Free Republic

“Democratic Party elites such as those on CNN are not just angry but genuinely confused by the fact that American voters don’t obey them.” — Glenn Greenwald. What’s most amazing about the fiasco that was the French Revolution is that it happened at exactly the same time that the United States successfully organized themselves into an orderly and effective government following the American Revolution. George Washington was elected and sworn-in by April of 1789, with the backing of an exemplary constitution assembled by the best minds in the land. The Bastille fell in July that same year. France then fell...

The judicial mob tyranny under which we’re now living didn’t begin with Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter, but it certainly got a lot of traction there. Earlier this week, I attended the theatrical debut of Dinesh D’Souza’s compelling new documentary Police State. As much as I liked the movie, there was one subject left unexplored: the ironic fact that, today, among those most vulnerable to the “police state” are local police. Searching for a more inclusive metaphor than “police state” to describe our current state of peril, I reached into the past and came up with “Jacobin Justice.” In...

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary. The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020. It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support. The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East. They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism,...

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (French: Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme) is a book by Abbé Augustin Barruel, a French Jesuit priest. It was written and published in French in 1797-98, and translated into English in 1799. In the book, Barruel claims that the French Revolution was the result of a deliberate conspiracy or plot to overthrow the throne, altar and aristocratic society in Europe. The plot was allegedly hatched by a coalition of philosophes, Freemasons. The conspirators created a system that was inherited by the Jacobins who operated it to its greatest potential. The Memoirs purports...

The Jacobin Left is just now beginning to get edgy. A few of its appeasers and abettors are becoming embarrassed by some of the outright racists and nihilists of BLM and the Maoists of Antifa — and their wannabe hangers-on who troll the Internet hoping to scalp some minor celebrity. The woke rich too are worried over talk about substantial wealth, capital-gains, and income taxes, even though they have the resources to navigate around the legislation from their wink-and-nod brethren. Soon, even Hunter Biden and the Clintons could be checking in with their legal teams to see how much it...

Parts of the movement started by widespread revulsion at the murder of George Floyd have metastasized into a power grab by hard leftists. Their aim goes beyond dismantling the police—likely to have an early sell-by date—but targets the suppression of such tenets of liberalism as speech and property rights. Conservatives who want to conserve the republic as it is need to gird up for this battle. For a brief, ephemeral moment, the country came together in condemnation of Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis. But a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so those who want to change...

While we hope to never experience a revolution in our lifetime in America, it is important that we understand and learn from the revolutions of history. For part 1 of my series on revolutions, we are going to look at one of the defining revolutions in history — The French Revolution of 1789. Many today wrongly believe that the French Revolution was a success. By all measures, it was rather an abject failure, delaying France’s adoption of Democracy by more than one hundred years. This movement, which in many ways began as a noble cause in support of liberty and...

While we hope to never experience a revolution in our lifetime in America, it is important that we understand and learn from the revolutions of history. For part 1 of my series on revolutions, we are going to look at one of the defining revolutions in history — The French Revolution of 1789. Many today wrongly believe that the French Revolution was a success. By all measures, it was rather an abject failure, delaying France’s adoption of Democracy by more than one hundred years...

Consider a few facts: Donald Trump is in the White House, despite winning almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The Senate, the country’s most powerful legislative chamber, grants the same representation to Wyoming’s 579,315 residents as it does to 39,536,653 Californians. Key voting rights are denied to citizens in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other United States territories. The American government is structured by an 18th-century text that is almost impossible to change. These ills didn’t come about by accident; the subversion of democracy was the explicit intent of the Constitution’s framers. For James Madison, writing...

Big-money groups are helping to organize and fuel 'AstroTurf' progressive uprisings. ... The housing, the food, the organized activities and the defense attorneys at the ready made the riots possible. But why did news reports never mention that the riots were being funded? ... The DisruptJ20 website says its efforts are "nationally supported" ... The Black Lives Matter movement, one of the organizers of the violent counterprotests in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, does take money ... Open Society Foundation documents showed that the George Soros-funded group gave Black Lives Matter groups $650,000. The Ford Foundation subsequently announced that it was...

