Free Republic

Two years ago, a slate of radical democratic socialists shocked the state of Nevada by winning all but one of the party leadership positions. In response, every paid staffer who worked for the Democratic Party resigned. Judith Whitmer became chairman of the party, and the civil war was on.The embittered establishment Democrats led by the remnants of the Harry Reid coalition formed an opposition party to the regular Democrats. Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, almost singlehandedly turned Nevada from a reliable red state during the 1970s and ’80s to a swing state.The socialists won thanks to some radical union...

Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential life outshined the time he spent at the White House and won him the praise of the progressive left — a more dominant part of the Democratic Party 42 years after the end of his presidency. Carter, 98, is a figure beloved by many Democrats in 2023 despite the difficulties of his administration. He’s respected for creating a footprint as a global humanitarian and peacebuilder in a bitterly divided world. To liberals, his imprint on their movement is especially profound. “President Carter promoted progressive issues well before they became mainstream,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our...

If Ronald Pestritto is right, then Barack Obama was wrong. Recall candidate Obama’s now famous (or should that be infamous?) pronouncement on the eve of his 2008 electoral triumph: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” More than that, if the Pestritto argument prevails, the Barack Obamas of our day may yet turn out to be the end of something rather than the beginning of something. According to Pestritto, the real transformers of America were the original progressives of better than a century ago and not their twenty-first century ideological descendants. The transformation that...

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary. The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to...

The National Institutes of Health is directing people to an absolutely absurd paper published in the journal Advances in Health Sciences Education. I have no idea how prominent the journal is, but I have a decent idea of the prominence of the NIH. A government agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, they essentially determine medical education in this country. The NIH actually invited these authors to lay out their theories of medical education. The paper is scary as hell. Not quite Canadian medical murder scary, but very very scary nonetheless. Why so frightening? Well, our NIH...

The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tiltThe long shadow of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. Since the launch of the so-called “Twitter Files” — Elon Musk’s self-styled exposé of the alleged excesses of the “woke” managers of Twitter before he bought it — there’s been a lively debate over what exactly Musk is trying to accomplish. His statements clearly indicate that he sees himself as being engaged in some kind of culture war — “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” as he tweeted on Monday morning. But what does the...

Since the French Revolution, leftwing politics, as distinct from the liberal sort, have been essentially about revenge, including in Great Britain with the founding of the Labour Party in 1900, an event recently characterized by the Daily Telegraph as an act of vengeance. Then, leftist vengeance meant class vengeance. While it remains so to some degree, it has lately been greatly expanded, complicated and fortified by identity politics, in which class resentments are compounded and confused by innumerable others hitherto unimagined — and some, indeed, almost unimaginable. Most began as aspects of what was called “grievance” politics, which over the...

As 2022 comes to a close, several audiobooks are all coming together around the same time. The latest is a little pamphlet written by Norman Thomas titled ""What is Industrial Democracy?Now why did I record this book? Norman Thomas is a socialist, not a progressive - and even, in this little work, he takes the time to swipe at the progressives. So what gives? Let's start with two things we all know and can easily prove in 15 seconds, and let's look at how those things are connected. First, nobody would dare call Theodore Roosevelt a socialist. But we have...

You may have seen that the Federalist Society has been holding its annual convention in Washington. I was there on Thursday and Friday. They have recorded all the presentations. If you want to watch some, go to this link and see what interests you. There was not a lot of moaning about the election results. Rather, the focus was on high-minded issues, mostly of constitutional and administrative law. I have selected a highlight that you may find interesting. One of the lunchtime panels on Thursday was titled “Render Law Unto Congress and Execution Unto the Executive: The Supreme Court Rebalances...

Last week Erik Wemple at the Washington Post wrote a really solid story about the firing of James Bennet from the NY Times. In case you’ve forgotten, Bennet was fired after he presided over the publication of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton back in 2020. Cotton argued that the National Guard should be called out to deal with riots which were taking place in locations around the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. There was a huge backlash on Twitter and within the Times’ newsroom led by black staffers who argued (if you can call...

Show of hands- True or false: The moment that force will become necessary to maintain freedom in America will be easy to identify.

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.” The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as...

You may not have been aware of it, but a religious revival has been sweeping America for the past few years. However, rather than the old-time religion of Christian piety, it’s a new religion with new idols and a new direction. Yet, not entirely new - it’s the latest phase in an evolving revolutionary belief system that has consciously set itself against every aspect of traditional American culture and society. Whereas earlier progressivism made an effort to appear to integrate itself into earlier American paradigms even as it was acting to overturn them, the current religion of Woke Progressivism has...

There is a new party, which it is difficult to characterize because it is made up of several elements. As I see it, it is made up three elements in particular. The first consists of those Republicans whose consciences and whose stomachs could not stand what the regular Republicans were doing. Added to this element are a great many men and women of noble character and of elevated purpose who believe that this combination of forces may, in the future, bring them out on a plane where they can accomplish those things which their hearts have so long desired. I...

Once again, Twitter comes through as a go-to source for material to write about. So I was a bit amused when I came across this tweet a few days ago, I found it amusing because I have to admit, Star Trek is one of those things I would now classify alongside, say, the MCU movies as being the domain of the bugman. And since bugmen are a little…suspect in my eyes, well, you know. But as it turns out, the text in the tweet comes from an article appearing all the way back in 2005 in the Huffington Post, before...

Working-class Americans are paying a heavy price for their elites’ moral posturing. As gasoline prices in the US continue to surge to an unprecedented $7 a gallon in some places, President Joe Biden seems more interested in finding someone to blame than mitigating the problem. ‘Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’, the president said on Friday at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference. The president then cited a ‘fact checker’ in the New York Times and a Washington Post op-ed to counter anyone daring to lay the blame for skyrocketing prices at the...

America’s most toxic two-term president left a lasting welt on the nation. If you were dragging getting out of bed to start this week, thank Woodrow Wilson. Daylight saving time is just one of a battery of ways that Wilson and his presidency changed America, most of them for the worse. I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more...

There are many significant moments in American history that have informed the principles of America’s tradition of liberalism, but not since the American founding have we lived in one so important. The United States is at a “1776 Moment” of ideological transformation. The American Revolution of 1776 marked a change of political ideology from constitutional monarchy to liberalism. Today, the ideological transformation is from liberalism to progressivism.

Russia's New 'Conservative' Ideology To Counter Liberalism ...

The Study of Administration (1887), by Woodrow Wilson, sets the stage for the bureaucracies that would follow it a little over a dozen years after it's publication. Starting roughly in the 20th century, the progressive era saw the explosive growth of administrative agencies lacking any oversight whatsoever, a malady we suffer under to this day over 120 years later. Unique among all generations of Americans before them, the progressives hated the United States Constitution, and Administration was their answer once and for all to get around this pesky obstacle we have all come to know and love.