Free Republic

This past week, Texas State Historical Association chief historian Walter Buenger made two controversial assertions regarding the Alamo in a story published by USA Today. Although the battle has become a symbol of patriotism and freedom for many Texans and Americans, like the Confederate monuments erected after the Civil War, the myth of the Alamo has been used to “commemorate whiteness,” according to Walter L Buenger, Texas State Historical Association chair. The battle itself was relatively insignificant tactically speaking, but it gained recognition decades later in the 1890s as backlash to African Americans gaining more political power and Mexican immigration...

The biggest impediment to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, dream of a society in which color is not considered important is the continued used of the extremely racist term "African-American". The term implies the descendants of slaves are a separate race whose members belong in Africa rather than the United States even though many have ancestors who were living in North America long before the American Revolution. The term "African American" arbitrarily segregates people by skin color. The term treats people with dark complexions as if they only had African ancestors even if more of their ancestors came from somewhere...

My money is on Q13 Fox being just plain stupid but the error (!?!) on their website is fascinating to say the least. Frankly, I can understand why they made it! After you force yourself to toddle from Q13's site over to Joe Biden's website (gag! retch!) to check the "Official" schedule for this week's events, you'll find it's about as clear as mud. (see slideshow) It very clearly states that "I Do Solemnly Swear: The U. S. Presidential Inauguration" is scheduled for high noon on Tuesday, January 19th. That seems pretty clear, doesn't it? High Noon. Inauguration. What's one...

On this date in 1676, Puritan colonist Joshua Tefft (or Tifft, or Tift) became perhaps the only person ever to suffer the traitor’s death of hanging and quartering in what is now the United States. The 30-ish Rhode Island farmer got sucked into King Philip’s War and was captured by colonists apparently fighting for the Narragansett Indians during a the Great Swamp Fight. Lacking a first-person account from Mr. Tefft, we are left to descry (or project) his purpose. Tefft himself claimed that he had been enslaved by the Indians, but he made this claim in the context of trying...

In The Hedgehog Review, Christine Rosen writes about technosolutionism. If the pandemic has made evident the precarious nature of the global economy (it could briefly be brought to a standstill by a single “bug”), it also showed how advanced our technology had become. We immediately found ourselves on Zoom, or other conferencing platforms, doing business, teaching class, or chatting with family and friends we were otherwise used to seeing regularly. The pandemic hit less than a year ago, and we already have not one but several vaccines. It is astounding. Yet, there are dangers, Rosen argues:

During the 1950s Sweden may have maintained a policy of neutrality, yet it still sought to develop a rather well-stocked arsenal of domestically-produced military hardware. From 1952-57 the Scandinavian nation even conducted a feasibility study to develop a delta-wing supersonic bomber that would have a nuclear strike capability.

ill Trumpism survive President Donald Trump? For many observers, the answer is obvious: no. Trumpism is about Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump, and it has no substance beyond that. It is a rhetoric and an affect, in service to him, and that’s on its best days. On most others, it is a gibbering cult and series of baroque conspiracy theories. Trumpism is just is a giant sucking sound around the black hole of the man’s own vanity. It will eventually disappear, as he has, up his own backside.

There are millions of Republican voters who carried in the past five years their own version of the Ross Douthat versus “Ross Douthat's Right-Wing id” debate: Trump is a charlatan, potentially dangerous, unsuited for the presidency versus Trump has actually gotten a lot of good things done on immigration, working class wages, not starting stupid wars. Moreover, those on this side argue Trump has a great natural political touch which no one in a generation can match. That debate came to an unfortunate and unambiguous conclusion in the last month, with Trump failing to recognize that his legal attempts to...

"Logic! Why don't they teach logic at these schools!?!" That's always been my favorite quote from C. S. Lewis' book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Since Election Day, the need for Logic has been foisted upon us. The world as we knew it had its mask ripped off and with it the scales fell from our eyes. Now we're on a crash course to shed our MSM brainwashing, learn to think logically and help the sleepers awake and cope in the coming days as they're thrown by the scruff of the neck into the deep end of the...

