Free Republic

‘If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” That’s the quote from the late economist Herbert Stein. Some facts to consider:- U.S. share of world population: 4% - U.S. share of world GDP: 26% - U.S. share of world wealth: 29% - U.S. share of world debt: 35% - U.S. share of worldwide military spending: 37% - U.S. share of worldwide foreign aid: 40%The above figures are not sustainable. Well, actually, they were not sustainable, past tense.Many will look at the first three bullets above and conclude that America has been exploiting the rest of the world to get...

Does it seem like Trump is already president? If his first week following the election is compared to a football game, he isn’t just throwing long bombs or running a smashmouth fullback right up the middle; he’s more like a run-and-shoot offense that completely confuses the defense and leaves it breathless. I’m hoping he names Steve Bannon to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, because that will ensure that Democrats will support their instant abolition. And why did Biden look so happy this week? I’ve got two theories. . .

I’m currently working on a long series of articles I’ll be posting on my new “Political Questions” Substack on the topic of “leftist fragility,” but there’s an example of what I’m after yesterday that is perfect for our short form here. The editor of Mother Jones magazine, Clara Jeffery, was offended and alarmed when an Alaska Airlines flight attendant triggered her with visions of fascism and the whole Handmaid’s Tale nightmare:I’ve circled what is known in the Twitterverse as “the ratio,” that is, when Comments exceed the number of Likes by an almost 10-to-1 margin as it does here, you’ve...

Some years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates was the hottest thing on the Left, viewed as an intellectual of world-historical importance. Scott performed the excruciating task of reading Coates’s Between the World and Me. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction, but Scott called it the worst book he had ever read.Coates made a lot of money from his racist grifting, and then disappeared from sight. He hasn’t been heard from for a while. Apparently he was writing comic books.But now Coates is back, with a new political cause: kill the Jews!His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just...

A society can reach a point where it is literally too stupid to survive. Are we getting close to that fatal juncture? Here is one of many thousands of data points: a judge in Indiana has ordered that state to pay for sex-change surgery on a convicted murderer.Not just any murderer, but Jonathan Richardson, who is serving a 55-year sentence for strangling his own stepdaughter. He now goes by Autumn Cordellionè. The accent is a nice touch.The inmate has sought sex reassignment surgery, including an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty, arguing it is the “only remedy” to treat “persistent gender dysphoria”.The state...

You just knew that as soon as Biden got caught (deliberately?) on a hot mic saying “No one f—- with a Biden,” someone would go out at f— with Biden. In particular the Saudis, who—how shall can we put this delicately?—have some experience with this sort of thing. When the Saudi foreign ministry puts out a public letter calling out the president for his nakedly political pleading to bail out his party at the midterms, you know that foreign respect for the president has sunk below 40 percent. Let’s go Brandon indeed.

I think [Vance] is a bad decision for a number of reasons. At 39, Vance is too young...with less than two years in the Senate as his only political office, he has nowhere near the experience that a VP should bring to a ticket. Vance, who is unknown to the general public, won’t bring Trump a single new vote. In fact, there is no reason to think that he is any kind of political powerhouse: in his only race, he ran far behind the other statewide Republican candidates in Ohio. ...Vance’s political views are...half-baked. He is still evolving...he denounced Trump...

Europeans Aren’t As Crazy As We AreOr, to be more specific, their left isn’t as crazy as our left. One instance among many is the United Kingdom’s relatively sane reaction to the “trans” hysteria that gripped the world’s leftists a few years ago. In America, “trans” ideology remains rampant, but in Europe it has been reined in. Thus, for instance, Britain has shut down its notorious Tavistock “child gender identity clinic.”In the last days of the Conservatives’ majority, they enacted an emergency ban on prescription of puberty blockers for children, the heart of the “trans” regime. In the wake of...

The Biden Administration is determined to limit America’s production of fossil fuels, of which we have the largest supply in the world. This will transition us from a position of energy independence, and potentially energy dominance, into a position of subservience to the Chinese Communist Party, on which we will depend for the vast quantities of materials that are needed for wind turbines, solar panels and batteries–which we will not be allowed to mine here. If this plan isn’t outright treasonous, it is possibly the stupidest program ever carried out by a government in world history. The stated rationale for...

Today is the anniversary of the birth of America’s great or greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. As a politician and as president, Lincoln was a profound student of the Constitution and constitutional history. Perhaps most important, Lincoln was America’s indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom at the exact moment when the country was on the threshold of abandoning what he called its “ancient faith” that all men are created equal. In 1858 Lincoln attained national prominence in the Republican Party as the result of the contest for the Senate seat held by Stephen Douglas. It was Lincoln’s losing...

