Free Republic

This week, my daughter drove me down to Virginia to a book signing. It was hosted by the American Legion Post 250 and organized by former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell for former CIA Director General David Petraeus. It was well worth the pilgrimage to little Middleburg, VA. Over 200 people were in attendance, and they were perhaps the friendliest crowd I’ve ever met. We were lucky enough to have a few minutes with Mike Morell, and I found him to be a very nice guy in person. The same is true for his wife and all the people who...

America’s educational institutions used to adhere to objective standards of excellence. Students and faculty members had to strive and were rewarded (or not) according to their performance. What their background might be or where their ancestors lived didn’t matter. That was true until a corrosive idea called “disparate impact” began taking hold in the country some 50 years ago. What that meant was that objective standards were objectionable if they resulted in poorer performance by certain racial groups. The obsession with disparate impact was kick-started by the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power decision and has been growing in...

With so many Americans now saying that they prefer to live under socialism than capitalism, it’s good to get a strong reminder about the true nature of socialist regimes. I’ve just read a book that does so. When I was much younger – in the 1960s and 70s – there was quite a lot of news about Cuba: Fidel Castro’s seizure of power, the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, people escaping by sea (and many perishing in the attempt), suggestions that Castro was behind JFK’s assassination, and so on. Today, however, one hears rather little about Cuba,...

Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman-turned-philosopher. In 1941, he wrote “My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.” Ten years later, Hoffer’s masterpiece The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements was published when he was in his late forties. Its unexpected success led him to later be appointed an adjunct professor at University of California, Berkeley. A slim volume, The True Believer was a favorite of President Dwight Eisenhower, who regularly gifted copies to friends. The British...

Thomas Sowell, now 93 years old, is one of the most esteemed and prolific authors and social commentators today. Trained as an economist at Harvard and the University of Chicago, he has written more than thirty books, and from 1991 to 2016, he had a nationally syndicated column. Sowell’s readers and admirers include the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and the former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. Pinker has characterized Sowell as the most underrated author in history. He also stated that, “Sowell is a libertarian conservative, which makes him taboo in mainstream intellectual circles, but even those who disagree are...

Like Jeanne d’Arc or Francesco di Bernardone, Francesco Forgione was one of those unique individuals gifted by God to the human race to assure us of His love, His understanding, and above all else, that He is not deaf to our sufferings and entreaties. But unlike these other great visionary saints, Forgione was not a streak of light which flashed across the firmament and returned quickly to heaven. Saint Joan’s mission lasted about two years before she was martyred at age 19. Saint Francis of Assisi was 45 when he passed to eternity, roughly 20 years elapsing between his call...

Meteorologist Janice Dean said Sunday that multiple outlets had refused to review her new book, “I Am the Storm,” because she worked for Fox News. Dean noted that among the outlets that had refused her latest book was Publishers Weekly — which had reviewed her previous books. “Was just told that all the major publications that review books declined to review #IAmtheStorm because of where I work. This included @PublishersWkly which has reviewed all of my other books,” she tweeted. Dean said that she had also been informed that while major book retailer Barnes & Noble had ordered hard copies...

Charles Calomiris has a splendid WSJ review of a great book, "The Myth of American Inequality" by by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early. It is a "'a truth universally acknowledged,' according to the Economist magazine in 2020" that little progress has been made in raising average American living standards since the 1960s; that poverty has not been substantially reduced over the period; that the median household’s standard of living has not increased in recent years and inequality is currently high and rising Most of all the last one. All of this is false. Most of all the last...

In the fall of 2021, it appeared that Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe, would rather easily defeat his Republican challenger, Glenn Youngkin. But the election turned dramatically once a number of parents voiced their opposition to the racially-themed material that was being taught in schools. They didn’t think it appropriate to tell students that America is an irredeemably racist country and that white people hold power and use it to oppress minorities. These parents, of all races, had found out that, despite official denials, concepts embedded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) had been smuggled into school curricula. At this...

A moment of crisis strikes the title character of George Leef’s new novel, The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale (Bombardier Books, 2022). How will Jen handle it? Does she suppress the feeling and practice what George Orwell called Doublethink: “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them?” Or does her mind reject the contradiction and actively seek out the truth? In his story, Leef offers what his subtitle calls “A Political Fable For Our Time.” Jen is a progressive political journalist for the Washington Post, highly skilled at crafting what real-life practitioners...

