Free Republic

In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.” Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it. I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind. Socialism With a Whimper So it is with our “woke”—a euphemism for the socialist revolution we are in and do not fully appreciate...

It’s time for a greater American opt-out. Victor Davis Hanson has recently pondered in back-to-back essays whether there is any way out of America’s previously “fast-tracked” and now accelerating decline. Meanwhile, Julie Kelly appears to see no way out of the “near-certainty” that a “D.C. grand jury . . . will indict Trump on multiple counts” in ways that will cause him to be treated “[n]ot as a former president but as a traitor.” Columnist Josh Hammer, addressing both Trump’s judicial travails and the broader “decadent civilizational morass,” insists in his own consecutive submissions that “sometimes, the only way out...

The new majority of radical Democrats allows the old fogies to bask in the limelight until they drop because these codgers mask their revolutionary intentions. Joe Biden is now 80 years-old. He will be 82 when he campaigns for the 2024 presidency—and a clearly debilitated 86 should he be elected and fill out his second term. He has been in government for over a half-century. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current representative from California is 83. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the second-ranking Democratic House member behind Pelosi, was House majority leader until early this year. He is 83, and has...

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Because today, the government is the cause of our many crises. Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline—until it began to implode. Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns? Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence? Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process? Or all that and more? Now with the election of...

Why is French President Emmanuel Macron cozying up to China while trashing his oldest ally, the United States? Why is there suddenly talk of discarding the dollar as the global currency? Why are Japan and India shrugging that they cannot follow the United States’ lead in boycotting Russian oil? Why is the president of Brazil traveling to China to pursue what he calls a “beautiful relationship”? Why is Israel suddenly facing attacks from its enemies in all directions? What happened to Turkey? Why is it threatening fellow NATO member Greece? Is it still a NATO ally, a mere neutral or...

We fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve. The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself. Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side. The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore them. And why not, when Biden...

Victor Davis Hanson joined Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night to react to New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Donald Trump. Hanson characterized it as “the worst example of third-world election tampering” and said, “We are in the middle of a revolution that we don’t even know we’re in.”We’re seeing war clouds gather abroad, and I think the United States’ economy, politically, foreign policy, is at a nadir, and we’ve lost now all credibility that we’ve stored up over 233 [years]. We have no more moral credibility to lecture people about the democratic process.They...

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary. The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020. It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support. The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East. They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism,...

Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would not survive. As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials. Most legal experts, Left and Right, have noted: 1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”...

A transgendered Tennessee mass shooter this week executed three adults and three nine-year-old children at a Nashville private Christian school. Supposedly she left behind her a manifesto justifying her mass murdering. As of this writing, law enforcement officials have declined to make the document public. Yet in about a nano-second after the news was disclosed, the left-wing activist machine kicked in, led by politicians, entertainers, and the media. Three predictable themes surfaced. The first was led by none other than Joe Biden. He lectured that guns were the cause of the mass deaths, not the free will of a psychopathic...

The megalomania of the current crop of students, faculty, and administrators at our radical universities blinds them to the claims of their generations of benefactors. The most recent shout-down debacle at Stanford’s law school, one of many such recent sordid episodes, prompts the question: “Who owns our universities?” The law students who are in residence for three years apparently assume they embody the university. And so, they believe they represent and speak for a score of diverse Stanford interests when they shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan, as if he were an intruder into their own woke private domain. After...

The list of serial embarrassments at Stanford reads like the suicides of Greek tragedy, where divine nemesis follows hubris. Stanford was once one of the world’s great universities. It birthed Silicon Valley in its prime. And along with its nearby twin and rival, UC Berkeley, its brilliant researchers, and teachers helped fuel the mid-20th-century California miracle. That was then. But like the descent of California, now something has gone terribly wrong with the university. Students at Stanford Law School recently shouted down visiting Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan. He had been invited to give a lecture by...

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome. Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence. Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world. Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like...

  Who Killed Homer? They were supposed to keep the Greek and Roman flame burning. Instead, the authors argue, today's classicists have trashed their own field, squandering the legacy that shaped Western civilization and destroying a noble profession. by John Heath and Victor Davis Hanson Related Articles:Two professors defending HomerRelated Site: Classics on the web This winter, a new crop of PhD students in classics will troop off to academic conferences in search of teaching posts. These would-be professors of Greek and Latin have done exactly what they were told and read precisely what was assigned. Most of them...

Another couple of weeks, another bout of madness from Joe Biden and his team. Of recent Biden delusions, consider: Biden went off in one of his impromptu Corn Pop, or “beat-up-Trump-behind-the-bleachers” fables. These often slurred and nearly unintelligible tales characteristically virtue signal Biden’s own victimhood and “courage.” They are interspersed with his bizarre propensity for eerie female contact. So we see or hear of his long record of blowing into the ears and hair, or squeezing the necks of young girls. He hugs, for far too long, mature women. He can call out among a crowd an anonymous attractive teen...

Magnanimity demonstrated to those harming us at home and abroad is interpreted as American weakness, if not decadence to be further exploited. Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage—of the thieves! They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished. The criminals entertained no fear of any consequences for walking out with bags of things that were not theirs. They had no care that mainstreaming their habits would undermine...

For over two millennia in the West, familiarity with the literature, philosophy, and values of the Classical World has been synonymous with education itself. The traditions of the Greeks explain why Western Culture’s unique tenets of democracy, capitalism, civil liberty, and constitutional government are now sweeping the globe. Yet the general public in America knows less about its cultural origins than ever before, as Classical education rapidly disappears from our high school and university curricula. Acclaimed classicists Hanson and Heath raise an impassioned call to arms: if we lose our knowledge of the Greeks, we lose our understanding of who...

The few sowed the wind, and the many reaped their whirlwind. American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires. Premodern Barbarism We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns. Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it. So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass...

Americans should end it now before it ends America first. Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous. Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result—history’s prescription for civilizational decline. If we continue with the woke hiring of administrators, air traffic controllers, ground crews, pilots, and rail workers, there will be even more news of disasters and near-miss airline crashes. Wokeness demands a McCarthyite suppression of free expression. No wonder a woke FBI recently hired out social media censors to suppress stories it deemed unhelpful. Soviet-style, wokeism mandates...

Triumph Retaken shows that America’s war in Vietnam could have been won earlier at far less cost, and in fact almost was, even belatedly by 1968. Military historian and Hillsdale College professor Mark Moyar has just published Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968, which is the second in what will become a massive three-volume revision of the entire Vietnam War. It is a book that should be widely read, much discussed, and reviewed in depth regardless of one’s view of that sad chapter in American diplomacy and conflict in Vietnam. The first book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 appeared...