Free Republic

Caitlin Clark made the WNBA rich, but its players seem determined to destroy the league by turning women’s basketball into a violent spectacle. A better name for the current Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) might be Women’s Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), given the growing performance-art violence that is now endemic in the league. Prior to the 2024 arrival of then-22-year-old Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark, very few people watched the WNBA. Team franchises were worth less than $20 million. The league ran chronic deficits and was subsidized by the men’s professional basketball league, the National Basketball Association (NBA). An unspoken subtext of...

Did Demons Create the First Atomic Bombs? Every August, debate renews over both the wisdom and the morality of dropping the two American atomic bombs, 81 years ago, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9). This August has been no exception. As ever, many critics have faulted the United States for the bombings: two gruesome blasts—aimed at dual-use military and industrial targets in both cities—that may have caused some 100,000–120,000 immediate deaths among combatants and civilians. And not all these critics are on the Left. Two years ago, podcaster Tucker Carlson blasted the Truman administration’s...

The West’s selective hatred of Israel says less about Israel than it does about the values—and prejudices—of those who condemn it. Hamas or Israeli Values?Israel dominates the daily news in this 2026 midterm election year—almost always in a boring, fatiguing, negative light. Tens of thousands of innocents may be slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, butchered, and tortured by the world’s dictators, yet an overwhelming and obsessive abhorrence is reserved for tiny, democratic Israel. Such perverse asymmetry is strange, since, at least privately, most Americans would concede that of the 18 Middle Eastern nations, only Israel is a genuine consensual democracy. As far...

The Left spent years destroying the norms it now invokes against Trump—and is outraged that Republicans learned the same playbook. One of the more surreal things about the new Democratic Party is its habit of charging Trump with legal and ethical transgressions that Democrats themselves normalized years ago. The result is a strange sort of projection, in which the Left’s charges often reveal its own prior wrongdoing. And after undermining norms, they now lament the loss of what they destroyed. Too Cozy an Attorney General? Democratic Senators voted unanimously against Todd Blanche for attorney general, claiming that, as a former...

When the Left cannot win within the rules, it changes the rules—and when that fails, it changes the people who make them. What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome—lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster—helped give birth to the socialists. But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the...

This is a YouTube video of a discussion of the works of Thomas Sowell, particularly his "Culture" trilogy. It is an excellent discussion of Sowell and his legacy, which continues to grow, although deliberately ignored by most academia.

In this new video, Victor Davis Hanson dismantles New York City Mayor Mamdani’s divisive Fourth of July speech, exposing the glaring hypocrisy of a multi-millionaire bicoastal elite lecturing the working class on systemic exclusion. Hanson pulls back the curtain on how his successes completely undermine his tribalist narrative. Don’t miss it. Victor, let's take the most controversial one that's gotten some attention, though I don't know how widespread this is, and this is New York City Mayor Mandami's prepared remarks for the 4th of July. And here, if I just bear with me, here's what he said. Um -- I'm...

Homer’s epic poem, “Odyssey,” is in the news lately, primarily because Christopher Nolan has produced a three-hour, and I can use the word impressionistic, retelling of the “Odyssey.” And a lot of people have criticized it; a lot of people like it. I’m gonna talk about the film later in one of our episodes, because I have now seen the new film, and Jack Fowler and Sami Wink and I have talked variously about it. But I wanted to today just talk about the “Odyssey” as a work of literature and history. A lot of people, I think, have the...

Iran’s rulers are not playing to win the war today—they are playing to survive long enough to fight another one tomorrow. We are now in Stage III of the Iran War: the familiar monotony of bomb, talk, bomb. It is now the liberal consensus that the war has failed, if not been won by Iran. We could be entering the war’s final stage, marked by an effort to escalate decisively before disengaging. We know the tired Iranian strategy by now. We might call it “theocratic rope-a-dope.” For the theocrats and their terrorist proxies, survival means outlasting Trump, waiting for the...

The Left’s socialist revolt did not come from nowhere—it was the inevitable offspring of years of Democratic radicalization, now turning against the party that created it. Who Caused Unaffordability? Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism. Yet annual inflation during Biden’s four years averaged almost 5 percent. It peaked at over 9 percent, while prices for some key staples rose by 30 percent over his tenure—all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9 percent. In his second term, it averaged 2.6 percent in 2025—and may rise to 4.5 percent in...

