Free Republic

FBI Director Kash Patel is shutting down the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.—a decision originally made under the Biden administration’s FBI. Symbolically, the closure speaks volumes. Victor Davis Hanson walks us through the troubling legacy left behind at the FBI HQ on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

There are more mysteries than answers surrounding the Biden team. Why did Joe Biden's medical team announce right now—on the eve of the release of “Original Sin” — this shocking story that the president, who just left office 100 days ago, was suffering from a very seriously rare, malignant form of prostate cancer, asks Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words:”

One of the most important reasons President Donald Trump won in 2024 was his very convincing case that the Biden family was corrupt. The president should act swiftly and make certain to an already hostile media that Qatar’s gift, the ‘palace in the sky’, is in keeping with ethical standards, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words:”

The long-overdue shuttering of the FBI’s scandal-scarred Washington headquarters signals not just a change of address, but a necessary exile of the agency’s most politically corrupted core. Current FBI Director Kash Patel is closing down the agency’s Washington, DC, mothership office and moving at least 1,500 employees out of the DC area to regional offices. The decision was not just Patel’s. During the Biden Administration, it was determined that the 50-year-old Hoover building headquarters was structurally decrepit. More germanely, no prior FBI director had ever explained why nearly a third of the FBI workforce was centered in offices in Washington,...

Why did the DNC, White House staffers and even seasoned journalists lie to the American people when they decided to run cover for Joe Biden? It's not enough just to say, “Politics. We want power.” What was the strategy to make you do something so egregious, asks Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words:”

Trump's first 100 days mark a chaotic counterrevolution, tackling crises long ignored—and infuriating the very forces that allowed them to fester. Pundits are confused about what to make of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. Supporters talk of “flooding the zone,” believing Trump is making so many changes so quickly that his opposition is reduced to deer-in-the-headlights infancy. They must be right when the nation suffers daily Democratic pottymouth videos, vandalism of Teslas, infantile meltdowns at congressional witnesses, rioting against federal agents to protect illegal alien felons, protesting on behalf of women beaters, M-13 gangbangers, human traffickers,...

From secure borders to functioning cities, America is shedding the hard-won pillars of civilization—by choice, not chance—in a sweeping, top-down descent into disorder. Secure borders and stationary populations were considered the mark of emerging civilization by classical historians. In contrast to nomadism and constant strife over disputed territory, peoples who had clearly defined and protected borders ascended to statehood, maintained a distinct culture, and achieved greater prosperity and security. In contrast, what we suffered from 2021 to 2025 was unprecedented. It was an intentional administration effort to de-civilize the nation by destroying its borders—as if to return to the premodern...

The left broke norms, erased borders, and weaponized justice—not to govern, but to crush Trump and cling to power by any means necessary. Somewhere between 10 and 12 million illegal aliens were invited into the United States by the Biden administration. As far as logistics go, Biden could not flee Afghanistan without getting 13 Marines killed and abandoning to the terrorist Taliban $50 billion in munitions, a billion-dollar embassy, and a $300 million retrofitted huge airbase. But Biden and his handlers proved far more logistically capable when their target was fellow Americans. After all, they somehow managed to stop the...

President Donald Trump is right to believe that Iran is in a historically vulnerable position right now. The Assad regime is kaput. Hezbollah’s effectiveness has been dramatically reduced since Oct. 7. Hama is living underground among the rubble of Gaza.

From Russiagate to Harvard scandals, the left’s decade-long hysteria machine spins on—loud, fact-light, and void of any serious plan for America’s future. The decade-old age of fables like Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, or the pangolin/bat cause of COVID is not over; it is just hitting midstream. For much of April, amid stock downturns, in the classical paranoid style, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal news reporters and the liberal press that Trump had either a) guaranteed an inevitable recession, b) engineered a losing trade war he likely regretted, c) crashed the stock market, d) lost his once majority...

The Good News: We’ve gone from over 120,000 people a month coming across the border illegally in April 2024 to fewer than 10,000 in April 2025.

(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a lot of media hysteria, some ambiguous and some negative polls. We have talked about that before, that they seem to be not so disinterested as we might imagine. It’s in line with previous prejudicial polls. But here’s the main course of action that we’re all looking at. It’s 100 days and we’re right in the middle of everything. And yet, people are already talking about President Donald Trump as if he’s failed or there’s an obituary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don’t listen to...

