Free Republic

Maybe Judge Luttig was right all along. I had the misgivings you’d expect back in late May, when I disagreed with J. Michael Luttig, the stellar scholar and former federal appeals court judge, regarding how the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should handle the Flynn case. At the time, that court’s three-judge panel had not yet heard oral argument on Michael Flynn’s mandamus petition — i.e., Flynn’s request that the panel find that federal district judge Emmet Sullivan was acting lawlessly. Sullivan had not only failed to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn; he...

For years, #NeverTrump activists were pushing the challenge to Trump supporters on social media: “Is there anything that Trump could do that would cause you to stop supporting him?” It was one of the primary “Orange Man Bad” themes. The morality test is that Trump supporters are abandoning all principle by worshipping Donald Trump as our Messiah and engaging in a cult. Leftists in both parties have lied about Donald Trump, hurling smears and invective, accusinng Trump of saying things that Trump never said and doing things Trump never did. And yet it just isn’t working. Why don’t any of...

National Review (NR) and the National Review Institute (NRI) are looking to get into the fight to defend free market capitalism from the Keynesian and socialist hordes attempting to destroy it.

On March 25, New York governor Andrew Cuomo made one of deadliest mistakes of the coronavirus crisis, signing an executive order forcing nursing homes in his state to accept patients who tested positive for coronavirus. Around 4,800 New Yorkers died from COVID-19 in those nursing homes from March to May — approximately 25 percent of all fatalities in the state. Many medical professionals opposed the policy. A report by ProPublica, certainly no right-wing outlet, found that deaths had spiked after Cuomo’s order. States issuing similar policies — Michigan and New Jersey — saw similar disasters unfold. By any standard, the...

President Trump has commuted the sentence of Roger Stone. The timing, late on Friday, suggests internal embarrassment over the move, and we wish there were more. The commutation is a move fully within the president’s powers and in keeping with the long-established pattern of presidents’ pardoning or commuting the sentences of associates caught up in special-counsel probes, although usually the associates aren’t as sleazy as Stone. We’re a long way from George H. W. Bush’s pardoning Cap Weinberger, the great Reagan-era defense official, who had been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the Lawrence Walsh investigation. [cut] It...

Victor Davis Hanson is without question the finest true conservative thought leader alive today. He is the William F. Buckley/Emmett Tyrell of his time, and his commentaries are not to be missed. Writing at The National Review online today, Hanson pens an absolutely devastating takedown of the Democrat Party’s Unfrozen Caveman Presumptive Nominee, Joe Biden. He eviscerates Biden’s elder-abusing handlers for their craven strategy of hiding their obviously cognitively-impaired candidate in the basement of his home, and scorches the Democrat Party for its despicable effort to saddle the nation with a man who is clearly incapable of holding a simple...

New York City workers were seen welding shut the gates of a playground in Brooklyn on Monday, one day after a demonstration in the borough saw thousands of attendees. On Sunday, thousands gathered at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza for a Black Trans Lives Matter rally. Despite the protests, New York City remains under the “phase 1” stage of the state’s reopening plan, allowing retail businesses to operate curbside pickup while large gatherings are still technically banned. Local observers filmed city park workers welding the gates of Middleton Playground, which is frequented by members of the Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg....

<p>Each day that the Obama administration fades into the past, its wrongdoings manage to wander back into the present.</p> <p>After years of suppression, all sorts of strange events keep popping up to remind us of what little is left of the Obama years — the Susan Rice memo, Christopher Steele deleting his computer records, FBI-doctored and lost 302s, text messages wiped clean, the bizarre Obama January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, the ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the unmasking and leaking of redacted names swept up in reverse-targeting surveillance operations, the administration fraud perpetrated on the FISA courts. The list is so overwhelming and bizarre that it ensures that anything at any time can now appear. And the result keeps reminding Americans of how corrupt were the years between 2009 and 2017 and how untruthful was the coverage of such institutionalized wrongdoing.</p>

They are just plain old Democrats now.For nearly five years most of our nation’s largest and most powerful news media outlets have given so-called NeverTrump conservative pundits an outsized voice in our political landscape. Figures such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Tom Nichols, Jennifer Rubin, Ana Navarro, and Rick Wilson do their turns on TV creating the illusion that there is some huge constituency of anti-Trump conservatives. There is not. In fact, these people are no longer conservatives in any real sense. Almost all of these pundits are now mainstream Democrats. They support Joe Biden, and many support voting a...

