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...
When Everything Is Illegal…
One of the few things our divided America agrees on is that our criminal justice system is failing. That the explanation and solution would be polar opposites is a separate matter. Leftists point at the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting, Righties point at the Darrel Brooks...
In Defense of Trolling
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and probable Presidential aspirant, recently signed a set of bills banning the mandating of COVID vaccines by schools and businesses. That he did so in the town of Brandon, population 100K and nearly a 5 hour drive from the state...
Some Lives Don’t Matter
Consider this reaction to the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal: 'if he were black, he'd be in jail.' Such a sentiment was voiced by many on the Left when they heard "not guilty on all counts." Let's look past the blind partisanship overriding the very obvious facts of the...
The Bail Quandary
About two and a half years ago, New York State, in a paroxysm of progressive beneficence, overhauled its cash bail system for those accused of crimes. For the past couple years, only those accused of violent felonies were required to post bail. The rest were simply...
Rittenhouse and the Racists
Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on 5 counts of homicide yesterday. Good. He should never have been charged in the first place. An arms-length assessment of the facts, once the fog of biased and tendentious reporting got cleared, made that obvious. To all but the Left's...
To Petition The Government
There are many things the Government is empowered to do. There's a list of them in the Constitution. A couple centuries of revision, a hundred-year-plus Progressive movement, and a few egregious moments of Supreme Court malpractice have expanded the list far beyond...
Green Oil
This morning's Wall Street Journal 10-Point included this tidbit: Royal Dutch Shell plans to consolidate its dual-share structure and move its headquarters to London to help it navigate the transition to low-carbon energy. It should be obvious to anyone who applies...
21st Century Scalpers
The act of scalping (the cutting off of a part of a victim's scalp as a trophy, not the act of reselling event tickets at a large markup) has been part of human history for thousands of years, and only fell out of practice in the past century or two. It's a barbaric...
Identity Trumps Science
Ponder this bit, from an article about how identity politics has infiltrated archaeology: [T]he archaeologist Bruce Bourque recently published a lengthy essay on Quillette about his attempts to decipher the genetic identity of an ancient maritime New England tribe...
Responsibility To Protect
Much is being made of our "abandoning" Afghanistan (they abandoned us, when they did not "cowboy-up" to defend themselves, is how I see it). Well: Civilized world governments have a doctrine against assaults on human rights of the kind the Taliban make their mode:...
The Rittenhouse Lesson
Most of you know the story. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old resident of Illinois (and , armed himself with an AR-15 variant and drove over to neighboring Kenosha, WI, during a period of protests and unrest following the shooting of Jacob Blake by police. Rittenhouse...
The Left’s Frank Problem
Sixteen years ago, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency, columnist Thomas Frank published What's The Matter With Kansas, wherein he basically posited that the Democrats lost the heartland because they didn't focus sufficiently on promising economic largesse...
Bernie’s Legacy
Joe Biden, the incredible shrinking President, went hat-in-hand to Congress this past week, mewling that his Presidency (only 10 months old) is hinging on the passage of the infrastructure and social spending bills currently stalled in Congress. The hangup? A couple...
No Faith In Constitution
I did a bit of streaming service surfing last weekend, searching for a new television show to watch. I typically gravitate to original content by the streamers and some of the more "quality" cable channels, having found that the broadcast networks' modern content is...
Whatever They Want
"We probably will have a wealth tax," said Nancy Pelosi on Sunday. The Democrats are in a mad scramble to cobble together a Frankenstein's-monster tax-and-spend bill they've laughably labeled "Build Back Better." They are reaping the gift given to them by the...
Mandates and Narratives
Professional basketball player Kyrie Irving has opted to resist a COVID vaccination mandate. Not the NBA's mandate - the NBA has not established a vaccine requirement. New York City's mandate, which has trickled down to Irving's team, the Brooklyn Nets. The team has...
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Opinion
Destroying America
The Art Institute of Chicago recently announced an end to its 60 years-running docent program. 122 volunteers, averaging more than 15 years experience, who gave "tours to millions, including more than 100,000 schoolchildren each year, many from the city’s mostly poor,...
Identity Hypocrites
Get on an airplane. Work at a government job. Enter a government building. Open a checking, savings, brokerage, or retirement account. Apply for a credit card, loan, or mortgage. Apply for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Welfare, food stamps, or other government...
Our OPM Culture
Back in 1969, bureaucrats testified to Congress that 155 high earners had managed to work their tax returns to where they paid no income tax... in one specific year. Anyone who understands the vagaries of business investing, capital gains and losses, tax loss...
Pax Taiwanica
This past week, China rattled a few sabers over Taiwan. Almost literally, in that China sent several dozen military jets into Taiwan's defense zone as part of a celebration of the PRC's founding. Much huffing and puffing ensued, along with the inevitable (and...
Security Of Base
Most Americans are convinced the nation has gone off the rails. The proofs: a mountain of debt (with much more to come) with no Marshal Plan leaps over normal market evolutions to show for it (and with none coming); our political system devolved into tribal warfare...
Diverse, But Uniform
Consider the bipolar nature of our society today. Modern society, thanks to the new tool that is social media, has created an enormous reward system for people who manage to stand above the crowd, who get themselves noticed, who are exceptional enough to attract...
Non-Denominational Racism
We are coming up on 15 months since George Floyd died under Derek Chauvin's knee. Despite nation-wide protests and massive dialogues at the local, state, and national levels, we've seen no institutional changes to speak of in response to this event. That's not for...
What’s Yours Is Theirs
Time and again, I hear the same refrain. My concerns, warnings, and accusations regarding the advent of socialist thinking and policy in America is baseless, or ill-founded, or a Fox News talking point regurgitation, or paranoia, or petulance. Simultaneously, I bear...
