Free Republic

For the past month the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has been ruffling a lot of feathers, especially for folks on the Left. He’s been doing this by basically gutting the censorship regimen that existed prior to his acquisition of the social media company. For those not familiar with the Twitter experience, beginning with Gamergate in 2014 (which more or less initiated the current “Woke Wars” in American culture), the platform became an increasingly repressive environment for people on the Right. Over the years, a greater and greater number of cultural and political touchstones were enforced to discourage criticism...

The Washington Post is leading tonight with a piece about how Biden is warning Russia not to use battlefield nukes in Ukraine. … Gosh, you think?! My God. Is there nobody eager to step in and try to get Ukraine and Russia to the peace table? It's good that Russia got its nose bloodied hard, but can we please put a stop to this before it gets out of hand? At the UN yesterday, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that unnamed Western countries that are militarily backing Ukraine -- that would include the United States -- are seen by...

Hello from the third National Conservatism conference, meeting in Miami. Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed the conference on the first night, and blew everyone away. It helped that he followed a dull but half-hysterical rant by Sen. Rick Scott, who fired a barrage of Republican cliches at the audience (watch it here). A conservative writer friend sitting across the room texted me during the speech to joke that this thing was so bad it's causing him to rethink all his convictions.

CHICAGO, February 18, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – As more and more observers arrive at the conclusion that Empire actor Jussie Smollett likely staged an assault against himself to blame on bigoted Trump supporters, Facebook temporarily blocked a post by The Benedict Option author Rod Dreher labeling the incident a “hate hoax.” The 36-year-old, openly-homosexual actor says he was assaulted in Chicago on January 29, with two masked men allegedly shouting racial and homophobic epithets, beating him to the point of fracturing a rib, putting a rope around his neck, and pouring bleach on him. “This is MAGA country,” they allegedly...

Two conservative ex-Catholics have recently been in the news sharing their reasons for leaving. One was Michael Coren. Apparently, the Canadian broadcaster and author of Why Catholics Are Right stopped attending Mass a year ago —but only publicly mentioned his switch to Anglicanism for the first time last month. He told the National Post on May 2 that he left over the Church’s prohibition of gay sex. “I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful....

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about sexual and romantic desire in young adults (birth cohort ~1995-2002, referred to from now on as Zoomers), as Rod Dreher’s article on bisexuality among young women https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/no-families-no-children-no-future-lgbt-30-percent-carle-c-zimmerman/

The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers. For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters.

The work begins with history. History as subtext should be noted. Not only is this about the history of totalitarianism, notably Marxist and Maoist communism, but it is also about remembering national history, about dismissing those myths which detract from our history, dismissing the myths that today’s neo-totalitarians present as fact, and replacing myth with honest history, with strong relationships, with strong teach, with strong commitments to truth, and more. This is not simply a Roman Catholic treatise, though that bell rings loudly, it is honest enough to cover Baptist and other protestant responses to the problem. Richard Wurmbrand, Alexander...

The premier world wildlife, science and history publication National Geographic seems to be succumbing to the woke mind virus. Well, senior staff at the famous magazine are, at least. According to one conservative commentator, Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg sent out a mass email from the magazine over the weekend in which she denounced her own “white” “privilege.” Now that’s what you call a “humblebrag.” But, yes, Susan Goldberg, the head editor of National Geographic and the first woman to have ever held that position at the prestigious left-wing rag, added an extra line to her signature in a National...

It’s a lie. Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process. I get sick and tired of people on the Left who refuse to believe things that contradict what they prefer to believe, but it is no better when people on the Right do it. It is as plain as day what happens when a people accept as true statements they have every reason to know are lies, and accept them because it suits their political preferences. The corruption of the truth is far worse than ordinary corruption, like stealing money. It makes it impossible to know what...

