Free Republic

The conversation about monuments — particularly which should stay and which should go — has eclipsed nearly all other conversations in the week following a rally-turned-near-riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. CNN's Kate Bolduan spoke to liberal analyst Angela Rye on Thursday, asking her whether the uproar was truly just about the monuments. Rye claimed that the problem ran much deeper than that: .. Rye concluded her argument by asserting that America was very close to once again being a nation of slavery: “We definitely need to learn about it so that we don't repeat it, because we're very close to repeating...

In the decade leading up to America's War for Independence, much of the drama took place in and around Boston. Sam Adams was the ringleader on the colonial side and public enemy number one to the British. He had been thinking about liberty and independence since he attended Harvard decades before. He was motivated partly because what we would now call the Regulatory State targeted his family because of their political views. Eventually, British troops were sent to occupy Boston and keep things from getting out of hand. Naturally, the occupying force was hated and the tension between colonists and...

If the Left takes follows the course of its own logic, then there’s one landmark they should want to blow up ASAP — besides Stone Mountain. It’s Mount Rushmore. All four presidents carved into stone on the mountain would be called white supremacists today. So it would make sense for our progressive nation to wipe them from the face of the landmark. Let’s start with Washington. He owned slaves. He approved the Naturalization Act of 1790 that restricted citizenship to “free white men.” He also earned the nickname “Town Destroyer” from the Iroquois for he fought against Indian tribes. Jefferson...

It's such a shame to see a magazine that claims to be "The Root", be so willing to ignore "the roots" of what you would think would be their own history. Recently, The Root engaged in gross historical malpractice by giving voice to people who would benefit greatly from learning their own true history. They created a short video titled "No Country for Me." This is (among many reasons) one of the reasons why I recorded William Cooper Nell's 1855 book The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution as an audiobook. There are many outlets out there, even outlets such...

Happy Independence Day July 4, 2017! As crazed Democrats are trying to impeach our duly elected United States President, important reminders by our founding fathers and greatest modern day Presidents and world leaders are never more relevant. “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”—Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President America’s second President and drafter of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson warned,”The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”

On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress, assembled in Philadelphia, formally adopts Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for independence from Great Britain. The vote is unanimous, with only New York abstaining. The resolution had originally been presented to Congress on June 7, but it soon became clear that New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and South Carolina were as yet unwilling to declare independence, though they would likely be ready to vote in favor of a break with England in due course. Thus, Congress agreed to delay the vote on Lees Resolution until July 1. In the intervening...

My friend Mark Levin is nothing if not a patriot of the first order. He loves the United States and its founding principles -- and his latest book, "Rediscovering Americanism," explains his passion and encourages ours. Levin believes that America's greatness lies in its unique founding ideals -- and documents -- and correctly observes how far we've strayed from those principles and the structure of government they inspired. In his other books, Levin has outlined the problems confronting us and proposed solutions, but in this book, he takes a deeper look into the Framers' vision and examines the anatomy and...

Liberal hysteria over Donald Trump was hardly required to pose questions about the "patriotic myths" of the Founding Fathers, but his elevation to the Oval Office has accelerated the trashing of the heroic past, even the stories of the American Revolution that generations of school children cherished. It's not just Parson Weems' imaginative tale of George Washington cutting down his father's cherished cherry tree, and his owning up with his assertion that "I cannot tell a lie." That story, from the first biography of the first president, has long been exposed as the fiction of a teaching moment meant...

In the first week of April, 2017, a nostalgic nation watched as one of the grand old institutions crumbled into dust: the Senate filibuster was removed from the toolbox for presidential appointments. Many on both sides of the aisle shed a tear or two as the US Senate lost one of its most famous and romantic tools; until the Democrats overplayed their hand on the Gorsuch nomination, a single Senator could hold up a presidential appointee with a filibuster. No more. Before you shed any more tears, though, dear Gentle Reader, please consider who had long been empowered with this...

