Free Republic

One of the primary critiques of religion popular among New Atheists and secularists generally is that it is arrogant and close-minded for any group to claim a monopoly on Truth. The idea that a divine creator had a plan and ordered things a certain way, that he (or she, or it) revealed the Truth to an elect group and that all mankind will be judged by how closely they aligned their lives with the Truth... nothing could be more offensive to the secular progressive worldview. On the contrary, secular progressives claim the mantle of open-mindedness and tolerance. They understand that...

While the country has become more liberal in some ways, the Republican Party has moved to the extreme right, and the Democratic Party has filled in the vacuum in the middle by also moving to the right on many issues. As a consequence, many people who previously considered themselves in the middle are finding that the current views of the left are closer to their views. Thomas Ricks, who wrote Fiasco, and excellent look at the Iraq War, described why he moved to the left at Politico: Disappointment in the American government over the last 10 years. Our wars in...

This week marks the 70th anniversary of a plot whose success might well have spared millions of lives, while claiming that of history’s most infamous mass-murderer, Adolf Hitler. The elaborate conspiracy centered on Claus von Stauffenberg was the most well-prepared and organized attempt to put an end to Hitler, but it was scarcely the first. The number of serious attempts on Hitler’s life would fill a book and indeed have; Roger Moorhouse’s Killing Hitler (2006), for example, covers the ground of several such attempts from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, at which time his security detail...

The left-leaning tech blog Pando seems to be angry about a lot of aspects of reality.* Witness David Carr flipping out over this billboard that he spotted in San Francisco, “walking home from Pando’s office a few nights ago.” photo: Paull Carr, Pando

I was picking at my habanero and lychee salad in one of Washington’s many new chichi must dine at spots and sipping a melon vodka martini which Barry our waiter had highly recommended when it dawned on me . I was so embarrassed this week to be a woman that only fear of surgery kept me from considering a sex change. Once again the left has manufactured a make-believe War on Women as a defense against America’s fury at intrusive, expensive, and foolish big government. This time the vehicle for the statists was the Hobby Lobby case and once again...

Aldous Huxley got a lot of things right in his envisioning of a Brave New World, especially in the rise of the state coupled with the dismissal of natural social structures. What Huxley did not foresee was just how powerfully equipped that the individual would become thanks to technological advancements that emerged so rapidly that the control of the state could not keep pace. In the short span of the past twenty years, the Internet has grown from about a half-million users to well over 2.7 billion. This represents 39% of the world’s population, including over 80% of every resident...

Traveling down I-95, headed home to Florida from visiting Mary and my parents in Maryland and West Virginia, I found myself yelling in frustration at my radio.  Rush Limbaugh asked: Who gives the left power to silence opposition, control speech, and get people fired or ordered into sensitivity training?  Rush rattled off numerous examples to prove his point, including a mere 50 leftist student protesters at Rutgers successfully forcing Condoleezza Rice to back down from giving their commencement speech.Who gives the left such power?  I yelled, “We do!” By the way, while in West Virginia, I attended Mary's dad's 82nd birthday...

Rape. Decades ago, women who were raped and reported it, particularly those raped by someone outside their race or social class, were often disbelieved and shamed. That is tragic. But how far the pendulum has swung in the other direction! Now, the term “rape” or “sexual assault” is thrown around almost effortlessly, accusations easily made and lives easily ruined. First, the pendulum shift began with feminists pushing the notion that women claiming they were raped should always be believed and never questioned. Presumption of innocence, a foundation of our culture, suddenly went out the window. Consider how quickly the...

Forget being smarter than a fifth-grader. Most Americans think they’re smarter than everyone else in the country. Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American. A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people. Men (24 percent) are more likely...

