Editor’s Choice
Do You Love Liberty?
If so, and if you like the content you find here on TheRootsOfLiberty.com, you can help the cause in many ways. First, don't hesitate to share any articles you like, anywhere you wish. Seeds of liberty can be planted in many different fields, and it can be pleasantly...
Gun Rights Lessons – A Series
The debate over gun rights and gun control stretches back decades, to at least the early part of the 20th century. It should, then, come as no surprise that there are quite a few recurring and oft-argued themes and positions in this long-running debate. Seasoned...
Four Decades of Failure
Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently reintroduced HR899, a bill that stated, in its entirety: This bill terminates the Department of Education on December 31, 2020. He's updated the year to 2022, but otherwise left it as-is. Of course, the Internet had its...
Policy and Experts
Back when he was writing a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (Best of the Web Today) instead of editing it, James Taranto had a daily feature called "What Would We Do Without Experts?" It, clearly, mocked absurd expert opinions, and reminded us that...
Menthol Madness
It didn't take America very long to figure out that alcohol prohibition was a bad idea. The Volstead Act, which took effect in 1920 to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, was repealed, via the Twenty-First Amendment, in 1933. Prohibitionists being who and what they are,...
We Don’t Need Another Hero
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story on Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist, Youtube phenom, and lightning rod for the woke-Left. In it, Peterson suggests that the attractiveness of the various movements that draw young activists (left and...
“Everything Is Allowed, While Nothing Is Forgiven”
This was said by a pastor I know of, who will remain nameless. Why nameless, when he might claim credit for such elegant words of wisdom? Because even he is worried about race-denouncement, social media canceling, hounding, banishment from his social support circle,...
How Dare You!?…
...leave the plantation???!!! Tim Scott, US Senator, was given this message (in spirit if not in specific language) by the woke-Left for having the temerity to give the rebuttal speech following Biden's first address to Congress. You see, Scott is a black man who has...
Why Pack The Court?
The Democrats, stinking drunk with power despite an election outcome that very much warns them off excesses, are running full-steam-ahead with a progressive agenda, and that includes an effort to "pack" the Supreme court i.e. add several seats (which they will fill)...
Bringing Down The House
The American Rescue Plan: $1,900,000,000,000. The American Jobs Plan: $2,300,000,000,000. The American Families Plan: $1,800,000,000,000. One hundred days. Six trillion dollars. Biden promised big things, and boy, has he delivered. Not one, but three colossal...
Death By Procedure
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made a now-notorious decision to concentrate COVID patients in nursing homes. This produced America's worst losses of the pandemic. I worked as a paramedic in New York City throughout, and have had conversations with a number of senior...
The New Marxism
Just about a century ago, Vladimir Lenin, held captive by the Germans during their war against Russia, was sent back to his motherland. The Germans didn't do this out of kindness or humanity, but instead saw "in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in...
Standing on Principle
Derek Chauvin got the book thrown at him yesterday, for killing George Floyd. Good. By accounts, he was a bad cop, with a bad track record, and he spent nine minutes suffocating to death someone he sought to arrest. The Left's behavior and reaction to this all has...
The Pitfalls of Language Arrogance
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is a follow-up to We Expect Less Of You, wherein I opine on a university's decision to de-emphasize good grammar and spelling. My father had an employee, decades back, who worked crazy hours at his restaurant. The man, whose name escapes...
Do You Love Liberty?
If so, and if you like the content you find here on TheRootsOfLiberty.com, you can help the cause in many ways. First, don't hesitate to share any articles you like, anywhere you wish. Seeds of liberty can be planted in many different fields, and it can be pleasantly...
We Expect Less Of You
The University of Hull, a school on the north-central eastern shore of England, raised a bit of a kerfuffle with a policy declaration that "[s]tudents studying at the University of Hull will not be marked down for poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in exams...
Inviting The Backlash
A few months ago, the New York Post ran a series of stories about Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents. Twitter decided that this was not to be shared across its platform, and suspended the Post's account. Only a rank partisan would imagine that Twitter did this out...
COVID-Eternal
The Babylon Bee, where snark flourishes, has offered us a commemoration: Nation Prepares To Celebrate 1st Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve The humor-impaired and virus-aggressive will bristle at this joke, as much because of the truths it rests upon as...
This Week's Poll
Loading ...Most Liked Posts
Most Liked Comments
on We Condemn Bigotry, Except When We Celebrate It 8+
on Trump’s Bullies 7+
on Gun Rights Lesson #551 – Sensible Gun Regulation 6+on Clinton The Bulletproof 5+
on Fact-Checking Trump 5+
on Let The Squirming Begin 5+- on Bernie-Bros, Meet William Hauser 4+
on Is the Earth’s Climate in Trouble? 4+
on Congratulations, Democrats! 4+
on Whence Morality? 4+
Opinion
Poles of the Pandemic
The pandemic has gone on long enough to draw some broad historical lessons. The first is that America's management was not fitting for the leader of the free world. Compared to our achievements in the Second World War, it is hard to escape the conclusion that we...
Has Woke Jumped The Shark?
Georgia and Texas enacted voting reforms in the wake of the mess that was the 2020 election. Quick as you can say "woke," the states' legislators and governors were denounced by the Democratic leadership and by those of a "woke" persuasion, with concomitant...
Break Before You Buy
Millions of Americans recently saw their bank accounts grow by $1400 or some multiple thereof. They have been told that these shekels are part of what it's going to take to help America recover from the economic ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. That many of these...
Platform Games
Trump (whom I briefly tagged with the "him who shall no longer be named' sobriquet... read on) is no longer residing in the White House, but he certainly continues to occupy the brain pans of countless leftists, wholly rent free. Given the attitudes the Left has...
Free Riders
America has a free rider problem. Except when she doesn't. Except when she does. Except when she doesn't. Depending on who you talk to, progressive taxation combined with various forms of welfare are either a justified "redistribution" of wealth by the government (I...
Take On Taking
Civics 101 taught me that a "Taking" of property by the government requires compensation. This is a continuation of an English precedent going back centuries, so it's not surprising that a court overturned, as a Taking, the eviction moratorium, in response to the...
Pants On Fire
Let us contemplate, as the Biden administration rushes to cripple the American economy with brute-force carbon reduction measures as part of its "green"/global warming agenda, that nothing America does will make one whit's worth of difference to global temperature...
How Cuomo Might Have Killed Me
As regular readers know, I have worked as a paramedic in New York City for over 25 years. Covid was the hardest challenge of my career, by far. It was the challenge of the century to our healthcare system (and our society). Controversy rages around Governor Cuomo's...
“Their” Truth
Information regarding the Atlanta massage parlor shooter continues to issue forth, and as the picture resolves more finely, we will get a better sense of why he murdered all those people. The earliest reporting (not reports, reporting, as in pundits interlacing their...
The Trotsky Treatment
Students of history know that the original "cancel culture" was the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when Stalin and his apparatchiks sent millions to forced labor camps, often based on nothing more than suspicion of unfavored political views (and often not even that). This...
The Peril of Identithink
This past Tuesday evening, an individual murdered eight people in three Atlanta area "spas" (i.e. massage parlors). Six of the eight were Asian women. A suspect, a 21 year old white man, was promptly arrested, and at this juncture it appears pretty certain that the...
Racists and Murderers
"The school can ask you to leave for any reason," said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. "Then you'll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you'll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer. Thus spake a Los...
Grabby Hands And Dead Grannies
Three weeks ago, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's top aide, secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa, had an "oops" moment, wherein she confessed to something that many of us already knew: that there were not only thousands of deaths attributable to a colossally stupid...
GameStop’s Crapitalist Vigilantes
An astonishing story is unfolding, with this aspect of the story getting astonishingly blasé coverage: it seems a vigilante movement developed on Reddit to revenge itself on "Wall Street" for their role in melting down the global economy in 2008 (which went...
BLM and OPM
Where is all that money going? Thus spake Michael Brown, Sr. after he learned that BLM (the organization) had raised $90M by exploiting BLM (the movement) for financial gain. And, thus, the seedy underbelly of all things political emerges once again. It's always about...
A Nibble A Day
Cancel Culture, a phenomenon whose existence (too) many contort themselves into pretzels denying, has "found" the writings of Theodore Geisel. Or, as most of us know him, Dr. Seuss, author of more than 60 books and creator of The Cat In The Hat, Sam-I-Am, The Grinch,...
