Free Republic

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

Whence Comes the Special Resistance to Christ? A Meditation on a Teaching from Joseph Sobran Msgr. Charles Pope • November 23, 2015 • I have started reading through a recently published book called Subtracting Christianity: Essays on American Culture and Society. It is an anthology of the writings of Joseph Sobran (1946-2010), long-time editor at National Review and a keen observer of culture and its intersection with faith. I recommend it highly, for its penetrating observations and its sober portrait of what happens when we remove Christianity from our culture, the same Christianity that was fundamental in our making.I'd like...

'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.'" - John Stossel

Just one of the many misconceptions about conservatives, particularly in the academy, is that we all come off of an assembly line. To preserve this fiction, academics prefer to study us from a distance, if at all. Thus we get studies with bizarre conclusions about how much we love authority figures. They read us backwards: Conformity is the antithesis of our ethos. I’ve been to left-wing and right-wing events and found infinitely more diversity at the latter than at the former. “For all the cant about ‘openness to ideas’ (that word again!), they cooperate to impose an ersatz consensus on...

    NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOEby Ann CoulterOctober 6, 2010My friend Joe Sobran died last Thursday, and the world lost its greatest writer. To my delight, some obituaries noted that he had influenced my writing style. I only wish I had known he was so close to the end so I could have seen him again to let him influence me some more. The G.K. Chesterton of our time, Joe could deliver a knockout punch with a single line. Many of his aphorisms were so catchy that everyone repeats them now without realizing their provenance. It was Joe who came...

...Sobran’s diagnosis of the domestic malaise started with the notion that “the regime we live under” derives its legitimacy from a blatant distortion of the United States Constitution. On the basis of a compact among the sovereign states, the federal government was to be a service confined to the specific enumerated powers the people delegated to it, pursuant to their general welfare and common defense. Over the past century and a half, however, the federal government has usurped all kinds of powers neither the people nor the states had delegated to it. It has become a “consolidated” or centralized government....

Our former NR colleague, Joe Sobran, passed away today after a long battle with a variety of ailments. He was relatively young, just 64, and while physically beaten at the end, he also departed spiritually triumphant.   Surely, in short order, there will be ample reflection — much of it critical — on the hyper-talented, hyper-controversial writer. There will be a recounting of his history at NR, the break, the following years, and Joe’s soured relationship with WFB (happily, they rekindled their friendship before Bill passed away). Good, let’s discuss all that, and more. But later. Right now, let us,...

During the so-called presidential debates, I failed to hear a single mention of the U.S. Constitution, which should have been the chief subject. What are the proper powers of government, of the federal government, and of the president? These questions don’t even come up anymore. The debaters wrangle heatedly about “the economy”—a phrase that never appears in the text of the Constitution but preoccupies today’s pundits and politicians. Neither of the major-party presidential candidates, let alone President Bush, could have held an intelligent conversation with Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, or John Jay, the authors of The Federalist, our best known...

The only thing sillier than a liberal is a conservative trying to outmaneuver a liberal. Consider the anti-sodomatrimony amendment that just suffered a first-round knockout in the Senate. Conservatives love the Constitution so much that every time a liberal court commits an outrage against it, they want to amend it. A state court — in Massachusetts, of course — has declared that the Fourteenth Amendment requires the legislature to certify homosexual unions as marriages. Equal protection of the laws, you know. Time for conservatives to swing into action! As usual in such cases, they chose the worst possible strategy. Amending...

Brown Reconsidered by Joseph Sobran January 13, 2004 Judicial review was originally proposed (most notably in Federalist No. 78) as a method of making sure legislatures didn’t pass unconstitutional laws. Today it has become a method of changing the very meaning of constitutions under the guise of interpreting them. The problem was highlighted this past November, when the supreme court of Massachusetts handed down the sensational ruling that the state’s constitution required that same-sex “marriage” be recognized in law. The court didn’t even bother citing any specific passage of the constitution that might be construed to mean this; obviously it...

November 11, 2003 New York leads the country again, paying $141 per thousand dollars of personal income in state and local taxes. This is 72 per cent more than the national average, according to a new Citizens Budget Commission study. New York has been traditionally liberal — meaning, in practice, that it has been dominated by rapacious pressure groups, each seeking to live off the taxpayer. It illustrates Frédéric Bastiat’s description of government as the system through which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else. Even if your self-respect prevents you from being part of the greedy...

