Free Republic

As various leftists talk of repealing the Second Amendment it must be noted that removing that amendment would neither remove the right to self-defense nor the guns Americans possess for that purpose. Those who have read documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution or books like John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Richard M Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, understand that the educational system run by leftists has left America with generations of citizens who do not understand the philosophies and natural rights integral to our nation’s founding. Moreover, generations of...

As schools across the nation wrestle with how to keep firearms off campus, Liberty University has opened a new gun range for students to brush up on their shooting skills. The range, built at cost of $3.2 million, opened on Monday and is currently available only to students of the Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia, WSET-TV reports. But it will open to the public and law enforcement officers following commencement in May. "What's unique about this facility is it's the only range on any college campus that has venues for all Olympic shooting sports. The rest of the world is...

Without question, the most distinctive feature of the modern social democratic state is the rise of administrative agencies, which at the federal level function as a shadowy Fourth Branch of government that fits uneasily into our constitutional scheme of separation of powers, and which at the state level oversee vast swaths of economic activity...Defenders of the current administrative setup claim the elaborate procedural safeguards built into today's administrative law effectively blunt the risk of arbitrary power, whose exercise has always been in tension with the rule of law. In this talk, Professor Epstein will explain why he thinks the massive...

Gov. Rick Scott signed into law Friday a bill imposing restrictions on gun sales and arming some teachers and school employees, a stark reversal of a two-decade push to ease gun regulations in Florida. The National Rifle Association filed a lawsuit against the new law in federal court almost immediately after it was signed, contending the bill’s ban on gun sales to those under 21 was a violation of the Second Amendment.

Two major companies, Enterprise Holdings Inc. and First National Bank of Omaha ended co-branding partnerships with the National Rifle Association Thursday as a #BoycottNRA social media movement picked up steam. Enterprise is the parent company of three car-rental brands: Enterprise, Alamo and National. The arrangement offered discounts to NRA members.

In November 2007, the novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a short essay for a special edition of The Atlantic on “The American Idea.” Writing about 9/11 and all that came after, Wallace proposed what some might consider a monstrous thought experiment: Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, ‘sacrifices on the altar of freedom’? In other words, what if we decided that a certain...

President Trump’s first State of the Union speech made it evident that his “America First” foreign policy will eschew diplomacy, multilateralism, free trade, and protection of refugees and migrants. This is why now, more than ever, those within the broader liberty movement should support U.S. involvement in the U.N. and other multinational institutions. The U.S. has a pivotal role in this as a permanent Security Council member, and wields great power in promoting American values on the global stage. As of 2016, Pew research shows that 64 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the UN, whereas 29 percent have...

Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That’s a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017—our gross domestic product—totaled about $19 trillion. If the Congress spent $4 trillion of the $19 trillion that we produced, unless you believe in Santa Claus, you know that Congress must force us to spend $4 trillion less privately. Taxing us is one way that Congress...

We remain embroiled in a debate over the nature and extent of our own government's spying on us. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 1978 as a response to the unlawful government spying of the Watergate era, was a lawful means for the government to engage in foreign surveillance on U.S. soil, but it has morphed into unchecked government spying on ordinary Americans. The journey that domestic spying has taken in 40 years has been one long steady march of massive increase in size and scope. The federal government now employs more than 60,000 people to spy...

...in December, the FCC rolled back Obama-era legislation aimed at regulating Internet service providers, meaning providers don't have to treat all online sites equally. ...On Monday, Montana Governor Steve Bullock went a step further and became the first state official to sign an executive order imposing net neutrality in Montana.... ...Governor Bullock is here with me now to talk more... ...tell us about your thought process in deciding to issue this executive order? And I'd particularly like to know why you think this is an important issue... BULLOCK: Well, I think it's an important issue for Montana and, indeed, our...

Undifferentiated bulk surveillance is the governmental acquisition of fiber-optic data stored and transmitted by nearly everyone in America. This includes all telephone conversations, text messages and emails, as well as all medical, legal and financial records. Congress recently passed and President Donald Trump signed a vast expansion of spying authorities — an expansion that authorizes legislatively the domestic spying that judges were authorizing on everyone in the U.S. without individual suspicion of wrongdoing or probable cause of crime; an expansion that passed in the Senate with no votes to spare; an expansion that evades and avoids the Fourth Amendment; an...

