Free Republic

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...

Trump’s doctrine is simple: strike first at the guilty, strike hard from afar, skip the nation-building, and end wars on America’s terms. War is the use of arms to settle differences—tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material—between organized groups. It is unchanging. The general laws of armed conflict stays immutable, given the constancy of human nature. However, the manner in which war is conducted remains fluid. New weapons, tactics, and strategies elicit counterresponses in an endless cycle of tensions between defensive and offensive superiority. That said, has President Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America’s foreign enemies?...

The Daily Signal @DailySignalVictor Davis Hanson: Susan Rice, What More Can You Do To Trump?Susan Rice, former UN ambassador under Obama, said on a recent podcast interview that corporations who “take a knee” to Donald Trump were not going to be left alone if/when Democrats come back to power.Do Rice, and Democrats, have anything to back up their threats? No.“ So Susan Rice, I just think that you've done it all and it didn't work, so your threats are empty, you know,” @VDHanson says on this week’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”Full Episode: https://youtu.be/L_zuHiz0VhMFeb 25, 2026

Several prominent Democrats have been open and vocal about their plans to punish members of the Trump administration, including civilian ICE agents, if they regain power. Eric Swalwell has vowed to make ICE agents' lives a living hell if he's elected governor of California, Rep. Shri Thanedar said Dems will prosecute ICE and Border Patrol agents, as has Philly DA Larry Krasner, and Mehdi Hasan wants the next Democratic president to run on a platform of prosecuting conservatives. Now Suan Rice, the former Obama National Security Advisor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as promised that Democrats will...

Susan Rice has a message for corporate America, and it sounds a lot like a threat. Obama’s scandal-plagued former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations sat down with former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara on his podcast Stay Tuned and laid out what Democrats have in store for businesses, law firms, universities, and media companies that have sought to accommodate the Trump administration. It was a disturbing promise of government retribution. Rice wasted no time getting to the point. "It's not gonna end well for them,” she promised. “For those that decided that it was, you know, that they would act...

Susan Rice offers a taste of what’s coming should the left retake power — promises Democrats will punish corporations and other institutions who have “taken a knee to Trump.” “It’s not going to end well for them." “If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules…they’ve got another thing coming." “There will be an accountability agenda." “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget."

Trump’s strategy prizes preemptive deterrence over drift or isolation, exploiting leverage to sap rivals, steady allies, and avert the cascading conflicts that metastasized under Obama and Biden. Critics of Trump’s second-term foreign policy—the usual Left and some on the neo-isolationist Right—claim it is recklessly herky jerky and guided by no consistent grand strategy. Yet, in both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper and its second-term update, he clearly disdained ground wars abroad, nation-building, and isolationism. A better description of U.S. strategy across Trump’s two terms in office might be called Jacksonian or preemptive deterrence. That is, Trump’s foreign...

Trump’s strategy prizes preemptive deterrence over drift or isolation, exploiting leverage to sap rivals, steady allies, and avert the cascading conflicts that metastasized under Obama and Biden. Critics of Trump’s second-term foreign policy—the usual Left and some on the neo-isolationist Right—claim it is recklessly herky jerky and guided by no consistent grand strategy. Yet, in both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper and its second-term update, he clearly disdained ground wars abroad, nation-building, and isolationism. A better description of U.S. strategy across Trump’s two terms in office might be called Jacksonian or preemptive deterrence. That is, Trump’s foreign...

Elite fashions harden into dogma, dissent becomes taboo, institutions fall in line—and only when reality intrudes does yesterday’s madness begin its overdue collapse. How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support—and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed? There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity. The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory). They begin insisting that a new existential...

Why would any president destroy the U.S. southern border? The Left typically “pounces” on anyone daring to suggest that the Biden administration had green-lighted illegal immigration to gain new constituents for agendas that otherwise were without broad public support. The Left smears critics of open borders as racist conspiracists spreading the “Great Replacement Theory.”

With only nine months until the midterm elections, Democrats will scrutinize every move President Donald Trump takes as they fight to reclaim control of the House and the Senate. Victor Davis Hanson lays out the narrow road ahead to victory for Trump and the GOP during the 2026 midterm elections. History is not on the incumbent’s side. Messaging mistakes and unforced errors could shift key voters and hand Congress back to Democrats. Hanson explains what it will take to hold a Republican majority—and why the stakes for these midterm elections could not be higher—on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson:...

Super Bowl halftime has devolved into a stale Roman bacchanal—gaudy, raunchy, and empty—leaving millions bored, alienated, and wondering who the spectacle is even for anymore. In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows: mediocre music veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets. As seen again this year, the usual array of supporting dancers twerk and simulate intercourse, in sync with the main singer, mindlessly grabbing his/her genitals—apparently to highlight the explicit sexual allusions of mostly nonsensical lyrics. For some strange reason, this Roman orgiastic ritual is supposedly...

here is “no coherent principle” to the left’s ongoing “utterly hypocritical” “insurrectionary movement” in Minnesota, argues Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson in his first post-surgery video appearance. Nearly five years ago, these same people lambasted Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed 14-year Air Force veteran who was shot and killed by the U.S. Capitol Police on Jan. 6, 2021. The left cheered as hundreds of demonstrators were arrested for allegedly assaulting officers and carrying firearms.

Democrats, lacking a positive agenda, bet on chaos, Trump hysteria, and media allies to spark a midterm backlash as Trump’s economic rebound gains steam. Recent regional special elections have seen Democratic candidates win a number of special election races. Now energized left-wing politicos remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress. Polls show Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating. So Democrats promise to soon stop all new legislation and end Trump and his counterrevolution itself. But the left will never offer any alternative agenda on...

Notes In Absentia I want again to thank everyone for the wonderful expressions of concern and reassurance that I have received from listeners and readers. In response to inquiries, and some quite detailed questions and advice, here is a brief update concerning my current temporary absence. As I wrote, the removal of a cancerous lung mucinous adenoma carcinoma along with the lower right lung lobe roughly a month ago was successful. But a post-op aneurism/bleed soon developed. That required a quick second reentry operation into the lung to stop the hemorrhaging—adding considerable time under anesthesia and requiring about five blood...

Minnesota’s defiance of federal immigration law echoes pre–Fort Sumter nullification, forcing Trump to choose between enforcement and letting blue states slide toward open rebellion. In the months before the April 12, 1861, firing on Fort Sumter, there were lots of sharp divisions in the North about the proper reaction to the first seven Confederate states that had already left the Union. Not all Unionists believed that war was inevitable. Some, in fact, were happy to be done with the departing South and thus see their stain of slavery gone from the Union. Similarly, others agreed that the emerging Confederacy was...