Free Republic

The presidential contest is not simply an election about who rules America; it is also an election about which set of principles defines American politics. For the past two and a half decades, conservatism has set the agenda. Is the left making a comeback? I don't think so. Notice that Democrats avoid terms like "the left" and even "liberalism" like the plague, while Republicans routinely associate themselves with the "right" and the "conservative" label. Also the left is now defined by shrieking demagogues like Michael Moore, while intelligent people are keeping their distance or moving out of this menagerie. In...

So isn't it interesting that we keep hearing about Sarah Palin's peccadilloes while the major media continues to ignore the George Obama scandal? Here is a guy living in Third World poverty and his half-brother is the leading candidate to become the next president of the United States. Are the networks and major newspapers so exhilarated at the prospect of an African American president that they have become cheerleaders for the Obama campaign? Fortunately the McCain campaign is making the media an issue, and I hope the American people are smart enough to see through the news charade. Here are...

Feedback archive → Feedback 2008 Christopher Hitchens—blind to salamander reality A well-known atheist’s ‘eureka moment’ shows the desperation of evolutionists In a recent article in the leftist online magazine Slate, prominent atheistic journalist Christopher Hitchens (b. 1949) thinks he has found the knock-down argument against creationists and intelligent design supporters. Fellow misotheist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) and another anti-theist Sir David Attenborough (b. 1926) agree. Not surprisingly, there have been questions to us about this, so Dr Jonathan Sarfati responds. As will be seen, their whole argument displays ‘breathtaking inanity’ and ignorance of what creationists really teach, and desperation if...

Peter Singer is a calm, lucid and able debater, and our debate at Biola University in Los Angeles on April 25 was lively and hard-fought. Not for nothing is Singer considered a world-class philosopher and advocate. To watch the debate go to dineshdsouza.com and click on my AOL blog. Singer praised me for not simply making assertions of faith or hurling Bible passages at him but rather for using reason and argument to make my case . And I complimented Singer for stepping, so to speak, into the lion's den. (Biola actually stands for Bible Institute of Los Angeles.) Unlike...

Ten Truths About The Election By Dinesh D'Souza Monday, March 31, 2008 1. Obama's connection with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright makes him unelectable in the general election, even though neither he nor most of the pundits seem to have recognized this yet. Obama continues to campaign as if he is still viable. The mainstream media continues to cover him as if he was still viable. In reality, Obama’s candidacy is seriously imperilled, and Hillary Clinton—yes Hillary Clinton!—is the strongest Democratic candidate left in the race. 2. John McCain is the strongest candidate the Republicans could have nominated. This is not...

I watched the movie "The Great Debaters" last night, and it helped me to understand why atheists are such bad debaters. The movie portrays four students from a little black college in Texas, and shows how, under the tutelage of their pugnacious coach, they went on to defeat Almighty Harvard. Denzel Washington, who plays the coach, says early in the movie that debate is a kind of bloodsport. It's great virtue is that it puts rival ideas up against each other, as argued by people who passionately espouse those ideas, and then it lets the truth emerge through a kind...

Commenting on Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, I recently commented that there are three groups that oppose democracy in the Muslim world: the secular dictators like Musharaff, the Islamic radicals of the Bin Laden stripe, and the cultural left here in America. In response, several people expressed indignation. One challenged me to provide a single example of a leftist who opposed Muslim democracy. Other liberals noted that they favored the idea of democracy but alas it wasn't succeeding in Iraq. Certainly it does seem odd that a left which is always calling for "more democracy" in America would resist democracy in Muslim...

Embarrassed at the murderous legacy of atheist Communist regimes in the twentieth century, leading atheists seek to even the score with believers by portraying Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime as theist and specifically Christian. Atheist websites routinely claim that Hitler was a Christian because he was born Catholic, he never publicly renounced his Catholicism, and he wrote in Mein Kampf, “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Atheist writer Sam Harris writes that since “the Holocaust marked the culmination of…two hundred years of Christian fulminating against the Jews,” therefore “knowingly or...

Imagine if one of the world's leading Christians--say C.S. Lewis a generation ago, or Billy Graham now--were to reject his religious beliefs and become a atheist. It would be big news! The New York Times would be all over it, for sure, and the question would be why a man who has devoted his life to God would now turn against Him? In sum, the focus would be on what were the reasons for the conversion and on what's so bad about Christianity. Contrast this with the New York Times' approach to the conversion of philosopher Anthony Flew. Flew has...

What's So Great About Christianity?   By Dr. Paul KengorFrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, October 31, 2007 Dr. Paul Kengor: Dinesh, I can’t help but begin by tossing you a big softball: I’m impressed by the endorsements for your new book. This is quite an eclectic bunch: Francis Collins of the Human Genome Institute, academic Stanley Fish, the Rev. Robert Schuller, Oxford’s Daniel Robinson, historian Paul Johnson and even Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine. Clearly, you’ve done something right. The title of this book, What’s So Great About Christianity, is a natural follow-up to your earlier work, What’s So...

