Free Republic

“I didn’t drink because I’m Native," said Melissa Rose, an Akwesasne Mohawk midwife. "I drank to survive colonialism."

Parents fighting critical race theory are making a fundamentally flawed assumption: That the government entities to which they appeal are responsive to them.Following a wave of parent outrage at finding their children’s public schools pushing racism under the guise of antiracism this past school year, states have begun to ban the ideology. Parents are engaging with local school boards all across the country, demanding they stop teaching racial division and start educating children. The outrage is not just among Republicans, but also Independent and even Democrat voters, making Democrats nervous enough that the Biden administration recently pretended to backtrack.What's going...

What is our recourse when our own government criminalizes our most basic rights while it allows Black Lives Matter and Antifa to rampage through our streets with impunity? Is there no Plan B when the federal or state governments treat all conservatives like terrorists, business owners like pariahs, and those who yearn to breathe unmasked air like murderers? Well, one Missouri county is demonstrating the importance of sheriffs and county officials returning to self-government and interposing between the governmental usurpers and the most sacred rights of the people.

2020 punctuated the generations-long decline of our republic. Will that half of America that sent Trump to drain the swamp care anymore after believing themselves disenfranchised in 2020?“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Never has...

It’s absurd to claim Cotton was saying Shakespeare was American simply because he said Chinese students should learn about the playwright 'from America.' Shakespeare understood ordered liberty. To repurpose words from “Macbeth,” social media and politics are “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” For proof, look no further than the response to Sen. Tom Cotton’s claim that Chinese students who study in American universities should not be taught quantum computing.Instead, Cotton said, “If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America.” He called it a scandal that American...

There is an exceptional amount of lying in Washington these days, and our media and politicians are entranced by it. Lies must achieve extraordinary bulk and quality to impress the sport’s most ardent practitioners: Only a particularly nasty outbreak of mendacity could draw Washington’s attention to a subject it knows with such intimacy and depth. Most Americans are unsurprised. Long ago, they learned lies are the oxygen of the political world. They know the phrase “political deception” is a redundancy, like “false pretense,” “free gift,” or “foreign imports.” Most electoral lies, they’ve found, are dandruff on the body politic, pedestrian...

Yes, it is good that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, especially in light of revelations of her private email security breaches and pay-for-play administration of the State Department. If true, she belongs in prison. However, what is ominous is the number of voters who, despite all that was known of her crimes, still voted for her. This is not a sign of a healthy American electorate. It seems the same citizens who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 after his disastrous first four years voted for her. Many people who go the polls in our generation are simply not thinking....

During the Bretton Woods Conference, in 1944, Lord Halifax is said to have “whispered to Lord Keynes: ‘It’s true: they have the money bags but we have all the brains.’” By “they,” Halifax meant the Americans. His frustration with the American mind—often prosaic and anti-intellectual—during the critical Bretton-Woods negotiations seems as valid today. As odious as Britain’s elites are; boy, are they cleverer than ours. Take the impromptu interview, on June 28, which Richard Quest, CNN’s imported British broadcast journalist, conducted with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. Farage had emerged exhilarated from the coven that is the...

Two of America's three branches of federal government have declared war on parental authority. President Obama's Department of Education has been explicitly attacking schools that have the audacity to prefer traditional morality. However, making sense of the Education Department's actions requires looking at the Obergefell same-sex "marriage" decision. The Obergefell decision explains why the Department of Education will not stop until it has eliminated parental authority to teach traditional morality to their children...

Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers voted Friday in an unofficial referendum on democratic reform that has alarmed Beijing and sets the stage for a possible showdown with the government, with mass protests aimed at shutting down the Chinese capitalist enclave’s financial district. Tensions are boiling over in Hong Kong, which came back under Chinese control in 1997, over how to choose the city’s next leader. Since the end of British colonial rule, Hong Kong’s leaders have been picked by an elite pro-Beijing committee. Beijing has pledged to allow Hong Kongers to choose their own chief executive starting in 2017....