Collective Shame
A friend and I recently had a conversation, wherein he recalled the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot and the reaction he witnessed from some political acquaintances. That reaction, encapsulated as "this is on you, Trump voters," had him pondering his visceral...
The New Tokenism
Hollywood is making another attempt at making a film version of the science fiction classic Dune. We already have David Lynch's 1984 version by David Lynch, which I didn't care for, and a SyFy channel miniseries from 2000, which I enjoyed rather more. The new movie...
People Differ
There's a litmus test applied by social justice types in their endless hunt for discrimination and oppression. It's a simple one: they look at a profession, or an industry, or an economic stratum, or a town/neighborhood, or some other parseable segment of society,...
Global Warming’s Third Way
News outlets are reporting that electricity prices are spiking in Europe. Apparently, a lull in offshore winds is reducing windmill power output, causing a mad scramble to buy coal and gas to make up for the shortfall. Their best buddy Vladimir Putin is jacking up the...
The Suicide Resolution
There will come a day, though it might not come for a long time, when Trump's presidency is assessed rationally rather than emotionally. When the tweets and rhetoric have faded to irrelevance and insignificant footnote, and the focus placed on policies and actions......
Suicide By Sycophancy
How many articles predicting the ruin that became Afghanistan's end-game have you read? I recently wrote one, and in all my study for it, I could not find a single source that forecast the speed of the Afghan National Army (ANA) collapse. In the many versions I tried,...
Compounding Incompetence
America's exit from Afghanistan is a monumental debacle born of a failure of leadership utterly breathtaking in its magnitude. Hundreds of Americans and perhaps tens of thousands of Afghan allies were abandoned to the predations of an emboldened Taliban in a rush to...
About Those Adults
Not that long ago, right after Trump shocked the civilized world by defeating Herself in an election that she and all those adults figured would be a rubber-stamp of her turn at the wheel, many sky-screamers sought to comfort their aggrieved fragilities by assuming...
Broken Trust
Trump held a rally the other day, in which he stood behind a lectern that reads "Save America," touted his successes. Included among these was the fast-tracking of vaccine development and approval. Then he did something he should have done more forcefully months ago....
The Great American Crack Up
If we've learned one thing from the first seven months of Joe Biden's presidency, it's that there seems to be no "bottom" to incompetence in American politics. Eight years of Obama-induced malaise and divisiveness ushered in the bull-in-a-china shop that was Trump,...
The New Blasphemy
When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons that depicted the image of Mohammed, back in 2005, the Islamic world responded with violent demonstrations around the world. More than 250 were killed in these demonstrations. Danish diplomatic...
The Buck Stops… Where?
Joe Biden made a great big deal of his comprehensive reversals of Donald Trump's policies upon his assumption of the Presidency. Such a big deal that he signed SEVENTEEN of them his very first day in office. Oftentimes, Biden's policy choices and decisions seem...
Our Afghan Whipping
Our Afghanistan project has failed. The Afghan National Army (ANA) has disintegrated, and as we leave, the Taliban fill the vacuum with breathtaking speed. What went wrong? The basic explanations are the only ones necessary. The first is that their holy book teaches...
Rancid Lemonade
Emperor Andrew I, the Petulant, who was actually showing signs of surviving his Triple-Lindy of scandals, resigned yesterday. The knockout punch was the release of New York State Attorney General Letitia James' 168 page report that provided credible evidence that...
Your Papers, Please
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -- William Pitt The Younger Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program -– Milton Friedman So this is how liberty dies... with...
Blunt Force Trauma
As the Delta variant of COVID-19 wends its way through the populace, our alarmist class feels the standard twitch-reflex of those who wield power, i.e. "DO SOMETHING!" It is spurred on by those in the electorate who allow themselves to be driven by the same...
The Power Of A Billion
Trump was right. Yes, that's a cheap ploy to capture your attention, no matter if you love the guy, hate his guts, are sick and tired of all things Trump, or fall somewhere in between the poles of that triangular spectrum. What was he right about? China's... let's...
Collectivist Bias
I recently dubbed "great" the it-word of the day. That proclamation served my thoughts of that moment, but does short shrift to the tomes worth of other it-words and phrases that relentlessly assault our eyes and ears in these modern, turbulent times. One that, I...
The Cognitive Elite
A couple decades back, I briefly dated a British woman who, in a political conversation whose specific subject is lost to memory, voiced the phrase: Because we're smarter than they are. That, as opposed to the particulars of our discussion, seared itself in my memory....
Some Are More Equal Than Others
Day in and day out, I'm informed that America's leftists (they are not liberals, and I shall no longer soil that word by association) are not Marxist, or communists, or old-school socialists, or even fascists. Day in and day out, I'm scolded about asserting that the...
The Hall Commissars
My latest version of Internet "sport" consists of skimming social media comments sections under any article even vaguely skeptical of Critical Race Theory, to find the morons (with apologies to actual morons) who rush to obnoxiously inform all us misinformed peons...
Tribes Fight
I like Jordan Peterson. Those four words, in and of themselves, are sufficient to induce some on the Left to call me a long stream of obscenities and nasty names, derogatory (and false) labels, and dismiss me as an irredeemable, deplorable, a bitter clinger, a racist....
Rage Addiction
Columnist Matt Taibbi, in a recent newsletter, lamented that columnists' target audience has shifted from placid Sunday morning paper perusers to what he dubbed "rage addicts." His comment was, in the end, self-deprecating and self-aware, but the phrase struck a cord....
Stupid Little Bolsheviks
The educational hubbub of our time is the debate over teaching Critical Race Theory in our schools. Teachers' unions, the Biden administration, and many progressive politicians have advocated its inclusion in the core curriculum, and some districts have already...
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