Trump’s counterrevolution presses on—quietly, methodically, and morally—while a flailing opposition offers only chaos, debt, and deflection in response. Despite the media hysteria, Trump’s counterrevolution remains on course. Its ultimate fate will probably rest with the state of the economy by the November 2026 midterm elections. But its success also hinges on accomplishing what is right and long overdue—and then making such reforms quietly, compassionately, and methodically. No country can long endure without sovereignty and security—or with 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants crossing the border and half a million criminal foreign nationals roaming freely. The prior administration found that it...

Trump’s trade strategy aims to slash the U.S. deficit by forcing fairer deals with key partners—pushing reciprocity, not profiteering, to regain economic balance. After only a hundred days, the Trump counterrevolution has made quite miraculous progress on the border, illegal immigration, cost-cutting, curbing the DEI/woke revolution, and a historic Ukrainian War settlement. The pushback to this multifront effort from the left has been formidable, if not hysterical. The greatest fury mostly centers around Trump’s efforts to force U.S. trading partners to adopt either reciprocal or no tariffs while obeying international trading norms—an effort aimed at vastly reducing the U.S. trade...

The left decries Trump’s deportation of an MS-13-linked illegal alien while ignoring its own legal hypocrisy and attempts to undermine the U.S. justice system. Since 2021, the left has waged a veritable war against the American legal system in a variety of ways. One serial target of Democrats and the Left has been the Supreme Court. In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke to an angry throng of pro-abortion protestors assembled at the very doors of the court chambers. He threatened two of the justices, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, by name. Schumer yelled to the volatile crowd that the...

Elite universities push for federal funding while ignoring legal and ethical obligations, fueling public distrust as they prioritize ideology over academic rigor and free speech. Harvard has refused to accept the orders of a Trump administration commission concerning its chronic problems with anti-Semitism, campus violence, and racial tribalism, bias, and segregation. Yet, unlike some conservative campuses that distrust an overbearing Washington, Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes. Aside...

Stanford University Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson recommends everyone “take a deep breath” when it comes to all the talk about tariffs. Appearing this week as a guest on Sirius XM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show,” the author and podcast host made several important points for Americans to consider as many in the media and Wall Street pundits predict calamity for the economy due to President Donald Trump’s trade policies. “There is a lot of misinformation,” Hanson said, first pointing out that many who are critical of Trump are only criticizing him because he is “Trump.” “Donald Trump did everything...

The real trade war wasn’t Trump’s—it was decades of lopsided deals, deficits, and double standards America tolerated while others profited. Trump’s So-Called “Trade War.”1. Many call the American effort to obtain either tariff parity or a reduction in the roughly $1 trillion trade deficit and fifty years of consecutive trade deficits “a trade war.” But then what do they call the policies of the past half-century by Europe, Asia, China, and others to ensure asymmetrical tariffs, pseudo-health and security trade restrictions, and large surpluses? A trade peace? Trade fairness? 2. Do Nations Prefer Surpluses or Deficits?Why do most nations prefer...

The left rages against Trump but offers no real alternatives on debt, trade, or immigration—just noise, while results quietly pile up. Two strange phenomena now characterize the political landscape. One, opposition to the Trump administration’s initiatives has reached a near-unprecedented fever pitch. The frenzy is manifested in strange ways. At the bottom end, there is an epidemic of street terrorism, including the keying of Teslas, bullying their owners, firebombing dealerships, or vandalizing charging stations. All that is mostly the logical but dirty reification of those in the media and the Democrats who brand Elon Musk as a foreign-born counterfeit citizen...

In this video, Victor Davis Hanson exposes the left's lies about tariffs. Hanson takes a deep dive into how progressive critics misrepresent tariffs as harmful, often portraying them as economic poison that hurts American workers and consumers. He argues that the left’s criticism of tariffs is rooted not in economic reality, but in a broader ideological opposition to Donald Trump's policies. Hanson reveals how tariffs, in many cases, are a strategic tool aimed at rebalancing trade and protecting American industries, rather than the disastrous tactic the left claims.