Free Republic

When it comes to radical activism, there are few who can hold an ethically-sourced candle to Michael Shellenberger. At 16, he threw his first fundraising party for a rainforest conservation group. At 17, he lived in Nicaragua to show “solidarity” with the Sandinista socialist revolution. […] But far from being a “hero” of the Green movement, he’s now become a heretic they’d happily burn at the stake — if that didn’t increase the global carbon footprint, of course. For the American environmentalist has changed his mind. Rather drastically. Distilling the contents of his new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism...

While it’s true that most die-hard supporters and opponents of the right to keep and bear arms have made up their minds and will never change, book or no book, it is also true that “swing” or “independent” voters will decide the presidential election and several other crucial elections this year

We need each other. That is being forgotten. PC fear is dominating discourse and too many people are forgetting to be kind. Hiding in a basement to win more votes? Some people remember to connect.

I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen. White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid...

I just finished my recording for section 1, chapter 8 of The Wrong of Slavery, by Robert Dale Owen. I wanted to share this with you, because its very pertinent to the things that are happening today. In s.1 c.8 Owen wrote the chapter in corresponding segments. The primary segment of note is named "A king the pillar of the slave-trade." In particular, the footnotes are among the more interesting parts of the chapter. After laying out some details about Virginia's protests against the King's slave trade, Owen wrote this: In the Report of the Lords of Council, so often...

They sound like Leftists. They act like Leftists. And now we learn that the Never-Trumper group called “The Lincoln Project” is funded by a Leftist billionaire, according to a new book on the subject. And a collective “Oh, it all makes sense to me now!” just spread over the land. The project features, among others, GOP political strategists Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, the Washington Post’s “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin, former “Weekly Standard” editor Bill Kristol, and disgruntled attorney, George “Mr. Kellyanne” Conway, who spends nearly all of his time trying to ruin his wife’s White House career. Judging by their...

First there was Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans, then came Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm, and now Michael Schellenberger’s Apocalypse Never. All three authors sound the common theme that the hyper-green environmental activists who have captured, politicized, and monetized the concern for the environment have, as Lomborg explains, created a false climate alarm which has “costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.” To varying degrees, all three authors come from a strong environmental activist background, which observation makes their public revelations even more noteworthy. Planet of the Humans, the recent film produced by Michael Moore,...

Despite many serious scholars’ denunciations, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has enjoyed phenomenal success since its publication in 1980: 2.6 million (!) copies sold, incorporation into the curricula of innumerable schools, and the achievement of almost iconic status in popular culture. Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America performs a valuable service by examining Zinn’s polemical volume and revealing “just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest” it truly is. A tireless left-wing activist with a Ph.D. in history, Zinn (1922–2010) urged fellow historians, as Grabar relates, to eschew...

Uncle Hugo's and Uncle Edgar's were legendary among the community of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery readers—and now they're gone. Venerable Minneapolis science fiction and fantasy bookstore Uncle Hugo’s and its sister store in the same building, Uncle Edgar’s, which specialized in mysteries, were both burned to ruins last Friday night by rioters. The store took its name from two major awards in the genre fields, science fiction’s Hugo awards, and mysteries Edgar’s. Independent bookstores are a threatened American institution, and Uncle Hugo’s was considered a flagship operation. Owner Don Blyly was noted for his ability to adapt to modern...

The power of the word classic cannot be underestimated, communicating as it does the idea of excellence, truth, order, discipline, and beauty. The word “classic” brings to mind something that has withstood the test of time, and by virtue of this fact, participates in some way in the timeless and the eternal. And what is the only thing we know of with these attributes but God and His Eternal Word? When looked at this way, every Christian should want a classical education for their children: It has everything we instinctively want. But when we examine this word “classic,” we find...

REASON #1: ARCHITECTURE Of all of the points that I will make, this is the easiest to understand because it is so visible: we see its evidence every day. The power and beauty of classical architecture is everywhere, from grand buildings like our Supreme Court to our humble everyday homes. The Greeks discovered the proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye which, they tell us, are based on nature’s greatest work of art: the human body. Scale, mass, proportion, and symmetry—the principles of classical architecture—were worked out by the Greeks in great detail and built upon in succeeding...