Link only: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/democrat_center_folds.html

“@PzFeed: Smart Car tipping is the new trend in San Francisco. http://t.co/GWqAyoTrLW pic.twitter.com/OnJxnflmI6” @haileyyyb look out— Megan (@m_emps) April 8, 2014 When I moved out to Silicon Valley from New Jersey in 1997, Internet fever was just about to peak (literally so, in the form of the bursting tech bubble that decimated the NASDAQ three years later). Silicon Valley was seen as the next big thing, ushering America into the wonders of the 21st century — and possibly saving the increasing bloated state government of California in the process. Wired magazine, based in San Francisco, was still owned by...

On February 6, Google revealed not only its dramatic bias against conservatism, but against reality. How else to explain an email received by WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah with regard to the Google AdSense policy? The email announced that AdSense would be cancelling WorldNetDaily’s account thanks to a “policy violation email this morning regarding negative/hate speech particularly with the repeated references to ‘black mobs,’ although I don’t know that this is specifically what it’s limited to.” According to Farah, Google wrote, “The reviewers cited a number articles [sic] with usage of this term specifically and in general asks that no ad code...

What is the reaction inside DOJ to the Senate’s defeat of the Debo Adegbile nomination to head the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice? According to an email sent by Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels, the “sacred mission” will continue. Samuels, in an email late this afternoon to Division staff obtained by PJ Media, said: I anticipate that last week’s developments will prompt a period of reflection and discussion about civil rights in this country and how we can best achieve our sacred mission. This is healthy, and I am confident that our work will emerge the...

If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political left's avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now — and the place would be New York City, where far left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things. These schools have given thousands of low income minority children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only shot at a decent life. Last year 82 percent of the students at a charter school called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics...

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism. Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the...

Hey, gals, want to avoid being raped? Put away that Lady Smith 38. No need for pepper spray. Self-defense classes? Not necessary. The solution is simple. The best defense against rape is to just cast away your "deeply troubling" Christianity and become a secularist slut. So goes the advice of one Katie McDonough, Salon.com assistant editor, fertile fount of millennial wisdom and – well – and whatever else. In an article published at Salon Feb. 20 titled, "The right's warped 'purity' culture: 4 ways evangelical views of sex took over America," Ms. McDonough provides an unvarnished glimpse into the profligate...

As I have confessed in the past, in my early years I found myself active in the Democratic Party and the general liberal methodology. I had no understanding of the concept of the false left/right paradigm. I had no inkling of the dangers of globalism and central banking. I had no concept of decentralization or non-participation. I had never even heard of libertarianism. I knew only that George W. Bush was a criminal (and I was right), but the problem went far deeper than the GOP. I was astoundingly ignorant of the bigger picture. However, what I did have going...

Recently, I saw a Photoshopped depiction of Charles Manson next to an unborn baby, and the caption suggested that liberals are more interested in protecting Manson than they are the baby. It got me to thinking. Yes, it got me to thinking about the absurd positions modern liberals hold, which wouldn't be nearly so disturbing but for the fact that I'm not talking about fringe liberals. I'm talking about mainstream liberals, who control the Democratic Party, the old media, the executive branch of the federal government, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court half the time, the mammoth federal bureaucracy,...

Gov. Jay Inslee is calling a moratorium on executions while he is governor. “Equal justice under the law is the state’s primary responsibility,” Inslee said during a news conference Tuesday morning. “And in death penalty cases, I’m not convinced equal justice is being served.” Inslee said there was “too much at stake” in death penalty cases in what he termed an “imperfect system.” “During my term we will not be executing people,” Inslee said. Inslee cited the high cost of trials and appeals, the apparent randomness that death penalties are pursued and concerns that executions do not deter crime as...

Right-wing politics are key to a murderer’s motivations; leftism must be ignored.Let me venture a guess, and wager that you have heard very little about the political preference of the young man who, on Friday, walked into his high school and tried to murder his teacher. On the face of it, this is a blessing, for in all but the most extreme cases a murderer’s ideological proclivities are wholly irrelevant to his crime. The “why” really matters when a terrorist group shoots up a mall, because the “why” explains the action. But when a man bears a grudge against his...