Free Republic

Today’s Democratic Party has abandoned its traditional working-class, patriotic roots and embraced a radical Jacobin ideology built on division, coercion, and political extremism. For the past century, the agendas of the Democratic Party were predictable. They professed concern for working Americans and supported blue-collar unions. Unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, and Social Security were their trademarks—often rapidly achieved by growing government bureaucracies and continually raising taxes. Still, many Democrats were socially conservative. By the 1970s, Democrats still deplored antisemitism. Party officials had rejected their own segregationists to champion civil rights. Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and...

The Iran war didn’t just break Tehran—it shattered old alliances, exposed Europe’s weakness, checked China and Russia, and accelerated an American-led geopolitical realignment. No one ever quite knows the nature of the aftermath of any war in the Middle East. The current effort to disarm and neuter the Iranian theocracy is no exception. But contrary to European and American left-wing consensus, the ripples of the Iran war are already remaking the postwar world as we knew it—and in ways that are all bad. For more than half a century, OPEC has terrorized the industrial world with threats of oil shortages...

For decades, Iran survived by staying just below the threshold of direct confrontation. It relied on shadow oil shipments, asymmetric attacks, and strategic disruption. That formula worked against sanctions. It is now colliding with something it was never built to handle: a sustained, enforced blockade.And markets are only beginning to understand what that means.How a Shipping War Turned Into Economic ContainmentThe escalation did not begin with the blockade. It began with Iran attempting to weaponize uncertainty.Early in the conflict, Tehran targeted commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, effectively freezing traffic through one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints....

Trump’s assassination attempts underscore how rhetoric that casts political opponents as existential threats can move from language to violence. Same Old, Same Old: Target Trump.At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Donald Trump was the target of yet a third assassination attempt—this time in full view of the Washington press corps. The event was presented as a spirited night with Trump. After 11 years of avoiding the predominantly left-wing media event, he decided to revisit the dinner. He anticipated that he would be the object of ridicule inside the hall—and that he might see possible violence outside it. Indeed, protesters ringed...

Iran’s decades-long bluff—built on terror proxies, nuclear brinkmanship, and Western appeasement—collapsed the moment it faced direct force and a changed geopolitical landscape. How does the supposedly most fearsome regime in the violent Middle East now find itself on the verge of an utter economic and military collapse? Iran’s half-century-long deadly terrorist reputation peaked with the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel that it helped fund and coordinate. Iran’s terrorist ambitions of running the Middle East had accelerated after witnessing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his administration’s distancing itself from Israel. Biden’s humiliation by a series of Chinese slights and the...

The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny. Pseudo-HeroesIt is difficult to determine whether the bizarro worldview of the current Democrat-media nexus can simply be attributed to either its generic Trump Derangement Syndrome or the attendant Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner obsessive/compulsive disorder. But the crazy world of the Left increasingly bears scant resemblance to reality. In this alternate universe, Eric Swalwell was a liberal icon and invaluable asset for years, though admittedly a bit randy and occasionally a serial sexual predator—a fact that the man himself made...

“It is one thing for the people (of Iran) to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now impotent incompetents and buffoons.” —VDH Wednesday the US / Iran ceasefire expires. It has been an interesting two weeks. The US used it to negotiate an end to hostilities, resupply our ships in the Arabian Sea, do maintenance on our ships and warplanes, dismantle Iran’s banking conduits, and blockade Hormuz to shut down the regime’s remaining income flow. The Iranians used it to jump up and down and go woo-woo-woo. They...

<p>Here are Victor Davis Hanson's own words from the discussion, cleaned up and formatted for clarity (removing timestamps, interviewer prompts, and host commentary):On Iran's regime and internal humiliation:“As I said in this article, it’s one thing to tell the population, ‘Well, you don’t like us, but we restored the Iranian credibility. Everybody’s afraid of us. We’re the terror master.’ And now the people are saying, ‘No, you’re not the terror masters of the Middle East. You’re a paper tiger. You’re buffoons. They’ve wiped you out. We’re going down the toilet with you.</p>

America’s leverage in the Strait exposes Iran’s weakness—turning its greatest asset into a liability and reshaping the balance of power without a ground war. The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum. The Strait of HormuzPrior...

