Free Republic

Science is not supposed to be filtered through a belief system. It’s supposed to go wherever the facts lead. But the human brain doesn’t work that way. Our brains zoom in on details that fit our preconceptions and skim over details that conflict with them. We don’t do this consciously, so we believe we’re objective. And we trust the objectivity of researchers because they have high status in today’s world. As a result, we don’t notice the belief system used to filter their facts. The belief system I’m talking about is Rousseau’s idea that nature is good and civilization is...

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — Names of the 31 people arrested for conspiracy to riot in downtown Coeur d’Alene have been listed on the Kootenai County Jail roster.Coeur d’Alene Police said those arrested were members of the white nationalist group “Patriot Front.”Here are some of their names: Kerry Lamont Arnold Jared Michael Boyce Nathan David Brenner Colton Michael Brown Josiah Daniel Buster Devin Wayne Center Dylan Carter Corio Winston North Durham Joseph Garret Garland Branden Mitchel Haney Richard Jacob Jessop James Michael Johnson James Julius Johnson Connor Patrick Moran Kieran Padraig Morris Lawrence Alexander Norman Justin Michael Oleary Cameron Kathan Pruitt...

After the arrest of more than two dozen members of a white supremacist group near a northern Idaho pride event, including one identified as its founder, LGBTQ advocates said Sunday that polarization and a fraught political climate are putting their community increasingly at risk. The 31 Patriot Front members were arrested with riot gear after a tipster reported seeing people loading up into a U-Haul like “a little army” at a hotel parking lot in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, police said. Among those booked into jail on misdemeanor charges of conspiracy to riot was Thomas Ryan Rousseau of Grapevine, Texas, who...

Gizmodo reported on the leaks. A hostile offshoot of the defunct neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, Patriot Front formed in late August 2017 less than three weeks after the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. (James Alex Fields Jr., who was convicted in December 2018 of killing 32-year-old anti-racist protester Heather Heyer at the rally, was seen there holding a shield emblazoned with the VA logo. VA later denied he was a member.) The split from VA followed months of infighting between Thomas Rousseau, the Front’s founder, and VA leader Dillon Irizarry, who was seen accusing Rousseau in...

In early October, Bright Sheng, a professor of music at the University of Michigan, played the 1965 rendition of Shakespeare’s Othello for his undergraduate class. The film starred Laurence Olivier, who was wearing black makeup, as the titular character. Having no concern for context or artistry, the university community revolted, deeming the film (and Sheng by association) racist. As a result, Sheng was temporarily removed from the classroom, and placed under investigation. Michigan administrators knew that Sheng had done nothing wrong. He showed his class a movie that cannot, in any sense of the word, be considered obscene, and Sheng...

The growth of our Leviathan state in the West has taken place under the auspices of democracy. The words of Ronald Reagan in 1975 come to mind: “If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.” Reagan seemed to intuit the power of the democratic lexicon to disguise totalitarian ambitions. Long ago, in a paradoxical move to welcome popular sovereignty to the table of legitimate governing theories, Jean-Jacques Rousseau conceived of democracy in such a way that it could never be anything but anti-democratic. Rousseau’s democratic ideal, which is paradigmatic of the Western elite’s notion...

The most famous fiasco in literary history occurred when Thomas Carlyle gave John Stuart Mill the first part of his great work The French Revolution to critique. Mill’s maid thought the manuscript was wastepaper and threw it into the fire. The loss was total. Carlyle had no copy. Carlyle and his formidable wife, Jane, were newly arrived in London from Scotland, with scant savings in their purse. The loss of the book, and its anticipated revenue, threatened them with ruin. Carlyle (who had just been introduced to high society, and was keeping company with grandees such as Mill and Wordsworth)...

Virtual Study Hall is the Best Contemporary Model for True Education. "We're all homeschoolers now." Virtual Study Hall is a contemporary update, for today's conditions, of the highly successful One Room School model of 200 years past, enlarging the scope of Homeschool socialization groups to encompass the primary education enterprise itself, centering on instruction and study. Study Halls supply a vital, missing element of study progress, for students to coordinate between textbooks and instruction. (The continual demand of junior students for the teacher's attention in the open classroom, tends to limit the effectiveness of the teaching and study enterprise to...

In Making Gay Okay, Robert Reilly says the ascendancy of men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s victory over Aristotle and that once philosophy fell the triumphant march through the institutions was quick and maybe even inevitable.Reilly explains that the debate centers on the question of what is natural and not, and how to distinguish between right and wrong. He describes how the Greeks fell in love with reality when they discovered nature and that the purpose of things was knowable and unchangeable even by the whim of gods.The author writes, “A dog wagged his tail because that was the...

For the progressive left, all roads lead to the French Revolution (1789-99) which was the first totalitarian revolution, the genesis of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual foundation for the Russian Communist, Italian Fascist and German Nazi revolutions. A nationalist-populist rebellion, it was established and controlled by a small intellectual braintrust hellbent on killing God, Christianity, capitalism and objective truth thus devolving Western civilization into a savage society based on a political religion that deified "the people," anointed the revolutionary elites as their priests, and destroyed the rights of individuals. As Robespierre put it, "The people is [sic] always worth more...