Rather than accept electoral defeat, the mainstream of the Democratic Party now believes in “resisting” -- resisting anything the party in power enacts into law, does, wants to do, or even wants to think. Their new goal is to disrupt, obfuscate, destroy, and neuter their opposition. They are doing it with revolting politicians who think their job is to say anything incendiary, nasty, boorish, off the wall, and destructive. Ditto with their “journOlists.” And, unfortunately, ditto with far too many of their voters. None have a clue that they are beyond the bounds of what was once called civilized discourse....

Pius VII sits behind Napoleon in Jacques-Louis David’s coronation painting (1807) Locking up the Pope alienated millions of the faithful and was one of Bonaparte’s most stupid mistakes“She was on her way home from church when she felt labour pains,” Napoleon would say of his mother Letizia, “and had only time to get into the house, when I was born, not on a bed, but on a heap of tapestry.” Napoleon Bonaparte’s fraught relations with the Catholic Church started early in life, for although his mother was a devout Catholic, his father was a Voltairean who despised popular religion....

Edmund Burke was, and still is, a provocative thinker—a provocation in his own day, as in ours. At a time when most right-minded (which is to say, left-inclined) English literati were rhapsodizing over the French Revolution—Wordsworth declaring what “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”—Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a searing indictment of the Revolution. He was accused then, as he often is now, of being excessive, even hysterical, in his account of the Revolution: "a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices, … laws overturned, tribunals subverted, industry without...

Last week, before an audience of millions of Americans, the new president made a telling statement. Alluding to the American founders, President Barack Obama, in his Inaugural Address, stated: “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” This seemed to be a reference to the Declaration of Independence, or at least to the principles in that sacred...

The New Jacobin Elite | Print | Written by William F. Jasper    Wednesday, 24 June 2009 06:00 The Socialist Party of Great Britain is celebrating the reissuing of Peter Taaffe’s book, The Masses Arise: The Great French Revolution 1789 -1815. “Its republication by Socialist Publications, in time for the 220th anniversary of this great event in July 2009, is extremely timely,” says the party’s website. A different page on the party’s site promoting the same book instructs readers: “An understanding of the French Revolution remains crucial for all revolutionaries. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky studied it intensely to gain an...

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, by Abbé Augustin Barruél The years 1796 to 1798 saw the publication of two important presentations of evidence concerning an international conspiracy, then only decades old, which had devastated France and was threatening the entire civilized world. That conspiracy had coalesced into a continuing organizational structure with the founding of the Order of the Illuminati by Adam Weishaupt on May 1, 1776 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. The conspirators in the Order came from the top levels of society, and their ultimate goal was the destruction of all existing religious and political institutions, all forms...

Should Your Personal Life Be An Affair Of State? Should your personal life be an affair of state? That's what divides libertarians and true conservatives from the modern Jacobins who falsely wear the label of "liberal" or "moderate." The libertarian/true-conservative position is that your private and personal affairs are not the business of the state as long as you refrain from applying force or fraud against your fellow citizens. The Jacobin position is that your life belongs to the state and your personal interests may be sacrificed for the common good, which, of course, the Jacobins will define. The most...

Which American? by Claes G. Rynby Claes G. Ryn The just-concluded 40th anniversary meeting of the Philadelphia Society, held in Chicago, featured a panel on US foreign policy. Midge Decter, the controversial new president of the society, praised the United States as embodying universally applicable principles, and endorsed the aggressive foreign policy that is the hallmark of the Bush administration. On the same panel, Claes Ryn, the 2001–2002 president of the Society and the author of the recently released America the Virtuous, criticized this kind of universalism as "neo-Jacobin" and as incompatible with traditional American views on government, not...

A Leftist Professor Strikes Again By Nick Bahl FrontPageMagazine.com | January 23, 2004 I am a 22-year-old senior planning to graduate with a journalism degree and a political science minor from Metropolitan State College in Denver this May. This past semester I took a class called Latin American Politics taught by Dr. Oneida Meranto, a political science professor at Metro State. When I registered for Dr. Meranto’s class, I didn’t know what I was in for. During the past semester Dr. Meranto has wrongfully dropped me from her class; threatened to throw a campus Republican group that I belonged to...