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...

The headlines focus on negotiations, but the war’s real story is this: Iran is steadily being broken by sanctions, isolation, and relentless military pressure. One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators. Of the roughly 150 days since the first strike, about 90 have passed without major military operations. Iran believes time is on its side. The Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted, gas prices are too high, and antiwar House Democrats seem poised to win the midterms and bring Trump’s...

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...

Democrats can't win back the white working class with staged populism while embracing the policies and elites that drove those voters away. The last Democratic candidate to appeal to the white working-class voter was Bill Clinton. He needed every one of those voters in his 1992 and 1996 races. Yet he still failed to win 50 percent of the popular vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy. Since then, the Democratic brand has lost the white working-class vote in nearly every presidential election. Yet this demographic still makes up 40 percent of the electorate and registers and votes at much...

Lupita Nyong’o calls Homer’s 'The Odyssey' sexist, but the ancient epic’s women tell a far different story. Acclaimed British filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer) newest film, The Odyssey, opens this week in the United States. But controversy has already surrounded Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem about Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home after the Achaian victory in the decade-long Trojan War. Some of the film’s actresses have suggested that Nolan is offering a more feminist—and long-overdue—take on the ancient poem. Actress Lupita Nyong’o, in particular, has criticized Homer’s purported sexism. Perhaps her misreading of Homer stems...