Free Republic

Conservatives often slept through the woke revolution only to awaken to a country their apathy allowed to transform into one they no longer recognize. Can they finally breathe fire? Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst. How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us? They don’t see much backing for the current wide-open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, yet it continues. Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events. They fear...

For the left-wing elites, the cause is but a means to personal and professional power. Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions? The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the...

Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide—to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice. The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges. The FBI hired...

While special counsel John Durham's investigation of the investigators concluded there was no "actual evidence" to justify spying on the Trump campaign, Victor Davis Hanson said the reality is there was evidence to spy on the Hillary Clinton campaign. But they refused to, fearing Clinton was about to become president and turn the tables on the FBI, the historian and fellow at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution surmised to the "Mark Levin Show" podcast, shared Saturday on Rumble. "I think it's so overwhelming and so existential, because it essentially said that far from being a Trump-Russian connection, there was a...

What cannot go on, will not go on and all the absurdities of the present will end with a bang not a whimper. A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples: Reparations How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations? The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. Its $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths with a foot of track. California’s income...

His racist commentary and demagoguery is an old story, deployed as needed and in the direction most likely to suit the moment. The most recent liberal ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Joe Biden’s approval rating at 36 percent—the lowest in history for a president at this point in his first term. Biden’s low popularity is no mystery. He inherited energy independence, affordable gas prices, historically low interest rates, low inflation, calm overseas, a low crime rate, and a largely closed border with legal-only immigration. And then Biden destroyed that inheritance. He has begged illiberal foreign governments to pump oil he...

Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies. Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre. But if that’s the case, why haven’t federal prosecutors also gone after Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? She clearly lied her way into a Harvard Law School professorship and an erstwhile presidential candidacy by claiming, in part,...

Recently there has been a spate of horrific murders. The killers, whether committing mass shootings or single homicides, are hard to stereotype. They can be clearly either mentally ill or simply innately evil. They can kill for revenge, for ideological purposes, out of hatred, for notoriety—or for no known reason at all. They are probably left-wing and right-wing, white, black, and brown, young, and old. While their weapons of choice are semiautomatic rifles, there are plenty of killers who favor handguns and even knives. Unfortunately, these tragedies increasingly have become politicized. Yet our media and politicians do not apply a...

Victor Davis Hanson explains how the middle class in California is struggling due to high taxes and heavy regulations that fall heavily on small business owners. As a result, many are leaving the state, causing the middle class to shrink and leaving California with the highest number of homeless people and welfare recipients in the US

At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum because its continuation would destroy all the work of 247 years of American progress and sacrifice. The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became antithetical to the earlier American precedent. American notions of liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force “fraternity” among its subjects. Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical...

For the Left, having virtually no president at all certainly has its advantages. With no one in charge, everyone is in charge. We start with the likely American landscape over the next two years. Joe Biden has no choice but to focus on a purely negative message. So we already know his talking points for the next 18 months: “ultra MAGA” demons, “semi-fascist” insurrectionists, Trump!, Trump!, Trump!, and more Trump!, murdering fellow Americans by putting limits on partial-birth and early abortions, “censorship” as banning critical race theory indoctrination and grooming books, inciting racial tribalism, along with the corollary old boilerplate...

Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. The network just settled for an astounding $787.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host. The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated, or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were “fixed” and misreported the vote count in some precincts of the 2020 presidential election.

Fox News is miscalculating in its "emotional" firing of Tucker Carlson, severing ties with an irreplaceable force in new-age populist conservativism, according to Victor Davis Hanson, a fellow at the Hoover Institute. Not only is the network disenchanting its audience, it gave the leftist cancel culture activists a victory, and created a 3.5-million viewer vacuum that other conservative networks like Newsmax are going to fill, Hanson told The Telegraph's "Off the Script" podcast this weekend. "The Murdochs are not quite understanding that when you take away somebody who had a greater potential elsewhere and was a precious asset that anchored...

Massaging a U.S. election by conspiring to concoct a disinformation campaign must be as actionable as Dominion’s postelection claim of $757 million in damages. That's exactly what happened in 2016. Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. The network just settled for an astounding $757.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host. The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated, or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were...

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...

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...

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...

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...