Free Republic

......Deference to leaders who do not necessarily share your background or agree with you on everything is in the fiber of representative government. It is enshrined in the Constitution. In fact, there probably never would have been a Constitution if the Americans of 1787 hadn't been willing to defer to the "assembly of demigods" (as Jefferson described them) that convened in Philadelphia, closed the doors to the press, sealed the windows to eavesdroppers, and privately debated the future of the nation. ....What the Tea Party needs to do is look for allies. There are other people in the country who...

[SNIP] ...So all in all, what choice do we have other than to go after the one individual whose horrible vulnerability Orwell pointed out? The one individual upon whom the entire Left-Wing Liberal movement depends, and must depend for its galvanic power -- the liberal intellectual? And what is an intellectual? Well, the dictionary definition is one thing, but what we commonly mean by the term isn't a Ph.D. in physics. And neither do we so call those highly educated in such disciplines such as engineering, math, chemistry, quantum mechanics, metallurgy, and medicine intellectuals. Instead, we usually hang the label...

The Western doctrine of non-violence depends on the willingness to compromise. To resolve any conflict by sitting down at a table, finding points of agreement and then working through the rest. The ruthless killing fields of the twentieth century have not shaken that eternal faith in a diplomatic solution, rather they have only strengthened it. But what happens when a compromise is genuinely impossible? The commitment to non-violence depends on the assumption that while small numbers of fanatics might seek war, the vast majority of people do not. And even if they do want war, they want a humane war,...

SHELBY IS THE FIRST ELECTED LEADER OF ANY OCCUPY MOVEMENT. WE ELECTED HER ON NOVEMBER 5TH BECAUSE SHE IS MORE OF A PERSON THAN A CORPORATION IS AND LESS CORRUPT THAN MOST PEOPLE. SHE IS THE YOUNGEST, FIRST, AND ONLY DOG LEADER OF THIS REVOLUTION.

The New York Sun has an article today called “Sarah Palin for the Fed?” in which they discuss how the former governor of Alaska and 2008 vice-presidential candidate has been running rings around all of Barack Obama’s high-priced, high-powered, ideologically impeccable financial men: “The big question as Chairman Bernanke gets set for his first quarterly press conference is how Sarah Palin was able to figure out sooner than everyone else that the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing wouldn’t work. Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York...

Recall, Obama was declared a genius of geniuses by the elites when he ran for president, based on admittance to Harvard Law and a few stirring speeches. Yet, once upon a time, some effort was made to connect education to that holy grail called “intelligence.” After all, wasn’t that the entire argument behind the support and development of the “Ivy League”? But as the average—meaning intellectually guileless—person now sees daily and proved by incontrovertible evidence, being an elite simply means you have been trained into sneering, illiterate idiocy. There is no longer any credible evidence suggesting elites and liberals understand,...

The NPR/ Schiller Doctrine Schiller proceeded to introduce and regale his potential donors to the vacuous ruminations of those whom refer to themselves as the intellectual elites of this world--the Liberals in charge--as they like to think of themselves. Here are a few things that Schiller, in near-lisp, declared: Schiller Speaking On Behalf Of NPR -"We all think that we don't have enough Muslim voices in our schools, on the air, it's like when the nation was not having enough female voices on the air." Our Take: Comparing Muslims to US Women? This boastful imbecile, Schiller, really needs to look...

The most dangerous of hypocrites come from the middle class. These are the middle-class "intellectuals" who openly despise other members of the bourgeoisie. They are ubiquitous in academia, the arts, and in much of the mainstream media. They are smugly satisfied to bite the cultural hand that feeds them -- a hand that rarely retaliates. The Tea Parties have begun the arduous process of taking back one portion of our society, the state, from the pseudo-intellectuals who have overwhelmed our political ranks. If Western culture is to survive, however, the middle class must also recapture the educational systems, the media,...

