Free Republic

The conflict today is not simply a normal policy argument between conservatives and progressives. It is over the future of the historic American nation, both its creed and its culture. The following is adapted from a talk delivered on April 18, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bellevue, Washington. In the past two years, two competing groups of conservatives—National Conservatives or NatCons and Freedom Conservatives or FreeCons—have issued competing manifestos. These manifestos reflect a divergent understanding of the progressive challenge to the American way of life. This divergence can best be understood in the context of the...

The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in a system of checks on government power. Foremost is the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government, as well as between the federal government and the states. For this system to work as designed, people in each branch of the federal government and in the state governments must do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes. But what happens when district attorneys—members of their states’ executive branches—refuse to execute the laws of the land? We are witnessing the...

If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between 2000 and 2019. (See the chart below.) The number of district administrators grew by a whopping 87.6 percent during these years, far outstripping the growth in the number of students (7.6 percent) and teachers (8.7 percent).In illustrating the difference in these rates of growth, the chart also illustrates a fundamental change that has come over our nation as a whole during this period—a change in...

Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as war itself. Grizzled veterans in the Greek phalanx, Roman legions, and Napoleon’s elite corps all believed that the failings of the young would be the ruin of their armies. This is not the chief worry of grizzled American veterans today. The largest threat they see by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or “woke”) policies being imposed, not by a rising generation of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness. Wokeness...

Believers: Steve Bannon, David Horowitz, Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Mark Levin, MTG, Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik Alex Jones Deniers: Pat Buchanan,Fox News, Breitbart, Joel Pollack, National Review, Wall Street Journal, NY Post, Michael Goodwin, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Chip Roy, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Bill Barr, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Guy Benson, Jedediah Bila, Karl Rove, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie, Dan Quayle, Alyssa Farah I'm not sure about these people: Sean Hannity,Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Dick Morris, Newt Gingrich, Greg Kelly, Michael Savage

Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening? The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years. The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months. Both are worthy of study. Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you were smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of...

The blizzard of emails around this FRAUD of the "Stealection" caused me to overlook one of the most important issues of Hillsdale College's excellent "IMPRIMIS" newsletter. The link below will take you to it: IMPRIMISIf you're not hooked after the first 4 paragraphs, let me know and I'll remove you from this list. As you read this, we're in trouble. This last "Stealection" was STOLEN by leftists who, for past and future promises of wealth and power, have literally invited an alien ideology into the deepest reaches of what was once the "America" left us by the Founders. If not...

Clarence Thomas is our eras most consequential jurist.....

Tom Cotton was elected to the U.S. Senate from Arkansas in 2014, following one term in the U.S. House of Representatives. He serves on the Senate Banking Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the Senate Armed Services Committee. A graduate of Harvard College, he studied government at the Claremont Graduate School and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2002. In 2005, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, rose to 1st Lieutenant, and served deployments in Iraq with the 101st Airborne and in Afghanistan with a Provincial Reconstruction Team. His military decorations include the...

The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates. Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months...

There are many complaints about administrative law—including that it is arbitrary, that it is a burden on the economy, and that it is an intrusion on freedom. The question I will address here is whether administrative law is unlawful, and I will focus on constitutional history. Those who forget history, it is often said, are doomed to repeat it. And this is what has happened in the United States with the rise of administrative law—or, more accurately, administrative power.

The Worldview that Makes the Underclass Anthony Daniels Writer and Doctor ANTHONY DANIELS, who often writes under the penname Theodore Dalrymple, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Born in London in 1949, he qualified as a doctor in 1974 and has worked in various countries in Africa and elsewhere. From 1990 to 2005, he worked as a doctor and psychiatrist in a prison in Birmingham, England. He has written a column for the London Spectator for 14 years, and writes regularly for National Review and the Wall Street Journal. He...

Harold Rood, a professor of international relations at Claremont McKenna College who died in 2011, was not as well known as he was influential. A soldier in Patton’s army in World War II, he taught his students that war is permanent to the human condition, and that in war it is better to win, for no one ever had to accommodate a loser. America will always have enemies, he told them, and those enemies will forever be planning and expending resources to place themselves in a position to defeat us. It would be nice if it was otherwise, he was...

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 15, 2012, by William McGurn (News Corporation) at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Newport Beach, California MANY SCHOLARS ARE better versed on the history of public employee unions than I am, but there is one credential I can claim that they cannot: I am a taxpayer in the People’s Republic of New Jerseystan. That makes me an authority on how public sector unions—especially at the state and local level—are thwarting economic growth, strangling the middle class, and generally hijacking the democratic process to serve their own ends rather...

IN PRESIDENT Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in at least a generation. In 2008, he won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote—something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter's squeaker in 1976—and handily increased the Democrats' control of both houses of Congress. Measured against roughly two centuries worth of presidential victories by Democratic non-incumbents, his win as a percentage of the popular vote comes in third behind FDR's in 1932 and Andrew Jackson's in 1828. More importantly, Obama won election not as a status quo liberal, but as an ambitious reformer. Far from...

The Constitution provides for treaties, and even specifies that treaties will be "the supreme Law of the Land"; that is, that they will be binding on the states. But from 1787 on, it has been recognized that for a treaty to be valid, it must be consistent with the Constitution—that the Constitution is a higher authority than treaties. And what is it that allows us to judge whether a treaty is consistent with the Constitution? Alexander Hamilton explained this in a pamphlet early on: "A treaty cannot change the frame of the government." And he gave a very logical reason:...

The fact is that we live in a time of fateful challenges. As a people and a nation we are under test. This challenge is, of course, Marxism-Leninism. There is no mystery in its strategies and tactics. It has always been concrete and spelled out in black and white. It has also been openly and actively tested in the economic, political, and ideological struggle for control around globe. Lenin, the founder of the first Communist state, put it simply: "First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. We will encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United...

Mark Steyn’s column appears in the New York Sun, the Washington Times, Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, MacLean’s in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke’s Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of National Review’s Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online and appears weekly on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show. He is the author of several books, most recently America Alone: The End of The World as We Know It, a New York Times bestseller and a number one bestseller in Canada. A...

Heroes: What Great Statesmen Have to Teach Usby Paul Johnson, Historian   PAUL JOHNSON is the author of several bestselling books, including the classic Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, A History of the American People, A History of Christianity, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, A History of the Jews, Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney, Art: A New History, George Washington: The Founding Father, and most recently, Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including...

Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. He also studied at the London School of Economics and at Worcester College, Oxford University. From 1985 to 2000, he was president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. He is on the boards of directors of the Heritage Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College, Americans Against Discrimination and Preferences, the Center for Individual Rights, and the Claremont Institute. He is the...