Free Republic

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Fresh off their $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” pork binge for their blue-state political clients, the Dems have now set their sights on “election reform,” which is Newspeak for legalizing patent election fraud. Having passed the House, H.R. 1 is now before the Senate, and should it pass there, it will de facto disenfranchise millions of American voters. It also will launch an assault on a critical bulwark of our political freedom––the sovereignty of the 50 states that the Constitution makes responsible for running their own elections The...

One party stands for life, freedom, and unalienable rights. The other stands for raw power. NRO’s Jim Geraghty in his daily column indulged one of the NeverTrump favorite rhetorical devices: That the president is just as bad for the Republic as the radical Democrats, and neither side “wants to solve real problems.” Apart from the common mistaken notion that the Founders created our political order “to solve problems” rather than protect the liberty of states, towns, civic society, families, and individuals, this tic often obscures an unwillingness to identify clearly those guilty of creating conflict and disorder by equally apportioning...

This weekend I missed my first posting at PJ Media since beginning in 2006. Why? Let me briefly explain the lapse — if I can be forgiven for comparing a bike accident with what I have seen on the farm the last 50 years (sliced off fingers, crushed legs, herbicide poisonings, manifold burns, etc.). I was going on a usual morning bike ride — safe stuff with like-minded older folks. I’m 60; so is my biking partner and fellow Hoover Institution associate Bruce Thornton. We are hardly reckless. (Not like sulfuring at midnight recklessly in one’s 20s in the old...

President Obama’s foreign policy team is built around one key idea: the neglect of diplomacy by President Bush’s “cowboy” unilateralism has damaged American prestige, alienated our allies, and worsened our problems abroad, particularly with the Islamic jihadists. Thus the new administration will restore diplomacy to its rightful place, and its ambassadors and special envoys and the President himself will diplomatically engage our enemies––even Iran, the Taliban, and Hamas––in discussions whose goal will be to find peaceful solutions to the issues that divide their interests from ours. This narrative of “renewed vigor” and “a new beginning for American diplomacy,” as Time...

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we continue to hunt for those whose blunders let them happen. The latest addition to earlier investigations such as The 9/11 Commission Report and television’s Path to 9/11 is the recently released CIA report detailing the agency’s mistakes before the attacks. As with the earlier reports, this latest exposé of error and incompetence has prompted demands for scapegoats. Blaming some government employees might make us feel better, and of course we should identify blunders to avoid in the future. But punishing a few bureaucrats won’t do anything to correct the two larger,...

The reaction to the murders in Blacksburg is eliciting the usual liberal nostrums. Typical is the N.Y. Times editorial that concluded, "What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss." NO, what is needed is some coherent thinking that will keep us from allowing the government from further restricting our Constitutional freedoms.

The New York City Council recently passed a resolution banning the use of the word “nigger.” The resolution, of course, is entirely symbolic, since trying to control language by fiat is like King Canute trying to stop the tide. Language isn’t legislated, but grows and changes organically through the people who speak it. That’s why the grammar police always fight a losing battle. More interesting is what this preening display of self-righteousness says about our culture of eternal childhood.-- snip--You can’t have free speech and sensitivity to feelings at the same time. The issues we as citizens have to debate...

Why many Muslims demand from Westerners a hypersensitivity to Islam, all the while that Christians and Jews in Muslim countries are subjected to harassment, assault, and the looniest kinds of slander and insult ----- Acceptance of a double standard has always been a sign of inferiority. To let someone behave according to one set of principles or values while demanding that you be subjected to others is to validate a claim of superiority that justifies the inconsistent and unfair behavior. A double standard can also reflect incoherent thinking, a failure to apply consistently a principle that presumably has universal validity....

Ambrose Bierce once quipped that war was God’s way of teaching Americans geography. He could have said “teaching us history,” for the enemy is emboldened by our ignorance not just of where he lives but of how he lives, his beliefs and values, and to understand these traditions we must understand their history. Unfortunately, in the current war against Islamic jihad we persist in ignoring the documented history of Islam and its beliefs, accepting instead the spin and distortions of various propagandists, apologists, and Western useful idiots. This imperative to know the enemy’s beliefs is particularly important for understanding the...

As if there isn’t enough evidence of the ideological corruption of America’s universities, along come Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt, arguing that the “Israel lobby” dominates American foreign policy to the hurt of our own national interests. Alan Dershowitz has exposed the errors of fact and the sophomoric logic that mar this thesis, and that should embarrass what are supposed to be two of the best universities in the country . Personally, I consider it intellectual malfeasance to harp on the Israel lobby while ignoring the Palestinian lobby — which includes most of the faculty of American universities,...

[Editor’s Note: In the Sunday February 5, 2006 edition of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Fresno-based Times reporter Mark Arax published an essay purportedly about how acrimony over 9/11 issues, Iraq, and the war on terror has divided his community "The Valley's Not So Civil War". In fact, the piece was slanted, replete with factual errors, and almost laughable in its caricatures, especially of Fresno-area "Jews." Here is our response to the essay by Victor Davis Hanson and Bruce Thornton, Private Papers contributors who were both mentioned in the article, and like Arax are both natives and life-long residents of...