Summary of Video Transcript Victor Davis Hanson suggested letting NATO "die on the vine" by putting into it exactly the amount of effort that Canada does, while making bilateral deals with European countries that support the U.S., in this video for "The Daily Signal." "Even though they have a $22 trillion GDP, apparently they don’t want to invest that in their own defense," he said. "And they don’t want us to use it when we need it." "What’s the future? Do we get out of NATO? I don’t think we do. I think we just let it die on the...

We've come a long way from the 2003 British lectures about American obtrusive ray-bans and Kevlar losing what British soft hats and smiles had won. That quote about defeat from "a senior U.S. official" about the British withdrawal from southern Iraq is probably accurate, but it belongs to a larger, more disturbing context: (1) the popular British anger at the U.S. (whether evidenced by the "poodle" slur or the latest Pew poll finding that a bare majority of British subjects approves of the U.S.); (2) a growing acknowledgement of British weakness and appeasement, as exemplified not just by the escape...

The Left and some on the Right went crazy over a recent Trump tweet. He warned that if the Iranian regime did not cease blocking the international Strait of Hormuz, he would hit its dual military-civilian infrastructure. He promised that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” His wording may have been sloppy, but Trump obviously meant that the murderous civilization/culture of radical Iranian theocratic Islam would cease to exist and wouldn’t come back once power plants and transportation systems crucial to the regime’s survival were cut off. Why do we know that? Because, unlike...

--SNIP-- Europeans are far more vulnerable to Iranian-inspired Islamic terrorism. They are more reliant on oil from the Middle East, some of it passing through the Strait of Hormuz. All the US had initially requested was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill an American president and secretary of state. But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some ****** the US effort as either illegal or unnecessary. The American public watched the British waffle for days over permitting the US...

NATO endures on American backing while many allies demand U.S. action abroad but withhold it when asked, exposing a widening gap between rhetoric and responsibility. NATO members are not legally required to join any member’s military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership. But they often do just that. Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security. They followed the precedent set by America’s 1999 intervention in...

Military victories are decided on the battlefield—but in modern America, they are too often lost in the politics that follow. The rare quick and total victory over an enemy at little cost often ensures unquestioned political support in modern consensual societies. In most cases, however, especially in the Western world, ongoing military success or failure is adjudicated through the lens of politics—in a way sometimes at odds with the reality of the battlefield. Politicians answer to the people. The best do not drift with the prevailing winds. On the other hand, all must face elections, secure legislative support, and ultimately...

𝗩𝗗𝗛: 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗜𝗚𝗡𝗔𝗟𝗦 𝗔𝗥𝗘 𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗣𝗢𝗜𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗔𝗠𝗘 𝗗𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡.Victor Davis Hanson has spent fifty years studying how wars end. When he says the tide is turning, it's worth listening to why.His argument isn't based on what the Pentagon is… pic.twitter.com/pC35L1Hdsu— M.A. Rothman (@MichaelARothman) March 20, 2026

YouTube video = 00:11:01Daily Signal article https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/03/19/why-2026-could-be-the-most-dangerous-and-transformational-year-since-world-war-ii/2026 looks like it’s going to be the most tumultuous, geo-strategically significant and dangerous year since the fall of the Soviet system and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The whole world is in upheaval. Donald Trump is the catalyst of this. A lot of people, both in his base and his opponents, both here in the United States and abroad, blame him. ...

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on how the war with Iran is going after two weeks for "The Daily Signal." Video Transcript Summary VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We’re just completing the second week of the so-called Iran war — this effort of the United States to bomb the theocracy into submission so they will cancel their missile and nuclear programs and to champion the popular protests on the streets that have some potential to get rid of the regime itself. But it’s a very surreal war. I haven’t seen — I don’t think any of us have seen — anything like...

Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic. All that said, was it really ever all that formidable? The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and, subsequently, the interim secular socialists. They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters, and transforming the most secular and modern of the Middle East Muslim nations into the most medieval that routinely hung homosexuals, adulterers, and almost anyone who questioned the authority of...

For decades, Iran cultivated a myth of invincibility through terror and proxies—until war exposed the regime as weaker, poorer, and far more fragile than the world had feared. Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic. All that said, was it really ever all that formidable? The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and, subsequently, the interim secular socialists. They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters, and transforming...