The introduction to "The Faber Book of Utopias," edited by John Carey, chronicles the methods of creating ideal citizens, which historically have been repeatedly promoted by utopian philosophers via the deconstruction or abolition of the family. Originally proposed by Plato in his magnum opus, "The Republic," this simple yet dramatic blueprint has influenced a number of social philosophers as diverse as More, Hobbes, Voltaire, Rousseau, to Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, B.F. Skinner, to socialist, liberal, progressive thinkers and politicians in modern times. Plato promoted the belief that the family should be completely deconstructed and its component parts used as...

The prime objective of secularists in modern times has been to “free” us all from the influence (The burden, they’d say) of Christianity. Just how they have gone about destroying that influence on the course of human affairs is ably described in Dr. Benjamin Wiker’s new book Worshipping the State:  How Liberalism Became our State Religion.Wiker, who has taught at Franciscan University and Thomas Aquinas College, holds that the raison d’être of secular philosophers’ has been to reduce Christianity’s hold on Western culture, and either to subordinate the Church to the state or to establish a rival civic religion that...

At the turn of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt became embroiled in a public controversy over how some writers and naturalists described the natural world in overly anthropomorphic and sentimental terms. In a 1907 article attacking Jack London, among other writers, Roosevelt popularized the moniker “nature fakers,” those writers whom Roosevelt called “an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover. But it is evident that [the nature faker] completely deceives many good people who are wholly ignorant of...

While we were students of the state education apparatus, how many of us had to write research papers where we were asked to "change the world"?I'm sure we can all remember a writing prompt similar to this: "If I could change one thing about the world, it would be …" or "How I can make the world a better place."Often, these writing prompts were given to us when we were not even old enough to think about abstract concepts like war and politics.Were these assignments teaching us to think critically? In some cases, this is possible. For the most part,...

Conservatives and liberals clash frequently on a wide array of issues, from taxes to trade, from deficits to defense. But their greatest conflict may lie in their contrasting attitudes toward civil society. Conservatives regard the institutions of civil society -- families, churches and communities -- as sources of hope and renewal. Self-styled "progressives" see these institutions as seedbeds of prejudice and ignorance. Conservatives believe that poverty stems largely from a lack of spiritual resources, resources that are typically transmitted through private, voluntary groups. Progressives view poverty as a simple lack of resources. Conservatives believe that social justice is best pursued...

De-Emphasizing marriage and abolishing State Marriage would definitely have been seen as liberal, up until very recently. Certainly, removing state control over an area where it is not required is definitely liberal. That was the understanding when I began to back this long term goal back in 2004. (snip) ...the reason why we are fighting for marriage equality is because we have to work with the present governmental system for a while yet. Marriage equality is currently easier to achieve than getting government out of the business, but the latter should be our long term goal. As for de-emphasizing marriage...

A reminder about the totalitarian temptationThe Washington Post’s culture critic, Philip Kennicott, recently took to the pages of his paper to note the “cognitive dissonance” between ingrained “habits of homophobia” in American culture, on the one hand, and a recognition that “overt bigotry is no longer acceptable in the public square,” on the other. As an example of those who resolve this dissonance by holding fast to their homophobic prejudices, Kennicott cited Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who had remarked on the similarities between the Empire State’s recent re-definition of marriage and the kind of human engineering attempted by...

Build it or We'll Keeeeeel You! Imam Ralph came right out and said it to Soledad O'Brien when she asked him about the possibility of moving the mosque site:  Rauf gave a reply that boils down to a threat. Rauf said that if his Cordoba House does not get built on his chosen site near Ground Zero, “The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack.” As for the message Rauf’s words might impart to the many Americans who oppose his project, his warning doesn’t sound like bridge-building. It sounds like blackmail. (Forbes - Claudia Rosett) Doctor...

It's good, occasionally, to take a trip down memory lane. It helps to put things into perspective. Hugo Chavez ought never to have been elected president. By rights, he ought to be growing old in a jail cell somewhere. Well, it's been seventeen years, maybe he’d be in a half-way house by now. As an army officer in 1992, he led a military revolt against the legal, constitutional government of Venezuela, and attempted to overthrow the democratically elected president of the time, Carlos Andres Perez. He gambled that once the shooting started, the minister of defense and the rest of...

Why not legalize same-sex marriage? Who could it possibly hurt? Children and the rest of society. That’s the conclusion of David Blankenhorn, who is anything but an anti-gay “bigot.” He is a life-long, pro-gay, liberal democrat who disagrees with the Bible’s prohibitions against homosexual behavior. Despite this, Blankenhorn makes a powerful case against Same-Sex marriage in his book, The Future of Marriage. He writes, “Across history and cultures . . . marriage’s single most fundamental idea is that every child needs a mother and a father. Changing marriage to accommodate same-sex couples would nullify this principle in culture and in...