Free Republic

Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention -- live from noon to 3 p.m. on weekdays -- the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. More than 15 million tuned in each week. Last week, 32 years and more than 23,000 hours of on-air commentary after he went national in August 1988, Limbaugh died of lung cancer at age 70. By the 1990s he had become the voice, literally and iconically, of the conservative movement and its hot/cold liaisons with the Republican Party. Limbaugh was hated by...

These are crazy times. A pandemic led to national quarantine; to self-induced recession; to riot, arson and looting; to a contested election; and to a riot at the U.S. Capitol. In response, are we focusing solely on upping the daily vaccination rate? Getting the country back to work? Opening the schools as the virus attenuates? Ensuring safety in the streets? Or are we descending into a sort of madness? It might have been understandable that trillions of dollars had to be borrowed to keep a suffocating economy breathing. But it makes little sense to keep borrowing $2 trillion a year...

Yet few of our leaders are very worried about the existential crises left unaddressed by their obsessions with the ghost of Trump. Take the debt. It is now nearly $28 trillion, and it is growing by almost $2 trillion a year. No one in D.C. talks about reducing the annual budget deficit. Nor do officials find ways to balance the budget. The idea of paying off the monstrous debt remains a fantasy.

Tonight, we sit down with classicist and historian (Victor Davis Hanson) to discuss the rise of critical social justice and (woke) ideology, growing limits on freedom of speech, and his take on the second ideology, growing limits on freedom of speech, and his take on the second (impeachment) trial of former President Donald Trump.“It’s like a public-shaming like the Communist Party used to make people wear dunce caps,” Hanson says.This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

A new buzzword on social media, cable news, and among leftist activists is “deprogramming.” Along with terms like “reprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” and “deplatforming,” deprogramming refers to cleansing the incorrect mentalities of former Trump Administration officials—and even those who voted for Trump. Note that deprogramming does not refer to elites who peddled the “Russian collusion” hoax for years, despite the abject absence of evidence. Not long ago, two Washington Post columnists offered some solutions to the Trumpist threat. One, Max Boot, wished to ban Fox News and other conservative stations from cable subscriptions. The other, Eugene Robinson, suggested that there was a...

(This photo made available by the U.S. National Archives showed a portion of the first page of the United States Constitution.)The newly formed President’s Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President, Dr. Larry P. Arnn. The vice chair was Dr. Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the commission.)The unanimously approved conclusions focused on the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the historical challenges to these founding documents and the need for civic renewal. The 16-member commission was diverse in...

Two days after the 2020 election, a defiant Kathy Griffin retweeted the notorious picture of her holding a prop that looked like the bloody head of a decapitated Donald Trump. Earlier last year, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted out a call to his followers to destroy Israel. Both tweets passed the censorship rules of Twitter's 20-something judges in San Francisco. ...................................................... Today, however, progressive politicians, Wall Street, the media, academia, Hollywood and professional sports are all on the side of the mega-rich tech cartels. Partnering with Big Tech is both politically useful and financially lucrative. So the values...

Hang on. It is going to be Mr. Toad’s wild scary ride for all of 2021. The proper conservative response to last Wednesday’s violent entry into the Capitol and vandalism, as well as assaults on law-enforcement, is to identify the guilty parties and ensure they are arrested. Such deterrence will prevent any future devolution from legal popular protests into thuggery. No constitutional republic can tolerate its iconic heart stormed, breached, and defiled. Is Some Violence Worse than Others? Of course, there is no such thing as “good” or “acceptable” violence of either Trump supporters or of the Antifa and BLM...

After Nov. 3, the meaning of some words and concepts abruptly changed. Have you noticed how new realities have replaced old ones? Media cross-examination of the president is now an out-of-date idea. The time for gotcha questions has come and gone. Why ask a president whether he is a traitor or a crook when you can focus on his favorite flavor of milkshake or compliment him on his socks? The old pre-election truth was that new vaccines take years to develop. The new postelection truth is that it's no big deal to bring out new vaccines in nine months. Impeaching...

COVID, Woke Science—and DeathIn this brave new world of ours, will we be pruning back the elderly altogether by credentialed “ethicists,” whether because of their longevity or race?Since March, the Left has proclaimed itself the guardian of science in dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic. Its champions are the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Dr. Fauci. All in the past have rendered valuable service to the public, and often life-saving aid.Yet the mixture of COVID-19, the first national quarantine, and Trump Derangement Syndrome have combined to give us reason to question their judgment. These authorities variously have...

