Free Republic

Even before this catastrophic Labor Day weekend is factored in (more on this below), the domestic 2017 box office is in hideous shape. This year is –6.3% behind 2016 and continues to fall behind 2015, 2013, and 2012. If you figure in inflation, those numbers are even worse. For example, in 2012 the average ticket cost $7.96. Today it is almost a full dollar more at $8.89. Yeah, things are that bad and will look even worse on Tuesday. With no apparent faith in their own product, this is the first Labor Day in 25 years where a new title...

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a statement issued by evangelical leaders August 29: The Catholic League has a long history of mutual cooperation with evangelical Christians on a host of cultural issues. In that spirit, we condemn the unfair attacks against the statement on marriage, family and sexuality that was signed by more than 150 evangelical leaders following their conference in Nashville last week. “Hateful,” “homophobic,” “anti-LGBT” are among the hysterical condemnations of the statement flying around print, broadcast and social media. But the statement is none of those things. While restating long-held Christian teaching that marriage is...

Fake News? That pales in comparison to Fake History. As committed socialist George Orwell once wrote: He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. There is an article in Vox yesterday which explains exactly why there need to be more conservative citizen historians so as to hold "the experts" accountable. Titled "“They have no allegiance to liberal democracy”: an expert on antifa explains the group", faux-historian Mark Bray accurately admits that Antifa terrorists have no interest in Freedom. They have no allegiance to liberal democracy, which they believe has failed the marginalized...

Katie, bar the ever-lovin’ door. Compromise seems a forlorn hope in today’s strange version of America. Anger runs too deep. All that is left is to choose sides. We will then see whether the country sinks—continues sinking–into a Soviet future already largely upon us, or we see armed mobs battling in the streets. Does this sound crazy? I don’t think so. The hostility is beyond anything I have seen in what has become a depressingly long life. In the media, on the web, anger seethes. Countries both civilized and not have plunged into bloodshed over as little. Think of Sunnis...

Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett said last week that it would take a white player to kneel for the national anthem “to really get things changed.” Seth DeValve is testing that belief. The second-year Browns tight end knelt for “The Star-Spangled Banner” during Monday’s game in Cleveland against the Giants, part of a circle of more than a dozen players who bowed their heads in silent protest. They were flanked by several more teammates who stood and put their hands on the kneelers’ shoulders.

An edict announced Monday by the militia's supreme leader, Mulla Mohammad Omar, calling for the destruction of all statues in line with "Islamic" laws, has caused shock around the world. Afghanistan is home to an array of pre-Islamic historic treasures from its days as a key stop on the ancient Silk Road and a strategic battleground for conquerers dating back to Alexander the Great and the Aryans before him. The two massive Bamiyan Buddhas, carved into a sandstone cliff near the provincial capital in central Afghanistan, stand 50 meters (165 feet) and 34.5 meters (114 feet) tall and were built...

ATLANTA (AP) — President Donald Trump’s widely criticized response to white supremacist violence in Virginia has left Democrats in a quandary: how to seize the moral high ground without getting sucked into a politically perilous culture war. Democrats have denounced Trump for blaming “both sides” for deadly protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, more recently, for defending Confederate monuments. But the party faces a complex task: While addressing race and history in ways that reflect the party’s values, Democrats also need to focus on issues like jobs and the economy that resonate with a wider range of voters, including white independents,...

While the rate of cord cutting during the second quarter wasn't quite as aggressively dire as many analysts predicted, the latest wave of TV subscribers lost by the traditional cable TV industry wasn't what you'd call good for the pay TV industry, either. Wall Street research firm MoffettNathanson predicts that once tallied, the sector lost about 1 million pay TV subscribers last quarter, with the losses hitting Dish Network, DirectTV, and AT&T particularly hard. Dish for example lost another 196,000 subscribers on the quarter, and that tally includes the additions seen to the company's Sling TV streaming video services (which...

For the baby-boomer generation (or at least the counterculture segment within it) the summer of 1967 became known as The Summer of Love.Actually, most of us boomers never experienced it. Certainly, 1967 wasn't a blissful, carefree summer of love for the hundreds of thousands of Americans serving in Vietnam.It didn't feel much like love in my hometown of Detroit either. Fifty years ago this week, on July 23, 1967 (a Sunday, as it is this year), deadly riots erupted in the Motor City. They lasted through Friday, July 28, when, with help from the National Guard (including Detroit Tigers' second...

