Free Republic

When I was a teenager I remember what passed for wisdom from the older college kids: “Hey man, everyone knows you can’t legislate morality.” I wasn’t comfortable with that and eventually learned why. Law reflects the morality of the lawgiver. It can't be any other way. A self-governing people can’t avoid imprinting the law with the essence of their beliefs and traditions. In contrast, lawgivers disconnected from the people cannot act in the people’s interest. In 2016, one of John Podesta's emails released by WikiLeaks exposed how progressive elites intended, after Clinton won, to exploit the people. The email features...

Today marks the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Though the treaty ended World War I — supposedly the "war to end all wars" — it practically ensured future conflict and charted a course directly toward World War II. A century after its signing, it remains an object lesson reminding us what kind of disasters lurk when self-righteous progressives, who think they can run the world, get their hands on the levers of power. The basis of the treaty was the progressive internationalism of college professor–turned-president Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had only two years of political experience...

Though betting odds had a 20 percent chance that Donald Trump would use his brief prime-time Oval Office address to declare a national emergency at the Mexican-U.S. border, he did not. Instead, he dedicated his time to a hodge-podge of lurid descriptions of violence juxtaposed to a plea for humanitarian aid. In no way does that mean the issue is settled, and a national emergency declaration remains very much in the mix as one way to break the logjam, appeal to the Republican base, reopen the government, and, oh, trigger a legal crisis. Just Wednesday, Trump claimed an “absolute right”...

Claremont Review of Books, the brainiest and best publication in the conservative world, published my review of a new biography of America's first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson. He was an unreconstructed defender of slavery and a rancorous apologist for the Confederacy. His whole academic and political life was devoted to tearing up the Constitution and replacing it with a progressive dictatorship. This resentment against a Union that had crushed his native south in the Civil War drove his obsession with a world government with power to issue orders to the United States of America. The constitution in Wilson’s reading had...

In 1915, the US Marines invaded Haiti, occupying the country until 1934. US officials rewrote the Haitian constitution, and when the Haitian national assembly refused to ratify it, they dissolved the assembly. They then held a "referendum" in which about 5% of the electorate voted and approved the new constitution – which conveniently changed Haitian law to allow foreigners to own land – with 99.9% voting for approval. The situation today is remarkably similar. The country is occupied, and although the occupying troops wear blue helmets, everyone knows that Washington calls the shots. On 28 November an election was held...

Some of you need to cease the denial and accept the harsh reality that the left hates you. It’s a fact, as much as the liberal gaslight gang and the conserva-sissy weakhearts deny it. You can tell that leftists hate you by the way that leftists tell you that they hate you.Take Sarah Jeong, please – hey, the New York Times was happy to get this bitter creep onboard because of her history of virulent racism. The Times saw her hate as a plus, not a negative, an asset, not a liability. You can’t draw any other conclusion – if you...

Richard Stengel, a former high-level U.S. government official, head of the office for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department from 2013 to 2016, former editor of Time Magazine and a regular pundit on MSNBC, said in April of 2018 at a Council on Foreign Relations forum about “fake news,” that he “supports the use of propaganda on American citizens.” He then continued; “Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job.” Keep in mind, that in 2013,...

Sound too conspiratorial to be true? Like the cover-up ops of spy novels? Well, it's reality. And it is possibly the most bizarre, inhumane and abusive way that the White House is expanding its power over the American people. It's not an extremist belief or theory of the far right. It's a fact that has been confirmed by The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC and even documented by the far-left online magazine Salon.com. And it's the gravest nightmare of U.S. citizens and abandonment of our Constitution to date: a presidential assassination program in which U.S. citizens are...

It’s 1911, convinced his entry to the race splits the party, Roosevelt decides against running for President. He campaigns vigorously for Taft, who easily wins his second term. Woodrow Wilson never becomes President. How does this rewrite the 20th Century and today?

