Free Republic

Christian families and communities that don’t embrace some form of the Benedict Option aren’t going to make it through this time of testing Veteran journalist Rod Dreher has just produced a potent study of what ails America—and is proposing that the best solution may be (as his new book is titled) “The Benedict Option.” As the book’s promotional materials describe it: Now is a time of testing, when believers will learn the difference between shallow optimism and Christian hope. However dark the shadow falling over the West, the light of Christianity need not flicker out. It will not be...

He uses the Left’s identity politics strategies against them ___ For years I’ve warned that the Left is playing a dangerous game by embracing illiberal identity politics. Last week, the liberal writer Jonathan Chait wrote about the “ideological fissure” on the Left: Why is it wrong for Trump to gripe about how a Latino judge is bound to be unfair to him by virtue of his ethnicity, but okay for Sonia Sotomayor to assert that a Latina judge could be more fair as a result of her ethnicity? Why is it wrong for white people to look out for their...

If you’re Donald Trump, you can’t buy publicity like this from his enemies in San Diego yesterday: As hundreds of protesters outside his rally here Friday afternoon chanted obscenities, waved Mexican flags and clashed with police, Donald Trump reveled on stage in the drama his candidacy has created. More: One poster referenced Trump’s wife, who immigrated to the United States from Slovenia: “The Art of the Deal. Deport Melania. Legalize 11 million.” Another: “Trump, Shame of America.” Another: “Jesus would not vote for Trump.” And: “Racist, go home.” As the rally progressed inside, a few protesters — including two women...

I keep telling my friends in the national media that if you think Bobby Jindal has a chance in hell of becoming president, send a reporter down to spend a few days in Louisiana, seeing what condition he’s leaving his state in. In today’s NYT, Campbell Robertson tells the country about the current mess. Excerpts: "Since I've been in Louisiana I've never seen a budget cycle as desperate as this one," said Robert Travis Scott, the president of the Public Affairs Research Council, a nonpartisan group based in Baton Rouge.Louisiana's budget shortfall is projected to reach $1.6 billion next...

TrampZZ/Shutterstock Ross Douthat politely but definitively unloads on the liberal Catholic theologians who griped about his opining in The New York Times, critical of Pope Francis and his allies in attempting to liberalize Catholic teaching on marriage, divorce, and communion. Excerpt: At which point we come to the third argument, which makes an appearance in your letter: You don’t understand, you’re not a theologian. As indeed I am not. But neither is Catholicism supposed to be an esoteric religion, its teachings accessible only to academic adepts. And the impression left by this moving target, I’m afraid, is that some reformers...

The poet T.S. Eliot predicted that, after the disintegration of Western society, civilization would be conserved and restored by a new monastic movement. He was referring to the events at the end of the fifth century, when Benedict of Nursia abandoned the decaying Roman Empire and established small communities of men and women dedicated to prayer, work and study. In Benedict’s day, the once-great Roman Empire had collapsed into chaos. Through economic disaster, famine, plague, moral decadence and political corruption, the society was enervated and vulnerable. Barbarians invaded from the north and east, sensing lucrative spoils to be had. In...

“Actions to stop terrorists who’d utterly annihilate America and delight in massacring our innocent children? Darn right I’d do whatever it takes to foil their murderous jihadist plots – including waterboarding. Whatever one thinks of my one-liner at the NRA rally about treating evil terrorists the way they deserve to be treated to prevent the death of innocent people, it’s utterly absurd for MSNBC to suggest that I could put our beloved troops in harm’s way, but we’ve come to expect the absurd from that failing network. If you want to talk about what really harms our troops, let’s talk...

Reader Richard sends this comment: I remember corresponding with you when John McCain tapped her as his choice for nominee for Vice-President. As a former Alaskan, I never saw her as the second coming, but like many people (and – I will quickly add – unlike many others)I found the potential story playing itself out of “Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington” to be very appealing. The person whom I had met a couple of times to spend time with in conversation (Alaska being a one-degree-of-separation state) was engaging, grounded, attentive to others and someone who had clearly and sincerely sought...

Somebody will do a Ph.D thesis in political science one day on the psychology of this stuff. Follow the link to hear the full clip. It’s delightful. (snip) Imagine the kind of conservative bubble in which the thought of Sarah Palin as a “serious political contender” is considered incontestable. Imagine the kind of conservative bubble in which holding a female who once ran for vice president of the United States responsible for something she said in a public speech is considered an act of sexism and disloyalty. To be clear, I’m not offended by this freakshow vulgarian in the least....

