Free Republic

Trump is a response to the excesses of the extreme left, that have been enabled by the silence of moderate Democrats and the support of the permanent underclass. As I have written since the appearance of Ross Perot in an earlier presidential election, the left will push and push until typical middle class citizens, the defenders of the American way of life as they have known it, finally reach out to a fighter who speaks their language.

Are we good people? In the past, Christianity, the dominant religion of the West, tended to emphasize our badness. But the history of Christianity since the Renaissance has, with some detours, been the history of our extricating ourselves from the notion that we are fallen creatures. The Calvinist idea of an Elect represents the big breakthrough, and nowhere has its effect been more evident than in America. The rationale of the Revolution and the development of our constitutional government have been traced many times from the (Calvinist) Puritans . Some Americans of increasing vociferousness argue that because religion was an...

The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it, the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in the nation's most prestigious schools. The acronym WASP derives, of course, from White...

On Jan. 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII sent Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, leader of the American hierarchy, a document in the form of a letter whose opening words in Latin were Testem Benevolentiae (In Witness to Good Will). “It is clear, our beloved son,” Pope Leo wrote, “that those opinions that, taken as a whole, some designate as ‘Americanism’ cannot have our approval.” Appalled, Cardinal Gibbons held up the document’s release in the United States for a week, until the publication of excerpts originating overseas forced his hand and moved him to give it to The Baltimore Sun. In...

Going through some of the religious website that I look at once in a while, I occasionally find interesting reflections on Religioscope run by Dr Jean-François Mayer of the University of Fribourg. There are articles in English and French on this site. The tone is quiet and non-polemical, which makes me think that some of the reflections will be all the more credible for it. Now, I will touch on a real hot potato. That is the issue of trying to convert the world to Christianity by political means. I’ll point my finger to the Americans and the French, but...

...who put their conservative Americanism before their Catholic faith? It’s more or less summed up in this note from a friend of mine, an Eastern Orthodox Christian who tells the following tale: The wife of a Russian Orthodox priest in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, once told me that she and husband, both Ukranians, had lost their families to Stalin, escaped to Hitler, and escaped deportation to the Soviet Union only by providential miracle (the intervention of Orthodox monks and stealth). They came to the US and he got a job with General Electric in Indiana. He retired from that job and...

How to Address Priests and Religious:Titles and Signs of Respect Marian Therese Horvat, Ph.DIn times past every Catholic used to know some of the simple rules that have been set aside from disuse. The general protocol was taught by sisters in grade school, but more often was learned as in osmosis from everyday practice. No one dreamed of calling Father O’Reilly by the nickname “Bill,” or, addressing Sister Margaret Mary as “Maggie.”Everyone knew you rose as a sign of respect when a priest or religious entered the room. Speaking before a gathering that included clergy or religious, a Catholic...

WHEN THE CRYING IS OVER: One half of this country is virtuous the other half is unable to face evil. Bill Whittle makes an interesting case for the future that does not include civil disobedience.

..................Each party is pulled into this debate by what it sees as the deeply misguided views of the other. Democrats listen to Republicans and hear a simpleminded and selfish radical individualism​—​or, as President Obama has put it, “nothing but thinly veiled Social Darwinism.” They hear people who think that being successful and rich means you’re smarter than everyone else or work harder than everyone else, and who therefore have no regard for those in our society who are in no position to start a business or get a loan. They hear people who have benefited from the privileges of being...

  Presidents Day: A Meaningless Day Off David C. Stolinsky Feb. 20, 2012 Today is Presidents Day. It isn’t Lincoln’s Birthday, which was Feb. 12. It isn’t Washington’s Birthday, which will be Feb. 22. It is just the last day of a three-day weekend. Instead of a day to honor our great leaders of the past, it became merely a day not to work and to enjoy sales at stores. The meaning was removed. Presidents Day? Which president? Millard Fillmore? He was an anti-Catholic bigot who signed the Fugitive Slave Law, which forced slaves who escaped to free states...

One of William F. Buckley’s later books was titled simply Gratitude, which is, when you think about it, one of the cardinal conservative virtues. The spirit of gratitude was amply on display this past week at a symposium jointly sponsored by the Bradley Foundation and the Hudson Institute titled “True Americanism: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Spoiler alert: It matters. Panelists took as their starting point an indispensable new book by Leon and Amy Kass and Diana Schaub called What So Proudly We Hail, a selection of stories, songs, and speeches about “the American soul” that should...

Bishop Adamec of the highly troubled Altoona-Johnestown Diocese retired in January of this year. How was it it was missed? Someone should have been popping the cork of champagne. But like the despot of a distant oriental country flooded with sand and camels tethered in the ruins of better days, his unhappy reign has passed like the report of a swinging rusty sign, deep in the rust belt somewhere between Detroit and Saginaw.

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=2zk3vy3lgq a flash from the past says it all about Americans and how we are perceived in Europe.

October 20, 2010. The League of Women Voters hosted a candidate forum featuring Joe Walsh & Melissa Bean running for the 8th Congressional District in Illinois. The League of Women voters got schooled on what it means to be an American.

Address To The Graduating Class Of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York - March 6, 1974 Since I am a fiction writer, let us start with a short short story. Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions in or mind would be: Where am I? How can I discover it? What should I do? You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the sunlight seems paler...

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate...

Check out this video of Jack Webb schooling Obama in what it means to be an American. It's a great way to get the day started on the right foot. Jack Webb educates Obama on America

An Overview of America The United States of America Born in 1776 our country is the offspring of a religious based heritage of liberty under law. Blessed with great natural resources and a pioneer people given to industry and moral discipline our nation grew to be strong and prosperous and developed the finest governmental system ever devised by man. America soon became the refuge of the world’s tired, hungry, and poor. Millions left everything in the old world to start over in a land that rewarded initiative and hard work and perseverance. The many millions who didn’t come here found...

I ran across this on vox and with amnesty coming up for dicussion when congress comes back, I thought I'd post it. A Quote by President Theodore Roosevelt... Aug 19, 2009 at 12:07 PM 1 comment Share Where to begin... It is always difficult to start one of these. I mean, what the hell do you put in a blog? What should you put in a blog, is probably a better question. Answer? I will figure that out later. For now, I'll post a quote from former-President of the United States, Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt. One that I believe to be...

Space and health, seemingly disconnected, join to provide important lessons about the nation. (In violation of a longtime columnar stricture against the first-person singular - in this age of the rat-trap of me, a stricture violated in columns and blogs and on television every day before breakfast - today's column includes some personal references.) Many in their 50s and older recall vividly where they were when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. My wife and I and our 6-month-old son spent the night at a vacationing neighbor's house that had a color TV and ours didn't. Because of the...