Free Republic

There's an article recently written on a website Quillette titled The Psychology of Progressive Hostility which is very well written, I highly recommend it. One part of the article asks the following question: "So how and why have these activists become so intolerant and horrible to deal with?" It is questions like that that this blog are built around. Due to the progressives' complete dominance of academia(history) and media(journalism), I think it is safe to say that progressivism is the least understood ideology of modern history. For what the article is and how it is set out to examine what...

Recently, I arrived at a moment of introspection about a curious aspect of my own behavior. When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. But I’ve discovered that when a progressive friend says something with which I disagree or that I know to be incorrect, I’m hesitant to point it out. This hesitancy is a consequence of the different treatment one tends to...

I have known Dana Loesch for a long time and I’ve been pleased to see her work her way up the food chain on the Right. She didn’t get to where she is because of a publicity stunt, because her whole gig is to offend people or because she mindlessly shills for the Republican Party. Instead, she’s someone with talent who was out there working her butt off for years.Is Dana Loesch a mainstream grassroots conservative? Absolutely. Is she someone who should be considered a feminist role model? You bet. Having met her and her husband on numerous occasions, I...

America is engaged in a great struggle with China for the hearts and minds of humanity. For generations, universities have been run by pious ideologies and political parties led by vainglorious sore-losers. Nowadays, however, young people are quitting the faith for the same reasons so many rural and smaller city Americans rejected the establishment Republican Party of Jeb Bush during the primaries and Hillary Clinton in the general election to put Donald Trump in the White House. America has failed many of them, and the leadership of the major political parties is callous to their pain. From the 1930s to...

My brother expressed his disgust watching an animated TV show trashing Trump, titled Our Cartoon President. Incredibly, leftists have hijacked the airwaves and everywhere people gather to exploit as platforms to spread their vitriolic, insane hatred for Trump. Outrageously, TV coverage of the Olympics included leftist hatred for the Trump administration. Despite the shocking discovery that leftist policies probably played a role in the deaths of 17 kids in the Florida school shooting, leftists continue puppet-mastering students to blame Trump. Even Sunday worship has been hijacked by leftists to trash Trump. My brother asked the pastor of his all black...

Not long ago I waited for a flight to board. The plane took off 45 minutes late. There were only two attendants to accommodate 11 passengers who had requested wheelchair assistance. Such growing efforts to ensure that the physically challenged can easily fly are certainly welcome. But when our plane landed -- late and in danger of causing many passengers to miss their connecting flights -- most of the 11 wheelchair-bound passengers left their seats unassisted and hurried out. It was almost as if newfound concerns about making connections had somehow improved their health during the flight. Two passengers had...

Do they really hate ordinary people that much? Yes, they do. For liberals, the distinction between the "dumb masses" and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature. At its heart, liberalism is a gnostic religion, and the essence of that religion is the believer's faith that he possesses the means of changing the world for the better. The belief that the world must be changed requires there to be a mass of individuals whose lives are in need of change. Following this...

This is progressive ideology 101 here. Forget that this is gun grabbing. Forget that this is running to the camera seeking the spotlight. Kamala Harris, who is working very hard to position herself as a future presidential candidate, recently said the following: When you see the effect of this extreme violence on a human body, and especially the body of a child, maybe it will shock some people into understanding this cannot be a political issue. We have to be practical. I support the Second Amendment, but we have to have smart gun safety laws. We cannot tolerate a society...

In the United States today, African Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard University-trained lawyer, works every day to right this wrong. He has argued five cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court; won reversal, release, or relief for 115 wrongly committed death row inmates; and also won a Supreme Court case affirming it unconstitutional to deliver life-without-parole sentences to children 17 and under. I met Stevenson on an August afternoon in Atlanta, where he was the keynote speaker at Georgia State University's freshmen orientation. His talk, delivered to a largely...

In the past, I have speculated heavily (based on deeply rooted and provable cultural origins that the original progressives called themselves "progressive" based directly upon the title of Henry George's book Progress and Poverty. (see also 1, 2, and 3) I speculate no longer. In the Quarterly Register for 1893, the following is written: The discontent of the workingmen and the mercantile classes in London against the wealthy titled landlords, has been increasing for several years. The latter have always succeeded in the past in minimizing the taxes on their own property, throwing a large part of the burden upon...