Utopianism is age-old, as are its tragic consequences — and we haven’t seen the worst yet.Bouts of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left.America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the late 19th century, amid the Great Depression, during the Soviet-American alliance of World War II and afterward, and in the 1960s. But rarely have these radical movements openly and without apologies made...

One can lie about collusion with impunity. But to speak the truth about collusion is to be smeared as xenophobic, racist, and nativist. Historians will dissect the origins and spread of the mass hysteria of Russian collusion. The farce infected the media. It discredited the Democratic Party. And it warped the popular culture between 2015 and 2020. Collusion destroyed what was left of respect for the Washington FBI, the CIA, and the liberal news media. When 50 former “intelligence” officers can attest, right before the election, that the Hunter Biden scandal emails are likely Russian disinformation designed to help Trump,...

The opposition to the Trump administration’s policy was carried out by the likes of “Anonymous” — who bragged of working inside the administration to countermand legal directives by systematically and illegally leaking classified information — and by a biased media that reached a new record of 80–90 percent negative coverage of the current administration and its policies. Joe Biden’s team, if it were to be wise and without arrogance, would build on the present policies, which have created far more strategic advantages for the West in general and the U.S. in particular than had the more praised but often empty...

This interview of Victor Davis Hanson with John Anderson of Australia, is very long - but it's very thoughtful and enlightening, if you have the time to watch. Hanson is one of our greatest thinkers and observers of the US political, historical and social scene: "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6idYZ25Qq6w

There was a low bar for Joe Biden in the first debate, given his cognitive challenges. Because he exceeded that pessimism, he won momentum. In opposite fashion, there was similarly an expectation that a disruptive Donald Trump would turn off the audience by the sort of interruptions and bullying that characterized the first debate. He did not do that. He instead let a cocky Biden sound off, and thus more or less tie himself into knots on a host of topics, but most critically on gas and oil. So likewise Trump will gain momentum by exceeding those prognoses. But far...

The coronavirus, widespread quarantines, an unprecedented self-induced recession, and unchecked rioting, looting, and protesting -- all in a presidential election year -- are radically disrupting American habits and behavior. Rents, home prices, and office occupancy rates in major cities, especially on the two coasts, are dropping fast. Techies and young professionals have discovered that they can work from home without paying sky-high housing costs in order to be close to the office. Those more fortunate wonder why they should get bogged down with commutes and urban traffic -- or navigate city sidewalks amid homelessness, crime, racial tensions, and urban unrest...

The so-called mainstream polls of the swing states show the race narrowing. If the trend continues at the current rate, President Trump could poll even in two weeks—in addition to the “other” polls that show him near there already. So Trump’s mission at the final debate on Thursday is to continue to accelerate his momentum, not to take risks to melt down Joe Biden with verbal fireworks. Every 10 days, the campaign starts anew. Trump’s rallies are back. He miraculously beat COVID-19 in near record time. Judge Amy Coney Barret proved stellar. If most voters poll they are better off...

The news media until recently had rarely criticized the medical advice of experts -- especially those who worked for federal bureaucracies, international organizations, or elite universities. Yet the much-praised Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has demonstrably weakened the effort to fight COVID-19. During the critical initial weeks of the virus's spread, Tedros parroted Chinese propaganda. He falsely assured a complacent world that the virus was likely not transmissible between humans and did not warrant travel bans. That Tedros was the first WHO director not to have a medical degree was seldom cited by the media. Dr....

On Tucker Carlson’s show, Prof Victor Davis Hanson slams Chris Wallace for directing gotcha questions ONLY AT TRUMP. See video starting at 1:55: https://youtu.be/bjUdObXAqP0 I wonder if Tucker will get in trouble from his Fox superiors for allowing a guest to eviscerate Fox’s Chris Wallace

In all the perfervid reporting this week (Victor Davis Hanson calls this “concocted melodramas”) there are only three big stories to my mind: The President’s stunning success in the Middle East, Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos’ brilliant parlay to Princeton’s virtue-signaling president and the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each of these are likely to further tip Trump toward an election victory in which according to Rasmussen he’s already reached 53% approval among likely voters.No one has better described the significance of the Abraham Accord than Spengler (David Goldman). The President, defying the conventional wisdom of decades of...