Free Republic

Against all logic and against all historical rationality, that ideology has survived and, what is even more irrational, has in some respects even strengthened, augmenting its ranks throughout the Western world. SNIP After the collapse of the Soviet monster, that is of the great financier of communist movements all over the world, which were therefore deprived of considerable economic means, it seemed that communism in the West could die out or at least be reduced to small groups of nostalgics, as it had happened for National Socialism and for the few Nazis scattered around the world. In fact, the Soviet...

Does Trans-World Airline Really Fly to Happy-Land? Intro: Chastity is Dead—Not long ago, family warnings passed from parent to child on avoiding unwise hookups and dodging defective partners, such as the promiscuous tart. Roman historian Tacitus offered this gem—“A woman who’s lost her chastity will stoop to anything.” Yet now, the category of un-chastity no longer exists since “slut shaming” is immoral—despite female’s sexual history being a statistical premonition of marital longevity. Overall, decline in romantic relationships from the 60’s till now is everywhere obvious. And yet—no element more influences human happiness and productivity than marital stability. Perhaps why, in...

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...

Apparently, a URL was mandatory, so I linked to FR. Has anyone else read this book? I inherited it from my grandfather, who was a cop with an extensive library consisting of all manners of philosophy, religion, myth, and history. I ask because I'm hardly thirty pages in, and I feel like this book was just written. Quotes shared here are cited as well as the can be via a smartphone and clumsy keypads. --- "Dedicated to: Mary Gracious Mother-Heart Of the World's Savior In Prayerful Hope Of The Conversion of Russia" Lastly, a paragraph; the one which made me...

LONDON — When I got off my flight from Beijing to London nearly two weeks ago, I knew what I had to do: go straight into self-quarantine. I live in China, where a dramatic lockdown since late January has made it clear that all residents, even those well beyond the epicenter’s outbreak in Wuhan, were in the middle of a global health crisis. The boarding process in Beijing was the final reminder: two mandatory temperature checks and an electronic health statement for which I had to provide an email address and two contact phone numbers. But as the plane approached...

Modern science, medicine, political freedom, the market economy—all of them, we’re told, are the result of a sort of miracle that took place 250 years ago. That miracle is called the Enlightenment, a moment in history when philosophers suddenly overthrew religious dogma and tradition and replaced it with human reason. Harvard professor Steven Pinker puts it this way: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment.” There’s just one problem with this claim. It isn’t really true. Consider the U.S. Constitution, which is frequently said to be a product of Enlightenment thought. But you only need to read...

The Hungarian government has warned that Christians and Christianity are increasingly being driven out of public life in Europe, as well as being persecuted around the world more viciously than any other religious minority. “Some years ago, at the Brussels City Hall, it was decided not to set a Christmas tree, and in Santa Monica, California, a ban on nativity screening was made on the grounds of world neutrality,” said Tristan Azbej, the Hungarian state secretary with particular responsibility for the Hungary Helps programme which extends aid to Christian minorities globally, in comments reported by the Hungarian press. “Meanwhile, in...

KYIV, Ukraine—As the Russian shells and rockets rained down on them in the frontline town of Debaltseve in February 2015, Ukrainian troops began to receive curious, anonymous text messages on their cellphones. “Your comrades nearby already left their positions, so you should leave yours as well,” one message read. The messages also claimed that Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at that time, as well as Ukrainian military commanders, had “betrayed” their soldiers. The Ukrainian military later concluded that Russian military forces had taken over the local cellphone network with mobile jamming stations. The text messages were part of a psychological operation...

THE MODERN FEMINIST CULTURE WAR https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2019/08/08/the-culture-war/ The light of liberty no longer shines as bright in The West as it once did. The Trump administration gives hope of a reversal but few conservative governments have as robust a figure as The Donald standing up for freedom. The external threat of totalitarian China is real but the threat from within of radical forces attacking and destroying the best western traditions is doing more damage now. How can civilized nations allow the feminist minority of one gender to hijack society and the courts and police and governments to make the demonization and...

