Free Republic

"Notorious disagreements" with Puritan leader John Cotton over the Massachusetts General Court censoring his religious speech led Roger Williams to publish The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Conscience Sake and Mr. Cotton's Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered in 1644. In it, Roger Williams first mentioned his now famous phrase, "WALL OF SEPARATION": "Mr. Cotton ... hath not duly considered these following particulars. First, the faithful labors of many witnesses of Jesus Christ, existing in the world, abundantly proving, that the Church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type and the Church of the Christians under the...

Voters chose Donald Trump as an antidote to the growing inflammation caused by the . . . swamp-creature governing class . . . On taking office, Mr. Trump proceeded to hire smart people and create a massive diversion (tweets, border walls, tariffs) as a smokescreen to let them implement an agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and originalist judges. Those reforms have left the market free to do its magic and got the economy grooving like it’s 1999. The daily Trump hurricane . . . makes the media focus on the all-powerful wizard while ignoring the policy makers behind the curtain....

I was head coach of a local swim team and was working with a 12-year-old girl who had enormous talent, beautiful technique and a gift for moving effortlessly through the water. I was pushing her hard . . . [but] Nothing would make her really try. So I called my friend Larry Liebowitz, a wonderful coach I knew . . . “Dan,” he said, “you want this more than she does.” I frowned, and realized he was right. Then he added the kicker: “You’ve got to realize, there’s nothing morally wrong with not wanting to swim.” . . . I...

A free and independent press is, and should always be, an impenetrable bulwark of our democracy . . . Thomas Jefferson [wrote to that effect] in a 1789 letter. The media’s hallowed role, embodied in the First Amendment, assures near-total freedom to report (and even misreport) the news. Press freedom, however, implies a responsibility to place truth above narrow partisan campaigns. That’s why editorial and commentary pages must be kept separate from news reporting. That separation has often been breached, but certain prominent news organizations have branded themselves clarions of truth. The New York Times long nurtured such a reputation....

Likewise, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Democratic governors and overwhelmingly Democratic State Legislatures controlled the South, which steadfastly opposed the push for civil rights. In contrast, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, openly praised school desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education decision and sent federalized Arkansas National Guard troops to Little Rock to protect nine black students after Democratic Governor Orval Faubus threatened to keep them out of a previously all-white high school. (snip) In June of 1964, though, the Civil Rights Act came up again, and it passed...over the strenuous objections of Southern Democrats. 80% of...

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...

Antonin Scalia pointed out that the Bill of Rights was not enacted to change anyone’s rights. At all. The Bill of Rights was created not to change anyone's rights but to set in concrete the already established rights of the people. That is explicitly the burden of the Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. And where the First Amendment refers to “the” freedom . . . of the press, it explicitly means that freedom of the press as it existed in 1787...

Historian Wilfred McClay aspires to be the antidote to Zinn, whom he accuses of “greatly oversimplifying the past and turning American history into a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’ ” Mr. McClay’s counterpoint, which comes out next week, is titled “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.” He says . . . he’s seen too many students drawn to Zinn because the standard textbooks are visionless and tedious. “Just as nature abhors a vacuum,” Mr. McClay says, “so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself...

On a recent thread Resettozero happened to tweek newfreep on the fact that, dating from 1999, that screen name was now a little funny. And it dawned on me that I’d been looking forward to my 20th anniversary of FReeperdom. Whoopsie! that was the day before yesterday!

. . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment. The general proposition that freedom of expression upon public questions is secured by the First Amendment has long been settled by our decisions. The constitutional safeguard, we have said, "was fashioned to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people." Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 484. "The maintenance of the opportunity for free political discussion to the end that government may be responsive to the...

The Key to Unhappiness - Denis Prager (5½ minutes, but a jewel)

The First Amendment requirement that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press” has one obvious objective. It exists to prevent the political homogenization of mass communications. It was well crafted, and it worked. Under that regime, Congress passed laws to expedite the propagation of information by giving preferential postage to newspapers which interchanged information by mailing their newspapers to each other. But in 1844 Samuel Morse demonstrated his famous Baltimore-Washington telegraph, and the Associated Press and other wire services soon followed. This was in principle the same thing as...

. . . Like Donald Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro . . . owes success his political success to in large part to support from Evangelical voters . . . Benjamin Netanyahu was the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit Latin America when in 2017 he traveled to Argentina, Mexico and Colombia. Now Mr. Netanyahu is expected to travel to Brazil for Mr. Bolsonaro’s swearing in. In addition to improved trade and diplomatic ties, he hopes evangelical driven pro Israel sentiment across the global South can reduce Israel's isolation at the United Nations. . . . Brazil [is plagued by crime and...

Video - actually audio - lasts about 20 minutes, I can’t do it justice but recommend it to anyone with the time. His point was that socialism is about putting people in charge of decisions about your life - and that letting the caravan in would be even worse, because it allows total strangers whom we didn’t even vote for define our laws. I enjoyed it.

On a scale of “spitting on the sidewalk” to “Starting a major war - and losing it,” exactly how significant is the charge of attempted rape? I ask the question that way because the Democrats are treating “the seriousness of the charge” of attempted (not successful) rape as infinite. If you go through the known facts about Brett Kavanaugh backward from the present, what you have is a cloud of witnesses and facts supporting the proposition that it has been at least 30 years since a time to which any claim at all of impropriety has been leveled at...

Whether or not Judge Kavenaugh is seated as a SCOTUS justice, the people on President Trump’s list of potential SCOTUS nominees need to take action. They need to write an open letter to the Senate Majority Leader and the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee - with a copy to POTUS Donald Trump. My suggestion for its contents follows.

A best-selling expert on education shows how to make the school system work for your child. Our K–12 school system is an artificial product of market forces. It isn’t a good fit for all―or even most―students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps “disability” labels over differences in learning style. Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged, disconnected, and unhappy. And when they struggle, school pressures parents, with overwhelming force, into “fixing” their children...

What, then, was “the Enlightenment”? This term was promoted, first and foremost, by the late-18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant . . . [who declared] that only reason allows human beings to emerge from their “self-incurred immaturity” by casting aside the “dogmas and formulas” of authority and tradition. For Kant, reason is universal, infallible and a priori—meaning independent of experience. As far as reason is concerned, there is one eternally valid, unassailably correct answer to every question in science, morality and politics . . . This astonishing arrogance is based on a powerful idea: that mathematics can produce universal truths by beginning...

Roundly vilified for not entering a Parkland high school during a mass shooting, Broward Deputy Scot Peterson insisted publicly that he believed that gunfire was happening outside on campus — not from inside the building. But internal radio dispatches released by the sheriff's office Thursday show Peterson immediately fixated on Building 12 and even radioed that gunfire was happening “inside.” And, just as school shooter Nikolas Cruz was fleeing the building after killing 17 people, Peterson warned his fellow officers to stay away — even as wounded students and staff lay inside . . . “Do not approach the...

Judge Sullivan is enforcing the Brady rule against the Mueller prosecution of Flynn. But in general only a judge can give a Brady warning which puts teeth in the Brady rule. IANAL but I wonder: Can AG Sessions order the Muller Special Persecutor team to submit to Brady rule sanctions even if the judge in a particular case does not impose it? If the Brady rule is SCOTUS precedent, what prevents any criminal defense - in a Mueller case or any other - from asking the judge to issue a Brady warning to the prosecution? And if the judge...