Free Republic

Since the outbreak of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, Pat Buchanan and other paleoconservatives have made themselves true exponents of populism: the Jew-baiting, conspiracy-driven demagoguery of 1890s agrarians. In two columns, posted at WorldNetDaily this week, Buchanan accused President Bush of being a puppet of nefarious Jewish warmongers. Outlets of the Hate America Right – especially Paul Craig Roberts and LewRockwell.com – have joined him, and then some. Nothing sets Buchanan’s imagination racing like a Bush-backed Israeli war. On Tuesday, Pat asked, “Who is whispering in his ear?” His answer: bloodthirsty Hebrews. That Tel Aviv is maneuvering us to fight its wars...

It’s hard to imagine a better endorsement of Donald Trump’s economic policies – whatever they may be, whenever he finds the time to explain them – than the recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton by former Goldman Sachs CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. As the man in charge of the biggest explosion of corporate welfare in world history – the “TARP” bailouts, he defined himself as a sworn enemy of capitalism and a socialist when it comes to the capital markets. Socializing billions of dollars in investment bank, insurance company, and automobile industry losses with taxpayer dollars qualifies Paulson...

At the outset of his administration, President Bill Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” He then did everything in his power to prove that to be yet another of his slick lies. At the outset of her administration, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a one-time East German “communist youth leader,” famously declared that “multiculturalism has been a failure.” She then did everything in her power to prove what a Big Lie that was, most notoriously by inviting millions of Third World, Muslim immigrants (mostly young men) into her country, lavishly subsidizing them, giving them sex education...

It is occasionally possible to see through the fog of mysticism, superstition, lies, and the romantic, happy-faced, floating butterfly vision of Abraham Lincoln that has been created by American court historians over the past century. One place to begin is the gem of a book by Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald entitled Lincoln Reconsidered. In a particularly important passage Donald quotes Senator John Sherman of Ohio, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman and Republican Party powerhouse from the 1860s to the 1890s who was chairman of the U.S Senate Finance Committee during the Lincoln administration, on why the...

Ever since the New York Times published a long article explaining that most of the architects of the Bush foreign policy are "Straussians," more and more journalists have been asking the question, "What the heck is a Straussian?" A number of common principles have emerged after these writers have examined the writings of Leo Strauss, the godfather of neoconservativism. Straussian Principle #1 is the perversion of the idea of natural rights, as understood by John Locke and the American founding fathers. The natural law tradition holds that man possesses natural rights to life, liberty, and property and that the state...

BALTIMORE--There is a good reason why the Lincoln legend has taken on such mythical proportions: Much of what Americans think they know about Abraham Lincoln is in fact a myth. Let's consider a few of the more prominent ones. Myth #1: Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves. Ending slavery and racial injustice is not why the North invaded. As Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley on Aug. 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any...

Washington, DC-area Freepers interested in Lincoln and/or the War Between the States should take note of a seminar held later today on the Fairfax campus of George Mason University: The conventional wisdom in America is that Abraham Lincoln was a great emancipator who preserved American liberties.  In recent years, new research has portrayed a less-flattering Lincoln that often behaved as a self-seeking politician who catered to special interest groups. So which is the real Lincoln?  On Wednesday, April 16, Thomas DiLorenzo, a former George Mason University professor of Economics, will host a seminar on that very topic. It will highlight...

The Civil War ended in 1865, but it continues to arouse passions even today. Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo of Loyola College has stoked such passions anew by provoking a heated debate among conservatives and libertarians over that war and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln with his book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda and An Unnecessary War.DiLorenzo's scathing reappraisal of both the Civil War and Lincoln - a president deified across the political spectrum and placed by the American psyche in the same pantheon as the Founding Fathers - does not make for politically correct...