Free Republic

After a tumultuous weekend at ABC News, Kim Godwin, the first Black president of a network news division, announced she was stepping down, according to an internal memo sent to staff and obtained by The Daily Beast on Sunday night. Godwin’s resignation is a severe public relations blow for Disney CEO Bob Iger, who until recently was publicly backing her despite numerous reports of growing discomfort within the ranks. Critics said she spent more time promoting herself than she did in the newsroom, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported her Sunday announcement that she planned to “retire...

Former vice-president Joe Biden said during the final presidential debate Tuesday night that the United States had a “good relationship with Hitler” during a conversation about diplomacy with North Korea. "We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded Europe, the rest of Europe,” Biden told Trump after the president mentioned the good relationship he has with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “Come on.” ... Many conservatives promptly criticized Biden on Twitter, including by conservative radio host Mark Levin. “Did Joe Biden just say we have a good relationship with Hitler at one point?” Levin tweeted....

CNN is lamenting the fact that GOP frontrunner for the U.S. Senate in Alabama Judge Roy Moore told pastors and Christians in a speech last month that shootings and killings in American society are the result of removing God from schools. Andrew Kaczynski’s KFile on CNN dug up a video of Moore from late August speaking at Citizen Impact USA, making the comments that have CNN and the GOP establishment in Washington similarly freaked out. “We are losing the acknowledgement of God and I’m standing here talking to Christians and pastors and I’m telling you we’re losing the acknowledgement of...

(snip) It would be wrong not to take Trump very seriously. It would be irresponsible. It would be to forget European history, from whose fascist example he borrows. In Weimar America politics are not what they were. The establishment looks tired. The establishment has not understood the fact-lite theater of the contemporary world. The Weimar Republic ended with a clown's ascent to power, a high-energy buffoon who shouted loudest, a bully from the beer halls, a racist and a bigot. He was an outsider given to theatrics and pageantry. He seduced the nation of Beethoven. He took the world down...

I often come away from the conservative/Christian conferences I’ve attended around the country with the feeling that we’re trying to drive the car by hitting the gas and the brakes at the exact same time. Although I have met many wonderful people at those events, and received no shortage of inspiration from the speeches I have heard, there is also a shadow that looms over everything. This shadow taunts us with visions of an army, whose soldiers run away or whose weapons jam right at the very moment in the fight when resolve and execution matter most. And those shadows...

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Israel of “barbarism that surpasses Hitler” during its ground invasion of Gaza. Erdogan made the comment during a campaign speech Saturday in the Black Sea port city of Ordu. He is running for the presidency in elections next month. …

People across the political spectrum, from left to right and back again, seem to revel in perverse delight when comparing the policies of a political foe to those of the Nazis. Sometimes, they will skip the group comparisons and head straight into drawing personal parallels between the individual in question and Adolf Hitler. The practice is so onerous that, in the Dark Ages of the internet (1990), an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation named Mike Godwin coined what has become known as Godwin's Law. It states that, the longer and more involved an argument becomes, the more likely a...

... Scott groused to the movie crowd that in America, unlike other countries, local curriculum content is set by - gasp - local school boards. Scott would like science curricula in every town and burg set by a national organization. Interestingly, Scott may have been milder than some of her colleagues. One panelist, Jon Amiel, who is currently making a movie on Darwin, compared those who deny evolution to those who deny that the Holocaust occurred. Great. Think for yourself, and you're a Holocaust denier. By the way, I looked up some promotional material for Amiel's movie, which is entitled,...

Okay, I don't think that went over too well, and I think I know why. Bob just posted a bunch of unconscious fragments, when he should have allowed me -- Bob's unconscious -- to elaborate on them. After all, I am the one who produces these quirky gems to begin with, so I should be allowed to flesh them out to a glossy sheen. Which is basically how I operate down here in my analogical world, blending this and that metaphor in various inappropriate ways. So today, Bob has set me free to look over the sacred journals, and to...

Ron Paul is pro-choice state by state: "While Roe v. Wade is invalid, a federal law banning abortion across all 50 states would be equally invalid." 1-31-06. ... If Ron Paul lived in Berlin in 1944 and had said, "While killing Jews is invalid, a federal law banning the holocaust across all of Germany's 16 states would be equally invalid," his wicked claim would be immediately obvious to most people, but abortion has so dehumanized babies that even pro-lifers are vulnerable to lies that promote tolerance of the slaughter.

