Free Republic

As the work-from-home trend took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, the term “quiet quitting” entered the contemporary lexicon. According to the Harvard Business Review, “Quiet quitters continue to fulfill their primary responsibilities, but they’re less willing to engage in activities known as citizenship behaviors: no more staying late, showing up early, or attending non-mandatory meetings.” Simply put, having perceived their jobs to not have value and meaning, they do no more than absolutely necessary. There is debate among scholars as to the extent of the quiet quitting phenomenon, but there is increasing evidence that white Americans are increasingly quiet quitting...

Is it crazy to notice our institutions are falling apart?I came across this thread recently about Boeing from financial analyst Porter Stansberry. Here’s what he had to say: A year ago @Porter_and_Co published a dire warning about a mega-cap American stock. This was the only mega-cap stock we told investors to avoid. And it is no ordinary business. It is America’s most strategically important company. We said it would soon collapse. Our January 27th 2023 headline? COMING SOON: THE BOEING COLLAPSE. How did we know? For the last 20 years, there hasn’t been a company in America that’s embraced more...

In just a couple of days it will be three years since the January 6 United States Capitol attack.Ahead of our 'Jan 6' debate on Saturday, it feels apt to take a step back to try and capture an overview of the state of trust in institutions in the United States.As Statista's Anna Fleck detail below, based on data collected by Gallup in June 2023, of the institutions selected, only the military and small businesses saw a great deal or a fair amount of trust in them from a majority of U.S. respondents.This is at odds with Congress, which saw...

At the heart of America’s political and cultural turmoil is a crisis of trust. In the space of a generation, the people’s confidence in their leaders and their most important institutions to do the right thing has collapsed. The federal government, big business, the media, education, science and medicine, technology, religious institutions, law enforcement and others have seen a precipitous decline. As public faith in the performance, credibility and integrity of these institutions has collapsed, so too has mutual trust—the social glue that holds the country together. Americans have become suspicious of one another, distrusting their fellow citizens as much...

Here are some news stories from recent days. Can you tell me what they have in common? Scammers clone a teenage girl’s voice with AI—then use it to call her mother and demand a $1 million ransom. Millions of people see a photo of Pope Francis wearing a goofy white Balenciaga puffer jacket, and think it’s real. But after the image goes viral, news media report that it was created by a construction worker in Chicago with deepfake technology. Twitter changes requirements for verification checks. What was once a sign that you could trust somebody’s identity gets turned into a...

The last thing any nation wants to see is the decline of its safety (think: an empire losing strength as barbarians are set to storm the gates). In our case, the signs of decay are there for anyone to see. But of course, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Here are four examples of troubling trends: Leadership: With Biden, America has a chief executive who must resort to cue cards to know how to enter a room, sit down, and give preapproved and scripted answers to reporters' questions while acting as if his answers sprang...

During an appearance on Tuesday’s broadcast of FNC’s “Hannity,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reacted to a Politico report revealing a leaked draft Supreme Court majority opinion indicating the 1973 Roe v. Wade would ultimately be overturned. Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity Democrats seemed to be working against American institutions to gain power and called the leak “the saddest chapter in the history” of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) continued to tow the Democrats' latest idolization on something President Trump has voiced criticism on, with this time being the United States Postal Service on Wednesday. Liberals have floated conspiracy theories about the USPS in recent weeks, including spreading the false claim the Trump administration is purposely removing mailboxes across the country to suppress mail-in ballots.

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal released the results of a poll performed in conjunction with NBC News. The poll found that 56 percent of Americans believe American society is racist. Seventy-one percent believe race relations are either very or fairly bad. Most troubling, 65 percent of black Americans say that racial discrimination is built into American society, "including into our policies and institutions." The notion that America is systemically racist bodes ill for the future. It's also a dramatic lie. American history is replete with racism; racism was indeed the root of systems ranging from slavery to Jim Crow....

If we’re inclined to glide past the Marxist fingerprints all over America’s current turmoil, assuming its ideas will flare up for a while and then burn out, we’re not paying attention. American institutions have stoked the coals of Karl Marx’s destructive ideology, fanning its flames until his notions have consumed our cultural pillars.Far from being forgotten and irrelevant, Marx’s ideas pervade key institutions, from universities and schools, to mass media and popular entertainment, to major corporations and medicine, to the arts and sciences. They’ve even seeped into many churches and seminaries. Of course, they also define the Democratic Party, Joe...

