Free Republic

In the aftermath of the election, Democrats are engaging in public blame-shifting, while avoiding accountability for their own policies and elite disconnect, which alienated voters and led to defeat.Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar“They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” – Often attributed to Charles-Maurice de TalleyrandThe Democratic election postmortem immediately descended into public blame-gaming—as expected. When Joe Biden was forced off the ticket in late July, the conspirators issued a party line that he was to be praised as...

Victor Davis Hanson joins John after President-elect Trump's victory to explore why his direct style resonated with middle America. Hanson examines the economic and social factors driving Trump’s appeal, from rising inflation and border insecurity, to the sense of exclusion felt by many Americans. This interview highlights the stark divide between global elites and everyday citizens, examining how media and institutions underestimated public frustration. Hanson argues that Trump’s policies address real concerns, fostering a lasting loyalty among voters. In addition to domestic dynamics, Hanson assesses Trump’s assertive approach to foreign policy, from NATO to trade relations, and its effect on...

Harris’s campaign was crippled by her ties to unpopular policies, Biden administration failures, authenticity issues, and a contentious nomination process. The presidential race was not unpredictable, as the now once again discredited polls swore to us. Instead, the great Trump comeback victory was clear by the last weeks of the campaign. The Republicans had made massive gains in voter registrations since 2020, when Trump had lost the Electoral College by only a few thousand strategically placed votes. Republicans began to master the transition to non-Election Day balloting—first engineered by the left in 2020 under the pretext of COVID. They not...

Derogatory labels highlight the cultural and socioeconomic divide between elite politicians and many Americans, particularly Trump supporters, who feel disrespected by these terms and policies. Who actually are the “garbage” people? Are they one and the same with Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “chumps,” and “dregs of society?” Or Barack Obama’s “clingers?” Do they include Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables?” Are they FBI grandee Peter Strzok’s Walmart shoppers who “smell?” Over the last decade-and-a-half, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Harris-Walz, and a host of other self-described elites have variously invented a wide range of smears and slurs—but about whom exactly? Who...

Hoover Institute Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson said Friday on his podcast that he believes Democrats are feeling more depressed and angry than usual because they fear they could be losing. Polls between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have tightened with fewer than five days until Election Day. On “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” the senior fellow called out a recent take from CNN’s senior reporter Harry Enten for claiming election polling could be underestimating Harris and noted that her campaign has shifted its resources from North Carolina to Virginia in search of a path to...

Harris is smearing Trump as a fascist, even though ironically, he has been the target of fascist machinations from her own party and supporters for nearly a decade. In the last two weeks, Kamala Harris has been trying to revive her stagnant campaign by smearing Trump as being Hitlerian and a fascist. She claims Trump is planning to put his enemies in encampments. Yet in the modern era, it was not Trump who put large numbers of U.S. residents and citizens into “relocation camps,” but liberal Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt who sent Japanese-American citizens and residents into them. If...

Netanyahu's actions have neutralized more Western adversaries responsible for decades of bloodshed than NATO, the CIA, FBI, or Interpol, combined, yet he’s often met with rebuke rather than gratitude. OrdealAfter the October 7 massacres, the obituaries of the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, published both in Israel and in the West, became orthodox. He was considered as politically inert as Donald Trump once was after January 6, 2021. The conventional wisdom speculated not if, but only when he would be forced out of office. Western leaders and the Israeli left, and indeed even the Israeli non-left, as well as...

Only two talking points matter: Which candidate’s past record and current agenda best appeal to voters? And which candidate seems the most authentic and genuine? As Vice President Kamala Harris slips in the polls, the Democratic National Committee/Harris Campaign/mainstream media fusion talking points become even more absurd. Claiming that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump were “weird” did not work—especially given the genuinely odd behavior of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and would-be First Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Nor was the next Harris meme convincing that the frenetic and non-stop Trump was somehow “exhausted,” “senile,” and “confused.” Voters know the workdays of...

The trust and prestige that took prior generations of journalists decades to earn have been thrown away in just a few years by incompetents and partisans. CBS’s iconic 60 Minutes has had plenty of scandals and embarrassments in its long 57-year history, most notably the fake-but-accurate Dan Rather mess. Yet never has it found itself in greater disrepute than in 2024. Donald Trump, for good reason, recently declined to join 60 Minutes for its traditional election-year in-depth interviews of the two presidential candidates. Why? Last time he consented in 2020, anchor and interviewer Leslie Stahl attacked Trump’s accurate assertion that...

Hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark. The election is finally shaping up to be not only liberal Democrat Harris versus conservative Republican Trump. Instead, it has become a larger contest between those who talk down to their fellow Americans and those who are increasingly sick and tired of being lectured. How smart is it, for example, for Harris supporters to claim nonstop that ex-president Trump is a fascist dictator—and thus, by extension, those also who vote for him? Women voters poll about 53-5 percent for Kamala Harris. Trump enjoys a...

Commemorating the anniversary of the battle of Tours. We have just passed the anniversary of an epic event that is not widely known in America except among history buffs, but which nonetheless dramatically shaped the future of the Western world, and which may still hold inspiration for us in the West today.After the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in 632, Islam spread like a bloody tide throughout the Arabian peninsula, north to the Caspian Sea and east through Persia and beyond, westward through Egypt and across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. From there it crossed...

Harris is distancing herself from her record, misrepresenting her past, and shifting blame for policy failures onto Donald Trump, creating a disconnect between her actions and campaign messaging. Increasingly, little if anything remains real about the Harris campaign. Take ideology and the issues. It is now well known that Kamala Harris was rated as the most left-wing of all current senators, including Bernie Sanders—according to GovTrack, a non-partisan compiler of evaluators in Congress. The Voteview project found her voting record the most liberal of all senators of the 21st century, except for radical Elizabeth Warren. Harris as vice president in...

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...