Sounds like the very definition of elitism. The elites in Washington DC, most of whom have never set foot in Nevada (outside a casino), controlling what the local citizens can or cannot do on the land within their state boundaries? This is not the way America was intended to be governed. Ever heard of local control? Self-government? States rights? To many of us out here in the West, pursuit of happiness means ranching, farming, logging, mining, drilling, hunting, fishing, or just living in and enjoying God's great outdoors. It's un-American and unconstitutional for unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington DC to...

In order for you to claim the right to be a sovereign citizen who can rebuke unwarranted intrusions into your life, you also need to take on the burden of self-government and accept the risk inherent in living in a society where every citizen is free and sovereign as well. But is seems we don’t want that, it seems we want to be coddled and protected from harm, especially from those “others”, those liberals or conservatives who scare us with their crazy notions. We want to make sure those brown skinned foreigners don’t infect us with their weird customs, that...

Right now I am reading an advanced copy of Os Guinness’s's A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. The book will be released by IVP on August 6. It’s an essential read and I pledge to publish a future review for our PowerBlog readers. Guinness was interviewed in Religion & Liberty in 1998. In my recent talks around town I have been asking questions about our capacity and desire for self-government as a community and nation. I recently gave a local presentation on President Calvin Coolidge and he helped inspire a greater desire to ask the foundational...

The 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War offers an opportunity to reflect upon the wartime statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln. Impelled to the presidency by a constitutional crisis, Lincoln stood on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution both before and during the Civil War. With special attention to what Americans today may learn from Lincoln as we grapple with a global war and prodigious debt, this lecture will illuminate Lincoln's example of self-government under law.

Davis was informed the next day.

At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, as the delegates filed out of the hall, a Mrs. Powell is reported to have asked Benjamin Franklin the following question: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin’s oft quoted and terse reply was reported by fellow signer of the Constitution James McHenry to be “A republic, if you can keep it.” For every American citizen from that day forward this simple, short phrase comprises both the promise and the challenge of the American Revolution: republican self-governance. The ability of a mass of people...

AIP is the Citizen-Led Campaign to Save AmericaThe example set by the people of Missouri is the cure for what ails America Yesterday the citizens of Missouri voted overwhelmingly, 71%-29%, to reject the unconstitutional ObamaCare mandate that forces us all to buy a product we may not want. Of the State's 114 counties, only two voted with Obama, and those were the two biggest urban counties in the state. Every other county voted to reject the Obama socialist scheme. In one county in northern Missouri, the vote was 89.2% against. That in itself is a earthshaking story. But the backstory...

An open letter to Washington, D.C. This letter is published to advise the federal government in Washington D.C. that this SOVEREIGN AMERICAN will NOT submit to the marxist/communist coup currently taking place in Washington, D.C., and will ACTIVELY OPPOSE IT.This SOVEREIGN AMERICAN will IGNORE any laws, rules or regulations that come from Washington D.C. that further restrict the FREEDOM and LIBERTY of individuals, and will in the future IGNORE any PREVIOUS, UNConstitutional laws, rules or regulations that have restricted the FREEDOM and LIBERTY of individuals in this country. Further, this SOVEREIGN AMERICAN will encourage others to ignore any laws, rules...

However you regard the outcome of the November 4 election, it was heartening to watch 125 million Americans cast their ballots at precincts from coast to coast. Unfortunately, they and the many millions more who skipped the whole thing collectively know frightfully little about the government we just reaffirmed, the principles that undergird it, and the basic documents in which those ideas are enshrined. Thus, Americans slouch into the 21st Century -- a free and confident people blissfully unaware of how we got here or how we shall continue our 232-year-old tradition of limited self-government. Consider these staggering data: *Fully...

Part 7 of 'The Crisis of the Republic' Of all the articles in the "Crisis of the Republic" series, this one is the most important. It deals with the relationship between the sovereignty and democratic self-government of our nation as a whole and the personal sovereignty and self-control of individual citizens. The failure to think through and act upon the consequences of this relationship is the main reason for the Democratic Party's near total abandonment of America's principles, as well as the inadequacy and failure of the current leadership of the Republican Party. It is the main reason the American...