Free Republic

Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as their agent, hedging it in by a doctrine of enumerated powers. Since the compact between the states was voluntary, secession was considered an option by public leaders in every section of the Union during Hie antebellum period. Given this tradition—deeply rooted in the Declaration of...

One of the most powerful tools of social control is capacity to define words. George Orwell established the ominous potential of the political darkness extending from such power. We in the United States find ourselves subjugated increasingly to a dangerous rhetorical world of doublespeak. Al Gore recently compared the killing of 19 children and teachers at Uvalde to the refusal to hear children crying out as victims of climate change. His comparison is not unlike his longstanding comparison of disagreement with his interpretation of the Earth’s proper temperature as analogous to Holocaust denial. The propriety of this definitional rhetorical power...

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, by Abbé Augustin Barruél The years 1796 to 1798 saw the publication of two important presentations of evidence concerning an international conspiracy, then only decades old, which had devastated France and was threatening the entire civilized world. That conspiracy had coalesced into a continuing organizational structure with the founding of the Order of the Illuminati by Adam Weishaupt on May 1, 1776 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. The conspirators in the Order came from the top levels of society, and their ultimate goal was the destruction of all existing religious and political institutions, all forms...