Free Republic

Modern society's focus on credentials has created a two-tiered system, where multi-talented individuals are criticized, and elites oversee a dependent underclass. The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88. Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with...

The Biden administration's approach to Iran destabilized the Middle East and led to the October 7 Hamas attack and subsequent regional chaos. When Joe Biden became president, the Middle East was calm. Now it is in the midst of a multifront war. So quiet was the inheritance from the prior Trump administration that nearly three years later, on September 29, 2023—and just eight days before the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis—Biden’s national security advisor Jack Sullivan could still brag that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” So, what exactly happened to...

Why does the Biden-Harris administration deify Zelensky and Ukraine but demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel? About half of America sympathizes with Ukraine’s plight and wishes to arm it. After all, Kyiv was attacked preemptively by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, in an effort to decapitate its government and turn the country into a Russian satellite, perhaps similar to the status of a Belarus or Chechnya. The heroic ability of the Ukrainians to save Kyiv and to stop the Russian assault beyond the occupied Donbas and Crimea has hinged on Western weapons deliveries, specifically from European NATO...

Former October surprises—both the embarrassing disclosures and the use of incumbency to warp the election—are now becoming earlier and more frequent preemptive “September” shocks. An October surprise is usually defined as the well-known (and more often left-wing) tactic of manufacturing or unloading a news story right before voting to surprise a rival without allowing them time sufficiently to respond or recover. Think of the last-minute bombshell disclosure, five days before the 2000 election, that candidate George W. Bush had been cited for drunk driving over a quarter-century earlier. That surprise may have cost Bush the popular vote that year. Sometimes,...

ne of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.” These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos. Instead, they are used by politicians to impress and persuade the public to follow the “expertise,” “science,” or “authorities” to support all sorts of injurious initiatives and policies—of dubious value and otherwise without much political support. Think of all the health experts who collectively swore to us that the COVID mRNA vaccinations would give us ironclad and lasting protection...

Harris thinks her delays, deceptions, and vilifications for the next 47 days will ensure her victory. Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Kamala Harris—ever since Joe Biden, at the 11th-hour, dropped out in July. Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked. Her single, 11-minute post-debate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating—even though the host was sympathetically left-wing. Even socialist...

While Harris initially appeared to win the September 2024 presidential debate by sticking to prepped strategy and benefiting from biased moderation, she's failed to gain a lasting boost in the polls. After the September 10, 2024, presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the Harris campaign became giddy. And why not? Pre-debate conventional wisdom had assured the country that underdog Harris would shock the nation with her endless wash/rinse/spin word salads of repeated phrases and memorized sound bites. She supposedly would prove as shaky as Trump—the veteran of several presidential debates—would prove merciless in eviscerating her. That did not...

The sappy Harris won the visuals; the grouchy Trump likely the issues. But the real losers were ABC and its two partisan moderators, Muir and Davis. The September 10th presidential debate went down as expected. Summed up, it was Sappy and the Blob pile on Grouchy. The swarmy and evasive Kamala Harris preened, posed, and proffered empty platitudes. The ABC moderators proved they were predictably and shamelessly biased. And an irate Donald Trump confirmed that he was too touchy and easily triggered. Harris’s instructions were not to explain her agenda. She never defended disowning policies that she had embraced as...

A confused but also encouraged world of enemies watches the listless United States and wonders whether to try something stupid. Somehow the United States ended up this summer with no engaged president and an absent vice president who avoids the missing president and is frantically repudiating everything she co-owned the last three years. The world was already confused over how President Joe Biden was apparently declared by unnamed Democratic insiders and donors unfit and unable to continue as their presidential candidate—as if he were a dethroned Third-World usurper. It further wondered how those who staged his removal had no problem...

For some nine years, the media and the left have successfully fed the country a succession of rank deceptions and conspiracies. The public is exhausted after a decade of chronic untruth from the left-wing and its media. The 2016 presidential campaign will be long remembered for the false allegation that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the election. Citing the bogus “Steele dossier,” loser Hillary Clinton and other Democrat grandees claimed that the victorious Trump was an “illegitimate” president. Almost immediately, the left and media then pushed for the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. He assembled a...

