Free Republic

On Wednesday’s “Alex Marlow Show,” Breitbart News economics editor John Carney discussed the policy legacy of Pat Buchanan. Carney said, “Pat Buchanan, really, was pretty formative for me. He, correctly, convinced me that America’s post-Cold War interventionism was crazy. So, I opposed — I was a kid at the time — but I opposed our toppling of the government of Panama, I opposed the incursion that we did in Somalia — I still can’t get anybody to explain what the heck we were doing during the ‘Black Hawk Down’ days in Somalia why were we there. I opposed the bombing...

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back. "Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave...

The economy has often soared under Republicans who protected domestic industry.“Make America Great Again” will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history. Yet it raises a question: how did America first become the world’s greatest economic power? In 1998, in The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, this writer sought to explain. However, as the blazing issue of that day was Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, it was no easy task to steer interviewers around to...

Various media outlets are reporting that deportations will begin on day one of the incoming Trump administration. “There’s going to be a big raid across the country,” said immigration border czar, Tom Homan. “We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens, that’s what’s going to happen.” What has been called the “National Question” is now mainstream and a battle looms—a battle that will determine whether America will continue to exist. But I want to ever so briefly return to the past. As Peter Brimelow recently wrote, the paleoconservatives have warned since at least...

…But as the 2024 Republican National Convention in the garrison state of downtown Milwaukee winds down, a more definitive transformation of the Trumpist creed is under way, chiefly in the selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. Trump’s own listless, meandering, and astoundingly long acceptance speech on the convention’s last night only made it all the more clear that the MAGA torch is being passed to a more focused and clear-eyed generation of ideologues, with Vance as their de facto leader. But the party’s fulsome embrace of a blood-and-soil brand of economic nationalism, as epitomized by Vance’s...

For most of the past three decades my favourite American political speech has been Pat Buchanan's keynote speech at the RNC in Houston in 1992. Maybe this recent effort from Tulsi Gabbard is better: "Aloha. What a beautiful sight ........ I feel this sense of hope and inspiration and motivation because you know how serious the task at hand is ...... Our fundamental rights and freedoms, the principles of this great country are under attack ........ We are seeing the fundamental pillars of our democratic republic being undermined ........ It is not up to someone else to fight this battle...

When I was looking desperately for a number of years two decades ago for voices that intelligently and courageously spoke up against the militarist excesses of Bush 2, I was astonished and delighted by what I found on The American Right - Congressman Ron Paul and Patrick Joseph Buchanan. IMHO there is nothing short on film from Buchannan to match the magnificence and power of Paul's "what if" speech. But the longer culture wars speech on youtube is for me an almost sacred text which I watch once or twice a year to restore my faith in truth. My own...

AJP Taylor died Sept 7th, 1990, in London, England. Wikipedia states that: “His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as “the Macaulay of our age”.” Taylor wrote: “Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.” “The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.” Taylor had a low opinion of Adolf Hitler’s intellectual abilities: “A racing tipster who only reached Hitler’s level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.” But he did not blame Hitler...

In the basement of an decimated church in eastern Mosul, rubble and debris tell a gut-wrenching story of ISIS' depravity towards Yazidi women and girls. On the floor of the iconic house of worship lie tiny pieces of pink and yellow underwear and flower headbands belonging to the very young Yazidi sex slaves the barbaric terrorist group took captive. Iraqi officials tell Fox News that at least 200 Yazidi girls and women were imprisoned in the historic Syrian Orthodox Church of St. Ephraim, one of the region’s largest Christian sites, which was freed by Iraqi forces several months ago. “We...

The Old Right/New Left/Neo-Nazi AllianceBy Steven Zak FrontPageMagazine.com | May 12, 2005 How much difference is there, really, between the far-Left, the far-Right, and overt white supremacists? How do the public stances of Michael Moore, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke compare? Proponents of both extreme views now think and sound so much alike, they sound like soulmates. Somehow these fringe characters have moved so far around the edges that they have arrived at the same territory, spouting identical positions in copycat rhetoric on such issues as Iraq, the broader War on Terror, and the Jewish state of Israel. Their own words...

