Free Republic

The Iran war could reshape the midterms as Democrats, Iran’s regime, dissidents, and Kurdish rebels weigh the political and military stakes of the next 50 days. Many narratives swirl around the U.S. war with Iran as the November 3 midterm elections loom. The Left is giddy with confidence that Democrats may take control of Congress. It is therefore planning a circus of impeachments, lawfare, and investigations to neuter the last two years of the Trump administration. High gas prices and the current unpopularity of the Iran conflict, coupled with the historical reality that the president’s party has lost seats in...

While the trade war between Trump and Canada continues, China has been selling cheap aluminum and steel to Canada to get around tariffs and undercut American workers. “The United States is fed up. They're fed up with countries that said for 30 years they were going to protect themselves and help NATO, and the most egregious offender in the last 15 years has been Canada.” Watch the full episode with Victor Davis Hanson here: https://youtu.be/-265LpIW5uI?si=H40pljVH0mICeB3f

Mark Carney’s anti-American crusade risks hurting Canada’s economy while strengthening China and exposing the contradictions behind his trade war with the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations. So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an...

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. I’d like to offer an update on the Canadian-American trade spat. Earlier, I had staged it. I said stage one was surprise on both sides of the border that two neighbors who spoke the same language, had the same civilizational origins in Britain, were close neighbors, and had the largest undefended border in the world were at a point of very angry disagreement. The second stage was that Prime Minister Mark Carney started to suggest that the United States was solely culpable, was a bully, and had forced him to...

The primaries are over, and the November general election looms. Suddenly, the Islamo-socialist podcaster Hasan Piker--who is now infamous for blaming America for 9/11 and warning Jews that "someone's going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews"--is persona non grata on the Democratic stump. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in the Michigan Senate race, once enlisted Piker to jump-start his lethargic candidacy. Now that he is locked in a close general-election race against a strong Republican, El-Sayed dismisses the antisemite, who has suddenly outlived his usefulness, as a mere...

The socialists didn’t radicalize the Democrat Party; they simply inherited a party that had already radicalized itself. The primaries are over, and the November general election looms. Suddenly, the Islamo-socialist podcaster Hasan Piker—who is now infamous for blaming America for 9/11 and warning Jews that “someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews”—is persona non grata on the Democratic stump. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in the Michigan Senate race, once enlisted Piker to jump-start his lethargic candidacy. Now that he is locked in a close general-election race...

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world. Maybe we’re progressive regressives, and I don’t mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive, and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing. But the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period. Remember, the medieval period was...

America is surging ahead while Canada stagnates, and that growing asymmetry—not trade alone—is driving the acrimony between two longtime allies. At first glance, the current American-Canadian trade “war” is absurd. We are neighbors with a long history of close friendship, speak the same language (for the most part), and spring from the same British civilization. Nearly one million Canadians reside in the United States. Given the two countries’ natural affinities, Canadians are nearly indistinguishable from Americans. Both sides have reasonable grievances over trade policy. Americans don’t like Canada’s perennial trade surpluses of more than $50 billion in a supposedly free-trade...

The West has mastered the technology of civilization but embraced the politics of barbarism, creating a modern medieval world where progress and regression coexist. For most people, the story of the medieval world was one of cramped cities, constant violent crime, and episodic outbreaks of deadly plagues—the dividends of unclean urban conditions, rotting food, fouled water, open sewage, unchecked rats, fleas, lice. Most of each day was spent simply trying to survive until the next. Castles and walls dotted the landscape to protect kingdoms from marauding tribes and foreign invaders. City gates were usually closed at dusk to keep out...

Why would anybody vote for a person tied in with Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi and that whole tradition of Bay Area politicians who've taken control of the state from the LA center of power of the 1970s and '80s, when they gave us a huge government fraud program, devastating wildfires, the highest electricity rates and income tax?

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...