Free Republic

As he toured America in the 1830s, de Tocqueville was stunned by the fact that normal Americans—not just public officials and lawyers—constantly and vehemently argued about law and politics. The average citizen was “attached to [the law] by a kind of parental affection” because he, however indirectly, helped make it. And discussing politics, de Tocqueville wrote, is “the only pleasure an American knows.” In an age of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” it isn’t clear we have these virtues any longer. With the death of Antonin Scalia, the nation lost not only a great Supreme Court justice, but also an...

For almost a quarter of a century I have spent my days working with utopians. The utopian is motivated to create heaven on earth because he is convinced that there is no other option. Put simply, the utopian believes there can be no heaven in the sense that it is described in the Bible because there is no supernatural realm. This commitment to naturalism is a philosophical commitment. It isn't based on science. In fact, it flies in the face of science. To paraphrase Josh McDowell, we only have three options when it comes to the origin of the universe....

One thing progressives are very, very good at is omitting facts that they find to be too difficult to deal with. So it goes for all of the black heroes who fought alongside our Founding Fathers during the American Revolution. The progressives continual racial narrative is what it is. I first learned of this book through Founders Fridays, because of the work of David Barton. After I read about 5 or 10 pages, I knew it needed to be made into an audiobook so that more people could consume it. Progressives have controlled the universities, have controlled history; for over...

In May, the History Channel will air its remake of Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of An American Family. Unsurprisingly, the advertising for the broadcast fails to mention that Roots is a fake, and a fake of the first order. First of all, the book upon which the successful mini-series was based was actually authored by Murray Fisher, Alex Haley's editor from Playboy magazine. Secondly, Roots wasn't just ghost-written: it was plagiarized: In 1978, Judge Robert Ward concluded that Haley had stolen the idea for Roots from Harry Courlander, the white man who authored The African. Courlander charged Haley with...

In an age in which "cultural relativism" seems an unchallenged standard in academia, Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual -- The Origins of Western Liberalism is a pleasant deviation from that norm. A political philosopher who served as a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, Siedentop wrote Inventing the Individual as an apologia for the West as a civilization which is caught up in a "competition of beliefs, whether we like it or not." Siedentop identifies "Islamic fundamentalism" as a primary competitor for Western civilization, but it is impossible to avoid the obvious point that the most vigorous opponents of his...

Two books relate how grace and the power of the Holy Spirit can overcome same-sex attraction Caleb Kaltenbach's new book, Messy Grace (WaterBrook Press, 2015), has a tantalizing subtitle: How a Pastor With Gay Parents Learned to Love Others Without Sacrificing Conviction. Kaltenbach states that "profound change is just as possible for a homosexual sin as it is for any other"-but it has to come through grace. Kaltenbach argues that Christians should emphasize a change of heart, and let that change then influence minds (and use of sex organs). It seems to me that churches should welcome but not affirm...

A FORMER NAVY SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden and wrote a bestselling book about the raid is now the subject of a widening federal criminal investigation into whether he used his position as an elite commando for personal profit while on active duty, according to two people familiar with the case. Matthew Bissonnette, the former SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the 2011 bin Laden operation, had already been under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Navy for revealing classified information. The two people familiar with the probe said the current investigation,...

Full title: Author Interview with Leonard Sax: The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups Our feature author interview is with Leonard Sax, MD, PhD, author of the new book The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups, published by Basic Books. With PC safe-space student protests roiling our nation's campuses, the topic of parenting has never been more topical. How did they get this way? Find out more below! Congratulations Leonard on your new book, The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When...

Review: Gavin Stamp, 'Gothic for the Steam Age: An Illustrated Biography of George Gilbert Scott' The Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott was born in 1811, died in 1878, and somehow managed to fumble just about everything in between. Gone, mercifully, are many of the 43 workhouses he helped design, making his first fortune in the boom of public building that followed the New Poor Law of 1834. But plenty of his later Gothic Revival buildings are still around: a set of stains across the architectural manuscript of England, like ink blots flicked by an industrious but inept schoolboy from the...

Review: Robert Service, 'The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991' Robert Service knows his subject. Assessing the Soviet Union's demise in The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991, he starts by outlining Ronald Reagan's fundamental change in U.S. policy. "[T]he assumption since the end of the Second World War," he writes, "had been that the West should only try to contain the USSR; no US President had ever truly endeavored to reverse the expansion of Soviet influence around the world. Ronald Wilson Reagan was determined to change things." Reagan's desire to advance human freedom under peace is the key theme...