A reader who requests anonymity because he is very much in a position to know what he is talking about, and would be punished for saying so, writes: I hope this finds you well and just wanted to offer some thoughts on the pending purge of DOD on explicitly ideological lines: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/us/politics/military-race-capitol-riots-extremism.html https://www.stripes.com/news/us/austin-launching-panel-to-address-extremism-in-the-ranks-as-military-completes-stand-downs-1.669182 Here is a passage from the NYT story the reader highlights above:

If you like to be frightened out of your wits, you can’t do better than spend an hour or two with Rod Dreher on “Joe Rogan World vs. NPR World” and Angelo Codevilla’s “Revolution 2020.” Ron Dreher argues that America cannot thrive with two narratives competing for dominance, the American founding narrative and the progressive narrative, especially when the progressive narrative says of “people who don’t fit the progressive narrative, that you aren’t worthy of our consideration or attention.” Codevilla says the same, only different. More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational...

A stupid costume choice at a Halloween party two years ago is front-page news in the newspaper of record in the capital city of the Empire? What on earth? ... I read it first with bemusement at the moral panic, and then finally, with horror over what we are doing to ourselves.... Honestly, what kind of white idiot shows up in blackface these days? Granted, this was 2018, but blackface was extremely taboo then. That’s what Schafer’s joke was about: how Megyn Kelly got herself in a world of trouble by suggesting that blackface was not that big a deal....

I hate long drives, but the one redeeming aspect of them is that I get to do something I never do otherwise: listen to audiobooks. Driving to and from Dallas is a 16-hours-plus trip from Baton Rouge. I made it with my wife and kids this past weekend, for a wedding. On my son Matt’s recommendation, I listened to historian Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade The World. Before I say anything about the book, I want to recommend a cool piece of technology. It’s illegal to drive with standard earbuds in, so Matt let me borrow...

Jordan Peterson has had a hell of a year. From the National Post: Jordan Peterson is recovering from a severe addiction to benzodiazepine tranquilizers and was recently near death in an induced coma, his daughter Mikhaila said. He is being treated at a clinic in Russia after being repeatedly misdiagnosed at several hospitals in North America, she said. The University of Toronto psychologist who became an intellectual hero to a global audience by aligning self-help theory with anti-progressive politics was first prescribed the medication a few years ago to treat anxiety after what Mikhaila described as an autoimmune reaction to...

Expect to see more and more of these defections in the coming years as Christianity wanes in popularity and influence and it becomes increasingly costly to remain a follower of Christ. There will be a high price to be paid for those who remain faithful to Christ and the teachings of the Bible. People will lose their jobs, they’ll be denied professional credentials, they will be banned from popular social media platforms and essentially exiled from polite society. Christians will no longer be able to “hide in plain sight” (a phrase recently highlighted by Rod Dreher in describing how all...

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of two landmark events of American popular culture: the assassination of pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk, and the mass suicide of 900 members of the Peoples Temple cult. If you remember anything about the mass suicide, it’s probably that cult leader Jim Jones was a fundamentalist Christian demon whose Bible-thumping berated brainwashed followers into drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Harvey Milk, by contrast, is a folk hero. The San Francisco supervisor became a gay-rights saint because he was martyred by a right-wing fanatic. That’s the received history in both cases. But according to author Daniel Flynn,...

I would like fair-minded liberal readers to take a look at this op-ed from The New York Times, and consider that this is exactly the kind of left-wing racist rant that drives many of us white people into the arms of the Republican Party — not out of any particular love for the GOP, but out of fear of what this progressive racism would do in power. Alexis Grenell, the author, is a white woman and a Democratic strategist. Here’s the headline on her article. Note well that authors do not choose their headlines. This was written by someone at...

The abortion chain Planned Parenthood claims women are its primary clients. But last week, Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky wanted its supporters to know that it serves men, too, including transgender “men [who] have a uterus.” It repeated the line “Some men have a uterus” 11 times in the tweet. In another tweet, it also claimed men have ovaries, writing, “Whoo brovaries!” The Christian Post reports conservatives quickly mocked the abortion giant for the biologically inaccurate tweet. According to the report: This is “madness” tweeted Obianuju Ekeocha, founder and president of Culture of Life Africa and author or the...

A lot of people don't want to hear it, but it's true: in the future, you will either be a religious conservative, or secular. The religious left will evaporate. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of Daniel Cox, the head of research at PRRI, a firm whose religious views tend towards progressivism. Excerpts: The first and perhaps most significant reason for skepticism is that there are far fewer religious liberals today than there were a generation ago. Nearly four in 10 (38 percent) liberals are religiously unaffiliated today, more than double the percentage of the 1990s, according...