Because leftists cannot win in the war of ideas, they will inevitably choose violence over reasoned debate. In 2004, when I got curious about what blogs were, I started investigating blogs on both the left and the right. I quickly realized that leftists dealt with obscenity, invective, and America hatred, and that I preferred the polite, reasoned debate on the right. One of my favorite sites was Power Line, started by a cadre of four Minneapolis-based attorneys. I still check in with Power Line on a regular basis, which is how I learned that leftists firebombed the offices of the...

An ATF spokesperson confirmed the investigation is moving forward as an "arson investigation.".. Ashlee Sherrill, public information officer for the St. Paul Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), did not provide details or indicate who, or if anyone, was targeted but confirmed the investigation is moving forward as an “arson investigation.” John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment (CAE), said based on the location of the fires in the building, it appears that someone targeted conservative groups. “The fires were obviously set by someone. They targeted conservative organizations. They didn’t firebomb the...

It is true that I have been in Washington, mostly to attend the Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn trial. I will write up my thoughts on the trial (or at least, those portions I have seen) when I have time. But something else has been distracting me: leftists firebombed my office last Saturday night. At around 2 am, they broke into the building that houses Center of the American Experiment and two other conservative organizations with which we often collaborate, along with many other businesses. The arsonists set two fires: one was in the first floor corridor between American Experiment’s...

The Biden administration is demanding that Israel take even more extraordinary measures to avoid harming “innocent civilians” as it tries to eradicate Hamas. Around the world, politicians and others express dismay at the alleged number of innocent civilians who have been killed by Israeli bombardments, even while admitting that Hamas’s casualty numbers include its own terrorists, people killed by terrorists’ awol missiles, and so on.But my complaint is more fundamental. Watching videos of Israeli captives being paraded through Gaza, and seeing “civilians” spitting on them, hitting them, joyously celebrating their capture, I have asked: where are these innocent civilians we...

I know, that isn’t exactly a news flash. But has there ever been more definitive proof than the silence of most feminists in the face of Gaza’s brutal assault on Israeli women? Caroline McCaughey writes in the New York Sun: One of the first videos uploaded to social media of the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7 showed the kidnapping of a 26-year-old Israeli, Noa Argamani, on the back of a motorcycle as she reaches out and screams, “Don’t kill me!” Another was of 23-year-old German national, Shani Louk, whose partially clothed, contorted body in the back of a pickup...

I have praised the Trump administration’s accomplishments many times, but there is one huge blot on Trump’s record: his administration’s response to the covid epidemic. Via InstaPundit, Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute comments on Megyn Kelly’s interview of Trump. Kelly, to her credit, began the process of asking Trump the tough questions about covid: We need to know why the churches, schools, and businesses were closed at the urging of the White House. We need to know why we faced travel restrictions, why government printed and spent multiple trillions that produced crushing inflation, why the hospitals were shut to...

Several weeks ago we offered our first installment of Power Line’s Lexicon of Leftist Terms, and it is time for an update that includes several worthy suggestions from readers. Taking it from the top: Populism: When the wrong person or cause wins a free election, like Brexit or Trump. Racism: Any kind of resistance, conscious or unconscious, to the political program of the left. Democracy: Any institutional design or voting system that enables the left to get what it wants. Updated version: “Our” democracy—the version of “democracy as the left defines it.” “Threat to democracy”: When Republicans win an election....

<p>In 2020, Nancy Pelosi, sitting behind Donald Trump at his State of the Union Address, showed her contempt for the speech by ripping it up. It was a nauseating display by the Speaker — one that said more about her poor character than about Trump or his address.</p>

For a long time, I sympathized with Dr. Anthony Fauci. There he was, trying to deal with a pandemic caused by a virus no one knew much about. Sure, he was often wrong about pandemic-related matters, but so were plenty of others, on both sides of the political spectrum and in between, who opined on these subjects. Everyone was shooting in the dark.But at some point — possibly because of all the attacks on him, some of which were over-the-top, possibly because of a personality flaw or maybe old age — Fauci decided to cast himself as Mr. Science. Criticize...

Did Joe Biden and the Democrats steal this year’s presidential election? Polls suggest that a great many Americans, including many Democrats, believe that they did. I don’t know whether the election was stolen or not. I will say this: the Democrats went to great lengths to commit, or enable, voter fraud. To cite just a couple of examples, in a number of states, including my own, they used corrupt, collusive litigation to eliminate the minimal safeguards that prevented fraudulent mail-in votes from being submitted, like the requirement that signatures be witnessed. Why would they do this? Obviously, they didn’t want...