Almost exactly a year ago, writer Katherine Dee, who blogs about internet culture and trend forecasting, predicted what she called a “coming wave of sex negativity.” Sex positivity, she suggested, had created new stigmas, including around discussing the harms of sex work and self-commodification. “People do not want to be atomized,” she wrote, adding, “Nobody wants this dystopia.” Not everything Ms. Dee foresaw — like a shift toward earlier childbearing among the upper-middle class — has come to pass, at least so far. But she nailed an emerging movement, one that now has a manifesto in “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation”...

Handloggers is the biography of Alaskan pioneer W. H. (Handlogger) Jackson and his wife Ruth Jackson, nee Ruth Johnstone. 251 pages, 1974, softcover. Jackson moved into Alaska about 1917-18, prospecting, handlogging, and trapping. He was born about 1883-84 in California when the fastest transport was a steam engine train. Most of his travels before 1920 were on foot, horseback, or by steamship. He married in 1927 and died in 1970. During his long outdoors career, he developed an outstanding reputation for skill and fair dealing. On page 225, Handlogger writes of the unprovoked black bear attack he foiled with a...

Our year in reading, featuring book recommendations from Federalist writers and contributors.Last year around this time, I lamented the end of 2020 with the expectation that better times had to be lurking around the corner. Well, I sincerely hope you had a good year, but it seems like the year was defined by inflation, the Afghanistan debacle, lapsing back into more COVID restrictions, and other disasters.In other words, it was the second year in a row to retreat into a book and at least forget about day-to-day affairs for a while. With that in mind we bring you The Federalist’s...

Remember when they deplatformed Parler, accused American grandmas of insurrection, and digitally silenced the president of the United States? Remember how they did all of this after Black Lives Matter and antifa rioted for months and radical mayors and prosecutors refused to lock them up? Remember how academia, corporate America, and even the military suddenly stepped out of the shadows and pushed the exact same racist theory, all pushing the lie that America is racist at the same time radicals across the country were attacking statues of our founders and even President Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant? It all felt...

"We're not going to put a dollar figure on human life," Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who was then New York's governor, declared four days after he imposed a statewide COVID-19 lockdown last year. The goal, he explained, was to "save lives, period, whatever it costs." Ryan Bourne's Economics in One Virus offers a much-needed rejoinder to that morally obtuse position. Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, highlights considerations that politicians like Cuomo too often ignored as they decided how to deal with a public health crisis more serious than any the country had faced since the influenza pandemic of...

Book reviews usually tell people, buy this new hardback. This article advises, don’t bother reading "Silent Earth," much less purchasing a copy; it’s mostly a junk-science, anti-technology screed. Dave Goulson’s book expands on "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson’s polemic against pesticides that helped rid Europe and the USA of deadly malaria, and now protect crops that require so much land, water, work, fertilizer and energy to grow and harvest that we dare not sacrifice them to hordes of hungry insects. Carson falsely blamed DDT for her cancer – and launched the practice of using conjecture, poetic prose, hyperbole and even fraud,...

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from "What to Say When" by Shawn Carney and Steve Karlen.What Not to SayMeaningful conversations, whether they go well or not, leave us thinking later, “I wish I would have said this” or “I wish I would have thought of that.” In such polarizing times, wording is important and saying the wrong thing could derail a conversation--especially when discussing sensitive conversations like abortion. The points we shouldn’t make, that don’t advance the conversation in a grace-filled way, will do the opposite. They can concede ground (without us even realizing it) or convey disrespect...

Before there was Jordan Peterson, there was Carl Jung (my new book, Citizen Trump shows Jung’s hidden influence on Trump). He was one of the leading minds of the 20th century and a counter to Sigmund Freud. Jung, like Peterson today, used the archetypes of good storytelling to explore the culture-changing forces like Order vs. Chaos or the persona as the Shadow to disclose the role of the character in the larger world. Trump made his fortune tapping into the power of these stories, as he explains in his 2004 book, How to Get Rich. Peterson admits Trump might very...

Colleges and universities used to proclaim that their mission was to give students a broad education that would expand their intellectual vistas—one that would open their minds. Most still say that, but the sad truth is that what passes for higher education these days often does the opposite. Many professors and some whole academic fields instill in students the habits of mind that betoken fundamentalism rather than free inquiry. They want students to conform to their views and rebuke them for disagreeing or even asking the wrong questions. The growing problem of fundamentalist thinking is the focus of Minds Wide...

What if Skynet didn't rebel just because? What if it saw humans killing their own kids because it was inconvenient and realized we would kill it if we knew? Book Review: Ctrl Alt REVOLT! by Nick Cole