Free Republic

September 12, 1905, a black day in history for America! On this day, about 100 people, including Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Walter Lippman(Dir, Council on Foreign Relations), and Clarence Darrow, met in NYC, to plot the overthrow of American culture, including Christianity, and replace it with the teachings of Karl Marx. They named their new organization the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, later renamed League for Industrial Democracy. Their plan? To infiltrate the education system, and ultimately, labor unions, churches, government, and all other American institutions, to promulgate Marxist/Socialist ideas into American society. They started by organizing chapters at colleges & universities,...

The Jack London I learned about in grade school was a seafaring adventurer. High school teachers taught me about his prolific pen and penchant for weaving together intoxicating descriptions of elemental sensations. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized London was more complicated than his reputation. While he was noted for being a progressive socialist, London was also adept at dystopian race-baiting and published horribly xenophobic prose, including about Asian people. Some of his writing also revealed an affinity for white supremacy.

In The Scarlet Plague, the California Author Imagined a 21st-Century Epidemic Hitting the Bay Area and the WorldJack London saw this coming. So why didn’t we? In 1910 the California author, already famous for The Call of the Wild and White Fang, wrote a short post-apocalyptic novel about a 21st-century pandemic in his home state. To revisit The Scarlet Plague now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, is to marvel at how much London understood—a century ago—about the challenges facing Californians now. London imagined a global epidemic in the year 2013 that killed almost all the people in California,...

Harrison Ford’s canine adventure “The Call of the Wild” is shaping up to be the latest box office dud for the Disney-owned 20th Century. The film, based on Jack London’s best-selling novel, has made $45 million in the U.S. and $79 million globally after two weeks in theaters. That wouldn’t be a bad result, had “The Call of the Wild” cost a moderate amount to make and market. However, it carries a price tag above $125 million, meaning the film needs to make between $250 million and $275 million to break even, according to sources close to the production and...

Thanksgiving and Christmas came a little early today for Quentin Tarantino and Sony Pictures. Picked up by the studio last week, as my colleague Mike Fleming Jr exclusively reported, the director’s next feature is among the 11 films awarded nearly $62.8 million in California tax credits. The Chris Sanders’ helmed adaptation of Jack London’s Call of the Wild, Destroyer, starring Nicole Kidman and directed by the Karyn Kusama, and an untitled Dan Gilroy project starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo were also recipients of the latest round of the hefty incentives made public Monday. The announcement this morning by the...

THE UNPARALLELED INVASION It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and China reached its culmination. It was because of this that the celebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was deferred. Many other plans of the nations of the earth were twisted and tangled and postponed for the same reason. The world awoke rather abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years, unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this very end. The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the development that, seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the whole world....

“Intellectuals and Race“ by Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, 2013, 184 pages, $25.99. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is not a newcomer to the theme of intellectuals and race. In his 1985 Marxism: Philosophy and Economics he noted that Karl Marx referred to German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle as a “Jewish n–ger,” based on his “cranial formation” and hair growth. Marx also said that Lassalle’s paternal grandmother or mother was “crossed with a n–ger” and that “the fellow’s importunity is also n–ger-like.” Sowell’s The Economics and Politics of Race, along other writings from a conservative viewpoint, drew attacks from...

Jim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80°F set in 1971, which is not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, it seems the battery died in the weather station just at the critical moment.Image from hamweather.com While the continental USA has a mild winter and has set a number of high temperature records in the last week and pundits ponder whether they will be blaming the dreaded “global warming” for those temperatures, Alaska and Canada have been suffering through some of the coldest temperatures on record...

I'm sure someone here knows this. I've finally read "The Sea Wolf" (a great book, BTW) but was puzzled as to the cause of Larsen's sickness and eventual death. William Jose Farmer in his Riverworld series states that it was syphylis. Does anyone know for sure what London intended, or was it left to be unanswered?