The Apostle Paul

The title of this essay, “Education as if Truth Mattered,” is taken from the subtitle of Christopher Derrick’s book, Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as if Truth Mattered, published in 1977. Derrick’s subtitle was itself borrowed and adapted from the subtitle of E. F. Schumacher’s international bestseller, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, published four years earlier. Derrick and Schumacher were friends, the former being instrumental in introducing the latter to the Church’s social teaching, and the two books have much more in common than their ostensibly different subjects would suggest. In both cases, the authors illustrate how modernity’s philosophical materialism has undermined the very foundations of civilized life and how the solution to the problem is a return to traditional concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Continue reading →

James Monroe (c. 1819) by Samuel Morse (1791-1872)

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 2, 1823 – In the greatest step to date by the United States, acting as a world power to assure the peace and security of those other nations in the Western Hemisphere which are our friendly neighbors, President Monroe today declared all of the Americas as “out of bounds” to would-be European conquerors.

A few paragraphs in a message to the newly assembled Congress, read on behalf of the President to a joint assembly of the Senate and the House of Representatives laid down a policy from which no avenue of retreat was left. In an eloquent silence after the reading, a formal motion to receive and to print the Message was adopted without debate.

One must reach back for precedent to the Pax Romana for as drastic a step taken to enclose a great portion of the world within a wall of freedom. Continue reading →

“..that the Lord may behold us as a people, offering praise and thereby glorifying Him…”

CHARLESTOWN, Massachusetts, June 20, 1676 – The American tradition of Thanksgiving, first celebrated by our Pilgrim Fathers more than half a century ago, was proclaimed today in formal statement for the first time from the steps of the Council House.

It was on December 20, 1620, that Governor John Carver gathered around him the small band at Plymouth, to thank God in the midst of overwhelming adversities for the great gift of life itself, in the wilderness of the first colony. Continue reading →

The following is a letter-to-the-editor of the Charleston, SC Post and Courier September 15, 2018 defending the crew of the Confederate submarine CSS Hunley against a letter-writer’s accusation that they were traitors. It applies to all Confederates. This letter was not published by the Post and Courier but has been published in the Abbeville Institute Blog (“Confederate Soldiers Were Not Traitors”, October 3, 2018) and other places.

Dear Editor of The Post and Courier,

A letter writer on September 12, 2018 is adamant that the proposed museum for the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley should not be incorporated into Patriot’s Point because Patriot’s Point honors the U.S. Navy and those “who defended the U.S. and its Constitution” whereas the CSS Hunley crew were traitors.

He is correct that the Hunley’s sinking of the USS Housatonic to become the first submarine in history to sink an enemy ship in combat was an historic event, but he errs grievously when he says the Hunley should also be remembered “for their pardons for treason.” That is fake history.

The Hunley crew gave their lives for their country. They were not charged with treason and nobody associated with the Hunley sought a pardon. Continue reading →

I wrote this article a couple of years ago. The Progressives continue fanning the flames of racism to further divide us. So, in response, I wanted to reissue this article to help expose their lies – the true source of the growing division. ~ Tom DeWeese

Webster’s Dictionary defines Racism as “The assumption that the characteristics and abilities of an individual are determined by race and that one race is biologically superior to another.” Another more direct way of saying it is “Blind hatred of another simply because of his/her race.”

On an historic summer day in 1963, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King inspired a nation as he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

That description of true freedom is the exact opposite of the definition of Racism. It describes various races living together in harmony through shared values, goals, and dreams. Continue reading →

MONTGOMERY, April 29, 1861

Gentlemen of the Congress: It is my pleasing duty to announce to you that the Constitution framed for the establishment of a permanent Government for the Confederate States has been ratified by conventions in each of those States to which it was re-ferred. To inaugurate the Government in its full proportions and upon its own substantial basis of the popular will, it only remains that elections should be held for the designation of the officers to administer it. There is every reason to believe that at no distant day other States, identified in political principles and community of interests with those which you represent, will join this Confederacy, giving to its typical constellation increased splendor, to its Government of free, equal, and sovereign States a wider sphere of usefulness, and to the friends of constitutional liberty a greater security for its harmonious and perpetual existence. It was not, however, for the purpose of making this announcement that I have deemed it my duty to convoke you at an earlier day than that fixed by yourselves for your meeting. The declaration of war made against this Confederacy by Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, in his proclamation issued on the 15th day of the present month, rendered it necessary, in my judgment, that you should convene at the earliest practicable moment to devise the measures necessary for the defense of the country. Continue reading →

“I find a hundred thousand sorrows touching my heart, and there is a ringing in my ears, like an admonition eternal, an insistent call, ‘It must not be again! It must not be again!'” said a tearful President Warren G. Harding in May 1921, as 5,212 wooden caskets with the remains of American servicemen from France arrived on the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Warren Gamaliel Harding was a kind and generous man with a heart, a president who loved people, adored animals, and hated violence, bloodshed, and war. Yet he is often ridiculed as America’s worst president by the nation’s “scholars.” Despite these erroneous opinions, he was a president of great achievements. He reversed a severe economic depression in short order, restored the nation’s domestic tranquility, pardoned war dissenters, and called for equality for black Americans. But perhaps his most overlooked achievements were in foreign affairs. Continue reading →

While the filibuster started as a measure to protect the voices of a minority, more recently it has been used in quite literally the opposite way: to protect entrenched and powerful forces.