The election last Thursday in Iraq, the third since the U.S. invaded, is an astonishing historical event in the Muslim Middle East......Yet with some few exceptions, the American media have done a poor job of telling us why this vote is so historically important, why it is such a remarkable achievement, and why the administration deserves credit for making it happen. Having opposed the war and the President from the start, the media’s coverage has relentlessly accentuated the negative, offering nit-picking analyses even as the bullets are flying, and asserting the failure of the effort before the job is even...

The stories about the video of US troops burning the bodies of dead Taliban are disgusting––but not because of anything our troops may have done to the corpses of fanatical murderers. What’s disturbing is the groveling reaction of our government and military officials, who are falling all over themselves to apologize to people who cheer every time an American is killed....The idea that all those millions cheering for the terrorists in Iraq, cheering for bin Laden, cheering for the Taliban are all just misinformed is a monumental delusion, and the most dangerous mistake we are making the war against jihad....

The website of the Director of National Intelligence just published a letter from Al Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head-terrorist in Iraq. This document repays careful reading, for it explodes much of the received wisdom many people rely on in making sense of jihadist terror.According to this standard interpretation, Islamic terror is the handiwork of a fanatic minority that has “highjacked” and distorted Islamic doctrine. These medieval throwbacks gain traction from the political autocracy and oppression that dominate the Muslim governments in the Middle East, regimes that cannot provide the freedom and prosperity that...

The news that the London terrorist attacks were carried out by second-generation Muslim immigrants should not surprise us. For years now we in the West have indulged a whole set of destructive ideas whose bitter fruit we will all continue to harvest, as more and more unassimilated and disaffected immigrant children turn against the countries that welcomed their parents and provided them with a prosperity and freedom unknown in their countries of origin. This baneful idea goes by the name of multiculturalism. Don't be fooled by marketing: multiculturalism is not simply a call to respect cultures different from one's own....

The slaughter in London is another grisly wake-up call that likely will go as unheeded as earlier ones. Already the standard narrative is being trotted out: evildoers created by what the New York Times predictably called the “root causes of terrorism”: autocracy, or economic stagnation, or Palestinian suffering, or globalization's dislocations, or Western historical sins, or the war in Iraq (the cause will depend on the political prejudices of the pundit) have “hijacked” Islam and distorted its peaceful message. And now they are using Islam to justify murder in order to further their own ambitions or dysfunctional psychic needs. Given...

The Republican Jewish Coalition of Central California is pleased to sponsor the 6th GREAT OXFORD/FRESNO DEBATE Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 7pm Bullard High School Theater 5445 N. Palm Avenue Fresno, CA The motion before the House: THE UNITED NATIONS HAS OUTLIVED ITS USEFULNESS Distinguished panelists include: PRO: Victor Davis Hanson, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute Bruce Thornton, Ph.D., Professor of Classics, CSU Fresno Stuart Weil, Chairman, Republican Jewish Coalition of Central California CON: Jim Bartram, Speech Instructor, Fresno City College Howard Hendrix, Ph.D., Lecturer, English Literature, CSU Fresno Richard Stone, Administrative Director, Fresno Center for Nonviolence ANALYST: Kevin Ayotte,...

Failed, useless, dubious, impotent, pernicious, morally exhausted… Every crisis is an opportunity, a time when the fissures and cracks of received wisdom and worn-out habits of thought are exposed. The years since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have been such a time for the United States. Decades of intellectual corruption, moral flabbiness, and blithe indifference to the reality of a dangerous, unpredictable world all culminated on 9/11. Yet despite the gruesome severity of that lesson, the same bad habits persist. Nothing demonstrates this truth more clearly than the unwillingness of many Americans, including the current administration, to accept once and...

May 18, 2005 Suicidal Tendencies in the WestTolerance unreciprocated leaves West vulnerable. by Bruce Thornton Private Papers Last week riots broke out in Afghanistan and Pakistan over an unfounded rumor, irresponsibly published by Newsweek magazine, that an American interrogator had flushed a Koran down the toilet. In response, the administration has been anxiously assuring the Muslim world that we indeed respect their religion and begging them to please like us. ... snip ...  Anyone familiar with the history of Islam and its 14-centuries-long violent jihad against the West and the Jews will not be surprised or shocked by these events....

A review of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'or. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 384 pages, $23.95One of the first requirements in any conflict is to know the enemy — how he thinks, what he values, what his goals are. In the current war against Islamism, we in the West have done and are doing a poor job of understanding our enemy on his terms; rather, we have reduced his behavior to our own particular prejudices and categories. Indeed, our enemy has been much better at knowing where we come from and exploiting our cultural ideals and weaknesses than we...