Free Republic

When China put in place its one-child pol­icy four decades ago, pol­icy mak­ers said they would sim­ply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy. “In 30 years, the cur­rent prob­lem of es­pe­cially dread­ful pop­u­la­tion growth may be al­le­viated and then [we can] adopt dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tion poli­cies,” the Com­mu­nist Party said in a 1980 open let­ter to mem­bers and young peo­ple. With the num­ber of births de­clin­ing year af­ter year, China is now rac­ing in the op­po­site di­rec-tion, clos­ing abor­tion clin­ics and ex­pand­ing ser­vices to help cou­ples con­ceive. But a legacy of...

Two Georgia election workers who became the target of conspiracy theories around the 2020 election are suing The Gateway Pundit, a far-right website that published false information about them as part of a sweeping effort to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote. The election workers, Ruby Freeman, a retired 911 call center worker, and her daughter, Shaye Moss, allege in the lawsuit that Jim and Joe Hoft, twin brothers who operate and write for The Gateway Pundit, conducted “a campaign of lies” that “instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their...

A group of protesters at Amherst College in Massachusetts has released a set of demands that include punishing students who produced a poster celebrating free speech by subjecting them to re-education for the sake of “racial and cultural competency.”In response to ongoing protests at the University of Missouri, which saw an attack on journalists Monday trying to cover the event, some students at Amherst this week put up small posters on campus. The posters read “In memoriam of the true victim of the Missouri protests: Free Speech (1776-2015),” and included a short “eulogy” which reads as follows:Who is constrained by the invisible...

Stdent protests roiled college campuses Thursday, when Claremont McKenna College's dean of students resigned under pressure over racial tensions and protesters at more than 100 colleges and universities nationwide demanded the cancellation of student debt. Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna stepped down after she sparked a campus protest and hunger strikes by two students this week over her email to a Latina student saying she would work to serve those who "don't fit our CMC mold." Spellman later apologized but her remarks appeared to be a tipping point for students who have pressed the campus for months for greater...

Mike Middleton, the man just named as the interim president of the University of Missouri, worked as a political activist with the protestors who forced out his predecessor. As NBC reports: "The University of Missouri's governing board on Thursday appointed a recently retired administrator to be the university systems interim president. The Board of Curators announced that Michael Middleton, 68, will lead the four-campus system until it finds a permanent replacement for Tim Wolfe, who resigned Monday under pressure from students who criticized his administrations response to a series of racial incidents." Middleton retired in August after teaching at the...

Clinton's solid win in the Pennsylvania primary exposed a quandary for the party. Her backers may be convinced that only she can win the white, working-class voters that the Democratic nominee will need in the general election, but many African American leaders say a Clinton nomination -- handed to her by superdelegates -- would result in a disastrous breach with black voters. "If this party is perceived by people as having gone into a back room somewhere and brokered a nominee, that would not be good for our party," House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (S.C.), the highest ranking African...

Australia's Muslims fear backlash By Nick Bryant BBC News, Sydney Sheikh Hilali's remarks come at a sensitive time in race relations A few weeks ago, I happened to interview Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali outside the Lakemba Mosque in Sydney where he delivered his controversial sermon. A softly-spoken man, who clearly commands both enormous respect and affection within his community, the Egyptian-born cleric discussed the government's recent proposals for an Australian citizenship test - an examination which many Muslim immigrants believe is targeted at them. His English is poor, and it was difficult at times to make out precisely what he...

...Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), the No. 2 man on both the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, revealed that an elite military-intelligence unit known as Able Danger identified Atta and three other hijackers as likely members of a terror cell in this country as early as 1999. The spies wanted to turn the info over to the FBI in 2000, Weldon said, "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." He claimed Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they mistakenly believed that since Atta and the others were in the country legally on visas, they...