Free Republic

Reading David Mamet’s new book of essays, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, I was reminded of how loosely jointed and shape-shifting an essay can be... Mamet, whose political conversion to conservatism was announced in 2008, has turned full-on MAGA. He believes the United States is in decline but remains hopeful, saying, "Trump is a hero, and his heirs will, God willing, increase the longevity of the American Experiment." What’s behind our political sickness, according to Mamet, if I read him correctly, is a compound of human failings. First, there is the mendacity of politicians whom he compares to the...

Sight-words — a theory about how to teach reading — is absurd. Give me three minutes, and I’ll explain why. The premise is that children can memorize English words without much effort. This is blatantly not true. Our words are hard to remember, and the more words you learn, the more they get in one another’s way. That’s why we have so many non-readers in middle school and high school. (Dirty little secret: Everyone running the school system surely knows this.) Think back to when you had a meal with some friends at a restaurant. Can you bring up the...

Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life” genre, I was compelled to see what all the fuss is about. Suffice it to say that I was not impressed. But I could not quite put my finger on the source of my disdain until, several days ago, it hit me: Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator walks away learning absolutely nothing. The fault of this particular novel might be with Moshfegh’s nihilistic outlook on life, but the problem cuts even...

In 1857 Charles Dickens first performed a live reading of a self-abridged "A Christmas Carol." He read it every year at Christmastime until his death in 1870. This is Hank Hayes, The Pirate Radio Guy reading from Dickens' abridged book.

In today’s culture, with the countless adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, some adaptations have been forgotten, or cast into the shadows for more modern interpretations. It is not difficult to see how and why this is, especially since there are so many adaptations going all the way back to the silent movie era. This particular version of A Christmas Carol, is one of the most historically significant because of a number of unique factors, of which I am going to address further in this piece....

Should we trust the research published by professors? The scholars who write books and papers have impressive degrees and teach at respected universities, and their work has to undergo rigorous scrutiny before it can be published, so the answer would seem to be that we should. The safeguards against deception and fraud appear strong. Decades ago, they were strong, but that’s not true today. In recent years, deception and fraud have been proven in quite a few instances. Some of the guilty professors have admitted their wrongdoing, one even confessing that he didn’t have the patience for rigor. Clearly, academic...

Today I'm happy to announce the availability of the book Reflections on Violence, by George Sorel. A lot can be said about this book, but one of the keys to it is that the outlook it carries was instrumental to the syndicalism that motivated radicals in Italy in the early 20th century. It is a little outside of my normal focus but someone else started this work and then abandoned it, and I am aware of this book's importance so I continued its work to completion. It's been somewhat slow over at LibriVox these days, not that I haven't been...

"I am not a conservative. I am a radical—a radical monarchist. I believe there are no rails—and never were any. America has no manifest destiny. Her constitution was not divinely inspired. No special providence was involved in her founding, nor has she discovered any unique principle of human governance. Nor can any theory of historical determinism, whether liberal, Marxist or libertarian, explain, predict or guarantee her future—which, like all future history, is a contingent and unwritten blank page in the hands of men only." Thus begin the self-revelations of Curtis Yarvin, radical monarchist and scorner of the American founding, in...

France and England in North America is a multivolume history of the European colonization of North America, written by Francis Parkman. The series highlights the military struggles between France and Great Britain. It was well regarded at the time of publication and continues to enjoy a reputation as a literary masterpiece.

The sabotage of K-12 education is easily implemented by rejecting methods that work, while simultaneously forcing phony substitutes into classrooms. QED: the experts embraced a far-left ideology that prefers control and leveling. Weirdly enough, our Education Establishment ends up promoting anti-education agenda. Here are the five most egregious examples of this totalitarian strategy in action. 1) Sight-Words Versus Phonics. All the main European languages are phonetic. You first learn the alphabet, then the sounds represented by the letters; and then the blends of those sounds. This approach has always worked. It's the method used in Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician, Greek, and...