Chicago "homer" refs are hosing the Dallas Cowboys... Updated: 9:49 PM 09/23/07 FOX 5 in NYC, Me, 7:05am...MONDAY Updated: 8:46 PM 09/23/07 BIG THANKS to PunditReview and Dean Barnett... Updated: 8:34 PM 09/23/07 <a href="http://ads.townhall.com/accipiter/adclick/CID=000127050000000000000000/site=TOWNHALL/area=TownHall.Web.Columnists.DineshDSouza/POSITION=TOWN_SKY/AAMGEOIP=68.112.78.1"> <img src="http://media.townhall.com/townhall/townhall-logo.gif" alt="" width="160" height="600" border="0"> </a> Ahmadinejad is in, ROTC is out By Dinesh D'Souza Monday, September 24, 2007 President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University is a very open-minded guy, in his own opinion. In inviting the Iranian prime minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia, he issued this statement. "Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas...Necessarily...

BC: It’s not hyperbole to say that your latest release, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, brought about a firestorm of contention. You were criticized by both leftists and conservatives. For what reason did the book outrage so many people? Dinesh D'Souza: Well, it’s not surprising that the book provoked hysteria from the left. The position I take is not one previously espoused by the right concerning the left’s role in 9/11. The common view that conservatives have is that liberals are naive or simply don’t understand terrorist motivations, but none of my peers...

Let the deportations begin! I've never understood all the nonsense about how we should be sympathetic toward illegals who came here to work and find a better life. We don't extend such sympathy to other people who routinely break the law. We aren't sympathetic, for instance, toward people who break into banks or hold up grocery stores in order to support their families and get a fresh start in life. We don't get teary-eyed about folks who engage in insider trading or bribery in order to send their kids to college and enjoy the American dream. We feel sorry for...

According to the Hoover Institution's Dinesh D'Souza in his new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, the Western radical left has so repelled Muslims with its secularity, impiety and license that it, rather than gruesome Islamist imperial ambition, is a primary cause of Muslim rage and terror against America. The left ought to be indignant, but a peculiar aspect of this controversy, little remarked upon, is that D'Souza's liberal critics, for reasons best known to themselves, are missing in action. True, Alan Wolfe wrote a review for the New York Times , but...

Anti-Americanism comes in different varieties. Speak to Europeans who dislike the United States, and they point to what they see as the evils of conservative America: a shoot-first, ask-questions-later cowboy in the White House, Bible-toting fundamentalists walking around the corridors of power. Speak to Muslims who are hostile to America, however, and the typical complaint is very different. Many Muslims point to what they view as the horrors of liberal America: homosexual marriage, family breakdown, and a popular culture that is trivial, materialistic, vulgar, and in many cases morally repulsive. So while many secular Europeans abhor "red America," many religious...

The movie "300" - based on a "graphic novel" (read comic book), itself loosely based on the battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) - has drawn the usual thoughtful and nuanced response from the turbaned thugs who run Iran. The last stand of King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans denigrates the glorious Persian antecedents of present day Iran, charges Javad Shangari, art advisor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Art advisor" to a terrorist state - now there's a non sequitur. Does he critique artists who work in body parts? "Hollywood declares war on Iranians" blared the headline in a Tehran daily....

March 16, 2007, 5:00 a.m. The Mind of Mr. D’SouzaNonsense. By Victor Davis Hanson Dinesh D’Souza now weighs in against his numerous conservative critics in a series entitled “The Closing of the Conservative Mind.” The result is again suicidal, for his latest apology only confirms the nonsensical arguments found in The Enemy at Home. 1. D’Souza writes: “One might expect the Right to be open to a candid evaluation of what’s going wrong and how it might be fixed.” In fact, that is what the surge, the appointment of Gen. Petraeus, and changes at the Pentagon are all about....

Ann Coulter shocked nobody last week by calling presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" during her appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Here's the YouTube video, as well as the quotation captured by the Associated Press: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I—so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards." It's true that the Democratic Party leaders displayed outrage. The Edwards campaign e-mailed the Coulter news to its supporters, calling...

Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, is not all bad. He is absolutely right that Osama bin Laden’s perception that Bill Clinton was weak in the 1990s led to the stepping-up of global jihad efforts. But the central point of the book is that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11,” not only by fostering a view that America was weak, but by spreading around the world “a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world that are being...

One of the responses to Dinesh D’Souza’s recent works (see note below) is from an unknown Muslim woman who helps us understand some of the underlying causes of Muslim unhappiness with the spread of western culture. Since Muslim terrorism is a world-wide phenomenon, existing in places like Darfur and Indonesia, as an explanation, there is obviously much more to it than the elevation of women’s rights, but it raises an interesting question: where are the womens’ rights groups? Why do they and other left-wing organizations turn a deaf ear to human rights abuses by Islamists? Why do they support the...