Free Republic

It shouldn’t be a secret that the public education system in the United States is collapsing, although a vast number of people don’t appear to notice that fact. This is a testament to mental inertia. It takes a steady drumbeat of evidence and perhaps the bravery of a few in the MSM to say the quiet part out loud.There has been a modest decline in Americans’ approval of the execrable system, but 42% of Americans still approve of the system either completely or mostly. COVID did enormous damage to the prestige of the system, as has the descent into ideological...

For freedom of speech to thrive we must cherish and renew the great words of a wide range of cultural heroes. And if freedom of speech does not survive no freedoms will survive. The most common form of racism I encounter in real life is the assumption that racism is white prejudice against non whites. I think racism is not a white sin. All races have the right to love their own and be proud of their own. And all races can slip into being unfair to other races. All of us are human and none of us now are...

For The West to survive and prosper, we must celebrate our heritage. It is a heritage of knowledge based freedom resisting tyranny for the sake of people. John Wycliffes pioneering translation of the Bible brought the phrase "kicking against pricks" into the English language. The original metaphor is of an oxen kicking the sharp prods of the driver of a wagon, thus making the suffering worse. In 2021-22 I see in these words the need to oppose senseless tyranny.

Washington -- I could not reach my colleague Wlady Pleszczynski for most of the day on Saturday. He was mysteriously missing. On Saturdays, we talk for at least an hour on the telephone about the past week's events, but not this Saturday. His telephone rang and rang, all for naught. The same was true for two more of my weekend confidants. I had important news to convey to them, but no one was answering the telephone. At the end of the day, I finally roused Wlady. Where had he been? He had been engrossed in the British Broadcasting Corporation's coverage...

As the Big Ben gong struck 11 p.m. GMT on January 31, marking the moment the United Kingdom left the European Union, thousands of people started singing “Rule Britannia” in Parliament Square. Next to the statue of Winston Churchill was a British Army Parachute Regiment flag—apt, given that the EU is German-dominated—and a few large American flags.Churchill was half American, and Americans in London clearly love a good independence party. A world where British people are free to vote and kick out their representatives might be hard in the days to come, but it is far, far better than...

Great news from yesterday evening, as the British people (at least the English and Welsh ones) voted to secede from the Second Belgian Empire. “British voters chose to ‘leave’ the European Union on Thursday, defying the polls — and President Barack Obama, who had urged Britain to ‘remain’ in the EU. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also urged Britain to stay in the EU. Only Donald Trump had backed the campaign to leave. “Republican strategists had panned Trump’s decision to travel to the UK in the midst of campaign turmoil, and in the wake of his blistering attack...

Is it possible for a Right-wing government to freeze spending and cut the deficit while remaining popular? As they say in New Zealand, ‘yih’. I’ve remarked before that, while no country is physically further from Britain, none is temperamentally closer. Yet there is a difference when it comes to public expenditure. A slowing of the rate of increase in the UK – there have, as yet, been no net cuts – is howled down as an assault on the poor directed by a clique of ancien régime aristocrats. In New Zealand, by contrast, ‘zero budgets’ are seen as prudent and...

The decline of the English-speaking world has been greatly exaggerated. The world financial crisis has provoked a stark feeling of decline among many in the West, particularly citizens of what some call the Anglosphere: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States, for example, roughly 73 percent see the country as on the wrong track, according to an Ipsos MORI poll—a level of dissatisfaction unseen for a generation. Commentators across the political spectrum have described the Anglosphere as decadent, especially compared with the rising power of China. New York Times columnist Thomas...

The 60s campus chant of “Hey, Hey, Ho , Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go, “ doesn’t sound so funny now as we see the inroads multiculturalism has made on our freedoms, our rule of law, our very way of life. In the run up to the Chicago Islam Conference of June 15, 2010, one commenter said, “to re-establish the Khilafah (Caliphate) we need to build an overwhelmingly strong movement within our countries that will overthrow the corrupt rulers from their thrones and bring into place a Khalifah who will implement the Shariah and stand up for the affairs...

If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff. In the days when I used to write for Fleet Street, a lot of readers and several of my editors accused me of being anti-British. I’m not. I’m extremely...