It’s bizarre—perverse, really—that the people doing the most whining about cultural appropriation by Americans don’t actually have worthwhile cultures themselves. The fact of the matter is that the only culture in the history of the world that amounts to anything is that of Western civilization. The West has given all of humanity concepts like freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, free markets, individualism, science, and rationality. In addition, the West has created almost all of the world’s great music, literature, architecture, and philosophy That’s absolutely true of Africa. Africans should be eternally grateful to the West...

An Increasingly Dangerous Stand-off between Civilizations by Denis MacEoin July 28, 2019 at 5:00 am https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14360/standoff-between-civilizations Not all people who worry about a replacement of civilizations are necessarily violent or even incorrect. They appear to be frightened folk, sent over the edge by matters they may feel beyond control. In Europe and the United States, they have witnessed wave upon wave of attacks by individuals and groups openly espousing violence in the name of religion. They seem to fear that their own governments are doing too little to protect them and their families from future attacks. "What unites these groups...

WotW reflects on the recent 'Gilets Noirs' protest in Paris and the ongoing migrant siege of the West.

From the extremist Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia to the Egyptian cult of the Muslim Brotherhood and Syrian terrorist groups allied with ISIS, the West has backed fundamentalist forces at the expense of nationalist Muslims.Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has for the first time openly said what has been the West's worst kept secret. According to him, the Saudi-funded spread of Wahhabism - the main source of the fundamentalist ideology of terrorist groups like ISIS began as a result of Western countries asking Riyadh to help counter Russia during the Cold War. Speaking to the US media, bin Salman said...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on Thursday that liberal values were obsolete because they had been rejected by the majority of the people in Western nations. Putin told the Financial Times newspaper that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had made a cardinal mistake by adopting a liberal policy towards immigration from the Middle East. “The liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected. What rights are these? Every crime must have its punishment,” Putin said in...

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump's election and the "yellow vests" protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives? Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists. What are the popular gripes against them? One, illegal immigration and open borders have led to chaos. Lax immigration policies...

People are getting dumber. That's not a judgment; it's a global fact. In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline. Though there are legitimate questions about the relationship between IQ and intelligence, and broad recognition that success depends as much on other virtues like grit, IQ tests in use throughout the world today really do seem to capture something meaningful and durable. Decades of research have shown that individual IQ scores predict things such as educational achievement and longevity. More broadly, the average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation....

The following brief but highly informative interview, titled, "Europe: Deep Spiritual Crisis," appeared earlier this year on Herland Report TV.'The host, Hanne Nabintu Herland, a Norwegian historian of religions and a journalist, interviews Iben Thranholm, a Danish theologian and journalist. Both women are to be commended for raising many important points — indeed, for getting to the heart of the West's problems, including vis-à-vis Islam — that are seldom acknowledged in American media, certainly not "mainstream" media.'Moreover, as both come from Scandinavia, arguably the most "progressive" region in the world, they know what they speak of and offer a prognostication the U.S....

One of the most important doctrines in Western law is that of stare decisis, a Latin term of art which means "to stand by decided cases; to uphold precedents; to maintain former adjudications". In modern jurisprudence, however, it has come to take on a life of its own, with all precedents being presumed to be well-founded, unbiased legal decisions, rather than political decisions, and presumed to have both the authority of the constitutional enactments on which they are based, plus that of the precedents on which they are based, so that later precedents are presumed to be more authoritative than...

To shoot 'The Brink', an illuminating new documentary about former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, director Alison Klayman embedded herself with his entourage for a year, beginning in October, 2017 and finishing just after the 2018 midterm elections. Klayman captured extraordinarily candid moments from Bannon, and the film colours in and rounds out the black-and-white one-dimensionality with which he has often been depicted in the media. Like anyone, Bannon is complex... What he does genuinely seem to believe is that America is at an inflection point in its history, a Fourth Turning, in the parlance of sociologist Talcott Parsons, a foundational...

The importance of Christianity in the formation of Western civilization can hardly be denied. That importance is not simply a matter of the past. In the process of secularization Western culture did emancipate itself from its religious roots, but that emancipation was by no means complete. A complete break from Christianity was not intended in the seventeenth century by those who wanted to put the public culture on an anthropological rather than religious foundation. The issue at that time was not a revolt against the Christian religion, nor even against its influence on the culture. Rather, there was an urgently...