Harris is not so much a flip-flopper as a padder, who supports anything, without any worry about framing each new position by renouncing her original and opposite one. An Opportunistic MediocrityIn theory, it should be hard for Kamala Harris to win the presidency of the United States. Under pressure, Harris just completed her first “live interview”—a disastrous performance that was mysteriously taped, edited, and emotionally supported by her co-interviewed running mate. During the interview, she claimed that her values remain the same even though her manifestations of them have admittedly changed. Translated, that means for the next 70 days, she...

How do accomplished radicals elect a mediocre far-left presidential candidate? The task might at first seem impossible. Kamala Harris is currently a radical incumbent vice president. For more than three years, she was second in command to an unprecedentedly unliked Democrat president, his failed policies, and his unpopular record. Harris herself had compiled a hard-left trail over her own entire career while loudly boasting indiscreetly to leftist audiences of being proudly “woke” and “radical.” Most challenging for a Harris candidacy makeover was the long, entrenched Democratic Party’s reluctance to remove a debilitated President Biden from the Democratic ticket. Why? Because...

Amid doubts about Biden's ability to effectively lead the U.S. in his remaining months as president, our enemies abroad might see an opportunity to alter the global balance of power. There are three current hot or cold wars: on the Ukrainian border, in the regions surrounding Israel, and in the strategic space between Taiwan and mainland China. All three conflicts could not only expand within their respective theaters but also escalate to draw in the United States. And all three involve nuclear powers. Various Russian megaphones routinely threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Some boast about sending strategic...

Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College, Pepperdine professor, syndicated columnist, bestselling author, and fifth-generation California farmer, argues in his July 29, 2024 article that American society is treating its citizens like lab rats, resulting in harmful outcomes. Read the article here: https://victorhanson.com/americas-lab... Transcript link below the video.

Have those who lectured us about democracy in danger now decided to save it by destroying it? The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic. Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic. That allegation subsequently justified a variety of anti-democratic means to neuter his first two presidential candidacies, his presidency, and now his third and final run for the White House. A near decade ago, we witnessed the 2015-2016 Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee/FBI-assisted effort to plant...

The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history. Here are 10 unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world: 1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now? 2. Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her last three decades of leftist...

ProjectionismProjection is a Freudian psychological term. It describes a particular defensive mechanism, when people, often unconsciously, attribute their own (usually undesirable) behaviors to others who do not have them. These mental gymnastics are intended to alleviate one’s own guilt or sense of inadequacy at the expense of another. Sound familiar? But in the political sphere, projection involves more overt dissimulation. It is increasingly common for leftist candidates or political parties to falsely accuse their opponents of the very destructive behaviors and unpopular agendas that they themselves embrace, but out of political necessity must deny. Rather than an unconscious Freudian defense...

This warped election violates every prior precedent and is not just creepy but dangerous—even before the campaign was supposed to formally begin. The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history. Here are ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world: 1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now? 2. Would the media prefer to...

The president, the Democratic presidential candidate, and the vice presidential nominee all either cannot or will not speak casually and publicly to elected representatives, reporters, or the people. BidenPresident Biden was forced, unceremoniously and unwillingly, to abdicate from his impending reelection nomination. Since then, we have neither seen nor heard much from our sitting President. He has vanished, poof, gone. This is quite unusual if not alarming. Unlike prior to the June 27 debate, the left now makes no effort to hide Biden’s debility. Indeed, it accepts the reality that an infirm Biden might not be able to finish out...

Joe Biden won in 2020 on the premise that until the November election, he would pose as good ol’ Joe from Scranton and not scare voters. So Biden talked about “unity” and “competency.” He erased his prior wild primary pandering to left-wing voters about shutting down fracking and opening the border. But as soon as he was elected in 2020, Biden became the leftist veneer for a hyper-radical Obama third term. Fooled and naïve voters were shocked that their supposedly moderate candidate turned into a veritable neo-socialist president. In general, the left acknowledges that its spread-the-wealth, high taxes, big government,...