It didn’t take all that much to tip a great civilization into the shackles of empire. Rome holds a special place in the popular imagination. Cast as a culture steeped in myth, with values reminiscent of our own, it is often treated as the forebearer of our own political system, an ancestral democracy that provides a republican link between the present and the ancient past. From architecture to literature to political system, Rome is where it all began. But in his latest book, Richard Alston wants us all to think a little more critically about our beloved Rome. Alston is...

His memoir, written with the help of Paul Cruickshank, a terrorism analyst, and Tim Lister, a journalist, is both a rollicking read and a rare insider’s account of Western spying in the age of Al Qaeda, where the risk if exposed is not Cold War-style expulsion but gruesome execution. Storm says his work made possible the killings of multiple militants, a fact he claims troubled but did not deter him.

Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not. So it is not astonishing that he is doubling down on his wager that the truth cannot catch up with him. It has, however, already done so. The prolific O'Reilly has, with his collaborator Martin Dugard, produced five "history" books in five years: Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing Patton, and now the best-selling Killing Reagan. Because no one actually killed Reagan, O'Reilly keeps his lucrative series going by postulating that the bullet that struck Reagan...

Former American President George HW Bush has publicly criticized Dick Cheney and Donald H Rumsfeld, key members of his son's administration, in a biography due out next week. Mr Cheney, Mr Bush said, built "his own empire" and Mr Rumsfeld "served the president badly," US media report. Mr Bush also called Mr Rumsfeld "an arrogant fellow" with "swagger".

...IQ has a substantial direct correlation with measures of success in life, and it is also correlated with a variety of other characteristics that promote success... ...It’s not just that the IQ gap in working-class and upper-middle-class communities has gotten wider. The life penalties associated with low IQ have risen since 1960. If you focus on the economic changes since 1960, those with low IQ have faced a labor market in which the market value of a strong back has dropped while the value of brains has soared... ...If you focus on the reforms and social programs of the 1960s,...

The evil of National Socialism seeming so obvious in retrospect, it boggles the contemporary mind to reflect that such an ideology proved seductive to so many millions of Germans, including many intellectuals. Yet some resisted, and My Battle Against Hitler, a newly-translated memoir by one of Nazism’s most implacable foes, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, relates one such story. Von Hildebrand was a Catholic philosopher at the University of Munich whose prime working years coincided with the rise of National Socialism in central Europe. As a resident of Munich, the cradle of Nazism, he was in a unique position to bear witness...

Book Discussion on The Real Watergate Scandal Geoff Shepard, former associate director in the Nixon administration, presents research he contends shows misconduct by the judges and prosecutors involved in the Watergate trials. An aging judge about to step down. Aggressive prosecutors friendly with the judge. A disgraced president. A nation that had already made up its mind. The Watergate trials were a legal mess—and now, with the discovery of new documents that reveal shocking misconduct by prosecutors and judges alike, former Nixon staffer Geoff Shepard has a convincing case that the wrongdoing of these history-making trials was actually a bigger...

¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, by Ann Coulter, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2015, 400 pages, hardcover. Ann Coulter cares little for political correctness, and her sharp tongue generates enemies at both ends of the political spectrum. To many constitutional conservatives, for example, her foreign policy views are too aligned with the neoconservatives who led the United States into the Iraq mess under President Bush. Writing in May, Coulter still defended the decision to go into Iraq: “There were lots of reasons to get rid of Saddam Hus­sein and none to...

Mark Levin’s new book will no doubt be a bestseller, just like his previous offerings. But his latest work should be required reading for every recent college or high school grad just starting to make his way in the world, as well as every American voter. Levin explains in elegant, but easy to understand terms just how Washington and the elites who infest the nation’s capital are stealing our future. Woven into his narrative are both his original analysis of the corruption of our modern state and thoughts on liberty and freedom from great statesmen like James Madison and Edmund...

Ann Coulter is bold, brash, provocative, talented, fearless, witty, and outrageous. If she were on the left, she’d be lionized. (Lionessized?) She’d be widely regarded as an adornment to society. But she is not on the left. She is on the right, and a darling of the Right. But she does not fear to depart from the Right. (She seems not to fear anything.) For instance, she is an avid fan of Mitt Romney. (It may surprise liberals to know, but he’s a bête noire of the Right.) And in a column last year, she blasted right-wing critics of Senator...