Free Republic

I'm almost as upset that Democratic presidential candidates are squabbling as I am that Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle apparently don't want to live in Los Angeles until President Donald Trump leaves office. Double bummer. Speaking of doubles, did you know that Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have accused each other of lying? How can this be? Progressives don't lie. With that in mind, one of them must be lying. After Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate, Warren and Sanders were noticed in an apparently heated exchange, and CNN later released the audio of the intra-socialist spat. Word...

Just when it seemed as though the transgender movement was reaching a fever-pitch and it was becoming impossible to stand up to the zealous mob of trans-enthusiasts, it appears some celebrities may have found the secret to shutting them down and evading the dreaded “cancel culture” imposed on anyone who dares speak truth or reason. Perhaps this culture battle is not all but lost after all. Back in December, famed author J.K. Rowling tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, a former tax expert who lost her job at think tank Center for Global Development for declaring that men and women...

Disillusionment with Woodrow Wilson changed the American Left forever. In 1916, German saboteurs destroyed Black Tom Island in New York Harbor.Click for Bettmann/Corbis pic. Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism. The progressives, led by President Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in reason and the better nature of the American people. Expanded government would serve as an engine of popular goodwill to soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. Describing the condition of his fellow intellectuals prior to World War I, Lewis Mumford exclaimed that “there was scarcely...

The raids constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes. Friday, January 3, 2020 Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en) Lawrence W. Reed Lawrence W. Reed Politics History Woodrow Wilson First Amendment Communism World War I Police State Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in...

Before I begin let me say that the objectives of Common Core Math sound good, especially to people like me who need to understand concepts before proceeding to mechanics: Greater focus on fewer topicsThe Common Core calls for greater focus in mathematics. Rather than racing to cover many topics in a mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum, the standards ask math teachers to significantly narrow and deepen the way time and energy are spent in the classroom. This means focusing deeply on the major work of each grade In grades K–2: Concepts, skills, and problem solving related to addition and subtraction In grades...

A self-described progressive activist, who helped found an advocacy group in Pittsburgh that supports autistic people, is mounting a challenge against longtime incumbent state Rep. Harry Readshaw. Jessica Benham, 28, of the South Side Slopes, is bidding for the Democratic nomination in the 36th legislative district, shaping her candidacy after the campaigns of a number of progressive women who have toppled longtime Democratic incumbents in the past two years. Her campaign is framing the race that way, too, and in a recent email, used the secondary headline to proclaim “Progressive Benham to challenge conservative incumbent Harry Readshaw.” “In some ways,...

Watching the hysterical reaction of the radical left—such as Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post—to Attorney General William Barr’s thoughtful, well-reasoned, important speech at the Federalist Society convention on the constitutional doctrine of the unitary executive is like history repeating itself. Liberals had the same overreaction to then-Attorney General Edwin Meese’s 1985 speech to the American Bar Association on the Constitution and originalism. Only someone as openly partisan and ill-informed as Marcus could possibly claim that a speech explaining the historical basis of the Founders’ views on the importance of a strong executive is “angrily partisan” and “scary.” So what...

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Joy Behar revealed a key piece of the Progressive Project to her listeners on 4 November, 2019. She advised politicians who want to confiscate guns from U.S. citizens to deceive the voters so the politicians could get elected; then confiscate the guns.To the Left, this is nothing controversial. The whole point of Progressivism is the electorate is too stupid and ignorant to govern themselves. They believe the purpose of an elite is to deceive the governed (through manipulation of the information they receive, and controlling the narrative), so as to allow the elite to keep power and govern...

I mourned the untimely passing of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman for the very personal reason that I hoped he would one day get to play Whittaker Chambers in a film version of Chambers’ 1952 masterwork, Witness. Short, heavy set, permanently rumpled, Hoffman would have made a near perfect Chambers to George Clooney’s Alger Hiss, the smooth, handsome, establishment golden boy. Chambers’ 800-page story of his life and their encounter remains the great political book of the twentieth century. Chambers was a deep thinker, a dazzling writer, and a reluctant participant in the most riveting political drama of the era. No...

When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality and peace, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, “please lower my taxes” — Greg Gutfeld 1) Most liberals are hateful people. 2) Liberals do more than any other group to encourage race-based hatred....

Oct. 21, 2019 - 4:41 - A New York congressional candidate is arguing that taking guns away from law enforcement will make communities safer. A law enforcement panel reacts on 'Fox & Friends.'