Killing Opportunity
What does the Left have against the young? Despite all the 'Science!,' schools remain closed or are opening sl-o-o-o-wly because of massive resistance from teachers' unions. A 'lost year' isn't a particularly big deal to adults from a developmental standpoint, but...
The Oppressor Class
The en-vogue social theory of modern times, when stripped of its various veneers, boils down to a simple concept: that there are oppressors and oppressed. Not individuals, mind you, but groups, aka classes, aka categories, aka "identities," and our only relevance lies...
The Double-Bind
Identity and "woke" politics are, it seems, an endless game of "hold my beer," where every face-palm inducing iteration begets an even more outrageous offering. Yesterday's escalation arrives from none other than the Coca-Cola company, wherein a training video thrust...
Conflict Karma
The fallout from the Capitol riot continues to expand, and we are now being told that the entirety of the Trump-voting populace should be labeled "insurrectionist." With such a label comes, of course, the application of tools the government has at hand in response....
How ‘Bout That Emmy?
Here in my home state of New York, land of the second-highest per-capita COVID mortality rate in the nation, a major scandal is unfolding in slow-motion. Governor Cuomo, the object of swooning adulation this past spring for his supposedly "adult" handling of the COVID...
Capitol Theater
In the wake of the January 6th riot at the Capitol, 25,000 National Guard troops were dispatched to DC, presumably to establish order and protect the Government against other acts of insurrection. Five weeks later, with nary a protestor in sight, 5000 troops remained...
The Neverending Derangement
To no one's surprise, the Senate failed to convict Trump on the impeachment charge forwarded by the House. What was originally put forth as a "save the nation from his lunacy the last two weeks of his term" was flipped on its head to a tepid "keep him from running for...
Rage And Loathing In Wokerica
Nowadays, it is virtually impossible to go through your daily life without receiving some blunt-force messaging about diversity, about inclusion, about multiculturalism, and about justice for the oppressed. That this messaging is being delivered (and often...
War Comes Through The Overton Window
In our political conversations, we encounter ideas that are broadly considered reasonable, and ideas that are considered unreasonable or flat-out bonkers. The latter exist outside the range of the former, with gray areas along the intersections. A couple decades ago,...
Green Energy’s Dirty Secret
A few years back, the phrase "Rare Earth" would most likely elicit recollection of a 70s Motown-soul band, that had a number of hit records (the most remembered, at least to this boomer, is "I Just Want To Celebrate"). Today, however, "Rare Earth" elicits...
…As Long As It’s Mandatory
A political friend shared a quote on social media today: "Liberals, I have heard it said, don’t care what we do as long as it is mandatory." -- Joseph Epstein This echoes a popular meme (and T-shirt, and other merchandise. A thumbs up for free enterprise!). I had an...
Presidents, Monarchs, and Tyrants
Joe Biden became the Democrats' nominee by projecting a "milder" agenda than the balance of the Democratic primary field. His party barely squeaked out a victory against a President who failed to capitalize on the various policy successes of his term, imploded on a...
Revelation By Proxy
As is probably true for most Internet surfers, I sometimes go "on safari" on the Web, letting my nose and the various algorithms take me where they will. Sometimes, those safaris do nothing more than kill time. Other times, though, I intersect something very...
Us, and Them, and Them
Speculative fiction writers, whether they be "science-y" or not, often bring us visions of possible futures. Some are optimistic, some less so. Some fall into the "dystopian" category, defined by the Oxford Languages folks as, "relating to or denoting an imagined...
A Policy of Ignorance
As promised (or as threatened, if you prefer), President Biden has made quick moves to advance the "greening" of America. Or, more accurately, to satiate the green lobby, an unholy alliance of ignorant virtucrats and corporate rent-seekers. He killed the Keystone XL...
Escalation, Not Equivalence
A libertarian site needs another article on "homo sapiens good," "homo politicus bad" like a fish needs a bicycle. Yet, here we are again, with obvious points of morality for individuals twisted beyond recognition as they grind through the mind of homo politicus:...
Active Comment Threads
Most Commented Posts
COVID Mask Follies
An Anti-Vax Inflection Point?
“Not In My Name”
The Great Social Media Crackup
War Comes Through The Overton Window
Rights and Wrongs
A Policy of Ignorance
Whence Morality?
Most Active Commenters