Free Republic

For those of you not familiar with Comedy Central or their flagship cartoon 'South Park,' a brief introduction. The show was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, two film students from the University of Colorado. The rampant liberalism of the film department at Colorado contributed to Parker and Stone's rejection of many of modern liberalism's pieties, and they emerged as right-of-center libertarians. 'South Park'--often crude, vulgar, and depraved, but usually funny--is their outlet for a dissatisfaction with modern political and social hypocrisy and demagoguery. Think of it as 'The Simpsons' for an even more desensitized culture--social commentary for the...

Worse than being a Christian in a Muslim country is being a Muslim who converts to Christianity. Such is the case of Abdul Rahman, a longtime Christian convert who lived in Germany for years and was arrested last month in Kabul, Afghanistan. Christians are no strangers to this, having endured persecution, including beatings, imprisonment and death in both Communst and Muslim nations, which Evangelicals have long chronicled. But, again, rejecting Islam for Christ is considered far worse. Christians worldwide have been joined by President Bush in condemning Rahman's being sentenced to death for this "crime." Of course, Americans of all...

For this magnificent and brilliant speech, delivered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the House of Commons in June 1940, the Claremont Institute has announced that it will posthumously give Mr. Churchill its prestigious Mark Steyn award. (The speech is excerpted below, click here for full text.) The British people have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can. Much of the so-called Western world will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands...

Speech to the Claremont Institute earlier this month. So far, Steyn is still being introduced...

Forgetting Pearl Harbor By Ken MasugiPosted December 7, 2005 Every few months it seems we are presented with yet another poll revealing astounding ignorance of basic American history by especially the young. The tendency is aggravated by the forces of political correctness, i.e., the liberal understanding of America, which emphasize a distortion of that history to favor a leftist contemporary political outcome. This type of knavery has always been around--we can go back to 1913 for the egregious example in Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States . This work set off a whole...

A review of Challenges to the American Founding: Slavery, Historicism, and Progressivism in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ronald J. Pestritto and Thomas G. West The essays in this volume, the second in a planned trilogy, survey the principal currents of 19th-century American political thought. The book is divided into two main parts: those ideas emanating from proslavery thinkers before the Civil War and those from progressive and positivist thinkers after the war. The slavery advocates emphasize historically conditioned social hierarchy as a central element of their romantic rejection of egalitarian political principles. The post-war intellectuals emphasize radical egalitarianism based...

Writings is the home for general works by friends of the Claremont Institute that don't fall into any other site category, such as our projects or Precepts newsletter.Derek Leebaert is a professor at Georgetown University and a consultant with the Zurich-based firm Management Assessment Partners (MAP). He is the author of The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Shapes Our World and Commandos and Conquerors: Special Operations and the Rise and Fall of Nations.Between Realism and IdealismPosted on June 23, 2005 Between Idealism and RealismPosted on June 23, 2005Tyranny And UtopiaPosted on May 31, 2005 Looking for something? Enter...

What (Most) Women Want A review of Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven E. Rhoads By Christine RosenPosted May 16, 2005This review appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Click here to send a comment.   That men and women are different is an accepted tenet of popular culture— indeed, the success of everything from reality television shows to self-help books relies on the notion that la difference is a fact that yields happy, challenging, and occasionally comic results in the course of everyday life. The acknowledgment of difference has also provided fuel for...

My friend Ken Masugi disagrees with me and Ben Boychuk not on the principles of free society and constitutional government, but on the prudent defense of those principles today. In an earlier post I had suggested that it would be good if President Bush, given his popularity and the public platform available to him, would remind his fellow citizens, those serving in Congress as well as those not, that in America we have the rule of law -- that the fundamental law, the Constitution, serves as the authority for what government may and may not do. That after all has...

Chivalry Now A review of The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man's Guide to Chivalry, by Brad Miner By Terrence O. Moore   Edmund Burke's famous pronouncement that "the age of chivalry is gone" was perhaps premature. Sure, ten thousand swords did not leap from the scabbards of the French nobility to defend Marie Antoinette, but such a betrayal did not mean that "the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise" was forgotten in Britain, or America. More than two centuries later, the spirit of chivalry has not been entirely...

During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events. Liberal bloggers forced Talon News White House correspondent James D. Guckert, a k a “Jeff Gannon,” to resign after it was revealed that he was writing under a false name for a Republican activist group (GOPUSA), that he was not really a journalist at all, and that he had posed nude on the Internet in an effort to solicit sex for money. Conservative bloggers, meanwhile, created a firestorm after Eason Jordan, the chief news executive for CNN, made controversial remarks during...