Following the fourth Democratic debate in Westerville, Ohio, BlazeTV's Eric Bolling questioned candidates Beto O'Rourke and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) about their support for a gun confiscation policy, and asked billionaire presidential candidate Tom Steyer why he thinks the economy isn't thriving under President Donald Trump. "Congressman, can you please clarify how you will get the ARs and AKs back," Bolling asked O'Rourke. "I expect our fellow Americans to follow the law. If you own and AR-15, if you own an AK-47, and it is no longer legal to own that, I expect you to turn it in," O'Rourke said....

The clown show known as the Democratic Presidential debates has given us a sneak preview of our future government. There are a few things all the candidates agree on, open borders with mass immigration, an insanely increased welfare state, massive tax increases on the middle class, and an omnipotent government. All are fighting for the support of the socialist extreme of their party. This endorsement of socialism and extreme progressivism will either be devastating for the Democratic Party or our Republic. Never has generous welfare and open borders succeeded. In years past, I would point to the European countries as...

A statue of Christopher Columbus in San Francisco was vandalized the day before the federal holiday commemorating his arrival in the Americas in 1492. On Sunday, city workers cleaned up the statue at the foot of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill that had been covered in red paint. Graffiti on the base read “Destroy all monuments of genocide” and “Kill all colonizers.”

...Progressivism: the religion of progress, a form of millenarianism that makes a god of the individual and a sacred and divine right of even his most capricious desires. Progressivism is a form of deified materialism that sees men as undifferentiated and interchangeable beings without sex or origin, beings that, like so many Legos, have been entirely constructed and may thus be deconstructed at will. Progressivism is a form of secularized messianism, as were Jacobinism, communism, fascism, Nazism, neoliberalism and the ideology of human rights. Progressivism is a revolution. Indeed, you may recall that our dear President titled his campaign book,...

The intellectual class across the West—encompassing its universities, media, and arts—is striving to dismantle the values that paced its ascendancy. Europe, the source of Western civilization, now faces a campaign, in academia and elite media, to replace its cultural and religious traditions with what one author describes as a “multicultural and post-racial republic” supportive of separate identities. “The European ‘we’ does not exist,” writes French philosopher Pierre Manent, assessing the damage. “European culture is in hiding, disappearing, without a soul.” The increasingly “woke” values of the educated upper classes reflect, as Alvin Toffler predicted almost half a century ago, the...

Everywhere you turn progressives are pushing the idea of diversity. It’s in our school curriculum, in every TV show and movie, and now even in corporate commercials. But within the era of Newspeak, what is now called diversity is actual progressive dogmatic orthodoxy. The only permitted diversity is in the narrow, acceptable progressive doctrine. It is acceptable to hold any opinion on the number of human genders if that number is greater than twelve. The current politically acceptable number is one hundred twelve. To say there are only two genders will get you send to re-education camp, or diversity training,...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s withdrawal from the presidential race last week is a lost opportunity. A successful de Blasio effort in the Democratic primaries—his was anything but—could have sparked a necessary national debate over signs of rising disorder in American cities. We haven’t returned to the bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s. The troubles of that era had many causes: disappearing jobs, changes in social welfare policy, changes in cultural attitudes, deinstitutionalization of the mental health system, drug wars, crack cocaine, a surging crime rate—all intersecting to drain the vitality of neighborhoods and stamp countless urban...

A hybrid derived from the Greek words meaning “well” and “born,” the term eugenics was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a British cousin to Charles Darwin, to name a new “science” through which human beings might take charge of their own evolution. The Eugenics Crusade tells the story of the unlikely –– and largely unknown –– movement that turned the fledgling scientific theory of heredity into a powerful instrument of social control. Perhaps more surprising still, American eugenics was neither the work of fanatics, nor the product of fringe science. The goal of the movement was simple and,...

President Trump is waging a nonstop, all-encompassing war against progressive culture, in magnitude analogous to what 19th-century Germans once called a "Kulturkampf." As a result, not even former President George W. Bush has incurred the degree of hatred from the left that is now directed at Trump. For most of his time in office, Trump, his family, his friends and his businesses have been investigated, probed, dissected and constantly attacked. In 2016 and early 2017, President Barack Obama's appointees in the FBI, CIA and Department of Justice tried to subvert the Trump campaign, interfere with his transition and, ultimately, abort...