Free Republic

After the 2016 presidential election, I wrote an exceptionally unpopular op-ed for The Washington Post headlined, "We must weed out ignorant Americans from the electorate." In it, I noted that "never have so many people with so little knowledge made so many consequential decisions for the rest of us." My assumption has always been that the Post only accepted the piece because its editors believed I was aiming my criticism exclusively at the right-wing populists who had just voted for Donald Trump. If so, they were wrong. My skepticism extends to all sides. And to all elections. Indeed, today, the...

Failed politician Stacey Abrams wants to do away with the electoral college. Her reasoning? The electoral college is a "classist, racist system whose time has passed and we need to get rid of it," so it's the same argument the left makes to get rid of everything they don't like. Naturally, Abrams attacked the centuries old constitutional system with the cast of ABC's "The View" on Monday morning.   Abrams claims the founding founders created the electoral system as a racist system designed somehow to prevent blacks from voting. To make her point, Abrams repeated the historically illiterate lie about...

Yeah, we’re a republic, but we also have democratic rules, norms, and traditions. Too bad the Democratic Party doesn’t believe in them.Case in point – their bizarre embrace of illegal aliens. Democrats seem to think that foreigners who violate our laws have a greater right to determine what will be America's laws than actual Americans. After all, that's their argument when they whine because some illegal is getting shipped back to his Third World hellhole-of-origin. They seem to think that just because some uninvited, unwanted, unlegal trespasser (we’re not supposed to call them “illegal,” right?) has been violating our laws...

Recent statements from various leaders within the Syrian rebel movement show that the rift between secularists and Islamists remains a key issue. A video released by a leading Islamist faction shows Islamist military leader Abu Bilal al-Homsi exhorting his followers to reject the largely secular Free Syrian Army, led by Salim Idris. According to Al-Homsi, Idris has said that the Free Syrian Army under his command is fighting for "democracy, secularism, communism, and the rights of minority groups", including Syrian Druze. Rebels must fight not for democracy or rights, but for Islam, Al-Homsi declared. From the beginning, the purpose of...

In brief: Kill the opposition. Allah commands it.

Thousands of Jordanians took to the streets on Friday demanding an end to the country‘s 18-year-old peace treaty with Israel. According to a report by the dpa news agency, in a series of nationwide protests, demonstrators urged Amman to cut ties with the Jewish State. The protesters burned Israeli flags and chanted “death, death to Israel”, the report said. The protests took place in seven cities across the country, and the protesters urged authorities to expel the Israeli ambassador from Amman, chanting “no to a Zionist embassy on our land.” Protest organizers, including the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and youth movements,...

David Kamerschen is a professor of Economics at the University of Georgia who has fun teaching economics to new students fresh to the field. Lots of people who teach economics, including yours truly, have used a variation of David's illustration over the years. It never fails to hit the mark -- if not Marx. Econ 101 or its equivalent is usually a required course for most college students, most of whom groan when they are forced to take a class in the "dismal science". That's because they never were exposed to real-world lessons in economics when they were in grade...