Free Republic

Reflecting on the Revolution in France in his classic 1790 treatise, the Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that “whenever our neighbor’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.” More than a century later, William F. Buckley Sr.—father and namesake of the conservative American icon—took a similar view of the Mexican Revolution (1911-20), sharing Burke’s pragmatic approach to government as well as his concerns about liberal contagion. But unlike Burke, who observed the happenings in France from the safety of England, Buckley was a participant in the drama...

Trump created a new conservatism. Now its our job to nurture it.Back in the early days of the Donald Trump phenomenon, whenever he supposedly got out of line a recurring joke about him was, “But he fights.” The pundits laughed. The poor rubes suckered by Trump were supposedly taken in by some canard that he was a fighter. But the fact is he was, he won a lot of those fights, and his voters are better off for those wins. When the spurious allegations of long past sexual misconduct from now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh emerged, conventional wisdom said...

Never before has it been harder to be a young conservative than today.  The rising AOC-socialist generation and social justice warriors are doing everything they can to silence or “cancel” conservative voices.   Young people today are fed a continuous, non-stop dish of political correctness, are constantly told that their country is systemically racist, and that anyone supporting Donald Trump is a racist, bigot, or deplorable.  Terms like “woke,” “trigger warnings,” “microaggressions,” systemically-fill-in-the-blank, etc. have been introduced in our lexicon as a way to muzzle any opposing opinion to the general globalist, progressive worldview orthodoxy.  The culprits enabling this come...

It’s been exactly a decade since William F. Buckley, Jr. died. Yet, surveying the ideological landscape, it feels more like a century. Watch an episode of his program “Firing Line,” and you’ll see what I mean. There, Buckley – in his uniquely aristocratic way – would debate guests on the issues of the day. Not try to shout each other down, or trot out a quick soundbite before three or four different people cross-talked over you, but actually debate. That may sound like a recipe for boredom, and perhaps by the cage-match mentality prevailing today, it was. But we’re talking...

William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review (where I work), once confessed in private, “I wish to hell I could attack them without pleasing people I can’t stand to please.” By “them” he meant the members of the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Communist, anti-United Nations, anti-civil rights John Birch Society. The people Bill couldn’t stand to please, of course, were liberals. And yet Buckley did eventually go after the Birchers, at first trying as best he could to denounce their leader, Robert Welch, without alienating the rank and file. Eventually, this needle became impossible to thread, specifically when Welch began insisting that...

For the Tucker Carlson (and William F. Buckley) fans out there, Washington Post Reporter Warns Journalists To Avoid Tucker Carlson’s ‘Dunk Tank.’ But of course. Given Carlson’s nightly ability to demolish leftwing shibboleths and those who claim to believe them, as William F. Buckley quipped when asked why Bobby Kennedy was declining repeated requests to appear on Firing Line, “Why does baloney reject the grinder?” - From Ed Driscoll at Instapundit And now since we’ve established the premise of this post let me just ask: is there anything better than bologna in all it’s glorious varieties? I say no. American...

From 1966 to 1999, the television series Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. was a venue for debate and discussion on political, social, and philosophical issues with experts of the day. The broadcast collection includes administrative files, program preparation materials, photographs, transcripts, sound recordings, and videotape copies of the 1,505 programs. Preface With 1,504 installments over 33 years, Firing Line is the longest-running public-affairs show in television history with a single host, William F. Buckley Jr. The Firing Line archives consist of: tapes of all the shows; transcripts of all the shows; for about two-thirds of the shows, the...

It's been a wacky election season, but when hasn't it been? Remember when Ross Perot, who couldn't decide whether he was running or not running for president, did both, alternately jumping in and out of the race as the mood struck him? Welcome to the quadrennial circus that is an American presidential campaign. This year the stacked deck now has two jokers -- Donald Trump, the self-infatuated real-estate magnate of reality TV and the Greater New York Metropolitan Area, and Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey with a gift for gab. Naturally he promptly endorsed The Donald. It's a...

Perhaps the most important fact to assimilate about modern American conservatism is that it is not, and has never been, monolithic. It is a coalition with many points of origin and diverse tendencies, not always easy to reconcile. And because of this fact, there has long been a felt need among many conservatives to integrate the Right's divergent components into a philosophically coherent--or at least functional--force. Hence the frequent use of the term fusionism, a word coined more than fifty years ago. Conservatives often like to say that they adhere to a body of immutable truths about human nature and...

