Free Republic

From a Renaissance fresco, “Take Rome as your example if you wish to rule a thousand years; follow the common good, and not selfish ends; and give just counsel like these men.” America isn’t the first country to suffer secular effects from shunning its religious foundation. I was at first surprised to learn that a decline in Roman religious observance played a leading role in Rome’s corruption and fall. In 715 BC, the Roman senate appointed Numa to succeed Rome’s founder, Romulus. He turned to religion to tame a fierce people and bring about civilized society. Perhaps not until the...

People all over the world are worried about the future. While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many. However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors. Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders. Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions. Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them. Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most...

From secure borders to functioning cities, America is shedding the hard-won pillars of civilization—by choice, not chance—in a sweeping, top-down descent into disorder. Secure borders and stationary populations were considered the mark of emerging civilization by classical historians. In contrast to nomadism and constant strife over disputed territory, peoples who had clearly defined and protected borders ascended to statehood, maintained a distinct culture, and achieved greater prosperity and security. In contrast, what we suffered from 2021 to 2025 was unprecedented. It was an intentional administration effort to de-civilize the nation by destroying its borders—as if to return to the premodern...

It’s vain and futile to suppose that the disordered minds of Western Civ’s entrenched Wokester Jacobins might ever be subject to polite persuasion about anything they believe. They believe only in the power of pushing their fellow citizens around, and so, alas, the only persuasion that might conceivably work to stop their infantile assaults on liberty, truth, and decency is to push back harder until they suffer and break.This is something that most parents with young children instinctively understand. You don’t negotiate with two-year-olds. You tell them how things are and what sort of behavior is required of them, as...

A shocking example of Western countries’ suicidal policies, and a warning regarding our own “sanctuary cities,” is provided by the Swedish “no-go” zones. Similar trends have emerged in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere in Western and Central Europe. The suicidal immigration policies of Western Europe and leftist U.S. administrations reminded me of “The Arsonists,” the widely discussed 1950s play by the Swiss author Max Frisch. In it, an otherwise decent citizen hosts arsonists in his attic, due to his naivete and misguided sense of propriety, and ends up assisting them in setting his own house on fire....

people are familiar with the common construct of “the third world.” they are also familiar with the idea of “the first world.” what’s interesting to me is the idea of how one becomes the other and the presumption of the causality and the pathways by which that occurs. it’s worth some exploration. worryingly, this is a topic on which i think most people’s intuitions and utopian hopes are hopelessly wrong to the point of being outright dangerous. in an attempt to clarify and circumvent such, i’d like to add a new construct to the list, that of “the second world”...

If there is a single moment in time in which the fate of Western civilization was decided, it is the battle of Marathon, 490 BC. The Persians under their king Darius landed in Greece, only 26 miles from Athens itself. A vastly outnumbered Greek force marched out to meet them. The Persians had already conquered huge swathes of the Middle East and South Asia. A relative handful of quarrelsome Greeks seemed unlikely to pose much of a challenge to them. But they were. When the day was done, the Persians were vanquished. The idea of Persian invincibility was destroyed forever....

Something some observers of public life in the United States and elsewhere have been wondering for a long time is whether, if you wanted to destroy American civilization, its values, traditions, and institutions, you would act differently from how George Soros has acted so far. I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s richest man, seems to agree. “In my opinion, he fundamentally hates humanity,” Musk said during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “He’s doing things that erode the fabric of civilization, getting D.A.s elected who refuse to prosecute crime. That’s...

Unwin examines the data from 86 societies and civilizations to see if there is a relationship between sexual freedom and the flourishing of cultures. What makes the book especially interesting is that we in the West underwent a sexual revolution in the late 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s and are now in a position to test the conclusions he arrived at more than 40 years earlier.

As the true scale of German war crimes committed during the 1940s eventually became known, the public response across the West was one of outrage and disbelief. That the native country of such master spirits as Immanuel Kant, Johann W. von Goethe, and Ludwig van Beethoven could also have bred the vile Nazi mob looked like a mystery. It was such a long way from the creation of philosophy, poetry, and symphonic music, respectively, to the implementation of fake-scientific, inhumane eugenics after the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler. And the distance between good and evil became infinitely long as...

All it took was a little bit of graffiti for Belgium’s third-largest city to side with hate. A group of Israeli frisbee athletes was scheduled to play in an international competition in Ghent last week when a vandal spray-painted antisemitic graffiti near the field: “Boycott Israhell Now!” Insanely, the town’s mayor and police force reacted by booting the Israeli team from the competition. ... More, the town told the coaches and team members they couldn’t even watch the game. In 2024, people in a major Western European city (a university town, no less!) are being banned from sporting events because...

George Will, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, went after House Republicans who recently voted against more aid to Ukraine in a Wednesday opinion piece in the Post. In the opinion, highlighted by Mediaite, Will said the 112 Republicans House Republicans who voted against Ukraine aid “voted last Saturday to endanger civilization,” calling them “ignoble.” “Hoping to enhance their political security in their mostly safe seats, and for the infantile satisfaction of populist naughtiness (insulting a mostly fictitious ‘establishment’), they voted to assure [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] attempt to erase a European nation,” Will wrote in his column. Opponents...

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. This is what American cities looked like a century ago. Everything you see here was demolished. Why?

Towards a Global War? Ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahuntAs missiles and drones ply the skies from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, the concern of Western diplomacies seems to be to procrastinate as much as possible a general conflagration that everyone believes is inevitable. One reason for this pessimism is the apparent lack of a way forward in the face of increasingly intractable international issues, such as those in Ukraine and the Middle East. Only an axiological view of politics could offer a glimmer of light, but today every state, every coalition, makes Carl Schmitt's categories its own, according to...

The American Medical Association today insists that medicine is characterized by white supremacy.

@trussliz My book Ten Years to Save the West is out on April 16th the UK and U.S. We must change the system and be prepared to fight for conservative values. elizabethtruss.com

The following essay is adapted from the author’s new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. It’s hard to survey the state of our country and not conclude that something is very wrong in America. I don’t just mean with our economy or the border or rampant crime in our cities, but with our basic grasp on reality itself. Our cultural and political elite now insist that men can become women, and vice versa, and that even children can consent to what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care.” In a perfect inversion of reason and...

Last week, Joe Biden issued a schoolmarmish warning to Israel, which he has been browbeating for months to placate his party’s anti-Israel left and Muslim American voters in Michigan, a critical swing state. Speaking to the press, he threatened, “There’s got to be a ceasefire because Ramadan – if we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous.”This solicitude for Muslims’ sensitivity about their faith bespeaks the West’s long bad habit of caring more about Islam––the faith that conquered and occupied, and to this day still occupies, much of the Christian Roman...

Since collapse in material technology is always preceded by collapse in the practice of social technology, Dark Ages are always preceded by Intellectual Dark Ages. Knowledge of these social technologies is highly compartmentalized and, as a result, they are not understood explicitly by all parts of society. This means that a society undergoing an Intellectual Dark Age doesn’t realize it is going through one at all—all the people who would notice are long-gone, and those who remain are miseducated, role-playing the forms left behind by their predecessors without realizing that they’ve lost the substance. Often not just the knowledge, but...

Years ago, I wrote a post about how cheap air travel to Europe was ruining America. My point was that the Americans visiting Europe were confusing what they experienced as a tourist with the reality of life in Europe. These progressive American fans of two-hour lunches and 6 months of maternal and paternal leave didn’t have a clue about how average Europeans lived. Indeed, a couple of years later, the Foundation For Economic Education came out with a study that showed the poorest 20% of Americans were better off than the average European. Basically, the average European suffers from high...