Over the last two weeks, considerable evidence has been released related to what appears to be a major, historic political scandal. The declassification of Susan Rice’s CYA email to herself alone raises a multitude of questions. Yet the mainstream media, who’ve suddenly become invincibly incurious about Russia-related matters, have posed not one question, either directly or indirectly, to the person to whom all the players in the scandal reported: Barack Obama. Since the Senate Judiciary Committee has signaled that the former president won’t be called to testify, it falls to the media to get some answers. But members of the...

Politico's Tim Alberta had an embarrassing temper tantrum after the New York Times published a letter from a 'founder of Politico' that said Biden winning was more important than justice for an alleged rape victim. On Tuesday, the New York Times published a letter to the editor from Martin Tolchin, identifying him as “a former member of The Times’s Washington bureau and a founder of Politico.” The letter took issue with a Times editorial that said the media should stop digging into sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden from former employee Tara Reade. Instead, the Times argued, some papers of...

French has slandered his Christian brothers and sisters by writing that 'millions of Trump-supporting white Evangelicals no longer care about character.' David French remains very disappointed that many of his fellow evangelicals support President Donald Trump. He has used the Wuhan virus pandemic to reiterate and expand his arguments against the president’s character and competence (spoiler: He still thinks Trump is too wicked and incompetent for Christians to vote for him).But he ignores that evangelical support for Trump, warts and all, is justified by principles French has urged on us — namely, that ours is not a Christian nation...

Several weeks ago, we detailed how American mainstream media outlets were intent on parroting communist propaganda talking points coming from disinformation ministers in Beijing. At first glance, it would be easy to write this disturbing surrender of journalistic integrity to advanced stages of Trump Derangement System. It would be reasonable to suspect that reporters, producers, anchors and editors held such an intense zeal to oppose, resist and damage President Trump that they'd even stoop so low as to hand their bylines over to propagandists supporting the totalitarian murderers at the top of the Red China food chain. However, something even...

Tom Cotton was both the first and the loudest voice in Congress to sound the alarm about the looming pandemic. While others slept, Tom Cotton was warning anyone who would listen that the coronavirus was coming for America. On January 22, one day before the Chinese government began a quarantine of Wuhan to contain the spread of the virus, the Arkansas senator sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar encouraging the Trump administration to consider banning travel between China and the United States and warning that the Communist regime could be covering up how dangerous...

There have been a few moments in recent weeks when the new reality of the coronavirus epidemic hit me in special ways. One of them was when Amazon put books on the bottom of its priority list. Bookish type that I am, that is what Amazon is for me: books. And I've rediscovered the bookstores and distributors I used to rely on before Amazon made things so simple. I'm thinking I really shouldn't go back. Aren't we all having a renewed appreciation for the smaller businesses in our lives and the people behind them? Of course, there have been more...

Thanks to Senators Rand Paul (R., Ken.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah), as well as an amen chorus of Trump loyalists in the House, the president seems poised to fulfill one of the fondest dreams of Clinton and Obama Democrats: Government policy that regards international terrorism as a mere crime, a law-enforcement issue to be managed by federal judges rather than a national-security threat from which the officials Americans elect must safeguard our country. I doubt the president realizes these ramifications of declining to reauthorize three PATRIOT Act security measures that are set to expire. Successfully camouflaging themselves as “FISA...

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...

As I said in a BreakPoint commentary last month, gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR and what’s being called “Prime Editing” are “existential threats.” We have no idea what our attempts to play god with the human genome will unleash on humanity. Yet, we insist on charging ahead despite our imperfect knowledge with an unbounded confidence in our abilities.Coming from a concerned non-scientist like me, these concerns can be easily dismissed as alarmist, but what if the concern comes from the Director of the National Institutes of Health?It turns out that Francis Collins is also concerned. In a recent article in...

It may be difficult to believe in this enlightened age but there was a time not so long ago when the National Review was the intellectual heart of America's conservative movement. Its writers were sharp, gifted and irreverent. Their appearances on Fox News and other TV outlets made them rock stars. All that ended on January 22, 2016, when the magazine posted online its "Against Trump" issue. Once again, the editors proudly chose to stand athwart history rather than make it. They chose to lose with what they consider honor rather than win. 22 writers signed on, each penning...

In an editorial published Wednesday at National Review, the editors argue that an “unspoken consensus” has emerged among Republican senators that what President Trump did was wrong but it doesn’t warrant his removal from office. The editors think this a “reasonable” position and that Republicans should make the case for it publicly, but they can’t because of the president’s “obstinacy” in defending his actions vis-à-vis Ukraine.Instead of insisting that Trump “cannot be impeached for any abuse of power unless that abuse took the form of a criminal violation of a statute,” they write, “Republicans would be better off arguing...