Free Republic

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...

America's allies are stronger, its rivals weaker, and the global balance has shifted. With a whimper rather than a bang, the world has become a different place than it was in January 2021, when Donald Trump left office. Almost everything we are now told about the global status quo is mistaken—largely because critics focus on what Trump says rather than on what he does. Rather, the Left—and some on the Right—are furious whenever Trump tweets, says, or does something that offends their delicate sense of taste, tradition, and decorum. Their outrage leads them to ignore whether this “Art of the...

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” to discuss the controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, focusing on comments by Lupita Nyong'o about telling the story from a female perspective and broader debates over casting and representation.

Mamdani’s Independence Day message says more about his own politics than the country that gave his family extraordinary opportunity. ohran Mamdani, New York’s self-described socialist mayor, could not resist using the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration to trash the very country that he and his parents voluntarily sought out. As is his custom, Mamdani speaks in stereotypes and generalities, offering few if any examples, all laced with his accustomed unctuous hypocrisy. Let’s deconstruct his incoherent July 4 riff: America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us,...

The new socialist movement believes it can remake America—but its growing radicalism may prove the very thing that drives voters away and fuels a counterrevolution. Win some blue-state and blue-city races, and the cocky new socialist Jacobins believe that they have either already taken over the Democratic Party or will soon absorb it. And in reaction to these new swarms, an increasingly terrified and ossified old Democrat guard either limps away from the hive or invites them in to take over more. It is fascinating but ultimately depressing to watch old-style Democrats say or do anything to avoid the new...

Victor Davis Hanson’s defense of the Second Amendment is not merely academic. In a Dec. 6, 2025 episode of Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words, the historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow recalled a late-night confrontation at his family farm that he says permanently shaped his view of armed self-defense. The episode was published under the title “Why Alvin Bragg Refuses To Recognize the Awesome Power of the Second Amendment.” Hanson is best known as a classicist, military historian, and conservative public intellectual. The Hoover Institution has described him as the author or editor of 24 books and hundreds...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version November 07, 2005, 11:15 a.m. Ruin? Was is death or renewal in Athens? EDITOR'S NOTE: Victor Davis Hanson's latest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War has recently been released by Random House. This week National Review Online will be excerpting Chapter 10 of the book. Below is the first part. Check back tomorrow for part two and click on Amazon to purchase A War Like No Other here. Was Athens — or Greece itself — destroyed by the war? An entire...

How Sparta, the most powerful Greek city-state, collapsed in only 20 years. The Decline and Fall of Sparta | 11:02 toldinstone | 627K subscribers | 82,207 views | Febuary 25, 2026Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:38 Classical Sparta 1:29 Spartan politics 2:22 Helots 3:24 Population decline 4:37 Hubris 5:25 The Battle of Leuctra 6:42 Messenia liberated 7:35 Enter Macedon 8:08 Attempts at reform 9:08 Irrelevance 9:37 Roman Sparta

People have also mischaracterized the deal itself. This is not the end of the negotiations or the war. This is the very beginning of the problems for Iran. Once the kinetic part of the war stops, they have to face the people, and the people are angry, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”

Trump’s Iran memorandum is not a surrender or a new beginning—it is the next phase of a strategy built on pressure, deterrence, and avoiding another costly Middle East war. The tentative “memorandum of understanding” with Iran has caused glee on the Left and furor among many on the Right. The Left might welcome “peace,” but surely not as much as it enjoys infighting on the Right over the details. If last week Democrats were calling Trump a fascist warmonger, now they deride his peace efforts as those of a Neville Chamberlain patsy. Within 24 hours, the Left’s talking points shifted...

No one yet knows the ultimate verdict on the war, given all the economic, military, political, and strategic variables still in play. A memorandum of understanding released this week might end the war, or result in further American strikes—depending on the degree of Iranian concessions and compliance. But in this confusing, ongoing drama, many fabrications and distortions still circulate.

California shows what happens when one party gains total control: soaring costs, shrinking opportunity, and a government that no longer serves its citizens. By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment. Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation. Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states. Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S. Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in...

1:11: Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. There's a lot of confusion, controversy, and disagreement about the latest phase of the so-called Iran war. Remember we bombed kinetically 38 to 40 days then we had 60 days of negotiation and here we are in mid June in which Donald Trump has announced yet another time there is going to be a peace deal coming with a 60-day um period for all the elements of the deal to be enacted. A lot of people are upset. They feel that Iran was on the ropes. they're going broke...

Updates on the conflict with Iran, the growing fallout from the Karmelo Anthony case, and a look at the legacies of George Washington and Joe Biden; this is “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” As the national debate over race, justice, and identity politics continues to intensify, new controversies are raising questions about equal treatment under the law and the future of race relations in America.

Iran survives by delay, deception, and deterrence games—but the moment may be coming when airpower, not diplomacy, decides how the nuclear standoff ends. The Trump administration has bent over backward to negotiate an end to Iran’s grand plans to develop nuclear weapons—before the June 2025 bombing, afterward, and again during the follow-up diplomacy of spring 2026. Yet Iran is unlikely ever to abandon its pursuit of the bomb voluntarily. With nuclear weapons, Tehran hopes to become the de facto hegemon of the Middle East. Only then could it effectively coerce or deter both Israel and the wealthy Arab Gulf states....

The far left has enjoyed one-party rule in the City of Angels for decades, but now there’s a slight wrinkle in their plans as Los Angeles might finally get its first non-left mayor in years this Tuesday. Spencer Pratt, the nominally conservative former reality TV star turned political activist, is currently trailing by less than five points behind incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and is even closer to current City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, according to recent polling by UC Berkeley/The Los Angeles Times.

Iran, China, immigration, elite institutions, and the future direction of the Democratic Party all point back to a broader debate over power, nationalism, and the stability of the Western world. Growing tensions in the Middle East, questions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz, and fears of conflict with China continue shaping American foreign policy, while political and cultural battles at home are increasingly centered around institutional control, media influence, and ideological conformity.