Free Republic

The remarkable thing about Russell Rickford is that there is nothing extraordinary about him. The Cornell University prof gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 by declaring that he found the terror attack “exhilarating.” Afterward, Rickford apologized for his “horrible choice of words.” After the controversy over his warm words for Oct. 7, Rickford took a “voluntary leave” and is now back in the classroom. What’s outrageous isn’t that he hasn’t been disciplined by the school, but that he fits in so seamlessly. If Rickford, a history professor, went somewhere else to ply his wares, he’d in all...

Folks online are calling out National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry after he seemingly used a racist slur while discussing the Republican-launched anti-Haitian rhetoric that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating domesticated animals.

In a sour commentary, NYT Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy said he'd 'cringed' when former president Bill Clinton took the convention stage on Tuesday to claim that Harris would be 'the president of joy'..... Harris can't coast on "joy",' he concluded witheringly. How's that going to help the millions of Americans whose livelihoods are now at stake, Healey asked? On Monday, the newspaper published a guest essay titled 'Trump can win on character', by conservative commentator Rich Lowry......Pulling no punches, Lowry wrote that Harris is 'weak and a phony and doesn't truly care about the country or the middle class.'...

Chuck Schumer is doing us a favor. Often, parties try to obscure or deny their radical plans prior to an election, but the Senate majority leader is being more candid. In a session with reporters at the Democratic National Convention, Schumer (D-NY) suggested that — should Democrats win the White House, Senate and House in November — he would seek to end the filibuster for purposes of passing voting rights and abortion legislation. This would be an inflection point in American government. There’s no nuking the legislative filibuster a little bit. The end run around the Senate’s long-standing requirement for...

I saw Twisters last night. What fun! I’ve always been fascinated by tornadoes, so I was going to be a sucker for this sequel, but it’s genuinely great. The blockbuster special effects are compelling, the characters are enjoyable, and the plot is clichéd, but okay enough for this kind of fare (there’s nothing woke, although there is an evil capitalist). Glen Powell, who plays a YouTube-star cowboy chaser, is a real movie star. Pass the popcorn.

National Review editor Rich Lowry reacts to the report that 34 Democratic lawmakers are calling for President Biden to exit the race on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend.’ #foxnews

As far as we know, Nikki Haley isn’t on the short list, nor on the long list. There’s no indication that she’s being considered as Donald Trump’s VP pick, and Trump forcefully smacked down a report in Axios that the campaign was looking at her. She’d still probably be the choice who, more than any other possible pick, would help Trump win in November. By conventional rules, the former South Carolina governor getting the nod would be so obvious as to be completely unremarkable — she’s the runner-up in the nomination fight; she represents a different faction of the party;...

Who knows what Trump is really thinking, but I’ve thought Rubio was the strongest pick — assuming they can find a way around the Florida thing — because he might help solidify the change happening among Latino voters and is an energetic and likable campaigner. But in terms of the electoral map, Trump is looking so strong in Arizona and Nevada, it may be that he should be looking for potential help elsewhere, especially with Biden so dependent on the Blue Wall states and holding up in them better given his strength among older white voters. So, yes, it may...

The Alvin Bragg case has gotten grander at trial, but also more ridiculous. The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so. Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the election. He, thus, joins all the other progressives who have denied the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, although he finds the culprit not in Russia (at least not in this case) but in the shady maneuverings...

I almost feel sorry for the anti-Trump-but-more-anti-anti-Trump conservatives. I know—you had to read that sentence twice. I’ll explain. These are right-wingers who oppose Donald Trump—because of his efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, or his often-incoherent policies, or his utter lack of decency, or his destructive influence on the right, or all of the above—but who devote more energy to decrying liberals for overreacting to and for persecuting Trump. I’m not referring here to Never Trumpers like neocon Bill Kristol or the gang at the Lincoln Project—those onetime Republicans who have readily joined forces with Democrats and progressives to oppose...

The cataract of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses has been shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It is the poisoned fruit of teaching a generation of college students to despise their own civilization. Jesse Jackson famously led a chant at Stanford University in 1987: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” He was talking about the college course, but he might as well have been talking about the thing itself. Jackson and his allies had extraordinary success in extinguishing the teaching of Western Civ. Not only have we largely stopped transmitting the story of our own civilization,...

Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday directed the Florida Department of Education to suspend four schools from the state’s school-choice scholarship program because of their alleged “direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.” “Through a thorough investigation, FDOE has determined that Lower and Upper Sagemont Preparatory Schools in Weston, Parke House Academy in Winter Park, and Park Maitland School in Winter Park have direct ties to the CCP and their connections constitute an imminent threat to the health, safety, and welfare of these school’s students and the public,” the DeSantis administration said in a statement. The Florida DOE is working with...

There’s being fortunate in your enemies, and then there’s having enemies who are helping you take the first step in your political comeback. Donald Trump and his adversaries want profoundly different things in the long run — Trump wants to be back in the White House; Democrats want him in an orange jumpsuit. Yet in the shorter term, they both are seeking the same thing — Trump as the Republican nominee, either so he can sweep to victory (Trump’s view) or be beaten again and pay the price for his crimes (the Democrats’ view). The serial indictments of Trump, even...

Donald Trump hasn’t been known for his scrupulously correct use of language, but he now wants to police the use of “woke.” “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘woke, woke, woke,’” he said the other day. “It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.” Of course, Trump wasn’t randomly volunteering his equivalent of an elementary rule of usage from Strunk & White. His newfound disdain for the term “woke” has everything to do with his contest with Ron DeSantis for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. ***...

Divorce usually isn’t a good idea, and that’s especially true of a nearly 250-year-old continental nation. The notion of a national breakup has long simmered as a fringe argument, but it is increasingly popular in certain precincts of the political right and has gained at least some traction with partisans of both sides. A recent survey by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia found that about 50 percent of Donald Trump voters and 40 percent of Joe Biden voters agreed to some extent with the proposition that the country should split up, with either red or blue...

Perhaps the most moderate candidate in the field as of this moment is Donald Trump. If you want a Republican who won’t cut spending or start foreign wars, Trump is still your man. Added to this now is clearly a discomfort with the fight over abortion in the post-Roe environment. Trump’s main line of attack against Ron DeSantis is from the left. He’s hitting the Florida governor hard for his past support for reining in Social Security and Medicare. He’s also called the governor’s culture-war clash with Disney “so unnecessary” and “a political stunt,” while not entering the fray in...

The Twitter Files released by Elon Musk give us a more fine-grained understanding of how and why the social media company decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. This was a woefully stupid decision. The New York Post’s account was suspended for two weeks for the offense of coming up with a scoop that we are still talking about and that will surely play a large role in upcoming GOP investigations into Biden family corruption. That’s the kind of thing that newspapers should get awards for; Twitter thought it should get punished for it. But the Twitter officials caught...

Kinzinger, a fervent Trump critic, was responding to claims Lowry made in a recent New York Times guest essay in which he argued that the various investigations into Trump, including the probe into his conduct on January 6, are unlikely to produce clear-cut evidence of the kind necessary to responsibly undertake the destabilizing exercise of prosecuting a former president. [cut] Kinzinger responded by arguing that existing law is surely broad enough to implicate Trump in criminal behavior on January 6, and even suggested passing new legislation targeting Trump if existing statues weren’t sufficient to prosecute. "Look, I had a lot...

There’s simply no market for this among Republicans. On top of it, Cheney’s alienation from her party is likely to build on itself. Already, she has said that she’d “find it very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis, the leading Republican alternative to Trump. In so doing, she is identifying herself with a fraction of a fraction of the party that is so small it is all but nonexistent. If she ran in a primary, she’d be firmly in the Larry Hogan lane, which might constitute about 5 percent of the Republican electorate total. It’s quite possible that those voters are...

In 2015, Donald Trump burst on the scene with a megaphone, a populist message, an army of grassroots supporters — and not much else. If he runs for the Republican nomination again, as seems likely, it will be different. Early in his first presidential campaign, he had to be grateful for every small crumb of support from Republican officialdom — an endorsement from then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, or former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Now, Trump is a former president of United States who looms incredibly large over his party. He and his loyalists have forged a new establishment —...