Free Republic

A review of Michael Malice's new book, The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics.

You may have noticed that conservatives are blessed with an impressive lineup of intellectual heavyweights. Liberals have none, literally none. A few of those on the conservative side are Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, Dennis Prager, Shelby Steele, Jordon Peterson, and Mark Levin. *snip* You cannot name a single liberal who has anything approaching the above credentials or intellectual output. Why? There are a number of reasons. Liberalism is fundamentally about feelings rather than thoughts. Also the left focuses on intentions, the right focuses on results and the ways by which results are achieved. An advantage of making intentions your...

Progressivism has been with us for just under 120 years now, destroying the country. Since day one, these people have staked their claim on the purity that they always have and always will stand against monopoly. Not so fast. Public posturing and the resulting public policy compared with the core ideological belief are two very different things. Progressives stand for and are ardent believers in the absolute regulation or complete nationalization of everything in sight, believing that government is the only entity that has any responsibility to be engaged in this, that, or the other thing. How dare they claim...

You have to give credit to progressives, when they are intent on achieving their purpose they don't let anything get in their way. Even reality. So the definition of a word in some dictionary stands little chance of being protected from the onslaught of "reform" in the face of the machinations of these people. Realistically, it is to the progressives benefit to take words and weaponize them. We have all been trained by progressive-dominated media, government schools, and even some of our "leaders" that a monopoly is a purely market-based entity and it's a bad entity. Well, not so fast....

At PragerU, we have released about 400 videos on virtually every subject outside of the natural sciences and math. Along with two billion views, the videos have garnered tens of thousands of comments. So we have a pretty good handle on what people most love and most hate. For example, any video defending America or Israel inevitably receives many negative responses. But no videos elicit the amount of contempt and mockery that videos defending religion, explaining the Bible, or arguing for God do. Why is that? There is a good reason. The Bible and the left (not liberalism; leftism) are...

The Democrats’ behavior after 2016 is not mass delusion or mass hysteria or Trump Derangement Syndrome, or any of the other psychobabble explanations that dominate our political commentary. My first career was as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and I am not impressed with spraying around clinical terms as a substitute for looking at what is in front of us. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a colorful description for political behavior. It is not an analysis of what causes it. Under Barack Obama, ordinary Democrats became enamored of the narrative that they were the Good People, hence entitled to crush anyone in their...

As recent electoral results have shown, not even Canada is immune to the rise of populist right-wing politics. Justin Trudeau has not only done severe damage to his reputation and chances of re-election, but he has also tarnished his brand of flamboyant progressivism for years to come... It's not that voters in the center have suddenly swung hard to the right, but rather that they are trying to swing away from this buffoon and everything that he is associated with. Bad optics and economic concerns swing elections way faster than principles and ideology ever could. That is the lesson here.

To write a thorough and well-documented history of the Left is an impressive accomplishment in itself.  To write such a history so that it reads with the ease and flow of a good, gripping novel is another thing altogether, but that is what Mark Melcher and Stephen Soukup have done with Know Thine Enemy: A History of the Left (Volume One).  This comprehensive history of the Left’s major figures and movements is page-turning read for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the threat to America’s culture, politics, and future posed by the Left’s radical agenda.The book’s opening alerts the reader...

Without God’s goodness as a plumb line for right and wrong, moderns have no framework with which to judge the clear evils that exist in human behavior. So they’ve settled on a simplistic moral standard that boils all sin down to a single category: oppression. Having learned about a few undeniable evils that existed in the recent past—slavery, Nazi concentration camps, Jim Crow—they’ve seized on the notion of “History” as a moral force that trends in one direction, the direction of progress. History has a right side and a wrong side, and that line—however vague and changeable it might appear—is...

If you think that the “tax the rich”rhetoric from the left-wing of the Democratic Party is primarily about economics you would be sadly mistaken. After all, there isn’t enough tax revenue in the highest income bracket, even with a 90% marginal rate, to fund anyone’s pet social program for more than 48 hours. Do progressives know this? Of course they do. The same observation holds true for the so-called ”Green New Deal” legislation recently proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the outrageous media darling from Queens. It’s true that this grab bag of environmental regulation, if enacted, would likely cost trillions and...

Sounding like the presidential candidate he insists he is not, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unleashed an energetic attack against President Donald Trump's policies Tuesday, pledging New York will lead the nation forward with the most progressive agenda in state history.

I rarely make predictions -- whether of election results or anything else. My policy has always been to say what I believe should be done, not what will be done. I am making an exception with regard to America in 2019. 2019 will be a dark year in America. Thanks to the left's control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019 -- with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself. Truth will not be the point. Defamation will....

And this year ends with our loser ruling class shedding any pretense of legitimacy in its quest to reclaim the power we took back from it in 2016. The reaction to Donald Trump by our alleged betters - SPOILER: They are much, much worse than us - is instructive. They have abandoned all the principles they once claimed to support - democracy, civil rights, due process, and equality. None of those principles help them to keep or regain power anymore, so they are expendable. As are you. Liberalism was always a lie and a scam, right from its sordid...

Careful scrutiny of how the left operates reveals a tiered hierarchy. There is a small cadre of elite leftist leaders who know the true nature of the evil that they perpetrate. This leadership is utterly self-serving and utterly cynical. This is where you find the true psychopaths, racial eugenicists, etc. Examples include Vladimir Lenin, Lavrentiy Beria, Heinrich Himmler, and George Soros. They have a praetorian guard of similarly elite true believers in the causes trundled out for consumption by the leadership. These are intelligent, motivated, and charismatic champions of causes like environmentalism, multiculturalism, Malthusianism, etc. These are the people who...

In his penetrating analysis of pagan Progressivism, M. Stanton Evans author of "The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition," observes that it is only against the background of neo-paganism that the bizarre 'isms' of Progressive politics come into focus. The common feature of all these movements – naturalism, materialism, sexism, multiculturalism, feminism, determinism, economic determinism, racism, heteronormativism, and patriarchalism for instance, is that they view irrational nature itself as ultimate and sovereign. In other words, they make a god of irrational nature – its laws, energies, and matter – which is precisely why Al Gore is synonymous...

This is a compilation of the many, many things that American Democrats (often radical totalitarian communists wearing the mantle of “progressive liberals”) want to ban. This is a running tabulated list that originated from an earlier post about busybodies. There, I argued that Social Justice Warriors (SJW) was just another name for a busybody. This is a set aside list tabulated by request. It supersedes the extensive list on an earlier post about busybodies. Remember, boys and girls, all bans are a restriction on freedom. Go ahead and shake your head in disbelief. These people are friggin’ lunatics. The List...

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society. By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods). Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is...

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Hispanic or black or Asian conservative in the growing #WalkAway movement from the Democratic Party; you are a white male bigot. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was not even included in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Feminists have been declaring conservative women to be non-female for decades for not worshiping at the shrines of abortion and sexual anarchy. Well, a lot of people have had enough of our progressively dysfunctional culture, which is the main reason that Donald Trump was elected. Many Americans saw their country being changed beyond...

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life. One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has...

o one understands the dysfunctions and debilitating impact of America's political system in the swamp better than Mark Melcher and Steve Soukup. For decades between them, they followed Washington for Wall Street at one of America's largest brokerage houses. For the last 16 years, the two have run their own, independent research shop, delivering political commentary and forecasting to the investment community, studying the intersection between politics and economics. This pushed them into a relentless pursuit of the new left -- measuring its deleterious impact on everything it touches -- most especially Western civilization. To this end, Melcher and Soukup...