Free Society

Merle Haggard and the Lost “Free Life”

by James Bovard June 1, 2024

“Is the best of the free life behind us now?” Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song “Okie from Muskogee” for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting widespread loss of faith in the American dream ...

The Steady Slide Towards Tyranny

by John W. Whitehead May 8, 2024

“As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”—Former presidential advisor Bertram Gross The American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism. The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being ...

Social Justice Fallacies

by George Leef May 5, 2024

Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books, 2023) Now 93, Thomas Sowell continues to produce excellent work — work that would help the United States escape from the grip of statism if people would heed him. Sowell has just published a new book, Social Justice Fallacies, and it contains a wealth of common sense about that ...

The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

by John W. Whitehead May 1, 2024

It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy. ― J. Edgar Hoover, ...

The Government Wants to Play God

by John W. Whitehead April 11, 2024

The government wants to play god. It wants the power to decide who lives or dies and whose rights are worthy of protection. Abortion may still be front and center in the power struggle between the Left and the Right over who has the right to decide—the government or the individual—when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy, sexual ...

When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

by John W. Whitehead April 2, 2024

“In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.”— Martin Luther King Jr. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the ...

The World Economic Forum Is Still Conspiring Against Your Freedom

by James Bovard April 1, 2024

Last January, humanity’s elite gathered again in Davos, Switzerland, to plan out the rest of our lives. World Economic Forum (WEF) honchos are morally superior because they are devoted to destroying your freedom to save the Earth, or at least to safeguard plant habitat. Sixty heads of government from around the world attended, as did endless Lear Jet–loads of multilateral ...

America Needs a Great Reset

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2024

For several years now, and especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 “pandemic” fiasco, we have been told that the world needs a “great reset.” World Economic Forum (WEF) executive chairman Klaus Schwab famously said in June of 2020: “The COVID- 19 crisis has shown us that our old systems are not fit any more for the 21st century. ...

Tyranny Is Rising as Freedom Falls

by John W. Whitehead March 22, 2024

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Day by day, tyranny is rising as freedom falls. The U.S. military is being used ...

Understanding Freedom and Faith in Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2024

There are two major obstacles to achieving a genuinely free society in our lifetime: one, a lack of understanding of the genuine principles of freedom, and two, a lack of faith in freedom. The first obstacle involves principally nonlibertarians. The second obstacle involves everyone, including libertarians. If someone were to conduct a survey among the American people today in which people ...

The Never-Ending Federal Surveillance Crime Spree

by James Bovard March 1, 2024

Last December, one of the most intrusive provisions in the federal statute book was set to expire. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the National Security Agency to vacuum up trillions of emails and other data. A bevy of bipartisan members of Congress called for radically curtailing those nullifications of Americans’ privacy. But the effort to ...

Unheralded Resisters in Nazi Germany: The Edelweiss Pirates, Part 3

by Wendy McElroy March 1, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 In his essay “Youthful Rebellion as Legitimate Resistance Against the Third Reich,” history professor John Charles Marsland II described the acceleration: By 1942, HJ leaders could not cross the street without incident and many stopped attending their meetings out of fear of molestation. The EP ...