Free Republic

When he embarked on his journey to discover a path to India Christopher Columbus’ lead ship was the Santa Maria. Built in 1460 it measured 62 ft with a crew of just 40, the Santa Maria would take Columbus to the New World and would change the course of human history. Half a century earlier there was another man who sailed ships who didn’t change the course of human history. His name was Zheng He and he commanded the Chinese navy during the early 15th century. His Treasure Ships were not only larger than the Santa Maria, they were more...

A descent into barbarism is easy and fast; you only need to let yourself go. The animal part of all of us is just below the surface and constantly has to be controlled, or it will bubble to the top, and we will sink into savagery. Rising into civilization is difficult and slow because the masses must know the difference between right and wrong, constantly be sober and vigilant about it, urged by universally acknowledged societal mores and virtues to pursue the excellent and reject the decadent, and, above all, individually conquer themselves, something few people are ever capable of...

I have been writing a lot on Israel, and thought I should write about another one of my lifelong interests: Spain Spain is undergoing its greatest crisis since the death of Franco, and the struggle began to develop a parliamentary system of governance. We see the reemergence of themes from Spain's complex and endlessly fascinating past. While in theory, and mostly practice, Spain has been a unified kingdom/state for some 500 years, under the surface separatist forces continue to work. Very quickly, and others can fill in more details. This, after all, is just a humble vanity blog. In October...

The world is heading quite rapidly toward tyranny. We are in a revolutionary period that will dramatically change civilization. Few people understand the gravity of our situation. Here are some of the reasons why the majority of people seem oblivious to the danger. These psychological shortcomings explain why we are sleepwalking into tyranny. The Normalcy Bias “is a cognitive bias that occurs in times of crisis, leading us to disregard any signs or warnings that we are in danger. Normalcy bias is a defense mechanism that lulls us into thinking life will just continue as it always has.” The evidence...

If you aren't familiar with Douglas Murray, you will be soon. In the wake of the Hamas invasion of Israel which has now led to a prolonged conflict in Gaza, the author and journalist has emerged as a rare voice of clarity. Specifically, Murray has not held back in critiquing the threats to Western civilization that have become entrenched over the years, and while his domain is primarily Europe and the United Kingdom, his warnings extend to the United States. As RedState reported, recent violent protests in New York City resembled something you'd see in a third-world Middle Eastern country,...

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war... In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title. The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it...

Declinism is in fashion again. As relations between America and China worsen, studying the ends of earlier ages of hegemony becomes more popular. Books predicting the unstoppable rise of autocratic strongmen and the death of democracy proliferate. There is much talk of the “Thucydides trap” the inevitability of a clash between a rising power and an established one, as Athens challenged Sparta in the fifth century bc. This provocative short book adapts this approach with a novel twist. It draws a comparison between the West in 1999, the zenith of its confidence, and Rome exactly 1,600 years earlier, in 399—just...

The West has been flooded with barbarians, who are no longer at the gates but well inside them. But the threat of the barbarians from without is minuscule compared to the reality that barbarism itself has become perfectly normal within our society, and barbaric practices have been adopted by many Americans. The chances that a graduate from a prestigious college in America will embrace barbarism are likely higher than your average illegal alien, at least from a few years ago. Most illegal aliens come here to live the American Dream, and prior to Biden’s open door/let’s hand you a check...

Since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October, there’s been a storm of commentary on how unhinged campus culture in the West has become. Politicians and writers are bewildered that at universities where it’s a ‘microaggression’ to ask someone where they are from, and where you can be subjected to a Salem-like grilling for wearing an offensive Halloween costume, actual genocidal violence doesn’t seem to bother people. The same fresh-faced Maoists who will weep and stomp their feet if you say ‘women don’t have penises’ have collectively shrugged their shoulders over the mass murder of Jewish women and children. Some have...

You may have noticed that the enemies of the West no longer need to hide their animosity or their purpose. In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of "Critical Theory"? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary "arc of history"? The sunny uplands of "fairness," "equality," and even "equity"? None of those things, I replied. What...