Race to the Finish Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World, by Wesley J. Smith By Travis D. Smith Wesley J. Smith excels at making complicated and controversial biotechnologies easier to understand while exposing the tricks and rationalizations that are oftentimes used to advance them. His latest book offers an inventory of the interested parties in these matters, from ethicists to ideologues and cult leaders, to scientists, celebrities, politicians, and businessmen. But the most essential and durable part of Smith's book is the author's uncompromising yet carefully considered arguments, which will hold, while various procedures, and those devoted to...

The Lesser Evil is Not Good Enough A review of The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, by Michael Ignatieff By Jeremy Rabkin Michael Ignatieff is director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and teaches courses on human rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is, in other words, a professional human rights advocate. Yet in 2002, Ignatieff broke with almost all human rights organizations when he publicly defended the Bush Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq, based on fears of what Saddam Hussein might do with weapons...

Bush's Mandate By William J. Bennett Editor's Note:This essay is adapted from a speech sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, delivered on November 15 in Washington, DC. * * * What emerged from the 2004 election was a moral consensus, and with it, something we might call a mandate. But it is not the mandate some are talking about. Let's begin with some inescapable facts. George W. Bush is the first president of either party since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 to be reelected while gaining seats in both houses of Congress. President Bush won a majority...

  What Does a Conservative Do on Martin Luther King Day?  How should conservatives celebrate Martin Luther King Day? We can honor the high-minded, patriotic side of King, who spoke of the American Dream, of a color-blind society that evaluates people on “the content of their character.” That would truly be an aristocracy of merit, a conservative idea if there ever was one. This King was the one calling us back to the ideals of the American Founding and reminding us that its legacy was not fully enjoyed by all. In this view, the Civil Rights Revolution, for which...

Democracy and the Bush Doctrine By Charles R. Kesler George W. Bush's first presidency, devoted to compassionate conservatism and to establishing his own bona fides, lasted less than eight months. On September 11, 2001, he was reborn as a War President. In the upheaval that followed, compassionate conservatism took a back seat to a new, more urgent formulation of the Bush Administration's purpose. The Bush Doctrine called for offensive operations, including preemptive war, against terrorists and their abetters—more specifically, against the regimes that had sponsored, encouraged, or merely tolerated any "terrorist group of global reach." Afghanistan, the headquarters of...

The Chief Justice and the Constitution By Charles R. Kesler We wish Chief Justice William Rehnquist well in his fight against thyroid cancer, and hope that he will be able to return to the bench soon. Even the New York Times seems to have caught the spirit, editorializing not long ago in support of Rehnquist's "proud record of defending the independence of the federal judiciary against intrusive attacks by politicians." Conservative politicians, that is. The occasion was the Chief Justice's nineteenth—"and potentially final," the Times noted cheerily—annual report on the federal judiciary. In it, he showed "appropriate concern" over...

Schwarzenegger on the State of the State By Ken Masugi Television allowed us to visualize the fight against "special interests" Governor Schwarzenegger is spoiling for. The tedious build-up he was given at his State of the State speech Wednesday night said almost all. (Sacbee audio here, under the story on the speech.) The silly Assembly Speaker Nunez, the investigated Secretary of State Shelley, the investigated President Pro Tem of the Senate Perata, the boorish, ponderous Lt. Gov. Bustamante (whom the Governor sarcastically congratulated for "his wonderful speech" introducing him), all those officials down to members of the State Board...

Killing Them With Kindness By William Voegeli Conservatives have a new reason to voice the four loveliest words in the English language: I told you so. A Stanford Law Review article by Prof. Richard Sander of UCLA concludes, "Blacks are the victims of law school programs of affirmative action, not the beneficiaries." According to Stuart Taylor, Jr.'s summary of Sander's research, preferences do such a thorough job of placing black students in law schools where they are unlikely to succeed, that abolishing affirmative action in admissions would decrease the number of blacks admitted to law schools—but increase the number...

  Democracy in Washington State, San Diego, and the Ukraine  Reading accounts of the Washington election for governor in the national papers makes the Republican request for a recount sound like loser's sour grapes. But there is a deeper issue that makes the episode surprass San Diego, even if doesn't near Ukrainean proportions. The conservative Republican challenger ran narrowly ahead of long-time Democratic pol, Attorney General Christine Gregoire, in the original election (261 votes) and then the first recount (42 votes). But, the second recount, by hand, put her ahead (by 129 votes), with her margin of victory increased...