BlackRock wants to control as much of Ukraine as it can

My book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History has received far more attention than I ever expected. Once the book hit number eight on the New York Times bestseller list, the Times’ editorial page condemned it without actually showing where its arguments were mistaken; several weeks later, to my surprise, the Times published a favorable profile of me. The controversy surrounding the book has reached at least two other continents: Brazil’s Folha de S. Paulo, with the highest circulation of any newspaper in Latin America, published a full interview with me, as did a major Catholic newspaper in Ireland....

I am making this appeal to New York City, because this is the only place in America where such an appeal can still be made. I just saw Billy Graham’s Qualcomm Stadium telecast on ABC, and I believe that there are legitimate grounds for the godless among us to demand equal time according to Section 315 of the 1934 Communications Act. Non-believers in America are far too polite, which will prove to be their undoing. There is a reason why the life of a typical atheist family resembles the Marshall-Will-and-Holly model from Land of the Lost. They live in caves,...

Likely we will never get to read the email exchanges between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, but we do have these, accidentally leaked to Mondoweiss, between the celebrated general and Romney the advisor and uberhawk Max Boot. The context is that in 2010 Petraeus submitted a statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee which said that the conflict between Israel and Palestine presented challenges for America’s ability to advance its interests in the Muslim world.

A group of anti-Israel activists and journalists are engaged in a coordinated campaign to stifle criticism of controversial secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel by attacking the former Republican senator’s critics, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. Fenton communications chief executive officer David Fenton, the Atlantic’s national correspondent James Fallows, former diplomat Charles ‘Chas’ Freeman, Just Foreign Policy director Robert Naiman, and American Conservative founding editor Scott McConnell participated in a recent email exchange dedicated to silencing Hagel’s critics, the emails reveal. The emailers targeted recent comments made by Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration National Security Council...

Snip In the aftermath of 9/11, when President Bush ordered the U.S. military to remove the Taliban, who had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda and Osama, America was with him. When he identified Saddam as an integral part of an Axis of Evil hell-bent on America’s destruction, the nation supported him. Now America is not so sure. Preventive war as the antidote to terror seems, now that Anbar province has become the world’s newest base camp of terror, to have failed us. Democracy as the surest guarantee of U.S. security, now that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Moqtada al-Sadr are...

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. . . . [Because we want history to render a negative verdict on Iraq to discredit the doctrine of preventive war.]

TrampZZ/Shutterstock Ross Douthat politely but definitively unloads on the liberal Catholic theologians who griped about his opining in The New York Times, critical of Pope Francis and his allies in attempting to liberalize Catholic teaching on marriage, divorce, and communion. Excerpt: At which point we come to the third argument, which makes an appearance in your letter: You don’t understand, you’re not a theologian. As indeed I am not. But neither is Catholicism supposed to be an esoteric religion, its teachings accessible only to academic adepts. And the impression left by this moving target, I’m afraid, is that some reformers...

It never ceases to amaze me how the populist Right, or what speaks in its name, overestimates its strength both here and in Western Europe. One needn’t be an enemy of these activists to recognize the exaggerated nature of their claims. Those in the media who now demand a border wall insist that the “people” want this goal achieved immediately if not sooner. In fact, according to Ann Coulter, Trump “scammed the American people” by not giving them the wall they’re clamoring for. But according a nationwide poll by The Hill, 51 percent of American voters oppose Trump’s project, while...

If presidential inaugurations are all about symbolism, what to make of this one? There was no grace present as Trump slunk off early in the morning, an embittered use of Air Force One while he still controlled it. No reports of Downton Abbey-like farewells with the White House staff. No first lady tea ceremony. Hell, it’s not like the Bidens haven’t seen the place before. The Trumps left the White House the way most people leave a hotel: might as well get an early start on it.