Free Republic

Liberal hysteria over Donald Trump was hardly required to pose questions about the "patriotic myths" of the Founding Fathers, but his elevation to the Oval Office has accelerated the trashing of the heroic past, even the stories of the American Revolution that generations of school children cherished. It's not just Parson Weems' imaginative tale of George Washington cutting down his father's cherished cherry tree, and his owning up with his assertion that "I cannot tell a lie." That story, from the first biography of the first president, has long been exposed as the fiction of a teaching moment meant...

In the first week of April, 2017, a nostalgic nation watched as one of the grand old institutions crumbled into dust: the Senate filibuster was removed from the toolbox for presidential appointments. Many on both sides of the aisle shed a tear or two as the US Senate lost one of its most famous and romantic tools; until the Democrats overplayed their hand on the Gorsuch nomination, a single Senator could hold up a presidential appointee with a filibuster. No more. Before you shed any more tears, though, dear Gentle Reader, please consider who had long been empowered with this...

Professor Jennifer Harvey took to the New York Times yesterday to ask: “Are We Raising Racists?” She begins her article by recounting how “dismayed” she was that her daughter admired George Washington. Her daughter was “signing the praises” of the first President, which surprised Dr. Harvey. “I was dismayed,” she writes, “that the peace- and diversity-centered curriculum she gets at her public school had left her with such a one-dimensional view of history.” Her 7-year-old daughter, she felt, needed to know the whole story. Eventually, her daughter asked her about news. Professor Harvey, after discussing ethics violations with her 7-year-old,...

Many in the progressive world, believe that our founding fathers were racist. As their evidence they point to Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution: “ Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” To the liberals, the 3/5th figure is an indication that our founding fathers...

Michael Klarman talked about his book The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, in which he recalls the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, from its tenuous start, according to the author the Philadelphia convention almost didn’t occur, to the many competing interests and internal debates that marked the Constitution’s creation. Michael Klarman spoke with Patrick Spero at the National Constitution Center.

Politics is a game, in some ways akin to football. A win depends on how many points are on the official scoreboard, not on how many yards have been covered. For a stable society to exist or a game to be successful, certain rules must be followed. They may be simple or complex, few or many, handed down orally or through a complex code, but they underlie a structured order. Adherence to that structure is essential even in politics, which is an ongoing process with no eternal answers. It is natural in politics that conclusions and procedures once generally accepted...

My previous posts regarding repeal of the horrid 17th Amendment were built on a simple republican foundation; members of republics are represented in the lawmaking body. The Constitution acts on the people and states, and both had their place in congress until 1913. In its wake, the 17th Amendment left behind a federal Constitution without a federal government. Here, I take a different tack as to why the 17A must go. I will show from the standpoint of balancing society's natural proclivities, we must reestablish a federal senate of the states. Without a strong middle institution to repel democracy, the...

Progressives are fond of selling old ideas as somehow being new, and the only real point that they have to rely on is that someone won't go and look it up. Meanwhile they engage in revisionist history, erasing and covering up historical facts, then progressives top it all off with the arrogance to claim that "Well the Founders could not have fore saw........" (finish the false claim) Mr. progressive, you would be wrong - as you always are. As recorded by James Madison, Gouverneur Morris made the following comment on August 9th, 1787: Mr. Govr. MORRIS. The lesson we are...

PHILADELPHIA -- The effort to save Benjamin Franklin's damaged gravestone received a hefty boost from a New Jersey rocker.

Petrus Paulus Vergerius, (1370-1444) educator, doctor of medicine and canon law wrote what has become known as the preeminent Renaissance treatise on education wherein he asserted that "what can we do better than gather our books around us... to see unfolded before us vast stores of knowledge, for our delight, it may be, or for our inspiration." Every educator has bemoaned the struggle to fill heads with knowledge and to that end, in my English composition class this term, the students worked on deciphering the rhetorical devices of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural speech. Most had never been taught about communism...