Timelines are devastating to progressivism. Over the years, progressive historians have done a good job of insulating their ideology from the question of "when did this happen", by taking quotes out of context, using the power of omission, and other trickery, in order to retroactively cook the books and make some things seem older than they actually are. The theory of the living and breathing constitution falls under this umbrella. Yet if you examine the history of progressivism itself, you once again see all of their lies on full display. You needn't look any further than the platform of the...

America was founded to be free and democratic -- unlike England with its monarchy and rigid class system. While classes will always be with us, only in America is class mobility possible and likely. Over our two-hundred and forty-two years, millions of people have become successful because they were not bound to the economic plight to which they might have been born. Americans do not care about the state of one's birth. They revere hard work, invention, imagination, and success. Success, to most Americans does not necessarily connote great wealth. In this country it means having a work ethic, work...

Leftist Progressive Utopianism's most enduring myth is the delusional and self-refuting multi-faceted notion that man is born good despite being the uncreated product of revamped and revitalized Babylonian evolutionary idolatry. (1) Even more incredible, man is somehow the slave of Jehovah (Psalm 83:18; Gen. 22:14) as well as of Biblically grounded Western tradition and culture even though God-hating Leftists claim He does not exist and sadistically ridicule those who worship Him as Lord and Savior. Yet according to these babblers, if human-apes of evolution are liberated from their slavery to the nonexistent God and Western tradition and culture, man's innate...

Yeah, Politico decided to run this op-ed, which says that toxic masculinity and men should be blamed for mass shootings. Not only that but the writer places doubt about the mental illness angle of this debate: ...as we begin a new year, it’s time to have a more nuanced discussion about what might really be to blame for the trend of mass shootings in America—as well as the gun violence epidemic more broadly. No, it isn’t mental illness. It’s gender. If we want to stop the problem of mass shootings, we need to fix the problem of toxic masculinity.If you take...

One of the least known but most influential characters of early American history is the industrialist Samuel Slater. One of my significant resources in documenting Slater's life and work came from author George S. White, who, in 1836, published his book, Memoir of Samuel Slater: The Father of American Manufactures. I found White's book a fascinating account of early industrial America. In the introduction to Slater's memoir, while singing the praises of the industrious Slater – he's known today as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution," – Mr. White also speaks against the "Occupy" fools of the early 19th...

From a Constitutional and therefore conservative(as in modern conservatism) point of view, the 14th amendment is a fantastic bit of work. I don't bring this up too often, because the 14th amendment didn't become a weapon of progressivism until somewhere in the 1950's(and it is thus generally outside of the scope of my focus), but the 14th amendment takes plenty of attacks from many who are not actually attacking that amendment, but rather, the courts' misuse of it. But they don't know that, which is sad. Most conservatives, if they knew the timeline, would be ardent, ardent defenders of the...

Social-justice warriors dominate a leading tech company.Let’s ponder a disturbing question: What if the crisis of free speech on college campuses, with their often extreme intolerance for conservative points of view, represents the high point for free expression in a student’s life? In other words, what if the “real world” is more repressive, more ignorant, and more punitive toward dissenting speech? What if entire corporations adopt the ideologies and norms of the most ruthless campus social-justice warriors, ruining careers and depriving employees of their livelihoods when those employees dissent from the dominant ideology? In other words, what if the rest...

In his book The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly wrote the following: (page 29) But although Hamilton is much the finer man and much the sounder thinker and statesman, there were certain limitations in his ideas and sympathies the effects of which have been almost as baleful as the effects of Jefferson's intellectual superficiality and insincerity. He perverted the American national idea almost as much as Jefferson perverted the American democratic idea, and the proper relation of these two fundamental conceptions one to another cannot be completely understood until this double perversion is corrected. To make Hamilton and Jefferson...

A common theme among progressives is that conservatives aren't just wrong; they're dumb. Reagan was dumb. G.W. Bush was dumb. Trump is dumb. "Knuckle-dragger," "mouth-breather," "stupid," and "uncultured" are typical pejoratives hurled at conservatives, who apparently tend to live in trailer parks, require dental care, handle snakes, and marry first cousins. Why, I had a liberal actor (excuse the redundancy) tell me once that I wasn't necessarily bad, just not as "evolved" as he was. (I had a great retort at the ready, but I decided just to lash him with my tail instead.) The reason for this arrogance isn't...