Free Republic

Massive looting in San Francisco’s central Union Square on Friday evening led local police to limit car access to the plaza, which is the centerpiece of the downtown area and one of the most popular tourist destinations on the cable car route. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday that gangs of looters emptied out high-end stores the night before, including Louis Vuitton. ...San Francisco has been at the forefront of left-wing cities in “criminal justice reform” and police reform. Earlier this year, the mayor announced that the city would redistribute over $100 million from law enforcement to projects aimed at...

A federal court of appeals in New York on Monday moved a step closer to unsealing documents that could reveal new evidence in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who’s been accused of being part of an international sex trafficking operation. A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals gave the parties until March 29 to argue their case that the documents detailing the alleged international sex trafficking operation should remain sealed. The evidence will be made public unless the lawyers make a convincing argument, the panel said, according to the Miami Herald. An unusual coalition of media organizations, a...

In 2015, Greg Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Jonathan Haidt (professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business) wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In that article, the authors argued that students (college but also pre-college) increasingly react to words, books, images, and speakers with fear and anger because they’ve been taught to exaggerate danger, to let their emotions rule, and to engage in binary thinking. It proved to be one of the most read and discussed articles ever published by the magazine....

A new study out of Harvard—the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience—may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings.In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (for which I work), and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic. In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral...

Jayne Riew is a photographer and artist who also happens to be the wife of academic Jonathan Haidt. Haidt may be familiar to readers as author of “The Righteous Mind” and co-author of a cover article for the Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Today, Haidt announced on Twitter that his wife had put together a project titled “She’s With Him.” The project combines Riew’s photographs with statements from a small group of women who defied the expectations of many around them and voted for Donald Trump. Here’s a bit of Riew’s description of how and why she...

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.... Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that...

Wow! File this one under: what would have happened to a conservative who had made the same un-PC statement? On today's Morning Joe, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, discussing the way American children have fallen behind children in other countries in academic achievement, and are coddled, handed trophies for non-achievement and protected from stress, said: "stress will be not understanding the thick Chinese accent of your first boss. That will be stress." View the video after the jump.

Barack Obama’s unrelenting pressure on Israel and appeasement of the Palestinian jihadists is not unique: There are signs this week that he is about to start behaving the same way toward Pakistan and India. The Wall Street Journal revealed Monday that Obama penned a secret directive last December, stating that India had to work harder to resolve its issues with Pakistan . Meanwhile, Pakistan is growing more demanding that the United States intervene in its disputes with India, and both American and Indian officials have acknowledged that the Pentagon wants the U.S. to put more pressure upon India. All this...

When it comes to dealing with genocide, bad guys and fascists, and we don't. Past deals like this highlight the sort of moral abdication our generation should reject as madness. Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anti-communist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday. The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the CIA. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence — and...

Horrifying stories about the rapes and murders of children, and about judges who go easy on sex offenders who prey on the young, have prompted some state legislatures to tighten up the laws and restrict the sentencing discretion of judges. Few in the media or among the intelligentsia have been as outraged about these sadistic crimes against children as they have been about whether terrorists' phone calls have been intercepted. Part of this is current politics but part of it is the continuation of a tradition that goes back more than two centuries, de-emphasizing the punishment of criminals. People who...

London 20.02.05 | Daily El Pais reports that the Hugo Chavez administration will purchase four corvettes (light military ships) to Spain. The €600-€800 million deal was broker during Spain's Minister of Defence Jose Bono's last visit to Caracas on January 25th. Purportedly Chavez would also be interested in acquiring six transport planes of the C-295 type. Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was not elected on his own merits, or those of his failed party PSOE, but rather due to the reaction of the Spanish electorate to the Madrid bombing; a terrorist attack that was not very well handled, politically speaking,...

Bogotá. The supposed assistance given by Colombian guerrillas to the kidnappers of the daughter of the Paraguayan ex-president is further proof of the international tentacles of the rebels who finance themselves through criminal activities, said Colombia’s Minister of Defense, Jorge Alberto Uribe. "This only confirms the fact that Colombian narcoterrorist groups are not merely Colombians, they have roots and presence in every country", warned Uribe, who was visiting Holland, according to AP. "I was just with the people at Europol – the European police- and I saw four or five cases which involved people from these groups, especially" from the...

As I watched the French and Egyptian military honor guards escort the body of the Egyptian, Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat, back to his Cairo funeral and Ramallah burial, I was saddened at the reverence given to such a merciless, depraved monster and murderer. Many European and Arab nations muttered about the low level minimal diplomatic delegation sent by the United States to the funeral. The question should really be why the United States sent any diplomatic delegation at all to the funeral of this despotic thug. Perhaps we should also send the minimum political...