Free Republic

It may be that the best book that will ever be written about today’s progressive mind-set was published in 1941. That in The Red Decade author Eugene Lyons was, in fact, describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to be confronted with how little has been gained by hard experience. The celebration of feelings over reason? The certainty of moral virtue? The disdain for tradition and the revising of history for ideological ends? The embrace of the latest definition of correct thought? Lyons was one of...

One of the most damaging yet least-known Supreme Court cases is J. W. Hampton, Jr., & Co. v. United States (1928). This case is much, much worse than the more well known case of Wickard v. Filburn. Wickard enables the bureaucracy to distort the commerce clause to do damage to our lives. Hampton enables the bureaucracy to exist. Without Hampton, Wickard is effectively repealed. A Twofer! Hampton also has another effect that is usually missed. There is a question as to when the Supreme Court decided it was fit to become involved in the process of creating law. This is...

On Thursday, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court called into question the whole project of modern American governance. In Gundy v. United States, which concerned the constitutionality of a law requiring the registration of sex offenders, four of the more conservative justices endorsed a controversial legal theory according to which Congress lacks the power to delegate broad powers to agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Heath and Human Services. For now, the four more-liberal justices have brushed back the challenge, ruling 5 to 3, with Justice Samuel Alito, that Congress can give to the...

“Socialism or barbarism!” That’s the classic Marxist theme, the title of many far-left books, and the stark existential choice posed by socialists of all stripes: Either adopt our enlightened way – or sink into barbarism. However, as with most everything else on the left, this is pure projection since history proves that, intentionally or not, barbarism is precisely the end result of socialism. Really? you ask. I know socialism ignores all the laws of economics and always seems to fail, but BARBARISM? Yes, barbarism. And we’re not talking just about the unprecedentedly barbaric death toll of over 100 million during...

This year, Sen. Rand Paul's (R–Ky.) effort to balance the federal budget didn't even get a floor vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. Paul's so-called "Pennies Plan" failed a procedural vote on Monday evening when only 22 senators voted in favor of a cloture motion that would have brought the bill to a final vote. A majority of Republicans and all Democrats voted against proceeding to a floor vote on the bill. It's another sign that fiscal responsibility is all but dead in Congress, even as the national debt heads toward record highs and the budget deficit approaches $1 trillion this...

Here is an interesting news item, right out of progressive ideology. I wanted to highlight this because the role of expertise has been, in my experience, one of the most misunderstood aspects of progressivism. Millennial dads have pathetic DIY skills compared to baby boomersIn this story, the "shocking" statistics are reported: Many millennial dads reported not owning a cordless drill (46%), a stepladder (49%), a set of screwdrivers (38%) or even a hammer (32 percent) — an item owned by 93% of boomer dads. Why the decline in DIY? Now this article tries to chalk it up to increases in...

The progressive era is a mystery to far too many people, and this is by design. One example of this is the book "Philip Dru: Administrator", which is in reality a blueprint of progressive action. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is an agenda - a provable fact. But due to the progressives' need for shadows and darkness with which to hide in, they have erased their own history and put a nice shiny bow on it. At the time of its publication, Dru was a big deal. We don't know that today, again, by design, but it...

Dan Freemyer, the pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, has obviously been drinking very deeply of Progressive Leftism's poisonous propaganda of the lie. To cheers from the crowd at Baylor University's 2019 commencement, Freemyer delivered a poison-loaded prayer to a 'god' that is not the Holy Triune God but pagan Progressivism's golden calf: "God, give them the moral imagination to reject the old keys we are trying to give them to a planet that we are poisoning by running it on fossil fuels and misplaced priorities – a planet with too many straight, white men like me behind...

A review of Michael Malice's new book, The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics.

You may have noticed that conservatives are blessed with an impressive lineup of intellectual heavyweights. Liberals have none, literally none. A few of those on the conservative side are Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, Dennis Prager, Shelby Steele, Jordon Peterson, and Mark Levin. *snip* You cannot name a single liberal who has anything approaching the above credentials or intellectual output. Why? There are a number of reasons. Liberalism is fundamentally about feelings rather than thoughts. Also the left focuses on intentions, the right focuses on results and the ways by which results are achieved. An advantage of making intentions your...

Progressivism has been with us for just under 120 years now, destroying the country. Since day one, these people have staked their claim on the purity that they always have and always will stand against monopoly. Not so fast. Public posturing and the resulting public policy compared with the core ideological belief are two very different things. Progressives stand for and are ardent believers in the absolute regulation or complete nationalization of everything in sight, believing that government is the only entity that has any responsibility to be engaged in this, that, or the other thing. How dare they claim...

You have to give credit to progressives, when they are intent on achieving their purpose they don't let anything get in their way. Even reality. So the definition of a word in some dictionary stands little chance of being protected from the onslaught of "reform" in the face of the machinations of these people. Realistically, it is to the progressives benefit to take words and weaponize them. We have all been trained by progressive-dominated media, government schools, and even some of our "leaders" that a monopoly is a purely market-based entity and it's a bad entity. Well, not so fast....

At PragerU, we have released about 400 videos on virtually every subject outside of the natural sciences and math. Along with two billion views, the videos have garnered tens of thousands of comments. So we have a pretty good handle on what people most love and most hate. For example, any video defending America or Israel inevitably receives many negative responses. But no videos elicit the amount of contempt and mockery that videos defending religion, explaining the Bible, or arguing for God do. Why is that? There is a good reason. The Bible and the left (not liberalism; leftism) are...

The Democrats’ behavior after 2016 is not mass delusion or mass hysteria or Trump Derangement Syndrome, or any of the other psychobabble explanations that dominate our political commentary. My first career was as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and I am not impressed with spraying around clinical terms as a substitute for looking at what is in front of us. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a colorful description for political behavior. It is not an analysis of what causes it. Under Barack Obama, ordinary Democrats became enamored of the narrative that they were the Good People, hence entitled to crush anyone in their...

As recent electoral results have shown, not even Canada is immune to the rise of populist right-wing politics. Justin Trudeau has not only done severe damage to his reputation and chances of re-election, but he has also tarnished his brand of flamboyant progressivism for years to come... It's not that voters in the center have suddenly swung hard to the right, but rather that they are trying to swing away from this buffoon and everything that he is associated with. Bad optics and economic concerns swing elections way faster than principles and ideology ever could. That is the lesson here.

To write a thorough and well-documented history of the Left is an impressive accomplishment in itself.  To write such a history so that it reads with the ease and flow of a good, gripping novel is another thing altogether, but that is what Mark Melcher and Stephen Soukup have done with Know Thine Enemy: A History of the Left (Volume One).  This comprehensive history of the Left’s major figures and movements is page-turning read for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the threat to America’s culture, politics, and future posed by the Left’s radical agenda.The book’s opening alerts the reader...

Without God’s goodness as a plumb line for right and wrong, moderns have no framework with which to judge the clear evils that exist in human behavior. So they’ve settled on a simplistic moral standard that boils all sin down to a single category: oppression. Having learned about a few undeniable evils that existed in the recent past—slavery, Nazi concentration camps, Jim Crow—they’ve seized on the notion of “History” as a moral force that trends in one direction, the direction of progress. History has a right side and a wrong side, and that line—however vague and changeable it might appear—is...

If you think that the “tax the rich”rhetoric from the left-wing of the Democratic Party is primarily about economics you would be sadly mistaken. After all, there isn’t enough tax revenue in the highest income bracket, even with a 90% marginal rate, to fund anyone’s pet social program for more than 48 hours. Do progressives know this? Of course they do. The same observation holds true for the so-called ”Green New Deal” legislation recently proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the outrageous media darling from Queens. It’s true that this grab bag of environmental regulation, if enacted, would likely cost trillions and...

Sounding like the presidential candidate he insists he is not, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unleashed an energetic attack against President Donald Trump's policies Tuesday, pledging New York will lead the nation forward with the most progressive agenda in state history.

I rarely make predictions -- whether of election results or anything else. My policy has always been to say what I believe should be done, not what will be done. I am making an exception with regard to America in 2019. 2019 will be a dark year in America. Thanks to the left's control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019 -- with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself. Truth will not be the point. Defamation will....