This April marks the 250th anniversary of the famous shots fired at Concord, Massachusetts, that set off the American Revolution. Captain Levi Preston, who fought there, later captured the principles at stake during an interview decades later in 1843. When pressed on various grievances, he replied, “Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”
Read the full storyTag: Self Government
Commentary: Four Education Trends to Watch This 4th of July
As we celebrate our independence on the Fourth of July, Americans would do well to reflect upon what’s necessary for a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, to long endure.
Read the full storyCommentary: American Self-Government Is Falling Apart
The American system does not require unanimity. In fact, its design presumes deep disagreement on matters of morality and policy.
This is why questions like religion are left to individual conscience, and why most policy is left to states or even smaller units, where the law’s touch will not be felt as harshly, because it reflects the more similar values of a smaller group. Finally, regardless of who has the reins of the federal government, the Constitution renders a great deal of substantive activity off limits, as exemplified by the Bill of Rights.
Read the full storyCommentary: The Great American Con
Gabriel: “Do you know the difference between a hustler and a good con man?”
Fitz: “No.”
Gabriel: “A hustler has to get out of town as quick as he can, but a good con man—he doesn’t have to leave
—Steven McKay, Diggstown
The Kansas City Shuffle: Winston-Salem, NC, 1985
I was a 16-year-old kid out with my girlfriend on a Friday night. We were at the county fair, where we wandered a lane crowded by brightly lit booths advertising competitions of chance and skill. Carnies invited us to toss baseballs into milk jugs, shoot basketballs through hoops, and pop balloons with darts. They made the games seem easy, but I’d never had much luck at them. I couldn’t throw a ball fast enough at the pitching booth, or swing a mallet hard enough to ring the bell at the strongman game. Still, I really wanted to win a prize for my girlfriend.
Read the full storyExecutive Director Gary Humble of Tennessee Stands Discusses Their Mission and Pending Lawsuits
Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Tennessee Stands Executive Director Gary Humble to the newsmakers line to talk about his mission, pending lawsuits, and what motivated the creation of the 501 (c)(4).
Read the full storyCommentary: Civic Virtues as Moral Facts Trying to Recover the Other Half of Our Founding
Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.
Read the full storyCommentary: Be a Daniel and Take Charge of Your Own Lives
by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch There is an old Puritan hymn (based on the apocalyptic Old Testament book of Daniel for the less-than-biblically literate) we grew up singing. Perhaps you recall it: Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone; Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to make it known. In a famous essay written just after World War II, George Orwell, in one of his great punchlines, suggested, “to bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don’t’ at the beginning of each line.” He was talking about the timidity of modern people, thinkers and doers alike, in relatively safe circumstances, to be quiet about dishonesty. Doesn’t intelligence require truth-telling? But then in the first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell himself wrote satirically: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” In our present-day Chinese-induced viral pandemic, which started with colossal lies from the East, perhaps it is time to get to the essential truth. Our brilliant global elites over a number of decades made a dangerous Faustian bargain with the Communist Party of Beijing. The deal was supposed to bring them into the capitalist fold and yield greater international…
Read the full story