In one of America’s most popular novels, seven-year-old Scout has been reading “ever since she was born.” She and her father read the newspapers together every evening. Late in the summer, she realized she would be starting school in a week. “I never looked forward more to anything in my life. Hours of wintertime had found me in the treehouse, looking over at the schoolyard, spying on the children there. ... I longed to join them.” But everything changed by lunchtime! Scout’s older brother Jem asked how she was getting along on her first day of school. “I told him....

If you really want to understand the horrors of war, don’t just read accounts written years after a battle, but instead read first-hand accounts by soldiers who were on the front lines. Similarly, to understand what has happened in the hostile takeover of American college English departments, it’s best to read a description by a professor who fought to preserve them as places where students are taught to write well by studying books by great authors. Fought and lost. His story is at once enlightening and depressing. The book at hand is Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual by Reynolds...

Kamala Harris’s book tour continues to generate interesting soundbites, with the former vice president blasting President Donald Trump’s administration, saying “These motha****kas are crazy!” during one recent appearance. Harris shared her assessment while speaking at the “Day of Unreasonable Conversation” summit in Los Angeles on Monday. The ex-VP told the crowd at The Getty Center: VIDEO AT LINK............... We are living history right now, and you all storytellers are living this. You’re not passive observers, you know that. You’re living it, and I would ask you that all the emotions that we are feeling — give those emotions, give that...

I am reading it now and I want to watch out for major themes, that might be false there. I already recognize it employs that literary trick of starting to explain something in a too positive way and then revealing the harsh reality in order to draw in sceptical readers. I have noticed small mistakes, but I can live with them. Is there anything you know, that is majorly wrong with it? Thank you!

I talk a lot about the Founding Fathers but you should not think that this means I forgot about our Founding Mothers. In the early 1900s, an effort was made to catalog early prominent women in the U.S. and the British Colonies. The result of that effort is a three-volume set, "The Pioneer Mothers of America". Here we have the release of the first volume, which covers the years prior to the 1700s and some of the early 1700s. The second volume contains the bulk of our Founding Mothers and many of the Wives of the Signers, however this book...

They want to justify killing you. No really, it's as simple as that. Yes, that is mega-successful horror author Stephen King saying that Charlie Kirk "advocated stoning gays to death" as justification for his murder. His post was so outrageous that sitting members of Congress called publicly for a lawsuit over the statement. What King did is frame an ideological opponent as the most extreme example of a straw man. Either unknowingly or purposely, he lied about who Kirk is in order to better justify the shedding of blood. If this was not the case, then woke men like Stephen...

While in college back in the mid-1970s, I wrote a short story on AI. I give a little background on the early mini-computers I operated with a photo of the Honeywell H200 I took. I don't have the original short story anymore but I wrote a pretty good summary highligting the major theme. Essentially, a computer operator was given the opportunity to train a computer as it discovers the world and asks questions.

Most Americans firmly believe that educational institutions should be places where all ideas can be discussed and no one need fear reprisal for saying the wrong thing or pursuing the wrong research topic. That ideal, however, is not embraced by all people. There are powerful forces, here and abroad, that want to dominate education in order to advance their goals. They have no qualms about telling students what they must believe or telling faculty members not to research certain topics. Of course, the leaders of our colleges and universities would never cooperate with those authoritarian forces—or would they? In her...

The following post contains discussion of alleged sexual assault, stalking, and predatory behavior. Most links are to conversations on Threads, some of which contain victim blaming and defense of assault. Please exercise caution and look after yourself before clicking links. … The con drama has been nonstop this year, as people try to launch weekend events and one, two, or nineteen things go wrong. The latest: Sinners & Stardust. Sinners & Stardust is a weekend event that hosts an author signing and a Dark Romance Ball to celebrate the readers and authors of dark romance. At the ball, apparently many,...

...The following passage contains text from the book, published in 1910, Betrayed Armenia, by Armenian writer and diplomat Diana Agabeg Apgar: “The genealogy in Genesis runs thus : "The sons of Japheth, Gomer and Magog and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meschech, and Tiras...Only the names of the three sons of Gomer, and the four sons of Javan are given in Genesis, and by these we are told were the isles of the Gentiles divided. So much for Genesis. Later history records that these Gentiles spread themselves over part of that stretch of terra firma which now goes by...