Lou Dobbs discusses the Document declassification. Jan 15, 2021.Hillary's server, the DOJ and FBI response, the FISA abuse into Trump, Flynn's prosecution, are discussed.

If you know one thing about Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, chances are it’s the phrase “military-industrial complex.” But the military-industrial complex was only part of his warning. Indeed, he saw that the massive military establishment and armaments industry were the results of a larger “technological revolution” that was still unfolding. Even if we were to radically cut defense spending, or somehow reconvert our permanent armaments industry to the production of ploughshares—which would themselves be hamfisted ways of correcting our policies—we would miss the root causes of these dysfunctions. Now, sixty years later, is as good a time as any to revisit...

Movies, TV shows and notably video games have convinced the masses that every soldier fighting in the Second World War was equipped with a submachine gun – but in fact, most soldiers carried a rifle. And in many cases, the rifles were little improved from those used a generation earlier in the First World War. Below you will find my list of the most well known and used battle rifles of World War II. Some were loved, some were hated–but all were feared, for one reason or another.

One hundred years from now, a fair-minded assessment of Trump’s presidency will recognize his abundant domestic and international accomplishments. Liberals unborn may be appalled. Conservatives unconceived may applaud. But both should agree that Trump was a consequential president whose sleeplessness achieved significant things, often while astonishing foes and friends alike.

One person’s “murdered under controversial circumstances” is another person’s “executed.” By most unbiased accounts, Patrice Lumumba was both. A strident anti-colonialist caught in the most inflammatory of Cold War power struggles, Lumumba remains a controversial figure. In 1956, Patrice Lumumba was a mail clerk in Belgian Congo recently out of prison for embezzlement of post office funds. Though previously involved with the Liberal Party of Belgium, a colonialist political party, after prison, he helped found the Mouvement National Congolais, a pro-independence national party (an important distinction at the time, as most pro-independence parties were at least partially tribal in nature)....

One of the more unsettling comments from influential lawmakers came on Wednesday with little fanfare despite being downright Orwellian in its perspective around "media literacy" and a congressional "truth and reconciliation" committee. "There’s absolutely a commission that’s being discussed, but it seems to be more investigating in style rather than truth and reconciliation,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in an Instagram video post Wednesday. In a related story, Orwell's "1984" had a government propaganda department called "The Ministry of Truth."

The economists found that this led to a 9% reduction in low-wage jobs. The pay increase it generated didn’t make up for the reduction in employment, and earnings fell for low-wage workers overall.

President Donald Trump has been attempting to prevent the type of violence that occurred on January 6. He didn't incite the violence that occurred on January 6 because the rioters entered . the Capitol before Trump finished his speech. Congress provoked the violence by ignoring the concerns of protesters who believed eyewitness accounts of suspicious activity by election workers meant Joe Biden stole the election . I doubt that any eyewitness would claim a machine could switch vote totals between candidates without seeing someone demonstrate this feature. If Donald Trump's voters behaved like Banana Republic voters they would have been...

All of Capitol Hill will flip blue in the next week, so it’s important to consider whether President-elect Joe Biden will attempt a second term in the commander-in-chief spot—potentially igniting a familiar political battle between Trump and Biden.

Despite the fact that satellites and drones can provide an eagle-eyed view to remote regions of the world for the United States military and intelligence community (IC), an aircraft design older than its pilots continue to serve a crucial role in intelligence gathering. It is the sixty-year-old Lockheed U-2. Initially projected to have an operational life of just two years, this aircraft has been flying high for more than six decades and has been present in every American conflict since.

One of the first memories I have of news and people discussing news is of my parents trying to figure out whether the president was dead. This is because in Portugal in the early sixties, the news of course couldn’t publish anything that the regime disapproved of. When they announced Salazar was dead, and who his successor was, mom’s answer was “he’s been dead for x months” (aka since he’d disappeared form in public/or they’d noticed a shift in governance) “they just finished the behind the scenes power struggle and can announce it now.” Also much was made of the...