Update (June 16th, 2010 10:20 am): A press assistant at the Wilson Center confirmed this morning that what I wrote below is correct. The ceremonial dinner, honoring Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, along with a Turkish business tycoon, is scheduled for Thursday evening, at the Four Seasons, in Istanbul. What follows is my post originally written Wednesday night:Turkey’s leaders have made a lot of news lately, and it’s been ugly: holding hands with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blessing the lead role of the terror-linked Turkish IHH foundation in last month’s Gaza terror flotilla, and voting last week against new sanctions on Iran in...

The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left Dinesh D’Souza’s new book takes on the real fascists of the Left. September 7, 2017 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. Almost a century ago, President Woodrow Wilson watched approvingly as the title card appeared on the screen, "The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright." Birth of a Nation was the first movie to play inside the White House. Many...

This is fully conjecture, but I'm convinced that the answer is yes. During the time in which Wilson was inventing the concept of the "living and breathing constitution", Wilson made the following observations: (Constitutional Government, page 55) The government of the United States was constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe [see: Newtonian government]. In our own day, whenever we discuss the structure or development of anything, whether in nature or in society, we consciously or unconsciously follow Darwin; but before Darwin, they followed Newton....

One hundred years ago today, the racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson conned America into a war we had no business entering.

Princeton is under renewed pressure to rename an institution honoring President Woodrow Wilson after activists branded him a “white supremacist”. Campus activists made another attempt to scrub Wilson’s name from the university’s School of Public and International Affairs (pictured above) over his views on race. He agreed to re-segregate large parts of the federal government, expressed sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan and regularly worked to exclude or dissuade black people from public life. As a Vox explainer notes, although the 1910s had very different racial norms to today, Wilson’s attitude was exceptional even then. However, despite the pressure, Princeton...

Joseph Patrick Tumulty is a name that every American should know; and yet so few do. He may have helped run the country for the last two years of Woodrow Wilson's Administration. This is what a Hillary Clinton presidency portends. Joseph Tumulty was born in New Jersey in 1879. His parents were middle class ethnic Irish, and he became a lawyer, and later a state representative. However, Tumulty was an accomplished wheeler-dealer, and Woodrow Wilson called upon his services when he started his political climb from Princeton University academic to Governor of New Jersey and then President. Tumulty was Wilson's...

Judging from the outcome of recent federal court cases involving Voter ID, one could be forgiven for believing two things. First, there is an unqualified right to vote. Second, the more voting by more people on more matters, the better. Voting itself would appear to be an unalienable right. Ever expanding democracy has long been the Progressive’s means to their fuzzy, yet dangerous social justice ends. Our national experience has shown that the explosion of the democratic element since the direct election of senators, voting by women, repeal of Jim Crow, abolition of poll taxes, lowering the voting age to...

Carol Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, is one of the stars of Dinesh D’Souza's new movie, :Hillary’s America," which examined in detail the historical racism of the Democratic Party. It's a story that hasn't been told by reporters from the liberal media who keep repeating the mantra that Democrats represent minorities, the poor, the downtrodden and the vulnerable. The movie highlights the fact that Democratic President Woodrow Wilson attended a screening of the pro-KKK film, "The Birth of a Nation," in the White House itself. If you don’t want to believe D’Souza's facts, consider...

After a war no one wanted and eight years of the devious and racially divisive Democrat Woodrow Wilson, America was ready for a change and “return to normalcy.” Nevertheless, it took until the tenth ballot at their 1920 nominating convention for Republicans to select Calvin Coolidge as their presidential candidate even though few thought could win. But the plain speaking Coolidge did win and went to work immediately to fix the Democrat mess that had put America in a deep recession that caused the unemployment rate to hit 15%. In just six months of saying ‘No” to new spending and...

Senator Sherman Takes Aim at the Supposed Radicalism of Administration(Note: Full Headline Title is not entirely visible) The Oklahoma Leader (Oklahoma City, Okla.), Vol. 5, No. 14, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 26, 1918Incidentally He Says Taking Over Industries Was Political, Not Governmental Control, But Concludes With Hidden Plea to Leave Packers Unmolested to Combine Activities and Profits. THE LEADER'S WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON - Poor old Senator Sherman of Illinois has broken out again in an attack on the supposedly liberal elements in the Wilson administration. Sherman has in the past year given a good deal of his attention to these...

Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, or Jacksonian?