Free Republic

Are the borders of country 5,000 miles away more sacrosanct and more worth taking existential risks than our own airspace and southern border? One of the strangest things about the American response to Ukraine has been the willingness of the Left and the establishment Right to discount completely that the war is heading toward a rendezvous with ever-deadlier weapons and staggering fatalities—even as we witness increasing nuclear threats from a weakened and adrift Vladimir Putin. They insist that Putin is merely saber-rattling. And he might be. Supposedly, in his diminished and discredited state, Putin would not dare to set off...

“Whites”—to the extent we can determine any race in an intermarried, multiracial society—do not fit the now ossified definition of an exploitive majority. Recently an unarmed 29-year-old African American, Tyre Nichols, was brutally beaten to death by five black Memphis police officers. They were charged with murder. All belonged to a special crime unit known as the Scorpions. Both the victimizers and victim were black. The Memphis police chief is black. The assistant police chief is black. Nearly 60 percent of the police force is black. The white population of Memphis is about 25 percent. The now-disbanded Scorpion unit of...

The Left runs Oceania, and we work for their various bureaus.The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist. But it was waged against—not from—the establishment. Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” from them.The current revolution is much different—and far more dangerous—for at least three reasons.The Establishment Is the RevolutionThe current Left has no intention of “dropping out.” Why would it? It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked—corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the...

One of these things is not like the other.Donald Trump for now certainly seems to have had more documents labeled classified at Mar-a-Lago in Florida than did Joe Biden at his various homes in Delaware. Yet otherwise, the comparisons between the two cases, contrary to popular punditry, hardly favor Biden. First, a stranger would face a far greater challenge entering a post-presidential Mar-a-Lago than a pre-presidential Joe Biden’s home, office, or garage—or who knows where? Secret service agents and private security were stationed at Mar-a-Lago. Prior to the 2020 presidential election they were not at citizen Biden’s various troves for...

The lesson from the $22 trillion record of Great Society compensatory payouts is that massive infusions of federal money are more apt to ensure social disruption and dislocation than alleviate them. The last time racial reparations made the major news was on the eve of September 11, 2001 attacks. The loss of 3,000 Americans, which for a time fueled a new national unity, quickly dispelled the absurdities of the reparation movement, and turned our attention toward more existential issues. Now the idea is back in vogue again. Here are 10 reasons why the nation’s—and especially California’s—discussions of reparatory payouts are...

Karma, Nemesis, payback . . . and all that stuff. The Left has gone mad over Donald J. Trump—past, present, and future. The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump “conservatives” assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails. Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him. And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators. In this context, the Republicans retaking control of the...

As Americans separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity, equity, and inclusion tribalism truly entails? "Despite being Black, he [Rep. Byron Donalds] supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.”—Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.) “Larry Elder [former candidate for governor of California] is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.”—Erika Smith, Los Angeles Times columnist America is an increasingly multiracial society. Despite its early history of slavery and racial segregation, and ongoing bias and tensions, the United States remains one of the few contemporary multiracial constitutional systems that have actually worked....

When historian, author, and conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson talks, I listen. VDH is one of a select few for whom I have complete respect — as opposed to the political hacks of CNN, Fox News, or anywhere in between, who covet viewers who tune in religiously to be told what they already believe.In a January 5 column, titled The Coup We Never Knew, VDH wrote in the subhead: “We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.”Hanson constructed the column primarily with uncomfortable questions for...

<p>We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.</p><p>Did someone or something seize control of the United States?</p><p>What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?</p>

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their...

Who watches the watchers? The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to...

Elite university degrees certify very little. And the secret is out. In a famous exchange in the The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” “Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion. During the 1990s “culture wars” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable. Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal. Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of...

RUSH: Now, Victor Davis Hanson was on Fox last night with Laura Ingraham talking about Notre Dame. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist. He is a Peloponnesian War expert, ancient Greece, and that entire era expert. And, as such, he’s also an expert on religions. Not theology per se, although he’s quite learned. But he is a perfect person to talk to about the situation with Notre Dame in Paris and what is to become of it. He’s the perfect person to ask to analyze what’s being said about it, particularly the rebuilding. So the question, first question: “Victor, you...

The hatred of the accomplished Musk and the worship of the hollow man Bankman-Fried are sad commentaries on how liberalism has descended into progressivism and ultimately into Stalinism. Before the midterm November elections, Sam Bankman-Fried was a left-wing billionaire heartthrob. He properly grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents were well-known left-wing activist law professors. He went to a tony prep school and on to MIT. Bankman-Fried mocked society’s bourgeois capitalist conventions by dressing and looking like a slob in cut-offs and T-shirts. Indeed, he bested the nose-ring, Charles Manson-esque appearance of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. He...

Despite Sam Bankman-Fried being a no-show — he’s busy fighting extradition to the United States after being criminally charged with fraud — there still were some fireworks at today’s FTX hearing in front of the House Financial Services Committee. You’re pretty much guaranteed a fun sound bite — or whacky video clip — when Maxine Waters, outgoing chair of the committee, is involved and today was no different. Current FTX CEO, John Ray, who’s trying to clean up the mess left behind by SBF, did appear before the committee today and testified that “FTX commingled customer funds with the FTX...

How can she conduct an impartial investigation of his Ponzi scheme? ... Sam Bankman-Fried, according to Victor Davis Hanson, “may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.” He “protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.” Now his dear friend Maxine Waters (D-Incitement), who was caught on video blowing him a kiss in December 2021, will be leading an investigation into his sleazy FTX Ponzi scheme as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Waters initially stepped on a rake when...

Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it. Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States? We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes. Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim...

Given events since Trump’s departure, he should be in the driver’s seat. But he is not. Team Trump has sometimes compared Donald Trump’s current quest for a nonsequential second term to two-term President Grover Cleveland’s similar three election bids. Cleveland remains our only elected (1884) president to have lost a reelection bid (1888)—in a disputed vote—only to be reelected four years later (1892). Yet Trump seems determined instead to follow a different, and bullheaded, Teddy Roosevelt model. Roosevelt left the presidency (1908), sat out four years, and then lost a reelection bid in 1912, split and alienated the Republican Party,...

The media has ceased to exist, and the public plods on by assuming as true whatever the media suppresses and as false whatever the media covers. The current “media”—loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and Facebook—are corrupt. They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically...

<p>Reduce new gas and oil leases on federal lands to the lowest levels of any president in history. Cut back production at precisely the time the world is emerging from a two-year lockdown with pent-up consumer demand.</p><p>Make war on coal and nuclear power. Drain the strategic petroleum reserve to make the pain for consumers more bearable for midterm election advantage.</p>