A NEW CONSTITUTION -- COMING UP! September 30, 2003 by Joe Sobran The U.S. occupation of Iraq is getting seriously weird. The U.S. Government has served notice that the occupation won't end until the Iraqis come up with a constitution, and Secretary of State Colin Powell thinks six months is a reasonable deadline. The Iraqis appointed to do the job say they'll need at least a year. A year? The U.S. Constitution was banged out in a couple of months in the summer of 1787. Of course conditions were somewhat different. The delegates to our Philadelphia convention were sent by...

September 30, 2003 The U.S. occupation of Iraq is getting seriously weird. The U.S. Government has served notice that the occupation won’t end until the Iraqis come up with a constitution, and Secretary of State Colin Powell thinks six months is a reasonable deadline. The Iraqis appointed to do the job say they’ll need at least a year. A year? The U.S. Constitution was banged out in a couple of months in the summer of 1787. Of course conditions were somewhat different. The delegates to our Philadelphia convention were sent by the 13 states, not chosen by a foreign power,...

America is still a great country, and it would be cruel to judge it by its patriots. I mean the sort of “patriots” who think the way to express your love for this country is to insult other countries. The events of 9/11 have brought the nastiest jingoists out of the woodwork, and their most toxic venom has been directed against France for opposing war on Iraq. Now that the war has failed in its express aims, the French are hated worse than ever. After all, they have committed the extremely annoying faux pas of being proved right by events....

Free and Independent September 11, 2003 A recent biography of Thomas Jefferson contains an amusing statement. It says that Jefferson’s arguments in the 1798 Kentucky Resolutions “brought him dangerously close to secessionism.” Apparently the biographer doesn’t realize that Jefferson was an explicit secessionist. For openers, he wrote a famous secessionist document known to posterity as the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration proclaims the 13 American colonies “Free and Independent States” — adding “that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which...

Victory in 2004! September 9, 2003 Time to get moving if I want to be elected president of the United States in 2004. I’m not going on the road to campaign; I’m not spending money, much less seeking unconstitutional matching funds from the Federal Government; you won’t be getting mailings or seeing TV ads for me. I’m simply relying on word-of-mouth (and word-of-Internet) to spread my message. Those who agree with it can write my name in. My message is simple: no wars, no spending programs, no taxes. My legislative program is equally simple: the repeal of most Federal laws...

Can Arnold Make the Difference? My first reaction to Arnold’s announced candidacy was, I imagine, a lot like yours. What a refreshing novelty! What a grand joke on our politicians! What an impudent deflation of the silly fiction that governing a state like California is a form of skilled labor! I hoped Arnold (you know which Arnold I mean) would show up for his inauguration in the garb of Conan the Barbarian. That would round out the joke perfectly. For Arnold has made himself one of our great national jokes — a joke he enjoys as much as the rest...

Bush, Sodomy, and Marriage July 31, 2003 Many years ago I heard the first lady of the United States give a speech. I didn’t fully approve of her, and I was determined not to be easily impressed — my usual wary attitude toward the high and mighty. My resolution lasted about five seconds. Her opening sentence was a one-liner Bob Hope would have envied. It brought down the house. I wish I could remember it now, but it was so topical that it wouldn’t sound as hilarious as it was at the time — an allusion to her embarrassment by...

July 29, 2003These are hard times for gay men. I speak with the authority of personal experience. You see, I am gay. It's just my nature. I've been this way as long as I remember. Even as a boy, when I watched the dapper, suave comedy of Cary Grant or Fred Astaire, I felt I was looking into a mirror of my soul. Life should be taken lightly -- that's my philosophy. My favorite writer is P.G. Wodehouse. When I hear a Rossini overture on the radio, I can't bear to turn it off. These are my gay brethren. I've...

Patriotism, Mom, and the Bums May 15, 2003 War always seems to bring out a certain kind of patriotism we’d be better off without: the “love it or leave it” variety. A lot of people assume that patriotism means supporting any war your government chooses to get into — or, in this case, any war your president even wants to get into. Some people took it even further, hoping for an even bigger war than President Bush had in mind. One reader wrote to me that if he had his way, we’d have “nuked Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, and, for good...