Free Republic

In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale a decade ago, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about...

That poses a problem for Biden, who shed the faux centrist label that he used for the campaign once he took office, but there is a larger issue at play. Biden is losing ground among black and Hispanic working-class voters because those voters are not the priority of the Democratic Party anymore. The Democratic Party is run by elitists, for elitists, and that means leaving behind blue-collar workers of all races.

What, precisely, is it about America you love? That’s the question this July 4 as just 29% of Democrats say they’re extremely proud of the country, accompanied by just 33% of Independents and 60% of Republicans. In fact, Democratic love of country has always fallen far behind that of Republicans, even during the Obama era, when it hit a temporary high of just over 50% (Republicans at the time said they were extremely proud of the country at a rate of approximately 70%). Why is it that liberals in the United States are so much less proud of America than...

Anti-ESG crusader Consumers’ Research is set to parade mobile billboards on streets in the heart of Washington Thursday as top government officials and influential voices gather at an event to discuss energy and green initiatives ... featured speakers include Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Democrat Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and sustainability executives at Citi and Microsoft .. in the battle to implement and enforce ESG standards to combat climate change. ... we will be reminding them of what their far-left ESG agenda really means,” said Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild. “The Biden administration and woke corporations continue...

Martha’s Vineyard residents are proclaiming that they have been “enriched” by 50 illegal aliens who arrived on two flights sent by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and were swiftly deported to a military base less than 48 hours after arriving. When 50 illegal aliens were flown onto the elite coastal island, home to the nation’s wealthiest and most well-connected, officials declared a “humanitarian crisis” and Gov. Charlie Baker (R) deported the new arrivals to Joint Base Cape Cod.

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences. s a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their...

Yuval Noah Harari, historian, futurist, and World Economic Forum (WEF) adviser, said, “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population” in the early 21st century given modern technologies’ rendering human labor economically and militarily “redundant.” Harari’s remarks were made in an interview with Chris Anderson, the head of TED, published on Tuesday. He assessed widespread contemporary disillusionment among “common people” as being rooted in a fear of being “left behind” in a future run by “smart people.” Such fears are justified, he added, given his projection that emerging technologies will displace economic needs to many categories of existing...

You won’t see it on any of the alphabet networks, but a protest movement is exploding in the Netherlands after the government moved to shut down farms in order to “fight” climate change. The contentious move, pushed by the World Economic Forum, was enacted as part of an EU agreement that seeks to limit the release of nitrogen. This is what becoming ungovernable looks like.🚨🚨⚠️⚠️The Dutch protesters are pouring manure on government offices, flooding streets, and becoming all together ungovernable. This uprising is in response to the WEF controlled government shutting down farms to "save the planet." You have to...

Multi-Millionaire Washington Nationals’ pitcher Sean Doolittle recently joined a webinar hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America to speak about socialism and baseball. The event held Sunday was put on by the DSA’s Baseball Caucus, the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, and the DSA’s National Political Education Committee. “Join us for a webinar about baseball workers brought to you by DSA baseball fans featuring Simon Rosenblum-Larson (founder of More Than Baseball and Tampa Bay Rays affiliate), Max Gerboc (SEIU Local 1 stadium worker organizer), and Sean Doolittle (DSA member and Washington National).” Doolittle, who is a proud socialist, signed a five-year...

Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum; he founded the organization in 1971. Each year, the WEF hosts a massive conference in Davos, Switzerland, with thousands of world leaders, diplomats and experts on various topics gathering to trade ideas about how best to cooperatively run the world. Lest this characterization be seen as overstating the case, Schwab himself said as much this year in opening the conference: “The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the state...

Working-class Americans are paying a heavy price for their elites’ moral posturing. As gasoline prices in the US continue to surge to an unprecedented $7 a gallon in some places, President Joe Biden seems more interested in finding someone to blame than mitigating the problem. ‘Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’, the president said on Friday at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference. The president then cited a ‘fact checker’ in the New York Times and a Washington Post op-ed to counter anyone daring to lay the blame for skyrocketing prices at the...

I’ve been a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) for years, and a fellow for the past six or seven years. I sat on their Council of Representatives, which theoretically sets policy for the APA, for three years. I am just ending my term as president of the APA’s Society for Media and Technology, where I have met many wonderful colleagues. Yet, at the end of 2021, I decided to resign my membership in the APA. My concern is that the APA no longer functions as an organization dedicated to science and good clinical practice. As a professional guild,...

If America’s journalists once spoke truth to power, today America’s journalists are the powerful, a tightly knit caste both highly educated and affluent. “Elite journalists resemble senators, billionaires, and World Economic Forum attendees in terms of educational attainment,” a recent study found. Politicians and journalists go to the same schools and live in the same neighborhoods — especially liberal journalists. Reporters didn’t used to be celebrities. But cable news and Twitter have changed the equation. Social media offer journalists a lower-grade but still-fulfilling form of attention, the ersatz celebrity of our age — internet fame — provided you can write...

To understand the modern world, perhaps the most important rule one needs to know is this: Everything the Left touches it ruins. This first became clear to me years ago during my radio show. I was talking about the Left's war on the Boy Scouts (for not accepting announced gay people). It was becoming clear that this would ultimately lead to the decline of the Boy Scouts, which led me to ask: "Will the left replace the Boy Scouts with a left-wing Boy Scouts?" Then I answered my own question: Of course not. Because the Left only destroys; it doesn't...

Skip 1. He was not “presidential.” He was considered crude in speech, rough-hewn in manner, and given over to bluster and hyperbole unbefitting the highest office in the land. ... 2. He was an outsider, ... He was never a member of the Beltway club, whether Republicrats or Democrats. ... 3. He was competent and proudly patriotic. He put America first, cutting taxes, renegotiating bad trade deals to the nation’s advantage, ... For the “question of Trump” factors down to the three elements for which he was held accountable—personality, independence, and ability—and, of course, to the unbridgeable rift between the...

I don’t imagine that Andrew Sullivan is reading anything I’ve written here at Hot Air but that said his piece today could easily be a follow up to this one that I wrote yesterday. If you missed mine, the basic point of it was that the media’s recounting of the culture war often frames conservatives as the aggressors. But in fact there’s pretty good evidence that it’s the left that has moved most dramatically away from the center. The right is most often just trying to reject some of the left’s more extreme plans and intentions. In short, the culture...

I think I've had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 1/x Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they'll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they're not particularly attached to them. 2/x Here are the facts - actual, confirmed facts...

A new report has found that Hollywood’s culture of bullying, abusive behavior, and employee mistreatment continues unabated................

Outdoor clothing company Patagonia announced on Monday that it would donate $1 million to multiple voting rights groups in Georgia in direct response to the restrictive voting legislation that recently passed in the state. In a press release, Patagonia celebrated the record amount of voter turnout seen in the 2020 election, reiterating the assessment made by many voting officials that they were "safe, secure elections." "But instead of celebrating democracy in action, a group of lawmakers in Georgia and states across America are doing everything in their power to make it harder for their constituents to vote," Patagonia CEO Ryan...

Back in the 1970s, the nation of Chile embarked on one of the boldest sets of free market economic reforms in history. The government called in the Chicago Boys, as they were called, led by Milton Friedman and other University of Chicago free market economists They were given a free hand to redesign the Chilean economic system with property rights, a low flat tax, privatization of the Social Security system, and industry deregulation. In 1991, Friedman wrote that Chile now has "the three freedoms: economic freedom, political freedom, and human freedom. It will be interesting to see if they can...