Free Republic

When Julian Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadoran embassy, he was carrying a copy of Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State, which is smart advertising both for the book and for Assange’s worldview. It’s enough to make one wonder what book one would like to carry if and when one is arrested. A few years before the 2006 launch of WikiLeaks, an activist hacker even stranger than Assange ran afoul of the U.S. government, in the paranoid environment just after 9/11. England’s Gary McKinnon hacked into NASA computers and took a look around, hoping to find evidence...

The full video of the debate between Christian apologist and campus evangelist Keith Darrell and atheist writer/blogger Todd Seavey, which took place at the Playwright this past Friday.

"The experience of having everybody around me on campus say the left is the way to go and then...seeing communism collapse made me think maybe the libertarians have a better handle on how these things work," says Todd Seavey, author of the new book Libertarianism for Beginners. "While the Soviet Union existed, the Marxists on campus were rooting for the Soviet Union." A New York-baseed comic-book writer, one-time producer for TV's own John Stossel, and a contributor to Splice Today, Seavey found his way toward libertarianism while attending Brown University in the late 1980s. His new graphic book, Libertarianism for...

One of the most frustrating things about the recent censorious trend among sensitive politicized youth is that it renders useless my last-ditch political metaphor. I always figured if the day came that all other arguments for liberty were failing—if no one wanted to hear about free trade or gun rights or religious liberty—I could always fall back on the concept of free speech. I don’t just mean that if you think speech should be free you logically must think all non-violent human action should be free (though I do). The free speech analogy, while it lasted, was also useful for...

The social media era has obviously taught us that most human beings should be avoided, some at all costs. Among the worst offenders, though, are those politicized individuals, usually pathological narcissists on the left, who genuinely believe that they can command others to engage in complex research projects (e.g.,Find me four independent studies you can link to that demonstrate the generalization you just made or I will know you are a liar!). Call these jerks the homework-givers. Jerks on the Internet only have so much power, though, even if they're becoming common enough to be major drivers of culture. More...

That big military exercise called Jade Helm 15 ends today without any obvious sudden uptick in police-state activity or FEMA camp-building. Far from being silenced, I think Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who worked so hard to direct attention to the exercise, is launching his satellite radio channel this week. Still, the world is so strange and authoritarian that I have to run through a quick mental checklist sometimes to remind myself that I don’t—strictly speaking—believe in any conspiracy theories (nor paranormal claims). I mean, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked at anything the CIA did, but I have no solid...