Free Republic

I n the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and other people of color, America continues to undergo a reckoning with our nation’s original sin: racism and white supremacy. Recent events have laid bare the brutal truth that systemic inequalities and state-sanctioned violence have continued to oppress people of color in our country. In the midst of this national conversation, the history of the United States Army has come front and center, largely because of the Army’s experience in the American Civil War. By May 1861, sixty-five of eighty-six southern West Point cadets had followed their seceded home states...

The following is the English-language version of “The Importance of Being Candid,” a speech delivered by Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger in Mandarin Chinese from the White House during a video conference hosted by Policy Exchange in London. Click here for Mandarin version. I’d like to thank Dean Godson and Policy Exchange for inviting me to deliver the ninth annual Colin Cramphorn lecture. We all look forward to a time when we can gather again in person for events like this. With new vaccines and therapeutics on the near horizon, I’m optimistic that day will soon arrive. In the...

The great Maya city of Tikal transported zeolites for water filtration thousands of years before other cultures learned or adopted the idea, archaeologists have found. The filtration was probably much better than anything known to the Europeans who conquered the area 1,500 years later. The Corriental reservoir was one of Tikal’s sources of drinking water. Dr Kenneth Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati found crystalline quartz and zeolite when digging at the reservoir. Neither are local to the area and would have had to be brought a long way by the standards of a people who had no beasts of...

This month marks 143 years since Chief Joseph, leader of the Pacific Northwest Indian tribe the Nez Percé, surrendered to a U.S. Army detachment in northern Montana. There the warrior famously declared, “From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”Others, however, are still eager to keep up the fight in the name of indigenous people. Demonstrators affiliated with the Miwok Tribe in San Rafael, California, on Oct. 13 vandalized and tore down yet another statue of Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra. Other ersatz torch-bearers of the cause include those municipalities, such as Baltimore and the District...

<p>DOVER, Del. (AP) — Two women are facing hate crime charges after confronting a 7-year-old boy and his mother outside the Democratic National Convention in Delaware over their support of President Donald Trump and seizing a “Make America Great Again” hat.</p>

Clive James's 2007 book titled Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts is a collection of artists and thinkers. They are largely concerned with responses to "threats against freedom, mostly in the 20th century." As I leaf through it, I am astonished at the echoes of my own qualms as this country stands on the precipice of either remaining free or not. I see Democrats and leftists invoking Nazism to describe conservatives in America, and I am reminded of Jean-François Revel's words that "one insults the memory of the victims of Nazism if one uses them to bury...

1984 has arrived, albeit a few decades later than Orwell suspected. Honesty is no longer a cardinal virtue, truth is shunned and covered up…not sought out and celebrated. Our history is, too. Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, “the Squad,” Adam Schiff, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden -- and their aiders and abettors in the mainstream media -- refuse to acknowledge obvious truths, while demanding that the rest of us proclaim obvious falsehoods to be obvious truths. It is jarring, insane. Democrats tried to impeach President Trump over a “quid pro quo” they claim he issued via a phone call to...

A French teacher who had recently shown students cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed was beheaded outside his school on Friday, in what President Emmanuel Macron called an "Islamist terrorist attack". The assailant, whose identity has not been established, was shot by police as they tried to arrest him and later died of his injuries, police said. The attacker shouted "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest") as police confronted him, a cry often heard in jihadist attacks, a police source said.

The lead writer of The New York Times’ anti-American “1619 Project” suffered a meltdown last week when a colleague at her paper offered fair criticism of its revisionist and inaccurate account of history.On Oct. 9, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens published a more than 3,000-word essay outlining the project’s blunders that have led the academics with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke its award to the project’s chief essayist, Nikole Hannah-Jones.“Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have...

Around 2 and a half billion people across the globe are part of the Christian community. From a gathering of just a handful of people 2,000 ago to becoming the world's largest institution, there have been numerous key points on the way.Here we highlight seven of the most important dates and incidents in Church history which have made us what we are today, and which possibly point the way to the future...1. 50 AD: The Council at JerusalemThough we mark Pentecost as the birth of the Church, the Council at Jerusalem is where it began to take shape. The account...