The Anglosphere, for anyone who still doesn’t know, is the community of free, English-speaking nations linked, not by governmental decree, but by shared values. Which nations, exactly? Good question. The UK and Ireland, obviously, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, plus what’s left of the Britain’s extended archipelago (the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and so on).

In this tumultuous political year, the latest sharp surprises come from the far reaches of the Anglosphere — Alaska and Australia. These were lands to which Capt. James Cook voyaged even as the seaboard Atlantic colonists were rebelling against king and Parliament in London. Cook’s charts of the southern coast of Australia are still in use, and he sailed from there to Hawaii and then through the Bering Strait to the ice-choked Arctic Sea. You can see splendid murals of his voyages in the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. Australia joined the Anglosphere when the British established a convict settlement...

LONDON: Britain's new coalition government on Thursday committed itself to forge a 'new special relationship' with India, an objective Prime Minister David Cameron had articulated as early as 2006 during his visit to New Delhi as the Conservative leader. The full text of the coalition agreement published on Thursday says: "We will work to establish a new 'special relationship' with India and seek closer engagement with China, while standing firm on human rights in all our bilateral relationships". The agreement also supports India's membership to the UN Security Council. It says: "We support reform of the UN Security Council, including...

The Dow Jones reached a significant milestone yesterday, and news outlets were abuzz with excitement. Olympia Snowe's vote for the Baucus bill was plenty fodder for the 24-hour news cycles. But, for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists in the United States, an epochal event transpired at the White House afternoon that should not slip notice. Lead me from Untruth to Truth. Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality. (from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad -- I.iii.28) As the ethereal sounds of a Hindu priest's chanting of this Sanskrit prayer from ancient Hindu scripture filled the East Room,...

Suppose that simultaneously the EU fractured, China's economy stagnated and the US recession became even worse what could the cosequences be for Americans and the world?

The success of the major Anglosphere nations at last week's United Nations climate conference in Bali marks the beginning of the end of the age of climate hysteria. It also symbolizes a significant shift of political leadership in international climate diplomacy from the once-dominating European continent to North America and its Western allies. This power shift has perhaps never been more transparent and dramatic than in Bali, when Australia's Labour government, under the newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, announced a complete U-turn on the thorny issue of mandatory carbon dioxide emissions targets. Only days after Australia's delegation had backed...

Commentary: Will the USS Kitty Hawk cement U.S.-India military ties? MANIPAL, India, Nov. 28 M.D. NALAPAT Column: Future Present Thanks largely to India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who shared with his leftwing British friends a dislike of the Yanks, the geopolitically senseless alienation between the United States and India continued for five decades after India's independence in 1947. What seems finally to have convinced the British to leave India was the seepage of loyalty from the Indian component of the armed forces. More than 2 million Indians saw action on the Allied side during World War II. Yet during...

KABUL, Afghanistan — A teenage boy who was teaching English at a local school was dragged into the street and executed by Taliban militants, the provincial police chief reported. The brutal killing sparked a clash that left two suspected Islamist fighters and two policemen dead, an official said. "The boy, who was teaching English to other students after school hours, had been warned by the militants to stop teaching," provincial police chief Esmatuallh Alizai said. Taliban militants have killed several teachers and students in the past for attending the government-run schools, which they regard as un-Islamic. -snip-

On November 11, 1999 Terry Kelly was in a Shoppers Drug Mart store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. At 10:55 AM an announcement came over the store’s PA asking customers who would still be on the premises at 11:00 AM to give two minutes of silence in respect to the veterans who have sacrificed so much for us. Terry was impressed with the store’s leadership role in adopting the Legion’s “two minutes of silence” initiative. He felt that the store’s contribution of educating the public to the importance of remembering was commendable. When eleven o’clock arrived on that day, an announcement...

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) Directed by Shekhar Kapur. Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, Samantha Morton, Jordi Mollà.From a National Catholic Register review By Steven D. Greydanus A lurid sort of Christopher Hitchens vision of history pervades Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his 1998 art-house hit Elizabeth. The earlier film, which made a star of Cate Blanchett as the eponymous Virgin Queen, celebrated the triumph of bright, happy Elizabethan Protestantism over the dark, unwholesome Catholic world of Bloody Mary. Even so, that film’s church-bashing was tame compared that of this sequel, in which...