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...
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...
Encouraging The Epidemic
No, not that epidemic. The obesity epidemic. Ours is a marvelously schizophrenic society, and it's almost nowhere more apparent than in its duality regarding obesity. We hear constant concern about an obesity epidemic, about it being a public health crisis, and about...
The Great Gaslighting
"Great" is the it-word of our day. The pandemic has motivated some to push for a Great Reset, wherein capitalism is set aside in favor of some presumably better way of economic interaction (i.e. the Best-and-Brightest will run our lives for us). That this form of...
The Huxtable Kerfuffle
As the resident Roots of Liberty writer on legal dysfunction, I find the latest Bill Cosby boot to be my bailiwick. It is all but certain that Bill Cosby is an abuser of women, and needs to be punished, yet the state of Pennsylvania failed to serve Cosby's victims by...
Cuomo’s Gun Crime Sham
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, he of the COVID nursing home disaster, the $5.1M "look at how brilliantly I managed the pandemic" book deal, and nearly a dozen sexual harassment allegations, has boldly declared a state of emergency over "gun violence" in New York. Not...
Critical Mush
Critical Race Theory is all the rage these days. In both the figurative and literal senses. Big Education, aka the NEA, the AFT. and other such organizations, is all-in on teaching CRT to schoolchildren. They're also committing resources to opposition research, since...
You Don’t Matter
Robin DiAngelo, PhD, author of "White Fragility" and 'White Fragility 2: Electric Boogaloo' (actual title, "Nice Racism"), has deftly employed a cheap-trick debating trap into the cultural wedge of our time. In two words, "white fragility," she simultaneously declares...
Eric Adams’ Wicked Meme
The worst social unrest we have had since the Civil War was caused by the George Floyd race protests. It has cost the nation between one and two billion dollars. No progress on the issues that set them off has been made in over a year (an election year, at that)....
Killing Hong Kong
The *Best-and-Brightest (TM) in our society are driven, they will tell you, by a desire to act against injustice and in support of the oppressed. That they have to create and amplify divisions to accomplish this mission doesn't seem to trouble them. While they're busy...
A Monopoly on Charity
It wasn't that long ago that I lamented the government's interference in a citizen's attempt to feed her fellow humans who were struggling due to the COVID lockdowns. In a more recent story, a member of the Charlotte, NC City Council, Tariq Bokhari, suggested the...
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Opinion
Hydrogen Trumps Lithium
Back in my college days, a good friend and I would theorize endlessly about how the world would change when "cheap fusion" finally gets figured out. Of course, as I sit here, four decades later, cheap fusion is still "just a couple decades away," but some of its...
No Social. No Justice. No Warriors.
"Left" political ideology has more regard for utility than principles. That utility is found in its language. George Orwell, this blog's spiritual father, is the most important teacher of how politics uses the tools of language to serve it, rather than the language's...
A Lousy Nit To Pick
We now have a new national holiday. "Juneteenth," a celebration of the emancipation of slaves in America that has been celebrated informally or at the state/local level since 1866 , was formalized by the government a few days ago, and we just celebrated the first...
Slaves To The State
If you dabble in political sandboxes, you are likely familiar with the term "intelligentsia." It's been around a couple centuries, if Wikipedia is to be trusted for that datum, and it speaks to both a category of people and to disdain for them. Or, at least, disdain...
Why So Twitter?
Twitter is an interesting place. It is a conduit for the id, where people routinely convert their in-the-moment gut reactions into permanent records (the bogeyman of countless school kids of generations past), far too often with regrets and apologia. Despite...
Liberty, Schools, and Critical Race Theory
We are witnessing a growing battle over public education curricula, with parents decrying the adoption of the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and the cultural Marxism that has become de mode in academia and amongst woke-pedagogues, revolts against and...
Conclusion Institutions
Postmodernist "thinking" and metaphysical obstinacy aside, there are such things as facts. A hydrogen atom has one proton. Gravity varies in an inverse-square fashion. The sky is blue and water is wet (and if you want to argue about those two points, just... stop)....
The Woke Rackets
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket. Thus wrote* social philosopher Eric Hoffer in 1967. Its truth could not be more timely, no matter that it was written half a century ago. Regular readers know I've...
The Great Firewall
The Ascendancy of China in American Culture Few people would disagree that the last two years have changed American society more than any entire generation in our country's history. In my opinion, that includes the decades of the Great Depression and World War II,...
Criminal Delusion
The other day, US Marshals attempted to apprehend a man who had a warrant out for being a felon in possession of a firearm. According to reports, the man refused to surrender, and either brandished or actually fired a firearm at the marshals, who shot him dead. While...
Curated Outrage
Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to the end of Israel as a nation, started shooting rockets into Israel a few weeks ago. Israel responded. After a few thousand rockets and a death toll that, depending on who's reporting, numbers from dozens to hundreds, a...
Rights And Their Burdens
A pastor I know of has had to abandon an important sermon, "everything is accepted, while nothing is forgiven". It wasn't because the Deacons found the subject matter too challenging or inappropriate. This does happen, by the way. My dad, who grew up in Virginia in...
Property Wars
Our current cultural clash, the conflict between the progressives (see: moving forward) who see our society as so fractured it has to be torn down en-toto (in favor of... wait for it... a century-old idea that killed a hundred million people) and the incrementalists...
Knowing IS The Problem
Editor's Note: This is a follow-up to Death By Procedure, which explored the adverse impact of our tortious culture on the pandemic response, and Incentives Matter, wherein we see that the pandemic was subordinate to political gamesmanship. New York Governor Andrew...
Gaslighting Capitalists
Our economy is recovering from the pandemic, thanks to human innovation (see: vaccines developed in months, not a decade), and without the need for massive, debt-fueled government "stimulus." Indeed, and as is so often the case, much that government does and has done...
COVID, Candy, Cigarettes, and Choice
Sixteen months ago, the World Health Organization announced a 'Mysterious Coronavirus-Related Pneumonia in Wuhan, China.' We all know what happened next. And by that I mean chaos, confusion, conflicting information, tendentious reporting (in multiple directions),...
Incentives Matter
Editor's Note: This is a follow-up to Death By Procedure, which explored the adverse impact of our tortious culture on the pandemic response. Incentives matter. Since everything in America now seems to be all about politics, it should follow that what is done by our...
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...
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