Free Republic

Once the Left took the presidency, the House, and Senate, they tried a deadly experiment on the American people. As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse. As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget. Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher...

The Democrats will soon chant democracy is dying because they are terrified it is thriving as never before. The Republicans were always going to win big in November, regardless of what biased pundits professed. There was likely never a sudden “blue resurgence” or “red collapse” of late summer. Those fantasies were mostly Democratic Party talking points. They were readily regurgitated by the fusion media and biased pollsters. The ruse was transparently designed to dampen conservative turnout and fundraising, while fueling interparty squabbling over supposedly “unelectable MAGA candidates.” As it turns out, all the late infusions of millions of dollars of...

The sharper wits of Silicon Valley know that if the public sees their products as toxic extensions of left-wing groupthink, the majority of Americans will shun them. A shared theme in all dystopian explorations of future and current totalitarian regimes—whether China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba—is government control of all media information, fueled by electronic surveillance. A skeptical public learns to say one thing publicly but quite another privately. It nervously nods yes at the news while at work, but at home cynically assumes the opposite of whatever is publicly said to be true. RIP, First Amendment Such electronic...

Having shut down America’s oil-producing abilities, Biden believes that he can strongarm his enemies to send us more of such taboo energy that we won’t produce ourselves. The Left used to accuse imperialist, resource-hungry Yanquis in Washington of cutting selfish deals with illiberal dictatorships in Latin America to grab their natural resources. How odd then that Joe Biden is now begging the despicable Maduro regime in Venezuela—corrupt, murderous, and anti-American—to produce more of its oil solely to send northward to America. Biden is quite willing to ease sanctions and condone the human rights abuses of Maduro—if his dictatorship will just...

Why is the supposed party of youth dominated by such frail and forgetful elderly? Joe Biden, the nominal head of the Democratic Party, is 79. But he increasingly acts and sounds 89. Recently, Biden has pivoted repeatedly on stage with his arm outstretched to shake the hand—of someone not there. On one recent occasion Biden called out for Representative Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) who passed away in a car crash in early August. He was insistent, shouting to the crowd, “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? I think she wasn’t going to be here—to help make this a reality.” Biden’s fantasy...

The United States obsesses over whether biological men can compete in women’s sports as transgender females. Crime is spiking at levels not seen in 40 years. But some consider it racist to suggest that arrests, indictments, convictions, and incarcerations deter crime. Major U.S. downtowns almost overnight went from mostly safe and clean to terrifying and toxic — and we brag that we are at least “tolerant” of the medieval conditions. The Pentagon and CIA put out recruitment videos that sound like kindergarten diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Yet the military is less eager to explain why the United States met...

So how does it all end, and Russian, Ukrainian, European and U.S. agendas become compatible? It doesn’t, and they won’t. For all the dramatic late-summer Ukrainian success, we are witnessing yet another deadlock in the war—one that supposedly will be resolved by escalations on all sides. Mutually Exclusive Agendas A rebooted Ukraine is clamoring for more offensive arms. It claims it can win the war, with victory now giddily defined as sending every Russian back home in disgrace. Russia is screaming threats about using nuclear weapons—though how Vladimir Putin would use them remains in dispute. Putin is ominously no longer...

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life. To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival. Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture. So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state...

What we used to know as “hate speech” is now presidentially acceptable speech, and what has followed from it is no surprise. It has been a canard of the Left that “words matter.” We are lectured that “hate speech” leads inevitably to street violence. So how ironic that the Left defames nearly half of America as dangerous “semi-fascist” extremists, white-raged and privileged, ultra MAGA, and guilty of all sorts of thought crimes from secession to civil insurrection? And what is the result? Does this constant demonization matter? And what are the bitter fruits of such labors? After all, what did...

We are now a revolutionary society in decline using the courts, prosecutors, the administrative state, and the law itself to punish enemies, help friends, and declare such asymmetry “social justice.” What once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.” The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court—an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept—what the Greeks called isonomia that distinguished classical democratic Athens from its anti-democratic rivals. Isonomia later...

After the fighting between Israel and Hamas in 2012, Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki announced that he wanted to visit Gaza.“I congratulate Ismail Haniyeh (the Hamas prime minister) on the victory in Gaza,” he said.Marzouki had previously met with delegations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. His support for the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group was so blatant that even the PLO had warned him not to come to Gaza. After leaving office, Marzouki boarded the Hamas flotilla invading Israel. When the flotilla was intercepted, Israel deported him. These days, Tunisia doesn’t want him either.But Massachusetts does.More recently an arrest warrant was issued...

We went mad because we easily could. And we could, not because we were poor and oppressed, but because we were rich and bored. Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. It is not boilerplate anti-Americanism of the usual cheap Euro style. And their keen criticism is not just that we are $30 trillion in debt, dependent on China, with a corrupt elite, or have gone insane inventing the most lurid crimes to put away the supposedly predetermined guilty Donald Trump. Instead, they express disbelief, worry, lamentation even, that...

Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson described the Left's "psychodramas" used to divert from issues that matter most to the American people on Tuesday's "The Ingraham Angle." VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It's really ironic because, why were we leaking? Because we had this disinterested special master that was taking charge, and they were going to adjudicate the entire file. It was almost like they went into panic and they wanted to prejudice whatever that finding might be by polluting the well. And then the two authors of The Washington Post news scoop, Mr. Barrett and Leonnig, they were essential in...

China can likely sink any $12 billion American aircraft carrier and its 5,000 diverse “they/them” crew that dares to venture into the Taiwan strait. The United States obsesses over whether biological men can compete in women’s sports as transgendered males. Crime is spiking at levels not seen in 40 years. But it is considered racist to suggest that arrests, indictments, convictions, and incarcerations deter crime. Major U.S. downtowns almost overnight went from mostly safe and clean to terrifying and toxic—and we brag that we are at least “tolerant” of the medieval conditions. The Pentagon and CIA put out recruitment videos...

There are a lot of ifs and time grows short. he late spring scenario of a massive GOP win—in historic proportions analogous to 1938, 1994, or 2010—is said now to be “iffy.” The Left boasts that it now has a chance at keeping the House, with even better odds for maintaining control over the Senate. Polls are all over the place. Now they show generic Republican leads, now Democratic. The general experience in polling is that they are more often conducted by left-leaning institutions and massaged to show Democratic “momentum.” Since the polling meltdown of 2016—when most polls showed a...

Our elites are now viewed with the disdain they have earned on their own merits. And they are none too happy about it. Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence. Yet the divide has grown far wider in the 21st century....

As President Joe Biden's polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover. This time the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a "civil war." The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump's Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy "civil war" conjectures. Recently "presidential historian" Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned civil...

Is the attorney general disingenuous or simply naïve? Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday held a belated press conference to explain that he had personally approved the FBI’s raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence to seize documents deemed U.S. government property. A clearly agitated and nervous Garland sought to exude confidence in the raid. He went on to heatedly defend the professionalism and integrity of the Justice Department and FBI. But almost immediately after his sermon, the Justice Department and its affiliates were back to their usual selective leaking (“sources say” . . . “according to people familiar with the...

The writer and historian Victor Davis Hanson is one of the most serious thinkers of our time. When he says something, people should listen. Following the raid on Trump’s Florida home, Hanson is saying that the FBI is beyond redemption. That it cannot and should not be saved in its current form. To hear Hanson saying this should alarm people. He is not the type of man who engages in outrageous talk. He means this, for real. When asked about the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., professor, author, and political commentator Victor David...

Leo Terrell and Victor Davis Hanson join Mark Levin on Life, Liberty & Levin tonight, August 14 at 8pm eastern on Fox News.