Free Republic

Elon Musk @elonmusk This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead. Elon Musk just moments ago. Today Apple Inc. threatened to remove Twitter from it's app. store. Apple also canceled advertising on Twitter.

Allan Penn Daniel C. Dennett. Q: How could you, as a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, write a book that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology? Why would you hold a scientist's microscope to something as intangible as belief? I don't know about you, but I find St. Paul's and St. Peter's pretty physical. But your new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," is not about cathedrals. It's about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease. That itself is a scientific...

You would think that a belief system where the most lauded members are those who blow themselves up would have some serious marketing problems.  I mean how exactly do you get rational post-secular westerners to buy into an idea like that?  But Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion none the less.  And much of it's growth is owed to its rapid conversion of certain segments of western society.   At a glance it defies all logic, but it's true.  It's a commonly held view that when a person stops believing in organized religion they don't then believe in nothing,...

Fort Hood Texas Shootings Free Republic Archives This thread is for everyone, be sure to bookmark it. If you create a new thread, feel free to post a link to it here as well. Our prayers Continue...... *Update:13 Soldiers Killed 31 Wounded Fort Hood Shooting [Muslim terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan] *MAJ. GEN. ROBERT SCALES (RET.) "This was a deliberate act of execution." (FOX NEWS) *Barack Obama Gives "Shout-Out" Before He Comments on Shooting -- FOX News (here's the video) *Transcript: President Obama delivers remarks on Ft. Hood shooting (after shoutout) *NBC CHICAGO: Obama's Frightening Insensitivity Following Shooting *Obama...

Pet Valu, the specialty retailer of pet food and supplies in the U.S., announced it was closing all of its 358 stores by year’s end. Like many retailers, they cite the COVID-19 panic as the reason for their failure, even though other retail pet-supply companies have actually seen a boom in business. People are home with their pets more now, so they are indulging their dogs and cats more than usual. One reason Pet Valu suffered, while others boomed, is they embraced the cultural aspects of the panic. Rather than begrudgingly going along with the nutty rules cooked up by...

The anti-Trump movement can be divided into two primary categories: (1) the leaders who sell the daily narrative and (2) the "useful idiots" who form the army of haters. The leaders include the Deep State criminals and media who protected Hillary and continue to collaborate on anti-Trump propaganda. The leaders understand Eric Hoffer's statement that "hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil." I am not arguing that the useful idiot sheep do not hate. There is...

Our country deserves a President who thinks his country is the best country in the world. Obama does not fit this bill. He is not an "American exceptionalist". Our country is a big, beautiful country with a varied population. It's probably the only couintry that could elect a minority such as Barak Obama. He patently does not appreciate this, and is ingrateful. He does not deserve to be President; we do not deserve him.

"Live" with TAE Thomas Sowell A senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, economist Thomas Sowell has written extensively on race, culture, and economics. While most economists focus on rational man, Sowell has shown a particular interest in irrational man--man in the grip of visions he refuses to test because he has an emotional investment in them. Among his 34 books on topics ranging from immigration to Marxism to childhood education, it is hard to know where Sowell has had the most impact. He considers his most important work to be A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles,...

<p>Marianne Koos has owned a convenience shop in the Alexanderplatz subway station ever since 1984, when her home and business lay east of the Berlin Wall. Her wares have scarcely changed since thenshe continues to sell Communist-era shampoos, household cleaners, and Ersatzkaffee (imitation coffee made of malted grains and charred vegetables). These aren't vintage goods, however; the companies that manufactured these products shut down after the fall of the Wall in 1989 but soon resumed production due to popular demand.</p>

The Resenters By Mark Gauvreau Judge February 21, 2003 Moralism without Morality In recent weeks the media has treated the antiwar protesters as one of two things: either as a harmless group of mainstream folks angry about American bellicosity, or as the second coming of the communists. In fact, it’s both simpler and more complex than that: The protesters are not anarchists or soccer moms—at least, they are not merely anarchists or soccer moms. First and foremost, they are Resenters. Resentment as a source of human action and thought has been around as long as the human race, of course, but...

There are Chinese towns near the border with North Korea that send rice across the Yalu River in exchange for girls to marry. It makes sense. North Korea needs rice, because communist farming is a failure. China needs girls, after thirty years of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide. And this neat little arrangement in an obscure corner of the East holds an important lesson for what is left of a Western civilization looking down the barrel of a gun of its own aiming: the feeling of self-determination can be reduced to the satisfaction of having a daughter to sell for...

The legacy of Eric Hoffer: Part II Thomas Sowell June 19, 2003 | Print | Send "There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life." This is just one of the pungent insights of Eric Hoffer, who died twenty years ago. This particular quote...

Name some of the things that make us so much better off than Americans of just a couple of generations ago. One of the most important things are new medicines that not only prolong life but leave us vigorous at ages when old folks used to sit around in rocking chairs. Airplanes have put the whole world within our reach. Computer operating systems have enabled people with no understanding of the science and technology of computers to use them nevertheless to do innumerable things. You might think that those who created these things would be among our heroes. On the...

<p>Despite many complaints about foreign imports, there has been little complaint, or even comment, over the importing of foreign law into American court cases. In recent years, opinions in several U.S. Supreme Court cases have included arguments from foreign court decisions. This has been done by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Steven Breyer and John Paul Stevens. But the only people who seem to have noticed it, much less criticized it, are Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.</p>

What more do you people want?" strikes most black Americans as a naive question. After all, the abuse of racial profiling remains one of the nation's most serious problems (although some profiling will remain necessary in troubled communities to protect their own residents from harm). Racial discrepancies, subtle but decisive, persist in areas such as bank lending and healthcare. Black men are tragically overrepresented in the prison population. Yet these remnants of pre-Civil Rights Act America hardly constitute the "reign of white supremacy" that some blacks still decry. The United States now has a lower percentage of black families living...

As the scent of burning electrical wire and the pulverized dust settled over Manhattan in the wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attack, a certain book disappeared from New York City bookstore shelves. Within a week, that book rocketed from No. 8,000 to No. 125 on Amazon.com rankings. It described the nature of fanatics, offering a powerful window of understanding into the people capable of blowing up those two towers. "The True Believer" was published in 1951. Its author, Eric Hoffer, was a self-educated longshoreman born in New York City to a German cabinetmaker and his wife. His keen...

The authors who are read most widely are those who are no longer around. Former Accuracy in Academia executive director Dan Flynn pays homage to a quartet of them in his latest book, Blue Collar Intellectuals. America may never again see the likes of Will and Ariel Durant, Mortimer Adler, Milton Friedman and Eric Hoffer. For one thing, all ascended to intellectual heights from modest means, if not actual penury. Moreover, although their political viewpoints spanned the ideological spectrum, all shared a love of country, namely the one in which they lived and worked. For example, Will and Ariel Durant,...

The surreal scene on the South Lawn of the White House featured a Lone Star-state school teacher toasting Frescas with a San Francisco stevedore. A scheduled five minutes turned into fifty-five. Dressed in work boots and a flannel coat despite eighty-degree heat, Eric Hoffer apologized for not accepting his conversation mate’s invitation to a state dinner. He did not attend because he did not own a tie. President Lyndon Johnson responded that Hoffer should just show up tie-less to the next one and promised that he would remove his in solidarity. This used to be the Democratic Party. Oversized guys...

How did this happen? How did the nation go in an instant from disbelieving every utterance of Donald Trump to robotically repeating — and acting on — every claim that falls out of Joe Biden’s mouth, no matter how disconnected from the truth? The most glaring example involves Biden’s fact-challenged tirade against Georgia’s new voting law. At his first and only press conference, Biden declared the state’s efforts to protect against voter fraud were worse than Jim Crow, “un-American,” “sick,” and “despicable.” (This was the same press conference where moments later Biden bragged about how much time he’s spent with...

Here's a quiz that may appear some day on history tests: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in November 2009, was: a) Part of a terror network that had planned attacks on the United States since the 1990s; b) A deranged psychotic who snapped under the pressure of treating soldiers returning from Iraq and who happened to be a Muslim; c) A prime example of "The True Believer," the lonely, frustrated individual who attaches himself to an overarching cause as a way of compensating for personal disappointments. The answer, of course, is "c," the true...