Free Republic

Hello from the third National Conservatism conference, meeting in Miami. Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed the conference on the first night, and blew everyone away. It helped that he followed a dull but half-hysterical rant by Sen. Rick Scott, who fired a barrage of Republican cliches at the audience (watch it here). A conservative writer friend sitting across the room texted me during the speech to joke that this thing was so bad it's causing him to rethink all his convictions.

CHICAGO, February 18, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – As more and more observers arrive at the conclusion that Empire actor Jussie Smollett likely staged an assault against himself to blame on bigoted Trump supporters, Facebook temporarily blocked a post by The Benedict Option author Rod Dreher labeling the incident a “hate hoax.” The 36-year-old, openly-homosexual actor says he was assaulted in Chicago on January 29, with two masked men allegedly shouting racial and homophobic epithets, beating him to the point of fracturing a rib, putting a rope around his neck, and pouring bleach on him. “This is MAGA country,” they allegedly...

Two conservative ex-Catholics have recently been in the news sharing their reasons for leaving. One was Michael Coren. Apparently, the Canadian broadcaster and author of Why Catholics Are Right stopped attending Mass a year ago —but only publicly mentioned his switch to Anglicanism for the first time last month. He told the National Post on May 2 that he left over the Church’s prohibition of gay sex. “I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful....

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about sexual and romantic desire in young adults (birth cohort ~1995-2002, referred to from now on as Zoomers), as Rod Dreher’s article on bisexuality among young women https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/no-families-no-children-no-future-lgbt-30-percent-carle-c-zimmerman/

The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers. For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters.

The work begins with history. History as subtext should be noted. Not only is this about the history of totalitarianism, notably Marxist and Maoist communism, but it is also about remembering national history, about dismissing those myths which detract from our history, dismissing the myths that today’s neo-totalitarians present as fact, and replacing myth with honest history, with strong relationships, with strong teach, with strong commitments to truth, and more. This is not simply a Roman Catholic treatise, though that bell rings loudly, it is honest enough to cover Baptist and other protestant responses to the problem. Richard Wurmbrand, Alexander...

It’s a lie. Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process. I get sick and tired of people on the Left who refuse to believe things that contradict what they prefer to believe, but it is no better when people on the Right do it. It is as plain as day what happens when a people accept as true statements they have every reason to know are lies, and accept them because it suits their political preferences. The corruption of the truth is far worse than ordinary corruption, like stealing money. It makes it impossible to know what...

I hate long drives, but the one redeeming aspect of them is that I get to do something I never do otherwise: listen to audiobooks. Driving to and from Dallas is a 16-hours-plus trip from Baton Rouge. I made it with my wife and kids this past weekend, for a wedding. On my son Matt’s recommendation, I listened to historian Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade The World. Before I say anything about the book, I want to recommend a cool piece of technology. It’s illegal to drive with standard earbuds in, so Matt let me borrow...

In the UK, the National Health Service has thrown out a doctor: A doctor has been “sacked” as a medical assessor for a government department after refusing to renounce his Christian belief that gender is determined at birth, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal. Dr David Mackereth has worked for 26 years as an NHS doctor but was told he could not be employed as a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) disability assessor if he refused to identify patients as being of a sex that they did not see themselves as. The 55-year-old father of four believes sex is genetic...

... The thing that just slays me about liberals like this is that they have no clue whatsoever that this kind of discrimination is immoral and offensive. This stuff is not new. I was told in 1997 by a newspaper that initially welcomed my job application that my CV was put in limbo because the publisher decided that he didn’t want a white male in that job, unless they couldn’t find anybody as qualified as me. After a national job search that lasted several months, their search was fruitless, and they said they would now like to bring me in...

A lot of people don't want to hear it, but it's true: in the future, you will either be a religious conservative, or secular. The religious left will evaporate. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of Daniel Cox, the head of research at PRRI, a firm whose religious views tend towards progressivism. Excerpts: The first and perhaps most significant reason for skepticism is that there are far fewer religious liberals today than there were a generation ago. Nearly four in 10 (38 percent) liberals are religiously unaffiliated today, more than double the percentage of the 1990s, according...