In the ancient world, when nations conquered their foes, they followed familiar patterns. Generally, the conqueror would execute most adults of the elite and educated class. They would destroy the memorials of the defeated nation’s past, and destroy the sacred places. The uneducated rural were usually left behind. The conquering nation would take the conquered nation’s wealth and usually bring back the children of the defeated nation’s elite/educated class to acculturate them. The complete vanquishment of the conquered nation occurred when the link to the nation’s past and culture was broken in that generation. America is in danger of a...

Was Christopher Columbus born in Genoa, Italy? Most definitely not, say an unlikely collection of experts from European royalty, DNA science, university scholars, even Columbus's own living family. This ground breaking documentary follows a trail of proof to show he might have been much more than we know.Who Was The Real Christopher Columbus? | Secrets and Lies of Christopher Columbus | Timeline

Several years ago, Edwin Settle wrote a syndicated news article titled “Jonah’s big fish story teaches important lesson.” Mr. Settle was a former college professor (COE College) and minister with a doctorate from Yale Divinity School.In his article, he attacked the book of Jonah by stating: “The book of Jonah cannot be accepted as history” (Settle, B-4).Professor Settle listed several alleged inaccuracies contained in the book. It is incredible that one could be alive for three days in a fish’s belly.It is unlikely that a city would so unanimously respond to the preaching of someone of a different language...

We are living through a year when the consequences of more than a generation of poor parenting and terrible education can be observed, in all their odiousness, in the streets of American cities. The young rioters, vandals, bullies, thugs, arsonists, and statue-topplers who pose as anti-fascists and racial-justice warriors do not just hate Confederate Civil War generals and certain specific institutions that, after sober and informed consideration, they have judged to be ethically inexcusable; they hate our country itself, and they hate its history, every bit of it, although they actually know next to nothing about either the country...

President Trump and his allies are launching a counterstrike in the war on our nation’s founding. Since The American Mind began nearly two years ago, we have consistently warned of the regime-level crisis caused by the corruption of the content of American education. The recent riots and the ongoing cultural revolution fomented by identity politics has helped prove our point. It is now clearer to Americans that if we do not change course, decades of anti-American propaganda and identitarian teaching in our schools will result in a fundamental overthrow of our system of government. Just two weeks ago the Trump...

Mazal tov to Hannah and Methuselah on their 111 miracle babies! The proud parents are date palms grown from ancient seeds uncovered in archeological excavations in Israel. These dates, recently picked at the Arava Institute at Kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel, are a type that hasn't been tasted since the times of Jesus and the Maccabees. "Dr. Elaine Solowey, our director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture, grew our first ancient date tree, Methuselah, in 2005," explained Miriam May, CEO of Friends of the Arava Institute. "He came from a 2,000-year-old seed found in excavations at Masada; his growth was...

Take a trip on a horse-drawn towing barge from Limehouse into old Central London! The trip goes over the Regents Canal from Limehouse, via the Wharves of East London, Mile End Road, Various locks, White Chapel, Heartford Union Canal, Old Ford, Acton's Lock, Hackney, through Islington Tunnel, passes under the New River, over the GNR at Kingscross, under the Midland at St.Pancras, Kentish Town, Alpine Chalet, through Regents Park and London Zoo and ends at Paddington Basin just off Edgeware Road.

Bad Beans Coffee initially came from Ethiopia, through Yemen’s port of Mocha, an area under the control of the Ottoman Empire. As the demand for coffee in Europe increased, so did the price levied by the Ottomans. The Dutch East India company saw a business opportunity, planting and then importing coffee from their holdings in Java, as well as Ceylon. Within a nine-year period, imports had shifted so that 90% of coffee now came from their holdings. And while coffee proved to be a lucrative import for them, it was not the case for the farmers who received little of...

“It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.” – Henry Kissinger American students are notoriously bad at geography, and have been for some time. In 2002, for instance – the year after the 9/11 attacks – only 17% of American students could find Afghanistan on a map. In 2016, less than one third were able to score a minimal pass of 66% on the National Geographic Global Literacy Survey. In 2015, the United States Government Accountability Office reported that 75% of eighth grade students don’t even know what...

Among the multitudes that America used to contain were Whittaker Chambers and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. A few months ago I happened to reread both Chambers’ autobiography Witness and Schlesinger’s Journals 1952-2000 one after the other. These two men are of different generations: Chambers lived from 1901 to 1961 and Schlesinger 1917 to 2007. They are of completely different temperaments, milieus, politics, and tastes. But there are some fascinating overlaps that have some bearing on the difficult passage we are traversing today as a nation.