President Donald Trump said, “We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts.” The president was responding to statements made in Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” Our nation does not need stronger laws against libel. To the contrary, libel and slander laws should be repealed. Let’s say exactly what libel and slander are. The legal profession defines libel as a published false statement that is damaging to...

Free speech has been faring poorly on American college campuses. Many students don’t believe in it at all (a point I examined recently in this piece), and many administrators believe they can restrict it to small areas and only with their prior approval. The trustees and top officials at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) are in that group. For the system’s flagship campus at Amherst, the officials have decreed a policy that places student First Amendment rights in a straightjacket. Free speech and rallies may only be held on a small plot of land (less than one percent of the...

From big cases before the Supreme Court centering on free speech and religious liberty claims of a Christian baker to the ongoing investigations into transactions between abortion providers and biotech firms over fetal body parts harvested during abortion procedures, 2018 is already shaping up to be a significant year for religiously observant Americans and the unborn. Here are five legal matters carrying significant implications that are expected to develop even more this year. 1. Decision to Be Handed Down in the Case of Christian Baker Jack Phillips at the Supreme Court In what is considered a landmark religious liberty case...

Nearly 30 years ago, the people of Eastern Europe were freed from the yoke of communism. Their liberation is a reminder that the Cold War didn’t just end -- it was won. And it was won because the ideas espoused by leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were far stronger than any army the Soviet Union could ever field. But eternal vigilance, as the saying goes, is the price of liberty. Freedom that is won can, through neglect, become freedom lost. Which is why, since the lifting of the Iron Curtain, America has...

Popular tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others—have strongly protected free speech online, a policy widely associated with the legal norms of the United States. American tech companies, however, operate globally, and their platforms are subject to regulation by the European Union, whose member states offer less protection to expression than does the United States. European regulators are pressuring tech companies to control and suppress extreme speech. The regulators’ clear warning is that, if the companies do not comply “voluntarily,” they will face harsher laws and potential liability. This regulatory effort runs the risk of censorship creep, whereby a wide array...

Given its prominence in current public discourse, one would think that hate, not love, is a many-splendored thing. The perfectly good word, which oozes out of every media pore, is now so overused that it means next to nothing. Every time you turn around, someone is accused of “hate” merely for expressing disagreement. This is not just a matter of semantics. It’s serious. When you cheapen a word, it discourages honest discussion and leads to more confusion and conflict, which is how the devil likes it. We have it on good authority that the underworld thrives on mayhem. One large...

This makes twice in 10 days that a host on MSNBC has openly marveled at the idea that many, many Americans believe their rights come from God and are recognized in the Constitution rather than derive from the Constitution itself. How can it be that this idea is so inexplicably foreign, even accounting for MSNBC’s left-wing bias? They know the percentage of the country that’s religious; they’ve read that not-unimportant bit in the Declaration of Independence about men being “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; they’ve read a treatise or two on natural law while in college; they’ve...

Freedom Without the Truth Leads to Chaos and Slavery Msgr. Charles Pope • December 6, 2016 • To most modern minds, freedom is a very detached concept; it is an abstraction of sorts, a free-floating power unmoored from any limits or defining standards. Freedom today is often viewed as personal and self-referential, with little consideration as to how one’s “freedom” might affect that of someone else. A healthy sense of the common good suffers mightily in a world of deeply conflicting personal freedoms.I have written before on the paradoxes of freedom and will not repeat all of that here,...

Most governments compete for the innovators of the world. In the United States, however, every great innovation leads to more government departments and more regulation, lessening the incentive to innovate. So companies innovating around drones, Bitcoin and initial coin offerings, driverless cars, and many new drugs are moving their operations overseas. What if policymakers instead adopted an entrepreneurial mindset? Delegating responsibility for our poor, our criminals, our sick, and our uneducated to the government may seem easier. But in practice, if incentives are aligned, it is far more effective to keep responsibility with the people, who can innovate and provide...