The most famous filibuster in American history is a fictional one. In Frank Capra’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart is Senator Jefferson Smith, a Washington outsider who has unwittingly been used and then betrayed by his late father’s friend, the powerful and corrupt Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains). In the stirring climax, Senator Smith filibusters for more than a full day, to the point of absolute exhaustion, in order to stand up for himself and challenge Paine’s crooked plans. Smith’s filibuster is a tribute to American ideals, but even more than that it represents an idealized vision of the filibuster itself, as a way in which the little guy can resist and eventually triumph over the Senate and U.S. government’s most powerful forces. Continue reading →

Owing to the many federal records that have been released over the years relating to the Kennedy assassination, especially through the efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, many Americans are now aware of the war that was being waged between President Kennedy and the CIA throughout his presidency. The details of this war are set forth in FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.

In an interview conducted by Former Congressman Ron Paul and his colleague Dan McAdams, Robert Kennedy Jr., which focused in part on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was Kennedy Jr.’s uncle and revealed a fascinating aspect of this war with which I was unfamiliar. He stated that the deep animosity that the CIA had for the Kennedy family actually stretched back to something the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, did in the 1950s that incurred the wrath of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. Continue reading →

The Founding of the united States: On THIS day in history…

President George Washington writes to Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, Virginia’s governor and a former general, regarding the Whiskey Rebellion, an insurrection that was the first great test of Washington’s authority as president of the United States. In the letter, Washington declared that he had no choice but to act to subdue the “insurgents,” fearing they would otherwise “shake the government to its foundation. Continue reading →

“The Union, next to our liberty, most dear.“ – John C. Calhoun

It is never too late to put up a fight for freedom. True, the prospect for such a venture at this time seems bleak indeed, what with the prevailing madness to push more power upon the political overseer so that he might the better regulate our lives. Recruits would be scarce. From the rank and file, those who under all circumstances are determined to be harnessed, little can be expected; they are too preoccupied with mere existence. And those who seem to have the necessary ingredients – that is, those who have by their own initiative pushed themselves above the general level – are equally fervent for a regulated and subsidized existence under an omnipotent State. Subvention has become everybody’s business. Continue reading →

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.”

Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern. Continue reading →

This weekend was a busy one… but no – nothing outdoors, as it is still too damned hot. I have spent hours moving my office and studio around to a degree, getting caught up on long-ignored files, and then less than an hour ago I was reviewing some old broadcasts and landed upon one which I had never re-aired nor re-listened to – and was totally shocked.

I no longer broadcast with the network which I shared this commentary on, but this recording goes back to April of 2009. I hope that each of the Groups on Facebook who I am proud to belong to will appreciate OUR history… and yes – even though I was born just North of the Land of Lincoln – I KNEW from an early age – the TRUTH – and it is MY history as well! Continue reading →

“The idea of imposing universal peace on the world by force is a barbarian fantasy.” ~ Garet Garrett

After the death of Taft and as the Eisenhower foreign policy began to take on the frozen Dullesian lineaments of permanent mass armament and the threat of “massive nuclear retaliation” throughout the globe, I began to notice isolationist sentiment starting to fade away, even among old libertarian and isolationist compatriots who should have known better. Old friends who used to scoff at the “Russian threat” and had declared The Enemy to be Washington, DC now began to mutter about the “international Communist conspiracy.” I noticed that young libertarians coming into the ranks were increasingly infected with the Cold War mentality and had never even heard of the isolationist alternative. Young libertarians wondered how it was that I upheld a “Communist foreign policy.”

In this emerging atmosphere, novelist Louis Bromfield’s nonfiction work of 1954, A New Pattern for a Tired World, a hard-hitting tract on behalf of free-market capitalism and a peaceful foreign policy, began to seem anachronistic and had almost no impact on the right wing of the day. Continue reading →

1022 – Published in ‘Words That Men Live By’ on the first generation Federal Observer, December 3, 2001

~ Introduction ~
This essay, based on a speech delivered at Stanford University in 1906, is the origin of the idea of organized national service. The line of descent runs directly from this address to the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps to the Peace Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps. Though some phrases grate upon modern ears, particularly the assumption that only males can perform such service, several racially-biased comments, and the notion that the main form of service should be viewed as a “warfare against nature,” it still sounds a rallying cry for service in the interests of the individual and the nation. ~ Ed.

Homer’s Illiad

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. Continue reading →

Continue your lessons in learn the meaning of the Constitution and the principles of American government in this new version of Hillsdale’s most popular course. Continue reading →

Learn the meaning of the Constitution and the principles of American government in this new version of Hillsdale’s most popular course. Continue reading →

An address given by Willkie at the 44th Congress of American Industry on December 8th, 1939

Willkie on the Campaign Trail

The history of government is the history of two conflicting principles: one is the supreme importance of the State; the other is the supreme importance of the individual. Either the people have believed that the State was merely the voluntary creation of individual citizens, responsible to them and designed primarily to protect their liberties; or else they have believed that the State was an authority in its own right to which individual citizens were subject and which could demand of them the suppression of their own desires and talents. The individual versus the State – that is the theme which more than any other has determined the course of civilization. Continue reading →