CORONADO, Calif. -- The U.S. Navy will spend as much as $600,000 to modify the appearance of a barracks complex in Coronado that resembles a swastika from the air. Navy officials said the spending for changes to the four L-shaped buildings were approved after satellite images from Google Earth revealed the swastika-like shape.

Manliness... seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad. If it is good, maybe that's because it's the only remedy for the trouble it causes. --Harvey Mansfield, Manliness One of the things that a classical liberal realizes that a leftist doesn’t is that human beings are the problem. And this is why the classical liberalism embodied in the conservative intellectual movement will always be a tougher sell than contemporary left-liberalism, because people naturally don’t want to believe that they are the problem. Rather, they prefer to imagine that there is some simplistic political solution that will cure the disease of...

In the book I am currently reading by Charles Upton Charles Upton, he analyzes one of the central problems of the postmodern world, which is the plethora of information that no person could possibly ever master. I'm not sure we realize how new and how alien this is compared to past generations of humans. After all, it wasn't too long ago that a gifted polymath such as Thomas Jefferson could more or less have a passing familiarity with everything important to know, but today it's probably a rare person who even masters his own specialty. As the cliché goes, we...

Regarding the transdimensional monument -- or monument to the transdimensional -- we spoke of yesterday, there is an imperceptible point that it necessarily shades off into the relative, or what Schuon called the "human margin." For example, yesterday Joseph posed a question about Catholic "just war doctrine" as it pertains to the liberation of Iraq. I don't really know much about this doctrine, but I am quite sure that it cannot be considered "absolute," and would instead fall along the human margin. In other words, there is nothing in revelation that explicitly addresses when a particular war is just, but...

Unintelligent people are usually just plain wrong, so we don't have to worry much about them. On the other hand, in order to attain truly deep stupidity, one must generally be of above average intelligence. Therefore, in a certain very real sense, intelligence does not vary inversely with stupidity, but directly with it. Not for nothing has it been said that so much philosophy is simply "error on a grandiose scale." A prime example of deep stupidity and grandiose error is Marxism and all of its many polluted streams, branches, creeks and crocks. That variants of this falsehood still proliferate...

Now, it seems to me that the left is King Midas in reverse, in that it destroys whatever it touches and reduces gold to excrement, whether it is institutions, countries, cultures, or individuals. I realize this sounds harsh, but I believe it is self-evident, since we can see the disastrous outcome of leftist ideas before our eyes. It's not as if the results are hidden, because whatever the left controls goes through a predictable process of degeneration and decline. For example, we all know that our educational system is a mess, the reason being that the left has had complete...

"Still up to your old tricks, I see. It is amazing how such sublime teachings can be so twisted to suit a limited, hateful ideology such as yours." That imbacillus of a parasitic comment yesterday must take the cake, for the ignoranus who impropagated it is referring to my "hateful twisting" of the sublime Meditations on the Tarot. But if my ideology is hateful, then so too is Meditations on the Tarot, which is quite unyielding in its disdain for leftism. In fact, it is not possible for me to conceive of someone as wise as the author of Meditations...

Even -- or perhaps especially -- as a young kit subjected to the tedium of Sunday School, I was uneasy with all this miracle business. You can't just say, "my God is better than your God because of his superior magic." This seems the way of the barbarians. After all, Mohammed supposedly ascended to heaven on a winged steed. Can you top that? "Yes, I'll see you and raise you one virgin birth." There is an old joke -- it might actually have been left by a commenter here -- about a fellow who says he wants to become a...

Reader Brian asks, "You've alluded to this before -- and may have dealt with it in the comments when I wasn't looking -- but I am incredibly interested in your take on Saul of Tarsus becoming Paul. His mindset was quite hostile to Christ, yet he had an almost involuntary conversion. Or was it involuntary? So many who wish to serve their Creator fall short because of internal divisions, etc., but Saul absolutely wanted the opposite, yet he became the man who spread the Gospel more effectively than anybody. Did God reach out to him, or did he reach out...

I have a feeling that we'll be staying with this arc of salvation business for a while. However, like the course of exterior history -- which is the arc's shadow in the herebelow -- we may jump around a bit, up and down, back and forth, in and out. For one thing, I can only write things as they occur to me, as none of this has been thought out in advance. Furthermore, dwelling within it simultaneously brings it into being. Not to spark another debate about the Trinity, but another universal trinity as it pertains to man's spiritual development...