A humanities course currently taught at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs teaches that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites, terrorists and money-hungry barons who used hyperbole and fear to rile up the colonists to revolt against England. The “Resistance and Revolution” class is co-taught by history lecturer Jared Benson and sociology instructor Nicholas Lee, who also suggest that it was Mikhail Gorbachev – not Ronald Reagan — who brought down the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that wealthy CEOs deserve to be in a “moral prison,” among many other assertions. Calling the Founding Fathers “terrorists,” Benson and Lee voice...

WASHINGTON ― Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump advocated for a literal interpretation of the Constitution during the third, and final debate, on Wednesday. “The justices that I’m going to appoint will be pro-life, they will have a conservative vent,” Trump said in response to a question about how the Constitution should be interpreted. “They will be protecting the Second Amendment. They are great scholars in all cases ― and they’re people of tremendous respect. They will interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted.” That’s not cool. Here’s what was going on when the Constitution was written in...

Coming up, an article by Reuben Ben Abraham of Los Angeles California. A senior member of the New England Alliance for Liberty and Free markets and a brilliant economist in the Austrian school gives us this insight in the superiority of the capitalist system over socialism... The article I am typing now deals with traits that show the superiority of capitalism, inspired by an incident that took place at a McDonalds restaurant one morning that illustrates capitalism. Anyway, this first incident I want to illustrate took place at McDonalds restaurant in Wilshire Boulevard across from Ross Department store and California...

The Constitution of the United States - Broken down into its sentences and proofread. Several years ago, I posted the Declaration of Independence broken down into its sentences and proofread. (Jefferson, for all his praises and faults, was a great writer, and little proofreading was needed.) Earlier this year, I posted George WashingtonÂ’s Rules of Civility broken down into its sentences and proofread. Washington copied these from a book written earlier by someone else, and it required a lot of proofreading. Grammar of 270 years ago had capital letters in words in different parts of a sentence, at random it...

When you think of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, it’s likely because of his ill-advised, bad-weather kite-flying foray or his face on the hundred-dollar bill or possibly the pithy sayings from Poor Richard’s Almanack. Here’s another side of Franklin: swashbuckling swordsman. In its Sept. 20 “Important American Furniture, Silver, Outsider and Folk Art” sale, Christie’s is set to feature just that as they offer a brilliant silver-hilted small sword, made for Franklin by a neighbor in Philadelphia circa 1760. Thankfully, it won’t ruin your peaceable image of the portly American statesman; at the time, it was a part of a gentleman’s...

A few months ago, I wrote and posted a defense of Donald Trump entitled “Why Would We Elect as President a Guy Who...? In it, I attempted to point out that MANY of those we have elected to the White House (as well as the myriad men and women who occupy high positions) have been – like ALL of us – frail, flawed and fallen fellow human beings and, yes, sinners. My defense of Trump – but, more critically, the vital need to keep the most corrupt candidate to run for the office in my lifetime OUT of the White...

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) called the Founding Fathers of the United States “a little maniacal” in their focus on having a separation of powers during an appearance Thursday on Morning Joe. McCaskill, a Hillary Clinton supporter, said while criticizing Donald Trump that the country should not be divided and pointed to the rancor in Congress as proof of the problem.

Has America spent the last few hundred years misunderstanding the Declaration of Independence? That's what Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, believes. According to Allen, the paragraph beginning 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' has been misinterpreted thanks to a rogue period that was not in the original document. And that could completely transform our understanding of how the Founding Fathers viewed the role of government, The New York Times reported.

Many historians call the Founding Fathers "Deists," and many of them were not true Christians -- after all, Thomas Jefferson tore all the miracles out of the Gospels! But judging by the Declaration of Independence, our Founders were more religious than many think: our founding document mentions God no less than four times.This is not to say America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation -- the federal government has never had an established religion. But the Jewish and Christian understandings of God deeply influenced the founding generation, and that influence radiates from the Declaration of Independence.Here are the four...

If this 4th of July George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Rush and the rest of our Founding Fathers were to come back from the grave and testified against America for her national departure from our founding, the majority of American’s would NOT hear them and would fully reject them. I truly believe Americans would be fully enraged by their words of condemnation and rebuke and seek to destroy and slander them 24/7 on all the media news outlets and then have them stoned. We as a nation are too far gone morally to restore this nation and the majority of...