publicly available encryption app?Have you ever watched a public hearing of the Senate or House Intelligence Committee? It happens almost every time: A witness from one of our intelligence agencies is asked a question that, whether the interrogating lawmaker realizes it or not, calls for an answer that includes national defense information — in the main, classified intelligence.... So what happens next is a commonplace: The agency official will tell the panel that he or she cannot answer the question in public, but may be willing to address the matter in the...

Predictably enough, the Ukrainian government has objected to its exclusion from the peace talks Trump administration officials held with their Russian counterparts this week in Riyadh and, for its trouble, is getting slammed by what is supposed to be its ally, the United States. In breathtaking remarks to reporters, President Trump poured contempt on Ukraine for its frustration. “But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a...

Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 @julie_kelly2 Andrew McCarthy is out with his 3rd of 7 consecutive articles criticizing AG Bondi and her efforts to depoliticize the DOJ. In today's installment, McCarthy describes Bondi's "Weaponization Working Group" as "Orwellian." McCarthy blasts Bondi for naming names in her working group memo--Jack Smith and Leticia James specifically--and says that's not how law enforcement works. He even condemns Bondi for naming James in a civil suit brought against New York for refusing to enforce federal immigration law.