Free Republic

Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, there have been over 75,000 requests for new Turning Point USA chapters and many conservative commentators have written about his legacy and achievements, but what hasn’t been remarked about enough is, “What was the essence of his appeal to young voters?" asks Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” The answer? Charlie Kirk understood that young people, by their very nature, are rebellious. He wanted to take their natural skepticism and point it toward the establishment, which, today, is composed of the corporate media, higher ed, and baby boomers...

Historians traditionally blame the failure of the League of Nations--the post-World War I, Versailles-era dream of President Woodrow Wilson--on many things. Its membership was small (58 nations). The League's utopian rhetoric lacked commensurate force. The postwar ascendant United States refused to join. The winners of World War I, like France and Britain, were terrified of rearming, while the losers, such as Germany and Austria, were eager to. Consequently, the League in the mid-1930s allowed fascist powers to make a mockery of the Versailles Treaty. It could never even enforce its own embargoes and sanctions. Without big power backup, the League...

Trump, unlike the UN, is brokering cease-fires and curbing threats by wielding U.S. power through trade, leverage, and force—favoring deals over endless wars. Historians traditionally blame the failure of the League of Nations—the post-World War I, Versailles-era dream of President Woodrow Wilson—on many things. Its membership was small (58 nations). The League’s utopian rhetoric lacked commensurate force. The postwar ascendant United States refused to join. The winners of World War I, like France and Britain, were terrified of rearming, while the losers, such as Germany and Austria, were eager to. Consequently, the League in the mid-1930s allowed fascist powers to...

James Comey’s indictment may grab headlines, but the real scandal is how many of his past abuses still escape legal or moral accountability. We have no idea whether the current DOJ indictments will lead to a conviction of James Comey, namely that he authorized FBI subordinates to leak to the media and then lied about it, obstructing Congress in the process. It may come down to the word of Comey, a known fabricator, against the testimony of his former subordinate, Andrew McCabe, an admitted liar. Take your pick. We know, however, that Comey is not facing a Trumpian $500 million...

YT: Victor Davis Hanson rips away the illusion. China claims ancient superiority, but its military is nothing more than a knockoff of the West — from tanks and planes to tactics and strategy. Worse, Beijing exports its authoritarian model into our universities, silencing pro-Taiwan or pro-Israel voices while radicalizing students against America itself.

The left’s crude obsession with Trump and conservatives now fuels sabotage, slander, and even celebration of violence—proof their hatred has gone global and unhinged. Donald Trump just visited the United Nations to offer a customary annual presidential address. Before he arrived, there were reports that UN staffers had joked about shutting down the escalator to chastise Trump for cutting out aid to some UN programs. Upon arrival, as if on cue, Trump was met by a series of mysterious coincidences. As soon as he and First Lady Melania mounted the escalator, it suddenly froze—forcing them to walk up. Other escalators...

When merit is replaced with ideology, fires rage unchecked, killers walk free, and fragile systems collapse—leaving lives and cities in ruin. America has a lot of built-in safety backups and redundancies. But every once in a while, when tradition, science, time-tested protocols, and common sense are ignored, a fragile system utterly collapses. Usually, an iconic event reveals how vulnerable the entire country has become, and predictably occurs when suicidal ideologies and nihilism, in perfect-storm fashion, wreak havoc. The media, academia, the bureaucracy, and higher education can mask the dangers of their political agendas—at least until their sheer incompetence or toxicity...

Universities have long been captured by liberal academics, and the fight for America's youth on campus at times feels hopeless. What made Charlie Kirk effective was that he did not run from that problem but ran head-on into it. Victor Davis Hanson explains this key aspect of Charlie Kirk’s legacy, emphasizing how his approach was effective, and what our job is now to carry on his mission in saving our country from the campus on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” “He did not go in the traditional academic pathway. He dropped out of college at...

Charlie Kirk’s murder sparked peaceful resolve, not riots—sharply contrasting the violence, destruction, and radical agendas unleashed after George Floyd’s death. Just days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the left is working overtime to hide the truth and create fantasies about his death. Specifically, leftists alleged that conservatives were going to “pounce” on the death to wage protests and boost radical agendas in the manner of what followed George Floyd’s death. Here are some of the lies that such a ridiculous narrative entails. One, Charlie Kirk is not conservatives’ George Floyd. There were no mass riots after his death of...

America is currently sick. The young conservative organizer and media personality Charlie Kirk was just murdered in a political assassination by a 22-year-old ‘anti-fascist’ and trans advocate, Tyler Robinson. As planned, he eliminated the most astute and successful political activist in a generation. Indeed, Kirk may well have ensured that Donald Trump won the 2024 election by not just increasing his youth vote by 6 percent since 2020 but, more importantly, by margins in the swing states of 15-24 percent, ensuring Trump’s victory. No sooner was he killed than thousands on left-wing social media erupted in celebration—among them scores of...