Democrats can't win back the white working class with staged populism while embracing the policies and elites that drove those voters away. The last Democratic candidate to appeal to the white working-class voter was Bill Clinton. He needed every one of those voters in his 1992 and 1996 races. Yet he still failed to win 50 percent of the popular vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy. Since then, the Democratic brand has lost the white working-class vote in nearly every presidential election. Yet this demographic still makes up 40 percent of the electorate and registers and votes at much...

Lupita Nyong’o calls Homer’s 'The Odyssey' sexist, but the ancient epic’s women tell a far different story. Acclaimed British filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer) newest film, The Odyssey, opens this week in the United States. But controversy has already surrounded Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem about Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home after the Achaian victory in the decade-long Trojan War. Some of the film’s actresses have suggested that Nolan is offering a more feminist—and long-overdue—take on the ancient poem. Actress Lupita Nyong’o, in particular, has criticized Homer’s purported sexism. Perhaps her misreading of Homer stems...

The world that we’re looking at today is radically different than that of just five years ago, radically different in the sense that it is much more in the interest of the United States. And I know that seems controversial because [President Donald] Trump is written off as someone who is too fluid and volatile... It’s more important to see what he’s done. Let’s go through the world abroad as it is today systematically. Look at Latin America. Five years ago, the Chinese were controlling, through their surrogate companies, the entry and exit to Panama. Russia and China were the...

America's allies are stronger, its rivals weaker, and the global balance has shifted. With a whimper rather than a bang, the world has become a different place than it was in January 2021, when Donald Trump left office. Almost everything we are now told about the global status quo is mistaken—largely because critics focus on what Trump says rather than on what he does. Rather, the Left—and some on the Right—are furious whenever Trump tweets, says, or does something that offends their delicate sense of taste, tradition, and decorum. Their outrage leads them to ignore whether this “Art of the...

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” to discuss the controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, focusing on comments by Lupita Nyong'o about telling the story from a female perspective and broader debates over casting and representation.

Mamdani’s Independence Day message says more about his own politics than the country that gave his family extraordinary opportunity. ohran Mamdani, New York’s self-described socialist mayor, could not resist using the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration to trash the very country that he and his parents voluntarily sought out. As is his custom, Mamdani speaks in stereotypes and generalities, offering few if any examples, all laced with his accustomed unctuous hypocrisy. Let’s deconstruct his incoherent July 4 riff: America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us,...

The new socialist movement believes it can remake America—but its growing radicalism may prove the very thing that drives voters away and fuels a counterrevolution. Win some blue-state and blue-city races, and the cocky new socialist Jacobins believe that they have either already taken over the Democratic Party or will soon absorb it. And in reaction to these new swarms, an increasingly terrified and ossified old Democrat guard either limps away from the hive or invites them in to take over more. It is fascinating but ultimately depressing to watch old-style Democrats say or do anything to avoid the new...

Victor Davis Hanson’s defense of the Second Amendment is not merely academic. In a Dec. 6, 2025 episode of Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words, the historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow recalled a late-night confrontation at his family farm that he says permanently shaped his view of armed self-defense. The episode was published under the title “Why Alvin Bragg Refuses To Recognize the Awesome Power of the Second Amendment.” Hanson is best known as a classicist, military historian, and conservative public intellectual. The Hoover Institution has described him as the author or editor of 24 books and hundreds...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version November 07, 2005, 11:15 a.m. Ruin? Was is death or renewal in Athens? EDITOR'S NOTE: Victor Davis Hanson's latest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War has recently been released by Random House. This week National Review Online will be excerpting Chapter 10 of the book. Below is the first part. Check back tomorrow for part two and click on Amazon to purchase A War Like No Other here. Was Athens — or Greece itself — destroyed by the war? An entire...

How Sparta, the most powerful Greek city-state, collapsed in only 20 years. The Decline and Fall of Sparta | 11:02 toldinstone | 627K subscribers | 82,207 views | Febuary 25, 2026Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:38 Classical Sparta 1:29 Spartan politics 2:22 Helots 3:24 Population decline 4:37 Hubris 5:25 The Battle of Leuctra 6:42 Messenia liberated 7:35 Enter Macedon 8:08 Attempts at reform 9:08 Irrelevance 9:37 Roman Sparta