If you believe any of the hogwash about the irrelevance of the religious right to this election, take a look at the numerous right-wing evangelical websites promoting the 40/40 Prayer Vigil, which began in September with a prayer for Christian voter registration and ends--you guessed it--just before election day, Nov. 2. The 40/40 stands for the forty days and forty nights that Jesus supposedly spent wandering in the desert before finally saying no to Satan's temptations. I'm sure that you won't have any trouble figuring out which political party the Southern Baptist Convention--America's largest religious denomination and one of the...

In our present Age of the Zipped Lip, you are supposed to avoid making any of the following inconvenient observations about the history and doctrines of the Islamist movement: You are not supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and '40s. You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide. And you are not...

The tenured intellectual is the only known creature that denies its own existence. They are, therefore, dangerous animals. Rather, it is not themselves who are of immediate danger, but it is those who come into contact with them and are infected by their philosophical pathogens who are a menace. The tenured intellectual is only a carrier; their disease only debilitates others. Not all who are exposed are infected. Only those with sufficiently weakened reasoning centers—caused by excessive exposure to the New York Times, “organic” foods, Seth MacFarlane creations, and the like—are at risk. Some symptoms of the infection are: an...

The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Palin's campaigning as a devout, plain-spoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists, and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from...

Says brother T.S. Eliot: Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it; or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. Thomas Sowell produces this apt quotation, a neat summary of Intellectuals and Society, his important new book. And what a frustrating book it is! It can be read only in snatches, absorbing two, at the most three examples of the insufferable...

A new leftist European Jewish group, JCall, has written a letter to be delivered Sunday to the European Parliament calling for a cessation of what it calls systematic support for Israeli government decisions. JCall, which describes itself as "the European J Street" and is to be officially launched Sunday with the presentation of the letter, has raised a storm with its call to stop construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem.

In less than a year, the MSM has gone from ignoring Tea Parties to mocking and insulting their participants to grudging coverage with ridiculing overtones. Finally it has arrived at giving wide attention to the movement, albeit grudgingly and ungraciously. A once-highly esteemed fourth estate, they have become talking-head dilettantes on a mission to save the disgruntled masses from democracy itself. David Brooks, token toy conservative at the NYT, wrote his explanation for the Tea Parties without ever mentioning them by name, even. He wrote a whole diatribe on the meaning of it all. It's a knee-jerk reaction by us...

Smart people should make smart decisions. So why do the best and the brightest always seem to create more problems than they solve? Renowned economist Thomas Sowell argues that intellectuals have strong incentives to step out of their area of expertise and "off a cliff." Ultimately, everyday people pay the price....

I will say that we are against is elitism. The founders created the nation, and while many went into (at times) government service at various levels, many others went back to work, or back to the farm. They left us to manage our own lives, without the tyrannical interference of government. On the other hand, our current elites crave power, and seek to wield that power in order to dictate most aspects of our lives. The elites sneer at the common man, or others that offer a dissenting opinion. They believe that they have a right to govern based on...

We expect those in government to know how to get things done. They need to understand organizational and political behavior, effective administration, and how to comply with the law. We do not expect or want elitists and moral supremacists who believe that they know so much more about justice, the market, and how we should live. In his recent book Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell explains how the "anointed" believe that their advanced education and depth of knowledge in one field automatically makes them an authority on any field in which they wield an opinion. Thus Noam Chomsky, a noted...

January 05, 2010, 4:00 a.m. The Divine Right of IntellectualsToo many intellectuals believe they have a duty to make decisions for the rest of us. By David Hogberg In his 1988 book Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Paul Johnson wrote that one of the lessons of the 20th century was “beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.”    Not long after Johnson released his book, economist Thomas Sowell appeared on the C-SPAN program...

One of the most extraordinary episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century—if, indeed, something that lasted half a century or more can properly be called an episode—is the moral and sometimes material support given by much of the western intelligentsia to the Soviet tyranny, a tyranny that made all previous tyrannies seem relaxed, liberal, and almost amateurish by comparison. Men who found the slightest circumscription of their own freedom intolerable raised hosannas to the most systematic and concerted abrogation of personal liberty yet attempted; many were those who strained at gnats to swallow a camel.No doubt the explanation...