Christian families and communities that don’t embrace some form of the Benedict Option aren’t going to make it through this time of testing Veteran journalist Rod Dreher has just produced a potent study of what ails America—and is proposing that the best solution may be (as his new book is titled) “The Benedict Option.” As the book’s promotional materials describe it: Now is a time of testing, when believers will learn the difference between shallow optimism and Christian hope. However dark the shadow falling over the West, the light of Christianity need not flicker out. It will not be...

The poet T.S. Eliot predicted that, after the disintegration of Western society, civilization would be conserved and restored by a new monastic movement. He was referring to the events at the end of the fifth century, when Benedict of Nursia abandoned the decaying Roman Empire and established small communities of men and women dedicated to prayer, work and study. In Benedict’s day, the once-great Roman Empire had collapsed into chaos. Through economic disaster, famine, plague, moral decadence and political corruption, the society was enervated and vulnerable. Barbarians invaded from the north and east, sensing lucrative spoils to be had. In...

Gay-rights activists have won the culture war—why the need to act like sore winners?Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson’s victory over the A&E network, which sheepishly reinstated him late Friday, is a rare culture war victory for conservatives. Though Robertson’s controversial remarks to GQ magazine were fairly cringeworthy, it is exhilarating to see the zero-tolerance liberal commissars who police the public square with such Javert-like zeal get their, er, goose cooked by their worst nightmare: a rural, Southern, fundamentalist Christian duck hunter who does not give a tinker’s damn what they think. Bien-pensant activists and their corporate and media enablers lecture...

"...American conservative Catholics who defend Pope Francis keep saying that Francis is truly orthodox, despite the fact that the liberal US media love him. Maybe they’re right. But the further we go into this pontificate, the more I wonder if liberals understand something about Pope Francis that conservatives do not."

If you ask me, nothing says Merry Christmas quite like a stage comedy about Santa Claus' gay relationship with toymaker Geppetto, a descendant of Pinocchio. Alas for Santa Claus Is Coming Out, now showing to Off Broadway audiences, a play about a gay Santa tormented by his clandestine same-sex canoodling is bound to have limited appeal. But the ho-ho-homosexual comedy has been embraced by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national gay organization dedicated to fighting anti-gay bullying in schools.

You can say this for Glenn Beck: He's charismatic, he was right on ACORN and Van Jones, and he's correct to point out that the government in Washington doesn't work for the common good. The affable Beck articulates the legitimate anger and frustration millions of Americans feel when faced by the fact that the country is in a hot mess of trouble. But here's the thing: Beck is a white Jeremiah Wright, a crazy-pants conspiracy theorist whose worldview is rooted in the paranoid teachings of a far-right Mormon political guru named W. Cleon Skousen. Before signing up as a recruit...

How on earth did this crackpot get a national TV show? Watch this amazing eight-minute monologue in which Glenn Beck interprets public art, and ties together the Rockefellers, communism, fascism, corporatism, the United Nations and the Obama White House together in a grand conspiracy. If this were in a movie, you wouldn't believe it. But this is on national TV, on Fox News, every weeknight: < video > Where's Beck getting this garbage? Listen to this 1976 speech by Beck guru W. Cleon Skousen, in which he cites Mormon prophecy to bolster his rant against the Rockefellers, the communists, and...

This past Thursday, Mark Levin talked about the speeches of Obama and Cheney and then took a call from a lib, Cindy in Westchester. That call has backbencher Rod Dreher in a tither. First, here is Mark unedited, in full context: Rod's friend Connor was miffed so Rod, being the world's foremost authority on Mark Levin, penned a post entitled 'The disgusting Mark Levin' within which he wrote, "Good grief. Having spent about 15 unpleasant minutes [emphasis added mine] listening to this creep, I cannot imagine why anybody pays attention to him." Then Rod's other buddy, another bastion of the...

I completely agree with Andrew Sullivan that hate crimes are a left-wing, thought-policing scam. Here's Andrew: "The real reason for hate crime laws is not the defense of human beings from crime. There are already laws against that - and Matthew Shepard's murderers were successfully prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in a state with no hate crimes law at the time. The real reason for the invention of hate crimes was a hard-left critique of conventional liberal justice and the emergence of special interest groups which need boutique legislation to raise funds for their large staffs and...