Free Republic

FPIW visited the campus of the University of Washington to see if students would affirm or reject Joseph Backholm's new chosen identity: a 6'5" Chinese woman... (And Backholm asks repeatedly if they would accept him as 7-year-old, too.)

If you've never come close to murdering members of your own family over a friendly game of Monopoly, you're probably doing it wrong. We don't think we've ever played a game where someone didn't have a hidden stash of cash, tried to swipe a C-Note while no-one is looking or bargained for their lives, prolonging the agony for way longer than necessary. Now a new version of the game is seeking to settle those dangerously vociferous arguments once and for all by doing away with paper money altogether and bringing the game into a digital age. The Monopoly Ultimate Banking...

Mainstream outlets have used polar bears to show the alleged dangers of climate change, but now this left-wing mascot is making its way to the big screen. Norm of the North will bring environmentalist propaganda back to theaters with its story of a talking polar bear who rescues his Arctic home from a housing development project "for the one percent." The film's writers pit eco-friendly protagonists against Mr. Greene: a greedy CEO who calls ordinary people "peasants," says things like "wake up and smell the profits" and "it doesn't matter if I'm corrupt," and hides a caged a polar bear...

Following his executive actions this week, President Obama will participate in what CNN is calling a "town hall" style discussion about gun control at George Mason University tomorrow night. The one hour show will be hosted by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and airs live at 8 p.m eastern. But according to a memo sent to faculty and students by GMU Communications and Marketing Vice President Renell Wynn earlier this week, participation in the town hall is by invite only. There are no tickets available to people who are not specifically invited to the event. "This is an invitation-only event. No...

After a teacher at a Virginia school handed out a standard homework assignment on Islam, such an angry backlash flooded in that it prompted officials to close every single school in the county as a safety precaution.

A Virginia school district is defending a classroom assignment that required students to practice calligraphy by writing the Muslim statement of faith, "There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." Female students at Riverheads High School in Staunton, Virginia, were also invited to wear Muslim clothing -- a story first reported by The Schilling Show. "Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion, or a request for students to renounce their own faith or profess any belief," the district said in...

Participants stand in a straight line in the middle of an empty room. Tell participants that some statements might be of a sensitive nature for some individuals, and that they do not have to respond to any statement that is uncomfortable. Read the statements below. If your ancestors came to the United States by force, take one step back. If there were more than 50 books in your house growing up, take one step forward. If you ever felt unsafe because of your sexual orientation, take one step back. If you believe that you were denied employment because of your...

 All that's necessary to assure our compliance is shaming us into silence.  Our best hope for substantial political change in the past generation was Sarah Palin. When she self-imploded during her Iowa Freedom Summit address last January, what we saw was, not just a personal failure of nerve, but the sure-thing, efficient result, the calculated application of ridicule as one of the key techniques of thought reform. The more one examines this field of study, the more pessimistic one becomes about the prospect for any meaningful resurgence of American democratic republicanism. When Sarah jumped the shark, she was showing understandable...

Alec Dent, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, broke the story in The College Fix [1]: An English class offered at UNC Chapel Hill this fall called “Literature of 9/11″ explores the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from the perspective of radical Islamists and those who view America as an imperialist nation. The course represents virtually everything wrong with American academia today.The reading list consists entirely of writings by Leftists who view the War on Terror as a massive exercise in American racism and imperialism. Most of the other writings are by Muslims who …...

Case in point is a freshman-level English class taught at several major universities across the country called “The Literature of 9/11” — which focuses almost entirely on writings from the perspective of the Islamic terrorists, rather than the nearly 3,000 Americans who were slaughtered by them. “These readings offer points of view that justify terrorism, paint the United States and its government as wholly evil and immoral and desecrate the memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” the UNC College Republicans said in a recent letter to Chancellor Carol Folt.

“Though additional work always remains, the physical sciences have completed their core task when it comes to climate change,” says Bill McKibben... "What we don’t know is how to stop ourselves from harming the climate, which is why this book and the social sciences are so important.” Edited by environmental sociologists Robert J. Brulle, PhD, a professor in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Riley E. Dunlap, a professor at Oklahoma State University, the book highlights new things by presenting climate change as a completely social phenomenon, implanted in behaviors, institutions and cultural practices. “We need to develop...

A report from the Centre for National Security in New York paints a surprisingly diverse portrait of the growing number of U.S. residents becoming foreign fighters for ISIL or plotting domestic attacks in its name.But the report, released Thursday, also provides insight on the motivations driving youths in both Canada and the U.S. to engage in terrorist activities, and strategies to deter them, as the number of homegrown extremists in both countries continues to rise.Since March 2014, a total of 56 people have been arrested and charged in U.S. federal court with supporting ISIL, and another three were killed by...

--SNIP--As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces “a grave new risk.” So-called “reforms” by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on AP testing across the country, “abandon a rigorous insistence on content” in favor of downplaying “American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.” The framework eschews vivid, content-rich history lessons on the Constitution for “such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning and development...

It may be possible to reduce biases regarding race and gender while a person sleeps, according to a new study published in the journal Science. Prior research has shown that biases can be reduced with a technique called counter-stereotype training. Neuroscientists at Northwestern University wondered whether sleep might bolster the effect. Study participants were shown images “that are opposite to what they might have been exposed to when growing up,” said Ken A. Paller, one of the study’s authors. These included images of women and African-American men. When participants were shown images of women alongside scientific words, and African-American men...

Saying that children “instinctively” understand the importance of the environment, President Obama said Thursday that climate change should be taught in schools and “weaved” into science and social studies classes. During a Twitter question-and-answer session, the president responded to about a dozen tweets, most about climate change. One tweet asked Mr. Obama how he believes children should be educated on environmental issues such as global warming.

 A Lioness in the Streets   In the 1930s, someone heard Adolph Hitler being screamed at behind closed doors by the head of the German Central Bank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. Who could get away with screaming at Hitler and live? Someone fronting from a group so powerful, it could have ordered that Hitler be made into Hoffaburger. It turns out that when Hitler first assumed power, he went with hat in hand to make his case to the heads of German industry that his gangster militias could deliver labor peace.  The big talking heads are mum about all this, so let this...

Apparently according to a homework sheet being given to our 2nd graders in this country about how to be good citizens, the government *gives* us our rights. Did you know that?

This year the movie God Is Not Dead preyed on every Christian parent’s fear of sending a child off to college only to have their family’s faith and values undermined by an atheist college professor espousing some form of moral relativism. The movie hinges on a certain cliché, but the cliché is a cliché because many of us took a class with “that professor.” He might not have been so over-the-top, but his prejudices were evident. The American university tends to be fairly hostile to the conservative movement. One of the core tenets of conservatism is the Judeo-Christian teaching that...

Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic. We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke,...