As a teenager, I remember watching the 1968 televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the two national political conventions and thinking that they were way more entertaining than any of the TV dramas that were popular at the time. Those debates, unaccountably unavailable for the most part since then, have been resurrected as the centerpiece of the terrific documentary “Best of Enemies,” directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon. The film positions those debates as a harbinger of the ideological sword-crossing that has become a staple of TV news. Except what we have now, as opposed...

<p>Now and then I get letters and e-mail messages asking why I am so "obsessed" with Jews and Israel. The question amuses me. It would be one thing if I often wrote about Mali, or Honduras, or Borneo, or any other nation or country most people remember only as a name from geography class.</p>

How many times have we heard: “Never again”? (Or taken selfies at a concentration camp or Holocaust museum with those words?) How often have we quoted: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”? And yet: Do we do nothing? What do we actually say in the face of evil? “I don’t want to have on my conscience that I was complicit in something as horrendous as this simply by being quiet,” is how Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., reflected on the persecution being conducted against Christians and other...

It could be due to the usual suspects: the dumbing down of culture. The partisanship of politics and cable television, which doesn’t make time for erudition and deep penetration into an issue. The dominance of secularism. Those are all probably to blame for the fact that there are no longer any real Catholic public intellectuals. Note: I did not say Catholic intellectuals. I said Catholic public intellectuals. William F. Buckley. Richard John Neuhaus. Fulton Sheen. These men were Catholic public intellectuals: they created popular magazines, hosted TV shows, wrote both fiction and nonfiction books. Their prose was literary, and they...

Conservative student group Turning Point USA caused a stir last week by posting pages online from a textbook used at the University of South Carolina. The book calls Ronald Reagan “sexist” and says conservatives “take a basically pessimistic view of human nature” — one in which “people are conceived of as being corrupt.” Several avowed conservatives balked not just at the negative portrayal of Reagan but also at the idea that the conservative persuasion contains a measure of pessimism. On this point, the textbook is right and they are wrong. Russell Kirk was the man credited by William F. Buckley...

Award ceremony will take place on Tues, Nov. 19th from 6:00-8:00pm at The Capitol Hill Club Buckley Award Winners: Yuval Levin – National Affairs, Editor & AuthorWill Weatherford – Florida House of Representatives, Speaker of the HouseRyan T. Anderson – The Heritage Foundation: DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society, Fellow & AuthorAlex Smith - College Republican National Committee, National ChairRemy Munasifi – ReasonTV, Comedian, Musician & Video Artist Buckley Award Winner Biographies:Yuval Levin – National Affairs, Editor & AuthorYuval Levin, at age 35, has served as the Editor of National Affairs magazine, an influential conservative policy journal founded in 2009.  Levin has been the organizer of a group of devoted conservatives who are interested...

According to respected political analysts, this election was a crushing defeat for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own party suffered a loss of 25% of its Knesset representation. Or it was a solid vote of confidence for Netanyahu, as he will remain prime minister of a coalition potentially stronger than before. This election was a huge victory for secular Israel. And the incoming Knesset will have the most religious representation ever. The country moved to the right. The country moved left. The center is now stronger. The extremes are stronger. The security hawks, skeptical of the Palestinian Authority's "peace process"...

It's hard for a lot of people, particularly on the right, to recognize that the conservative movement's problems are mostly problems of success. The Republican Party's problems are much more recognizable as the problems of failure, including the failure to recognize the limits of that movement's success. American conservatism began as a kind of intellectual hobbyist's group with little hope of changing the broader society. Albert Jay Nock, the cape-wearing libertarian intellectual -- he called himself a "philosophical anarchist" -- who inspired a very young William F. Buckley Jr., argued that political change was impossible because the masses were rubes,...

Streaming on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q3JT6A/ Taped on Dec 11, 1967 (New York City, NY) Guest: Saul David Alinsky

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Chris Bram is the author of the novel Gods and Monsters. Gore Vidal was famous for his hates: academia, presidents, whole portions of the American public and, most notably, Truman Capote. Yet he could be incredibly generous to other writer friends. He wrote beautiful, appreciative essays about Tennessee Williams and Dawn Powell. He was a man of many facets and endless contradictions. He achieved his first notoriety in 1948 when he was only 22, for his novel, The City and the Pillar. It was the fullest, most frank portrait of gay American life at that time. The book wasn't autobiographical...