All the parts to generate electricity, and all the components needed to use electricity, are all made from the oil derivatives manufactured from raw crude oil. Over the last 200 years, after the discovery of crude oil, the world populated from 1 to 8 billion. Today, all the electricity generation options available, such as wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear, hydro, coal, and natural gas, are all dependent on the products and components manufactured from crude oil to be able to generate electricity. Looking back, the history of the petroleum industry illustrated that crude oil was virtually useless, unless it could...

Last week, an 8-foot-tall, golden statue was unveiled atop a New York state courthouse in New York City. It stands alongside several other, older statues of classical design.According to the artist, Shahzia Sikander, the statue is meant to be a representation of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her support of abortion rights.This is a statue of a demon. Not only that, it’s OBVIOUSLY a demon, horns and all. It’s like something terrifying from an archeological dig of a civilization that practiced human sacrifice. It is designed to unsettle & spread ugliness. It’s on top of...

If you’re a left-wing radical advocating to defund the police, eliminate bail, and turn this country into an even bigger crime-riddled cesspool, beware, because Karma and the Grim Reaper are both on your tail. Literally. Under Joe Biden’s failed leadership, the United States is in a state of chaos. Many people compare what’s happening in the U.S., with our soaring crime, widespread perversion, border invasion, and North Korea-esque government, to the “end times” described in the Bible (complete with the “sign of the beast”) or even the fall of the Roman Empire. And speaking of the fall of great empires,...

The end of high-trust societyRioting and mass looting broke out across Philadelphia last week after murder charges were dismissed in the case of a white police officer who shot an armed Hispanic suspect during a routine traffic stop. The incident was ruled as a justified shooting after bodycam footage showed Eddie Irizarry producing a weapon and pointing it at officers during the stop. The weapon turned out to be a knife, not a gun.A swarm of criminals used the dismissal as a pretext to smash and loot Apple, Foot Locker, and Lululemon stores along with many other businesses during the...

They Are That Evil We have plenty of treason. It isn’t hidden. It isn’t even debated. The fact of it is recognized, but what is lacking is a will to engage that treason with consequences. Who would do it? The average person on the street sees it, recognizes it as such, but they are and have been indoctrinated in the rule of law, so they expect that out of the hundreds of thousands employed in law enforcement that the law would be enforced. Why does that seem so irrational? No one with a brain and the ability to do math...

Anthropologists from the largest associations of anthropologists in the world canceled an event discussing the importance of biological sex in the context of studying the human skeleton while citing "transphobia" as the reason for the panel being cut. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) and The Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) were skewered for walking back their approval for a panel event at its 2023 conference discussing biological sex. The AAA and CASCA said that it was now tightening its review process to ensure such an event wouldn't recur in the future. The event in question discussed "Sex identification whether an individual...

Attorneys general from 10 states, including New York, plan to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, saying its failure to review and ensure emissions standards for residential wood-burning stoves has allowed the continued sale of appliances that could worsen pollution. That means programs that encourage people to trade in older stoves and other wood-burning appliances, such as forced-air furnaces, haven’t necessarily improved air quality, the states say. “If newer wood heaters do not meet cleaner standards, then programs to change out old wood heaters may provide little health benefits at significant public cost,” the states wrote Thursday in a 60-day...

It is essential to understand the nature of those actively dismantling our nation the next time they emerge. A coda to Kyle Rittenhouse’s ordeal recently occurred: conviction of one of his aggressors, armed rioter (now armed robber/kidnapper) Joshua Ziminski, on unrelated felony charges. Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and NYC subway Samaritans Daniel Penny and Jordan Williams are frontline warriors battling to preserve civilization. Rittenhouse's legal ordeal continues. He faces litigation from Gaige Grosskreutz (wounded after pointing a gun at Rittenhouse) and a wrongful death action from Anthony Huber’s estate, shot by Rittenhouse after Huber bashed him with a skateboard. Grosskreutz's complaint,...

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...

Whatever you had planned to do for the rest of the day, please drop it and read this right now: Heather Mac Donald's new book, "When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives." It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd's death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization -- law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine -- to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to...