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...
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...
Rise of Conscience, Fall of Charity
We are in the midst of a massive cultural awareness of race and racism that future historians might define as an "awakening" (or Marxists as an "expansion of consciousness"). In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. I have frank conversations with many people of...
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,...
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Opinion
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...
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...
Language Games and Political Baskets
I recently learned something new. Normally, learning something new is a good thing, but the implications of this one are infuriating. As most know, the Woke Left has its own lexicon, and more acronyms than the Department of Defense. It also is constantly trotting out...
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...
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War Comes Through The Overton Window
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A Policy of Ignorance
Whence Morality?
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