What we call the pro-family movement is a component of the larger conservative movement and deals with matters of sexuality and the natural family. Its American roots are in the cultural backlash to the Marxist revolution of the 1960s that turned family-centered society on its head and swapped the Judeo-Christian morality of our founding for Soviet-style “political correctness.” Before the 1960s there wasn’t any need for a “pro-family” movement because family values had been the overwhelming consensus of the western world for centuries. Indeed, so surprised were Americans about the cultural revolution that it took nearly twenty years for the...

Recently, Gallup published the results of its annual Values and Beliefs poll. The headline of the report speaks for itself: "Americans Hold Record Liberal Views on Most Moral Issues." Gallup has been doing this poll since 2001, and the change in public opinion on the moral issues surveyed has been in one direction -- more liberal. Of 19 issues surveyed in this latest poll, responses on 10 are the most liberal since the survey started. Sixty-three percent say gay/lesbian relations are morally acceptable -- up 23 points from the first year the question was asked. Sixty-two percent say having a...

In the first line of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson speaks of “one people.” The Constitution, agreed upon by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1789, begins, “We the people…” And who were these “people”? In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as “one united people … descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs…” If such are the elements of nationhood and peoplehood, can we still speak of Americans as one nation and...

Another Right Angle video from Bill Whittle, this one called “Men Like These”. I hope you are fortunate to know such men – I often see them in our comment section but they will go nameless should I inadvertently leave one out…but you guys don’t need my acknowledgment: you know who you are, even if you’ve never had to do something like this. Or don’t have to do it anymore. Think of it as an early Fourth of July video, in honor of honorable men. (video at link(

I'm certain this rather long essay has been around before. Because it is long, some of you may have not bothered to read it. If you do so now, you may agree with me that it outlines in brutal detail the origins of many of the troubles we now face. For that reason, I forward it again and encourage you to read it now. If you are EVER to understand why men like Jefferson, Lincoln and others believed that, while there are exceptions (think Sowell, Williams, Ben Carson, Colonel West, Herman Caine and others), it would take a looonnnggg time...

The famous auctioneer scene that takes place on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland and Disney World is set to be overhauled, according to a press release from the Disney Parks blog. As of 2017, the attraction — which opened in 1967 in Disneyland and 1973 in the Magic Kingdom of Disney World — will no longer feature the famous auctioneer scene, in which a red-headed “wench” is auctioned off to a crowd of raucous and dirty pirates who wish to make her their bride. An artist’s rendering of the new scenes reveals that the pirates will now...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: Resistance and opposition to same-sex marriage has been crumbling among Americans — save for one specific segment of society that’s proving the last wall to even wider acceptance: Evangelicals. This is not entirely unexpected. But it is uncomfortable. It puts those of most serious faith in a heated spotlight that can be used by the left to showcase the evangelical Christian crowd as discriminatory, as hate-filled, as antithetical to the core values of America. Standing strong on this point is not only going to prove lonely. It’s also going to prove a real test of faith — and conversely,...

Dear leftists in Hollywood intent on pushing incessant gayness, even when unnecessary and irrelevant, Today it seems Hollywood’s primary mission, especially television, is to shove gayness into wherever it may fit. It’s getting tired. Namely because it’s being pushed by a tiny minority of militant gay activists in the gay community. I want to make this crystal clear. I’m not suggesting ALL gays are pushing for all gay characters in all TV shows or movies. I contend like with most issues in our political climate, the “Gay Agenda” in TV is being shoved by a fraction of a percent of...

[I]t is important to point out that the popular image both of Angela Merkel and of modern Germany is deeply flawed. Because far from representing a negation -- or a misguided attempt at negation -- of past German policies and attitudes, the modern German mentality is in many ways a mutation or an update of the same mentality that has guided Germany since the eighteenth century, and especially since the unification of the country in 1870. Let us begin with the more obvious parallel: German support for further European integration. Despite all the German talk about subordinating narrow national interests...

After prayer and careful consideration, I, and my courageous wife, have decided, with the help of our stalwart legal team at Liberty Counsel, to take the unusual step of appealing the dismissal of the SMUG v Lively lawsuit to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. We believe that action is necessary to purge the prejudicial ruling of Judge Ponsor’s false and subjective assertion that the incidents in Uganda on which the suit is based (incidents by parties unknown to me that the record shows I had no part in) constitute crimes against humanity, lowering the standard for asserting such claims...

A racial slur. A homophobic joke. A mock beheading. Anti-Trump comedians are having a moment — and not the good kind. (snip...) antics like these are the exact opposite of the Michelle Obama maxim: “When they go low, we go high.”