Professor Jennifer Harvey took to the New York Times yesterday to ask: “Are We Raising Racists?” She begins her article by recounting how “dismayed” she was that her daughter admired George Washington. Her daughter was “signing the praises” of the first President, which surprised Dr. Harvey. “I was dismayed,” she writes, “that the peace- and diversity-centered curriculum she gets at her public school had left her with such a one-dimensional view of history.” Her 7-year-old daughter, she felt, needed to know the whole story. Eventually, her daughter asked her about news. Professor Harvey, after discussing ethics violations with her 7-year-old,...

Many in the progressive world, believe that our founding fathers were racist. As their evidence they point to Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution: “ Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” To the liberals, the 3/5th figure is an indication that our founding fathers...

Michael Klarman talked about his book The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, in which he recalls the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, from its tenuous start, according to the author the Philadelphia convention almost didn’t occur, to the many competing interests and internal debates that marked the Constitution’s creation. Michael Klarman spoke with Patrick Spero at the National Constitution Center.

Politics is a game, in some ways akin to football. A win depends on how many points are on the official scoreboard, not on how many yards have been covered. For a stable society to exist or a game to be successful, certain rules must be followed. They may be simple or complex, few or many, handed down orally or through a complex code, but they underlie a structured order. Adherence to that structure is essential even in politics, which is an ongoing process with no eternal answers. It is natural in politics that conclusions and procedures once generally accepted...

My previous posts regarding repeal of the horrid 17th Amendment were built on a simple republican foundation; members of republics are represented in the lawmaking body. The Constitution acts on the people and states, and both had their place in congress until 1913. In its wake, the 17th Amendment left behind a federal Constitution without a federal government. Here, I take a different tack as to why the 17A must go. I will show from the standpoint of balancing society's natural proclivities, we must reestablish a federal senate of the states. Without a strong middle institution to repel democracy, the...

Progressives are fond of selling old ideas as somehow being new, and the only real point that they have to rely on is that someone won't go and look it up. Meanwhile they engage in revisionist history, erasing and covering up historical facts, then progressives top it all off with the arrogance to claim that "Well the Founders could not have fore saw........" (finish the false claim) Mr. progressive, you would be wrong - as you always are. As recorded by James Madison, Gouverneur Morris made the following comment on August 9th, 1787: Mr. Govr. MORRIS. The lesson we are...

PHILADELPHIA -- The effort to save Benjamin Franklin's damaged gravestone received a hefty boost from a New Jersey rocker.

Petrus Paulus Vergerius, (1370-1444) educator, doctor of medicine and canon law wrote what has become known as the preeminent Renaissance treatise on education wherein he asserted that "what can we do better than gather our books around us... to see unfolded before us vast stores of knowledge, for our delight, it may be, or for our inspiration." Every educator has bemoaned the struggle to fill heads with knowledge and to that end, in my English composition class this term, the students worked on deciphering the rhetorical devices of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural speech. Most had never been taught about communism...

A humanities course currently taught at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs teaches that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites, terrorists and money-hungry barons who used hyperbole and fear to rile up the colonists to revolt against England. The “Resistance and Revolution” class is co-taught by history lecturer Jared Benson and sociology instructor Nicholas Lee, who also suggest that it was Mikhail Gorbachev – not Ronald Reagan — who brought down the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that wealthy CEOs deserve to be in a “moral prison,” among many other assertions. Calling the Founding Fathers “terrorists,” Benson and Lee voice...

WASHINGTON ― Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump advocated for a literal interpretation of the Constitution during the third, and final debate, on Wednesday. “The justices that I’m going to appoint will be pro-life, they will have a conservative vent,” Trump said in response to a question about how the Constitution should be interpreted. “They will be protecting the Second Amendment. They are great scholars in all cases ― and they’re people of tremendous respect. They will interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted.” That’s not cool. Here’s what was going on when the Constitution was written in...

Coming up, an article by Reuben Ben Abraham of Los Angeles California. A senior member of the New England Alliance for Liberty and Free markets and a brilliant economist in the Austrian school gives us this insight in the superiority of the capitalist system over socialism... The article I am typing now deals with traits that show the superiority of capitalism, inspired by an incident that took place at a McDonalds restaurant one morning that illustrates capitalism. Anyway, this first incident I want to illustrate took place at McDonalds restaurant in Wilshire Boulevard across from Ross Department store and California...