Man, the 12 minute speech Sarah Palin gave to the NRA convention is awful. It's just witless, red-meat blathering, delivered in that nasal whine of hers that makes it sound like she's chewing wads of tinfoil. For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. Fast-forward in the video to the 6:30 mark, though, and listen to what she says about terrorists. It's part of a long harangue about lily-livered liberals, delivered in such a way that makes Archie Bunker sound like Cicero. Money quote: "Oh, but you can't offend them, can't make...

I said here last night that the California GOP audience cheering the announcement that Texas has executed 234 condemned murderers under Rick Perry was a vile, repulsive thing. Even when I was for capital punishment, I believed this. Justice may require execution, but we should never rejoice in taking the life of another human being. At best, capital punishment is a necessary evil. I quit believing in capital punishment when I became convinced that the state is not trustworthy to use this power responsibly. It happened about 10 years ago, when it emerged that a forensic scientist in Oklahoma whose...

<p>Sarah Palin said some amazing and terrific things the other day — and nobody who wasn’t there heard about them. From, believe it or not, The New York Times, in which a columnist points out that we’re so used to goofiness coming from Palin that we missed some really interesting things at the Tea Party meeting last week — something that even liberals would have found compelling. Read past the jump for Anand Giridharadas’s summary of the great things Palin said. A hint, to get you to read further: “Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.”</p>

How on earth did this crackpot get a national TV show? Watch this amazing eight-minute monologue in which Glenn Beck interprets public art, and ties together the Rockefellers, communism, fascism, corporatism, the United Nations and the Obama White House together in a grand conspiracy. If this were in a movie, you wouldn't believe it. But this is on national TV, on Fox News, every weeknight: < video > Where's Beck getting this garbage? Listen to this 1976 speech by Beck guru W. Cleon Skousen, in which he cites Mormon prophecy to bolster his rant against the Rockefellers, the communists, and...

This past Thursday, Mark Levin talked about the speeches of Obama and Cheney and then took a call from a lib, Cindy in Westchester. That call has backbencher Rod Dreher in a tither. First, here is Mark unedited, in full context: Rod's friend Connor was miffed so Rod, being the world's foremost authority on Mark Levin, penned a post entitled 'The disgusting Mark Levin' within which he wrote, "Good grief. Having spent about 15 unpleasant minutes [emphasis added mine] listening to this creep, I cannot imagine why anybody pays attention to him." Then Rod's other buddy, another bastion of the...

It ended, as these things always do, with mutual frustration. Linker decided that I, a traditionalist conservative, believe gay marriage should be illegal because ... I believe it should be illegal. And I reached the same conclusion about his support of same-sex marriage. To Linker, my argument looks like faith-based special pleading. Likewise, his rationale struck me as little more than emotivism -- the idea that something is true because it feels right. We talked past each other, not only because neither of us can agree on what constitutes the Good, both public and private, but also because -- indeed,...

Here in a nutshell is why I think Obama will preside over a prolonged world depression with extreme consequences for the developing world: Americans, per my Peter Pan analogy, haven't been saving. They expected their homes and other assets to appreciate instead. Now the Boomers are broke just prior to retirement and are saving as much as they can. If everyone tries to save at once, the economy shuts down and stays shut -- it has nothing to do with the credit crisis. The only way to save without shutting the economy down is to export (as the Chinese have...

Does the Angry Left really want to launch a culture war over Sarah Palin? Fine. Lock and load. That's the feeling of many conservatives who until last week were lukewarm at best about the prospect of a John McCain presidency. The unhinged malice of the cultural left's assault on the Alaska governor's personal life has focused their minds and stirred their hearts. Ms. Palin's astonishingly poised and confident performance in her convention speech proves that this Iron Lady is not about to quail before the judgment of her would-be betters. Neither will conservatives. If they were indifferent or hostile to...

Does the Angry Left really want to launch a culture war over Sarah Palin? Fine. Lock and load. That's the feeling of many conservatives who until last week were lukewarm at best about the prospect of a John McCain presidency. The unhinged malice of the cultural left's assault on the Alaska governor's personal life has focused their minds and stirred their hearts. Ms. Palin's astonishingly poised and confident performance in her convention speech proves that this Iron Lady is not about to quail before the judgment of her would-be betters. Neither will conservatives. If they were indifferent or hostile to...

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family. That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can't explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears. The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic "Family and Civilization," which has just been republished in an edited version by...

The Washington Post recently carried out an unusual experiment. It hired Joshua Bell, one of the world's most famous classical musicians, to dress like a common street busker and play his Stradivarius in a D.C. metro station during rush hour. The anonymous Mr. Bell played Bach, he played Schubert, he played some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the minds of mortals. And virtually nobody stopped to notice. The point was not that most people are uncultured clods. The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail...