Free Republic

The last forty years of politics and religion has been focused squarely on the ascendancy of the Religious Right. I must admit that I’ve probably contributed my fair share to that discourse, as well. A motley crew of white evangelicals and traditional Catholics locked arms on some social issues, started voting in large numbers for Republican candidates, and changed American politics forever. But I think that era of religion and politics is rapidly coming to a close. The Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement - it’s one about cultural conservativism and nearly blind support for the GOP...

The free speech advocacy organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) creates an annual ranking of colleges from best to worst environments for free speech on campus. 2022/2023’s list, based on responses from 45,000 students at more than 200 schools, placed University of Chicago in the top spot, meaning the school “promotes and protects the free exchange of ideas” more than any other college on the list. Columbia University was dead last, with “by far, the lowest score,” and its speech climate rated as “abysmal.” There are a few notable things about the rankings (a detailed methodology, highlights, summary,...

The Red Scare (1947-57) was a decade-long period of intense anti-communist paranoia in the United States. During this period, millions of ordinary Americans were paralysed by an irrational fear of ‘Reds under the bed’ – the belief that thousands of communist agents and sympathisers were secretly living amongst them, plotting or waiting to overthrow the government. Today, we live under the White Supremacist Scare, the irrational fear that there is a white supremacist under every bed. An email sent to the parents of University of Virginia students, for example, warns that “events have occurred on Grounds that have been cause...

Longtime Baylor University professor Rodney Stark passed away at his home in Woodway, Texas, on July 21, 2022. One of the world’s preeminent figures in the sociology of religion, in 2004 Stark joined the faculty of Baylor as Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences. In 2005, he agreed to become co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) with Byron Johnson. Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, and began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments...

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge," wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871). Experimental findings reported in 1999 by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger bolstered Darwin's insight. They tested people on their knowledge of grammar and logic and found that many of the people who did badly on the tests rated their performance as being well above average. On the other hand, those who did well tended to underestimate how well they had done. The now eponymous Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people "wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a...

The BBC carried a story this week with the headline ‘Covid origin studies say evidence points to Wuhan market’. Bizarrely the paper in Science they are referring to, by Michael Worobey and colleagues, says no such thing. It says: ‘the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there’. All three of the scientists quoted in the BBC story have been highly dismissive about even discussing the possibility that the pandemic began as an accident in a Wuhan laboratory. Their vested interest is clear: they worry that the...

For many years there has been debate about allowing teachers to be armed to protect students. This post describes an established training program for teachers who choose to do so in compliance with school rules. The program is FASTER—short for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response. Introduced in Ohio, FASTER could be adopted by every state and school, at no cost to taxpayers, and at considerable saving of lives. FASTER was created in Ohio in December 2012, following the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. FASTER Ohio's website, FASTER Saves Lives, is the best resource for information about the program....

I noted earlier that Justice Alito did not speak to the Fifth Circuit Judicial Conference. As a result, the conference organizers had to shuffle the schedule. We were treated to a presentation from an expert on cyber-security. She discussed at some length how the goal of foreign hacks is to sow discord in our polity. For example, cyber units would deliberately schedule protests for Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter at the same time and in the same location. The goal was to foment division, and perhaps, create a violent confrontation. While watching this fascinating presentation, a thought jumped...

I have now had a few hours to think through the apparent leaked Dobbs majority opinion. (My tentative thoughts are here (https://reason.com/volokh/2022/05/02/making-sense-of-the-apparent-leaked-opinion-in-dobbs/). Let's play a game of whodunnit? To begin, there are a few clues that can be derived from the document itself. First, at the top of the first page is the phrase "1st Draft." And it is highlighted in yellow. The rectangle around the phrase is perfectly angled. This was done with a digital highlight feature, and not a real highlighter. I can reasonably infer this document was printed on a color laser printer. Most people would simply...

Half a century ago (although it now seems to me but yesterday), there was a lively public debate as to whether representations of violence on television and in the cinema conduced to, or even caused, real violence in society. There was at the time great public concern over a rising tide of violent crime that some criminologists insisted, in the lordly fashion that academics sometimes adopt towards the general population, was unfounded. There were two main schools of thought on the question of the effect of televisual and cinematographic violence: those who thought that such representations of violence acted in...

Last week, the Senate confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. This raised the question of whether the President could go ahead and appoint Jackson to the High Court, even though the seat for which she was nominated is still occupied by Justice Stephen Breyer. A newly released memo from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice addresses this question. The memo, "Authority of the President to Prospectively Appoint a Supreme Court Justice," is dated April 6, was signed by Assistant Attorney General Christopher Schroeder, and suggests presidents may appoint confirmed...

France is no longer the country of Notre-Dame, nor the country of De Gaulle, where the Concorde was built and a broad middle-class prospered. To understand this moment of profound transition, you have to look past the results of last weekend’s Presidential election first round, and beyond the forthcoming run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Election campaigns can only tell us so much. What is happening to France, as sociologist Jerôme Fourquet observed, is best understood as “the Great Metamorphosis”. Nobody has done more than Fourquet to peel away the misapprehensions that surround French society, and reveal what...

Hu Wei is the vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor’s Office of the State Council, the chairman of Shanghai Public Policy Research Association, the chairman of the Academic Committee of the Chahar Institute, a professor, and a doctoral supervisor. To read more by Hu, click here to read his article on “How did Deng Xiaoping coordinate domestic and international affairs?” Written on March 5, 2022. Translated by Jiaqi Liu on March 12, 2022. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most severe geopolitical conflict since World War II and will result in far greater global consequences than...

When I watched Vladimir Putin, with what the Russians so graphically call his “tin eyes,” justify his invasion of Ukraine, I thought, as did many others, that he looked a little deranged. Denazification, indeed! Had he failed to appreciate that Ukraine, not noted throughout its history for its philo-Semitism, had elected a Jewish president, and that by a large majority, thereby suggesting a major cultural shift in the country? It then occurred to me that Putin looked rather puffy in the face, and I wondered whether he could be taking steroids. These drugs are noted for their numerous side effects,...

Most of the past forty-eight hours have been spent either in, or en route to and from, the Midland-Odessa region. Far out in west Texas’s Permian Basin, the two cities — towns, really — have a relationship that I still can’t quite unpack. On my last visit, which turned out to be the first time I ever actually set foot in Odessa, a woman told me: “Midland is where you raise families. Odessa is where you raise hell.” She was from Odessa. Midland-Odessa sits in the vast expanse of the old Llano Estacado, the “staked plain” discovered by the Spanish...

For several years now, David Cole has been a minor celebrity in the Northern Territory of Australia on account of his colorful conspiracy theories. While few people take anything he has to say seriously, many of us in the Territory enjoy wondering what he’s going to come up with next. Cole believes that the Hillsong Church in Sydney carries out child sacrifices, that Australia is a registered corporate entity of the Vatican…. It is hardly a surprise, then, that Cole’s statements about the pandemic have been monumentally confused. He believes that sunlight can cure COVID-19; that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is...

Gas was deliberately released from a nuclear power plant in southern China as operators work to fix an issue at the facility, its French part-owner said Monday following a US media report of a potential leak. CNN said the US government is assessing a report of a leak at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in populous Guangdong province after Framatome, a French firm that partly owns it, warned of an "imminent radiological threat". EDF, the majority owner of Framatome, said the plant's number one reactor experienced a build-up of noble gases in its primary circuit, which is part of the...

The New York Times (NYT), based on analysis by a private intelligence firm Recorded Future, reported on February 28 that as the China-India tensions in eastern Ladakh continued unabated last year, a Chinese entity penetrated India’s power grid at multiple load dispatch points. It also raises the possibility that an October 13 blackout in India’s financial capital Mumbai, while the city managed to contain COVID-19 outbreak, could be related to this intrusion. The NYT story (and the report it was based on) seems to suggest that the alleged activity against critical Indian infrastructure installations was as much meant to act...

Starting this week, California will require counties to meet certain equity requirements before they're permitted to reopen more businesses and social activities. Proponents of this equity-focused approach say it is necessary to prevent the most vulnerable communities from being left behind as the state digs its way out of the pandemic. Critics call it a deeply flawed and potentially illegal means of determining which areas are safe to reopen, and they argue that it will only slow California's recovery. "Our entire state has come together to redouble our efforts to reduce the devastating toll COVID-19 has had on our Latino,...

Technology and social media use are increasingly associated with delays in nightly sleep. Here, we consider the timing of President Trump’s official Twitter account posts as a proxy for sleep duration and how it relates to his public performance. The President wakes around 6am, a routine which has not changed since early 2017. In contrast, the frequency of Twitter activity 11pm-2am increased 317% from under one day per week in 2017 to three days a week in 2020. The President’s increased late-night activity is not accounted for by increases in the frequency of his use of social media over time,...