Europe faces four self-inflicted crises—radical green mandates, collapsing families, unchecked immigration, and rising tribalism—that now threaten Western civilization itself. Europe is plagued by a number of existential crises. Yet they are all self-inflicted—and by a dominant, therapeutic culture that embraced utopian but lethal bromides. These suicidal wounds are now nearing the end-stage. Indeed, they are destroying the very civilization that was soon envisioned to be heaven on earth. The global warming hysterics could not just entertain gradual transformations away from dependencies on traditional fuels and power generation. Instead, elites have demanded catastrophic and near-instant “net zero” mandates. That radicalism entailed...

LINK: Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Gearing Up Against Trump’s CounterrevolutionThis video by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is, in my opinion, prescient. At the 6:42 mark (Click HERE to go directly to this passage) He states:“...We’re going to see the counterrevolution I think, succeed, with one caveat: we are going to see, in the next year, a frenzy, a frantic, almost out-of-mind reaction from the Left because they know that if this counterrevolution succeeds, it’ll be very difficult for them to push down and unpopular agenda down the throat of the American people. So brace yourself. We’re looking at...

Democrats attacked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hard during his congressional testimony last week, launching personal attacks on the health and human services secretary. But it’s not just congressional Democrats on offense, as his own family is blasting him as an “embarrassment.” Victor Davis Hanson breaks down the Kennedy family’s hypocrisy—especially considering their silence on Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick scandal and JFK’s infidelities—on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

Trump is enlisting tech titans to secure U.S. dominance in AI, biotech, and national security—reviving a modern-day War Production Board for the 21st century. The left weighs in on anything that Trump is against, which drives it to lionize criminals like Abrego Garcia, champion open borders, and oppose increased oil and natural gas production. And they are against anything Trump is for. So often, they did not care much about big-city crime rates, supported biological men’s usurpation of women’s sports, and opposed taking out the Iranian nuclear threat. However, recently, some former and, no doubt, current Trump opponents now seem...

To call last week’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a “tragedy” would ignore the culpability of the shooter, Robert Westman—a man who identified as “Robin,” a woman. Victor Davis Hanson explains why this was not simply a tragedy, but an act of evil, and why the media and political leaders refuse to have an honest discussion about the factors behind it on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” “They won't have any discussion over transgenderism. This falls in the broader category of exempt DEI woke topics, but I think we should talk...

Seven months in, Trump has curbed illegal immigration, steadied the economy, and scored foreign policy wins—while Democrats flounder without a counteragenda. Trump’s greatest achievement within six months was simply ending illegal immigration as we had once known it—without “comprehensive immigration reform” or any other rhetorical trickery. It remains difficult to find, much less deport, the 10 to 12 million illegal aliens who entered in the last four years. Those who helped break the law, by design or indifference, now believe it was moral to destroy federal immigration law but immoral to uphold it. And it is still unclear whether Joe...

Europe faces a breaking point as illegal migration, welfare strain, energy crises, and defense demands collide with shrinking populations and stagnant economies. Almost weekly in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, a sensational assault committed by an illegal migrant—often enjoying some sort of state support or with prior arrests for the same crime—surfaces. Until recently, European politicians and the media sought to either ignore such news or accuse those who clamored for tighter borders, more police protection, and stiffer penalties of being “racists” or “xenophobes.” Until recently, that is. Mass protests are now common in Britain against the...

The FBI recently raided the home of John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-outspoken Trump critic, seizing documents allegedly tied to classified material. From Bolton’s role in the Trump administration to prior warnings from a federal judge about his handling of sensitive information and why the DOJ under Biden dropped its earlier investigation, Victor Davis Hanson unpacks the full backstory behind the raid on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

The Democrat Party abandoned the middle class for elites and identity politics—trading broad appeal for globalism, DEI dogma, and political self-destruction. The answer was not Trump alone. Indeed, irony abounds when Democrats resonate with the claims of the vestigial Never Trumpers that the MAGA movement “hijacked” the Republican Party. In characteristic projectionist fashion, the left is simply falsely attributing to their opposition the very hijacking that hit the Democratic Party. The Republicans are still the party of conservatism and traditionalism. But in the last decade, it adopted an expansionary middle-class agenda that has led to record party registration, its first...

The Pavlovian Left goes berserk at the mere prospect of each new Trump initiative. Its escalating reactive venom and hysteria are calibrated to the success of Trump's latest policy. Yet the new hard-left Democratic Party offers no counter-agenda to explain its furor. Still less do Democrats attempt bipartisan efforts to craft shared legislation. Take foreign policy. Democratic senators trashed the recent Trump-Putin Alaskan summit as a failure. Then they became depressed when, just days later, an entourage of European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suddenly flew to the White House. The Euros praised Trump for offering some sort of...