Fishing for Lake Trout off the Old Mission Peninsula, Traverse City, Michigan

By Audie Cockings

*Submit your photographs of nature and the outdoor life to [email protected] to participate in this weekly feature exploring the natural world.*

Interview: Mike Baron Talks Comics, Culture, and Conservatives with Mark Tapson at FrontPageMag

By Liberty Island Links & Excerpts

By Mark Tapson: Recently I read a page-turner of a new novel with the eye-catching title Sons of Bitches, which centers on a young Jewish artist who releases a comic book boldly depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This naturally makes her a target for outraged Muslim fundamentalists, and their death threats force her to hire former biker hoodlum-turned-private investigator Josh Pratt. Justice, revenge, and mayhem ensue.

This is obviously a reflection of the real-life experiences of such artists as Mollie Norris, who apparently still remains in hiding years after merely suggesting an Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, and frequent FrontPage Mag artist, former Muslim Bosch Fawstin, who was targeted by terrorists at the Draw Muhammad event in Texas a couple of years ago (a contest which Fawstin won). And then, of course, there was the massacre of twelve employees at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in response to their “blasphemous” depiction of Muhammad on the magazine cover. Violating Islamic blasphemy laws comes with a high price – but so does submitting to them.

5 Pros, 7 Cons, and 2 Questions For Information Appliances

By Tamara Wilhite

Pros: * If you would have trouble typing something, whether due to a disability like Parkinson’s or simply busy at that home, you can still make queries or place orders.

* Visually impaired? Access to information and services is readily available to you.

* You get directions in a readily understood manner without taking your eyes off the road or the cook pot.

The Greatest Conservative Films: Fight Club (1999)

By Eric M. Blake

Editor’s Note: In April of 2017 writer Eric M. Blake began a series at Western Free Pressnaming the “Greatest Conservative Films.” The introduction explaining the rules and indexing all films included in the series can be found here. Liberty Island will feature cross-posts of select essays from the series with the aim of encouraging discussion at this cross-roads of cinematic art with political ideology. (Click here to see the original essay. Check out the previously cross-posted entries on Jackie Brown, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Unforgiven, Hail, Caesar!, and Apocalypse Now) If you would like join this dialogue please contact us at submissions [@] libertyislandmag.com.

Read the Prologue and First Chapter of Quin Hillyer’s “Mad Jones, Hero”

Pick Up the Second and Third Volumes in The Accidental Prophet Trilogy

By Quin Hillyer

In Mad Jones, Heretic, young high school history teacher Madison Lee Jones of Mobile, Alabama, already having lost both parents at a young age, suffers as his grandfather, his wife, his unborn child, and his mother-in-law all die tragically in rapid succession. Grief-stricken and angry, Jones vents by penning 59 religious theses (see appendix) and pinning them to church doors in Mobile and in New Orleans. With his theses unexpectedly (and unintentionally) attracting a national social media following, and spurred on by an odd collection of entrepreneurial friends, Jones—an only intermittently churchgoing Episcopalian—begins a writing and public-speaking “ministry” to elucidate his theme that anger at God can lead to deeper faith. His inaugural public speech/homily, at a Good Friday service at a “charismatic” church in a New Orleans suburb, begins as a fiasco and a comedy of errors—yet somehow ends in triumph, as Jones leaves the church “experiencing a boundless optimism…. He felt that he was leaving a wilderness, and that a Promised Land awaited.”

Click to purchase Mad Jones, Heretic; Mad Jones, Hero; and Mad Jones, Agonistes

New Poetry: Daydreaming

By Jon Bishop

Standing on the corner of the road,

Watching the sky change from black to red,

Thinking of all the day demands.

Hungover from the night before.

How am I alive?

Characterization 101: Characterizing Through Dialog

Part 8 In a Weekly Column With Advice for Conservative Creative Writers

By Jamie K. Wilson

Welcome to this series on how to write fiction from a conservative point of view. These posts can simply be read, or you are invited to join a guided writer’s workshop to practice and critique with other writers. To join the workshop, please email me, Jamie, at kywrite at gmail.com and request an invitation.

PreTeena: July 30 – August 5, 2018

Sunday Comics!

By Allison Barrows

You won’t want to miss these hilarious cartoons depicting the ups and downs of adolescence. Now each week’s strips will debut on Sundays as the lead strip of Liberty Island’s Sunday Comics feature. If you draw a comic and would like to have your work featured on Sundays, please contact us: [email protected] Check out Allison Barrows’ new PreTeena blog here.

The Paper of Record Just Recorded They’re All Right with Racism. Really

Or: “The black people were surprisingly good last night…”

By Roy Griffis

One of my personal failings (well, the only one I feel like admitting) is I have a strong fairness impulse. It was the whole thing, judge people by the content of the character not the color of the skin. My father, who had grown up in the deep South, surrounded by virulent racism, introduced me to the concept, mostly by living it. It was what made me a nascent liberal as a young man.

That belief in fairness was the same thing that drove me away from Liberals. Growing up, my experiences with other kids growing up were a lot like the Woody Allen joke about going to youth camp “…where I was sadistically beaten by children of all colors and creeds.”

Those experiences made it clear to me that “jerk” was a choice limited to any race, sex, or religion. And thus I was rather heretical toward the idea that People of Color were really Saints of Color.

One Happy Doggo Loves the Beach: 4 Photos

Pics from Rosie’s Dog Beach in Long Beach from February 2015

By David M. Swindle