REASON #2: VIRTUE In the last article, we learned that the Greeks established the first principles of architecture by studying nature. The proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye are those of nature’s greatest work of art—the human body. We learned that God gave man reason and the desire to know, but he did not leave us without guides. He gave us the Greeks, the world’s first systematic, abstract thinkers. And so we study and honor the Greeks because they teach us how to use reason to explore and understand our world, a world that is material and...

Reason #3: SCIENCE Because we live in the aftermath of what has been called the “scientific revolution,” we modern people consider ourselves quite superior to the ancients in regard to the study of the natural world. We are polished practitioners of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” We think ancient people were ignorant of the natural world and that we, with all our advanced scientitic knowledge, have little to learn from them. But one of the problems with having your nose so high in the air is that you can miss the thing right in front of you. Science, as...

REASON 4: EDUCATION A classical education focuses on the study of the classical languages, Latin and Greek, and on the study of the classical civilization of Greece and Rome. But why is the word classical reserved only for the languages of the Greeks and Romans and only for their civilization? What really is so special about the Greeks and Romans and why should Christians study them? After all they were not Christians, they were pagans. Some have objected to the word pagan and misunderstood its meaning. Pagan is a word Christians coined in the later Roman Empire to refer to...

REASON #5: NATURAL LAW What did the first Continental Congress mean when it appealed to “the immutable laws of nature,” or Thomas Jefferson when he referred to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the unalienable rights of man”? Natural law. The principle of natural law is embedded in Western civilization, the Declaration of Independence, and our whole history as a nation. The concept of natural law was first articulated by Aristotle in Rhetoric, where Aristotle notes that, aside from the “particular” laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a “common” law that is...

American government and political science will come alive when you read the Greeks and Romans, the same way that words come alive when you study Latin and Greek. There were many influences on the Founding Fathers, and certainly the modern philosophers—Locke and Hume—were important along with the tradition of English liberty. But separation of powers, mixed government, and checks and balances are the principles that first come to my mind when I think of the genius of the American political system; and where did these concepts come from? Plato in the Republic describes five types of government and says they...

Reason #7: RELIGION Saint Augustine in his Confessions tells us that after many years of wandering in the desert of indecision, it was Cicero who led him to Christ. Cicero’s Hortensius set him on the path to Christian conversion by implanting in him a longing for the immortality of wisdom. The text of Hortensius did not make it to the modern world and thus is probably the most famous lost treatise in world literature. Wouldn’t we all love to read this work that St. Augustine praises so highly? Well, I have read a lot of Cicero and, like most writers,...

REASON #8: PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY IS A DEEP SUBJECT THAT CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IS SO ESOTERIC THAT FEW CAN UNDERSTAND OR RELATE TO IT, BUT CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IS DIFFERENT. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding of a subject that is baffling in its modern form. While philosophy may seem abstract and unrelated to the real world, quite the opposite is true. In fact, we are all philosophers; we all have a view of reality, a worldview, as we say today....

Reason #9: HUMAN CONDITION When it comes to the human condition, we may think that Scripture is all we need. After all, Scripture does show us our true human condition in a way that the Greeks did not and could not: our relationship to God, that we are sinners, that we are a fallen race in need of redemption, that sin separates us from God, that God loves us and offers us grace and salvation. This is the good news that has been revealed by God in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ and nowhere else. Indeed, the...

Reason #10: LITERATURE What is literature, and what is it for anyway? Have you ever wondered that? It’s not practical like science and math, so what is its purpose? Why do we include literature in our curriculum, how do we choose it, and what do we hope to achieve by reading literature? These are some of the questions that puzzled me most in my own education. The ancients thought about all of these questions too. Plato brings up the question of poetry, by which the ancients meant literature, and he famously bans the poets from his ideal Republic. Because, he...