Free Republic

The purpose of this article is not to mock, ridicule, or insult. Nor am I here to gloat or say, “I told you so.” Instead, I want to make a simple, two-fold appeal: First, can we be realistic and recognize that Trump will not be restored to the White House by some kind of military act or miraculous event (other than simply running again in 2024)? Second, can we be mature enough to acknowledge our errors, learn from our mistakes, and move on? In short, can we make this a teachable moment? When I announced on the radio on January...

Over a weekend of discussing politics with like-minded family, we of course discussed Trump and the mean tweets. Women don’t like mean tweets. Especially from their president. Because? Never mind. Remember Ronald Reagan? Back when Ronald Reagan was building up to a presidential campaign he was broadcasting weekly opinion pieces in which he sounded pretty angry and determined to do something about it. When he was on the Carson Show he emitted corny one-liners, and everyone laughed. But when he became president he switched to an avuncular personality. I wonder why? Do you think it was because he had a...

Last week was a good one, so it’s kind of dickish to make fun, but it’s really amusing how quickly some of you went from, in 2016, “We’re gonna get tired of winning,” to nervously awaiting the Youngkin/McAuliffe results sweating bullets, fingers nervously crossed, “Oh please please please just give us this one victory!” Trump lost the House, then the White House, then he blew two potentially winnable Georgia races to lose the Senate, then he idiotically engineered a piece of pointless theater that turned into a full-on riot that morphed into an event that will never stop haunting the...

TEL AVIV – As the debate over Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border continues to dominate the presidential race, Israel is reportedly planning to move ahead with a massive above and underground concrete barrier along the entire border with the Gaza Strip. The barrier was revealed on Thursday in a story splashed across the cover of Yedioth Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. The story was published with the approval of the country’s defense ministry. Yedioth’s affiliated website, Ynetnews, has the details:

The first thing to know about the “Let’s go Brandon” thing is: It’s funny. Or at least, it started out funny. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s how it started. In September, largely or even entirely in response to the Biden administration’s botched handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, crowds at various sporting events started chanting, “F— Joe Biden!” That’s not funny or appropriate. But maybe understandable, given how badly he botched the pullout. On Oct. 2, NASCAR driver Brandon Brown won a big race. While he was being interviewed by a reporter, the crowd could...

After announcing on Friday that he would not seek reelection to Congress in 2022, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said Sunday he, Rep. Liz Cheney and "a few others" are the only House Republicans "telling the truth" about the 2020 election and its aftermath. "You can fight to try to tell the truth, you can fight against the cancer in the Republican Party of lies of conspiracy of dishonesty," Kinzinger told ABC "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos exclusively in his first interview since the announcement. "There are about 190 people in the Republican Party that aren't going to say a word,...

U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger criticized Democrats for encouraging Republicans to tell the truth but then targeting him in redistricting. Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, explained his decision to not seek re-election while appearing on ABC News' This Week Sunday morning. He said one reason he opted to retire is that he has not seen other Republicans "move away from lies," amid baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election by former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies..... He also called out Democrats for drawing him into a district with another GOP incumbent. His district is currently largely based in...

[This open letter is being published simultaneously by The Bulwark and the New Republic.]We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things.Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come. Because we believe in the pluralism that is at the heart of democracy.But right now we agree on a fundamental point: We need to join together to defend liberal democracy.Because liberal democracy itself is...

Remember when they deplatformed Parler, accused American grandmas of insurrection, and digitally silenced the president of the United States? Remember how they did all of this after Black Lives Matter and antifa rioted for months and radical mayors and prosecutors refused to lock them up? Remember how academia, corporate America, and even the military suddenly stepped out of the shadows and pushed the exact same racist theory, all pushing the lie that America is racist at the same time radicals across the country were attacking statues of our founders and even President Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant? It all felt...

In a recent Washington Post opinion piece, Robert Kagan presented a chilling, but disturbingly accurate, portrayal of American politics today and its dire portents given the deep political divisions and dysfunctional state of our institutions. A premise of his thesis is that “party loyalty has superseded [executive-legislative-judicial] branch loyalty … in the Trump era.” A more descriptive statement of the Republican side of the ominous national problem — Democratic extremists deserve at least equal blame — would be that loyalty to Donald Trump has superseded party loyalty. Trump has proved himself to be the ultimate embodiment of a “Republican in...