In July 2018, Commentary published an article by Yuval Levin that caused everyone who thinks about the balance of power among the branches in Washington, D.C., to say: "Of course! That's it exactly!" It had long been observed that Congress had, over the course of several decades, relinquished its powers to the executive and the courts. That wasn't news. Others had remarked that geographic sorting and gerrymandering had increased the ideological polarization of the two parties. This spurs members of Congress to side with presidents of their own party more than with their fellow legislators. Levin's insight went further. The...

America has lost a voice that strongly and consistently provided the road map to steer us away from the political and cultural abyss we currently face. That voice belonged to historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died Dec. 30 at age 97. Gertrude spoke passionately about how our most important institutions—families, communities, churches, and private enterprise—must be “remoralized,” as it is only through a strong civil society that we can have a strong nation. In her words, people learn to function as “free, responsible, moral adults” in these institutions and apply that responsibility and morality as citizens of a nation. But she...

This week, the House passed a reauthorization bill of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), but this bill falls short and fails to accomplish its namesake goal. From its inception, the purpose of VAWA has been to protect, support, and seek justice for women who have suffered assault or abuse. CWALAC fully supports that mission. The goal of the current VAWA reauthorization efforts should advance these objectives, not compromise them. The reauthorization must address misguided efforts to go beyond the scope of VAWA, which represent a fundamental threat to the privacy and safety of women and girls. Unfortunately, the House-passed...

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said our institutions of government were “under assault” by President Donald Trump. Partial transcript as follows: TAPPER: Let’s take a wider view of this for one second and then get back to more detailed questions. This week with the president firing the FBI director while this investigation is going on, and then saying that he was thinking about the Russia probe when he was making the decision, have we crossed a line here? well, CLAPPER: Well, I will just say that the developments of the past...

If President Obama’s appearance at the Notre Dame commencement in 2009 sparked an unprecedented uproar among American Catholics, imagine what inviting President Trump to graduation might provoke That concern is making Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. John Jenkins, think twice about making a pitch for the incoming U.S. president to receive an honorary degree...spoke to the student newspaper December 2, 2016.

Today’s Roman Catholic calendar lists May 21st as the feast day of St. Christopher Magallanes, a martyr killed for celebrating Mass during the Cristero War in Mexico. Perhaps Catholics today may want to recall St. Thomas More — the patron saint of lawyers, who was executed for refusing to agree to a mandate that gave Henry VIII the prerogative of defining religious expression in England. Dozens of Catholic institutions filed lawsuits today against the Department of Health and Human Services over its mandate and its narrow definition of religious practice: Catholic archdioceses and institutions filed suit in federal district courts...

Johnny Whitmire shuts off his lawn mower and takes a long draw from a water bottle. He sloshes the liquid from cheek to cheek and squirts it between his work boots. He is sweating through his white T-shirt. His jeans are dirty. His middle-aged back hurts like hell. But the calf-high grass is cut, and the weeds are tamed at 1900 W. 10th St., a house that Whitmire and his family once called home. “I’ve decided to keep the place up,” he says, “because I hope to buy it back from the bank.”

Toulouse, France - Jewish institutions around the world are stepping up security after a gunman killed four people - three of them children - at a Jewish school in the southwestern French city of Toulouse yesterday. (Snip) About 200 students study at the small, private, religious school, which has no exterior signage to indicate that it is a Jewish institution. Intelligence work was apparently undertaken prior to the attack. The gunman took advantage of the fact that, despite the tall gates surrounding the school and security cameras at the entrance, no security guard was standing at the site. In the

Nick Clegg is to make an explosive attack on British universities as ‘instruments of social segregation’ as he orders them to stop taking so many middle-class students. The Deputy Prime Minister will this week insist that top institutions must ‘throw open their doors’ and lower their entrance requirements for the less well-off.

Day two in a three-day series Once or twice a semester, Dr. Chris Gunn comes across a student so unstable that he and his colleagues at Northern Arizona University get together and decide: Call the parents? Suspend? Have committed involuntarily for psychiatric care? Speculation has strongly leaned toward alleged Tucson mass shooter Jared Loughner as having untreated paranoid schizophrenia, and his behavior was erratic enough that his school, Pima Community College, suspended him until he could provide a mental health clearance. The propensity for people with serious mental illness to commit extreme violence like the kind seen in Tucson is...