Free Republic

Culture is the culmination of everything happening in a society, the collective stew of the nation. A good stew, a healthy stew, has all the flavors melting together to create something better than the sum of its parts – garlic is great, but it’s much better on something than simply eating a bulb of it. Our stew, our nation, is reversing course and coagulating to the point that some parts are actively working against the whole and making the stew inedible. No, I’m not talking about the president as a man, or any elected Democrats. Their tactics sometimes cross the...

The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator. Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal. The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men. As...

Obama will not complete his 2nd term as President. First, for Obama’s repeated lies, coverup and abandonment of two heroic Navy Seals, leaving both to die on the Benghazi battlefield on 9/11/2012, while the liberal media openly carried his YouTube video water for eight months. During last week’s House hearings, the mainstream media was shamed and embarrassed before the entire world, exposed as being lazy, partisan and incurious. The Obama-fawning media was highlighted as being unwilling to honestly report to their fellow citizens. Secondly, the 60-day electronic DOJ surveillance blanket thrown over the Associated Press, monitoring 100 reporter’s work and...

If the closest confidante and advisor to an extremely consequential American president had written a fantasy novel about a heroic social agitator with a plan to bring about a "benevolent" progressive dictatorship by instigating a brutal civil war, might one imagine that an honest press would take an interest? In fact this has happened, and America's actual press has tried to dismiss the book as a meaningless "bad novel". In 1912, Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson's most intimate and influential advisor, wrote Philip Dru: Administrator. (Read it online here.) House is credited with having orchestrated Wilson's presidential nomination, and was...

Culture’s shifting sands on moral standards by Gilbert T. Sewell Sixty years ago juvenile delinquency and what to do about it suddenly drew a round of national soul searching. We no longer even use the term. We think in terms of juvenile monsters. Yesteryear’s hoods and troublemakers seem quaint and innocent beside today’s appalling school murders, gang rapes and teenage mayhem... ...Put together violent, porn-saturated electronic entertainment and armed, shame-free, unparented young men. Crazy things happen... ...Who is delinquent? A sociopath? A truant, an unwed mother, a rapist of drunken and unconscious girls, a meth addict or a mass murderer?...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

For those of you who didn't catch the tail end of Mark Levin's show Tuesday night, here's what he discussed in the last 5 minutes.(mp3) At the Constitutional Convention, July 17th, 1787, delegate Gunning Bedford of Delaware made the following proposal: Mr. BEDFORD moved that the 2d. member of Resolution 6. be so altered as to read "and moreover to legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent," or in which the harmony of the U. States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation."...

Why has the American society changed so drastically in the past few decades? How did the feminist movement get started? How did Obama get elected? Why are there so many single parent families? Where is God?

With deep condescension, my professors informed me that we live in a post-religious world. Religion, I was lectured, was the opiate of the people. I wondered, but never had the courage to suggest, that perhaps Marxism was the opiate of the elites.

Progressivism in America has always been a thuggish ideology. It rests on the notion that laws require no evidence to support their implementation, that intentions are all that matter and that those who oppose "change" of the sort progressives like are morally deficient. Progressivism requires Americans to separate off certain groups in American life as evil -- the rich ("greedy!"), gun owners ("hooligans!"), traditionally religious people ("sexists!"), Constitutional government advocates ("bigots!"). It requires that certain Americans be cast as good -- racial and ethnic minorities, low income earners and women ("victimized!"), irreligious people ("rationalists!") and big government advocates ("experts!"). Progressivism...

The generous mortgage-interest tax deduction that homeowners have long enjoyed could be diminished or eliminated as part of efforts to reduce the federal deficit, disproportionately hurting Massachusetts and other regions where real estate is especially costly. Proposals to change the deduction include limiting it to the 28 percent tax bracket and lower; converting the deduction to a less generous tax credit; reducing the maximum allowed mortgage balance from $1.1 million to $500,000; and eliminating the benefit for second homes and equity loans, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., nonpartisan think tank.

......[George] Washington spoke truly: a democratic form of government, republican or otherwise, is only as virtuous as the citizens who form it. Institutions of liberty, equality, and mutual respect cannot be sustained in, let alone re-imposed upon, a society that has generally forsaken every single virtue named in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and has in turn filled the soul's moral void with hatred, envy, gluttony, sloth, covetousness, lust, and collectivism's unique license to pillage, namely its presupposition that individual men -- that is, other men -- do not really exist. The entire moral and intellectual structure of the West has rotted...

With the political winds now blowing favorably for liberals, or “progressives” as they have more recently labeled themselves, another label (conservative) seems to have gained a negative connotation among some. Actually, there’s really nothing negative about conservatism, at least compared to all other alternatives. First, we should think about what conservatism actually is. The first definition in Webster’s Online Dictionary, by Wordnet, defines conservatism as “A political or theological orientation advocating the preservation of the best in society and opposing radical changes.” The second definition, by Webster, defines the term as “The disposition and tendency to preserve what is established;...

During my transcription process of the book Fabian Freeway, I would sometimes go through the footnotes and see what I could verify, when one thing in particular caught my eye. (Chapter 17) The fact that an old-line southern Democrat had been induced to sponsor the basic legislation so ardently desired by all spokesmen of gradual Socialism was an early and notable example of success for the Fabian technique known as permeation. This concept is actually used extensively throughout the book, but for whatever reason, it caught my eye in the current context. The Fabians turned "Permeation" into a policy because...

An academic lecture by Professsor Thomas West from Hillsdale College. An excellent lecture from their Consitution 201 series plus links to other Hillsdale College lectures. An educational series that I wish would be viewed in our private high schools. Excellent material for home schoolers. Pass it on.

President Obama’s first-term Supreme Court appointments make it seem unlikely to conservatives that the president will nominate judges over the next four years known for their judicial restraint. In fact, for progressives, judicial restraint takes on an entirely different description. At least, that’s the impression given by Ian Millhiser at a recent Center for American Progress event, in which he said that the “frivolous” lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, convinced him against judicial activism. “And one thing I will say that that taught me is that judicial restraint is really important and that I think...

The Progressives won on Tuesday. I don't mean the people who voted Democrat who call themselves "progressive." Though they won, too. I mean the Progressives who've been waging a century-long effort to transform our American-style government into a European-style state. The words "government" and "state" are often used interchangeably, but they are really different things. According to the founders' vision, the people are sovereign and the government belongs to us. Under the European notion of the state, the people are creatures of the state, significant only as parts of the whole. This European version of the state can be nice....

<> Though many of the state margins were narrow President Obama ran the table winning every swing or battleground state with the possible exception of Florida where votes are still being counted as of 5:30 this morning. President Obama also won the popular vote by 2 million votes. The President won 303 electoral votes to 206 for Romney. We knew about 11 pm that the President had won when Ohio was called for him. Democrats also held the Senate. Elizabeth Warren won with a good margin in Massachusetts. Claire McKaskill won in Missouri beating Akin-he of the legitimate rape...

In Madison, people dining at food carts don't have to eat their veggies, but in the future, they could get the choice. The city's Vending Oversight Committee, as part of its annual review of food carts, on Wednesday will discuss whether carts must offer vegetarian menu items.

.... Modern American liberalism has always had a streak of political messianism, a Great Man view of the presidency, and impatience with a government slowed by the checks and balances created by the Founders. The history of modern liberalism begins with Woodrow Wilson, the father of the movement to create a “living Constitution” in place of the written one. He sought to end what he called “blind worship” of the Constitution, taking pride in the fact that: We are the first Americans to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which...