Free Republic

In 2020, covert actors manipulated the Democratic primary to ensure Joe Biden's nomination and later controlled his presidential agenda, ultimately forcing him to step down in favor of Kamala Harris. In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden. Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina. Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply...

When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton. What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump. The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it. In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent. Hillary...

Can we cease the charge of Trump the fascist since it has not only been proven false but has revealed far more about the authoritarian and conspiratorial nature of the accusers than their target? Who has most peddled conspiracy allegations the last nine years—all of them false and nearly all of them influencing national elections and public policies? Once a target is constructed as Hitlerian, almost any means necessary to quash that perceived existential threat become justified. And we have seen a lot of them in the last nine years. Russian collusion did not work. Christopher Steele was a fraud....

As Victor Davis Hanson notes, “our Soviet Union” features our own Brezhnev in Joe Biden and our own Pravda in the establishment media that praises the Delaware dullard as “sharp as a tack.” Our Soviet Union also features Stalinist show-trials, imprisonment without trial, government control of media, deep state agencies deployed against the people, and our very own communist party. Long before the Russia hoax, the Soviet Union interfered with American elections by running their own candidates of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR. The CPUSA candidate in 1924, 1928 and 1932 was William Z....

Why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president? When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton. What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump. The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it. In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher...

Removing Biden is wise and needed for the country’s sake, but it will not solve the growing public anger at the left. Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems. Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of...

If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way: We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence. But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book is a macabre warning to an aging America as it closes in on its 250th birthday. The warning comes in the form of a graphic depiction of the hideousness of war and the terrifying state of those who suffer ignominious defeat. However different the four societies described in the book were, be they Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, or Aztecs, each was blinded by the illusion of invincibility. Hanson shows that such an illusion is so persistent that even as the conquered were being slaughtered, they continued to think: “It cannot happen here.” Thebes, the 4th century...

Leonid Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1982. But like most Russian apparatchiks who excessively smoked, drank, and gained weight, he aged prematurely. Also like them, his disabilities never led to his abdication. By Brezhnev’s late sixties and early seventies, he was too ill to travel abroad or make public appearances. Indeed, his debility left the Soviet Union without a real leader for the final six or seven years of his tenure. Brezhnev got away with it because the Soviet state-controlled media doctored photos and videos to attest to his supposedly vigorous...

The more Biden avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent. The entire 2019-20 Biden candidacy and subsequent presidency were predicated on a rotten Faustian bargain. A hale Joe Biden would feign his aw-shucks, Joe from Scranton schtick. And an ossified working-class Joe’s camouflage would get the hard left elected—especially thanks to the changes in balloting laws that often saw only 30 percent of the electorate voting on Election Day in key states. In exchange, the two narcissistic Bidens would bask...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky might do well by studying the career of Carl Mannerheim and how he saved Finland from the Russian meatgrinder. In early World War II, on November 30, 1939, a Soviet-Russian army invaded Finland in a surprise massive attack. The Finns were eventually outnumbered nearly 3 to 1. The population of the Soviet Union in 1940 was 50 times larger than that of Finland’s. Finland’s former anti-Soviet ally, Nazi Germany, had sold it out under the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which made Germany and Russia de facto allies. Finland’s other allies, particularly France and Britain, were slow...

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” — Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. After last Thursday’s debate, Biden himself laid to rest the Democratic lie that he was robust and in control of his faculties. In truth, he demonstrated to the nation that he is a sad, failing octogenarian who could not perform any job in America other than apparently the easy task of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief in charge of our...

There is a growing movement to surrender American sovereignty to international bodies. This effort—championed by a global elite—excludes the participation of the American people and threatens our national security. Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. Victor...

The only practicable way to avoid another near-one million dead and wounded would be a settlement, however unpopular. Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War. Both Russia and Ukraine underreport their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting. In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would...

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. Victor discusses current political and social events and ideas, and current and past cultural trends.

The Biden administration's agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought. Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens? Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every...

How and why did California end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism? California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly. How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism? The symptoms of the state’s suicide...

When we hear such things in the months to come, remember that these mythologies are usually a warning: what the left is alleging is, quite often, precisely what the left is already doing. Since 2016, there has been a clear pattern to left-wing conspiracies—beyond the obvious fact that they traffic in lies, stereotypes, and paranoia to serve precise political agendas. We now know that the conspiracy to cook up the Russian-collusion hoax—Donald Trump allegedly conniving with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 vote—was perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its funding was hidden by the Democratic National Committee, the law...

Are America’s cultural institutions in decline? In this insightful interview, Victor Davis Hanson explores how the left's dominance in Hollywood, professional sports, and media has led to significant disengagement from the public. With NBA ratings at record lows and Hollywood relying on Chinese markets, Americans are opting out of what they perceive as a socialist-dominated culture, creating a "monastery of the mind." Hanson discusses the broader implications of this shift, noting that traditional cultural monopolies are crumbling as people reject network news, blockbuster movies, and even major sports events. This disengagement poses a dilemma for the left, which has leveraged...

The West Is Sick of the New Woke Jihadism By Victor Davis Hanson - RCP ContributorJune 14, 2024 The West Is Sick of the New Woke JihadismFR159526 AP What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting? What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about? Occupations? They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.