Bill Kristol, editor of the anti-Trump conservative site The Bulwark, said on Sunday that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was entitled to call Fox News host Tucker Carlson a "repulsive bigot" for his remarks about Buttigieg taking paternity leave. Carlson had mocked the secretary for taking paternity leave and sniped that the secretary was "trying to figure out how to breastfeed." "I'm not going to apologize to Tucker Carlson or anyone else for taking care of my premature newborn infant twins," Buttigieg said in responding to Carlson's comments during an appearance Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

Two GOP officials have urged Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2022 midterm elections to bolster the party from candidates they described as "pro-Trump extremists." Miles Taylor, a Trump-era Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, and Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, wrote a New York Times op-ed that ran Monday. Taylor is best known for anonymously writing a 2018 op-ed article in The Times describing a "resistance" of Trump administration officials working to tamper what he called the former president's "worst inclinations." Together, Taylor and Whitman asked that the GOP's base consider supporting Democrats...

And if she wins next year, it won’t be the first time Trump has handed a seat in Georgia to the Democrats.I’m impressed by his commitment to turning that state blue. That’s another thing he and Abrams have in common.From last night’s rally in Perry:That wasn’t the only moment when he endorsed Abrams over Brian Kemp. “Stacey, would you like to take his place? It’s OK with me,” he said elsewhere during his speech.

With Joe Biden announcing a vaccine mandate on private businesses yesterday, the country entered a new era of federal power, one that is seemingly limitless in its ability to suppress individual rights. And while some national GOP figures quickly devolved into the typical talking points and empty promises, others are rallying around a theme I wrote in my initial impressions yesterday — do not comply. Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire are putting their company on the line to make that point. This morning on Fox News, the top-rated conservative podcast host laid out how they plan to fight back...

Fresh polling from Fox News confirms an emerging trend: While his GOP rivals poll competitively or ahead of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump consistently trails her by a substantial margin. The new national survey shows Ohio Governor John Kasich -- who has no mathematical path to the nomination -- leading Clinton by a whopping 11 points (51/40), with Texas Senator Ted Cruz edging the former Secretary of State by three points (47/44). By contrast, controversial real estate tycoon Donald Trump trails Clinton by 11 points (38/49). Roughly half of registered voters say they'd be "scared" Trump wins the...

The situation in Afghanistan is dire. But it is not too late to deploy forces to stabilize it, and ultimately turn it around. We can at least avoid the worst outcome, a collapse and slaughter that would be a catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan and a strategic and moral disaster for the United States. We know this is doable: General John Allen, who served as commander of the International Security Assistance Force from 2011 to 2013, laid out a realistic plan for salvaging the situation and avoiding the complete collapse of Kabul. Would a bold intervention now commit us...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) slammed some in the Republican Party for “whitewashing” the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. In an interview on “The Takeout Podcast,” CBS News’s Major Garrett asked the governor to weigh in on efforts within the GOP to “sanitize” the attack, which led to multiple deaths and hundreds of arrests. “We have to get to the bottom of exactly what happened there, and there's no whitewashing,” Hogan said.

Cyber Ninjas, the cybersecurity consulting firm hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 election, on Thursday pushed a false narrative that Maricopa County received thousands of mail-in ballots that had no record of being sent out to voters. The firm’s CEO Doug Logan used the baseless claim to urge legislators to subpoena more records and canvass voters at home, grasping for evidence of fraud even as a hand count of a statistical sample of ballots and two post-election audits showed no proof of wrongdoing in Maricopa County’s election. The false claim has reverberated online...

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, who regularly attends Trump rallies and interviews supporters of the former president, got quite the shock while interviewing attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas over the weekend. Most of the people O’Sullivan interviewed gave answers that have come to be expected. One man said he thinks the election was probably stolen from Trump, while a woman said she finds it very questionable that Trump lost. Another woman said that she would like to hear Trump say in his speech on Sunday that he would “regain his rightful seat as president” as soon as the...

California GOP gubernatorial hopeful Caitlyn Jenner called out Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for the settlement she paid to a “Twitter troll” now being donated to organizations that support gun control, after the controversial Georgia Republican attacked her on Twitter. Jenner’s clap back came in the wake of Greene calling on Republicans to withhold their support for the transgender reality star and former Olympian — with Greene referring to her as a “man in a dress & NEVER-Trumper.” “GOP support & consultants working to elect Jenner for Governor in CA are playing the left’s stupid identity politics game. A game that...