Free Republic

Ann Coulter escalated her war of words with Donald Trump, branding the former president a “gigantic p—y” after he referred to the conservative commentator as a “has-been” and a “stone cold loser.” “Trump begged me to come to Bedminster this week, I said only if I could record a substack with him, but the GIGANTIC P—Y is too afraid of me, so instead he did this,” Coulter wrote in a post on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter. *** The firebrand conservative media personality records a video interview show called “Unsafe” that she publishes on subscription-based Substack,...

More than 40 African American intellectuals are asking Smith College to end the “forced, accusatory ‘anti-bias’ training” that was mandated for campus service workers after a student falsely accused some workers of racially-profiling her. The letter, obtained by National Review, was sent on Monday to Smith College president Kathleen McCartney by Bob Woodson, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and founder of “1776 Unites,” and 44 fellow black intellectuals. The signatories ask McCartney to “rethink how you have handled” the fallout over an alleged incident of racial profiling in the summer of 2018, and urge her to “publicly apologize”...

In this short “round table” vid clip hear a black group of pseudo intellectuals pontificate that,“Yeah we wanna kill all white people. Just not today, because we don't have the power.” You better watch this so you can understand the consequences of "why can't we all just get along" think. https://choiceclips.whatfinger.com/2020/09/21/yeah-they-wanna-kill-all-white-people-just-not-today-because-they-dont-have-the-power/

The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. ............... ............... But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody...

Politicians across the Western world like to speak fondly of the “middle class” as if it is one large constituency with common interests and aspirations. But, as Karl Marx observed, the middle class has always been divided by sources of wealth and worldview. Today, it is split into two distinct, and often opposing, middle classes. First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle...

It’s nearly impossible to have even a short conversation with a college administrator, politician, or chief executive without the words diversity and inclusion dropping from their lips. Diversity and inclusion appear to be the end-all and be-all of their existence. So, I thought I’d begin this discussion by first looking up the definition of diversity. Here’s my question to those who are wedded to diversity and inclusion: Are people better off the less they have in common with one another? For example, women are less likely to be able to march 12.4 miles in five hours with an 83-pound assault...

As George Orwell said, "some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them." Many stupid ideas originate with academics on college campuses. If they remained there and didn't infect the rest of society, they might be a source of entertainment, much in the way a circus is. Let's look at a few stupid ideas peddled by intellectuals. During the Cold War, academic leftists made a moral equivalency between communist totalitarianism and democracy. Worse is the fact that they exempted communist leaders from the type of harsh criticism directed toward Adolf Hitler, even though communist crimes against humanity made Hitler's...

The intelligentsia impulse is all about power. It's about a small faction of academics, intellectuals, and arrogant eggheads who think they know better than everyone else One study I read labeled the prophets in the Old Testament one type of intellectual. I disagree, since they operated as revelators to a nation which had rejected the laws of God and rejected His precepts. The philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome fall into this “intellectual” category more accurately, since they praised their reasoning, research, and logo ahead of revelation and physical effort The common denominator among them? They were spectacularly wrong on...

Imprisoned serial killers of women are often the object of marriage proposals from women who know nothing of them except their criminal record. This curious phenomenon indicates the depths to which self-deception can sink in determining human action. The women making such offers presumably believe that an essential core of goodness subsists in the killers and that they are uniquely the ones to bring it to the surface. They thereby also distinguish themselves from other women, whose attitude to serial killers is more conventional and unthinkingly condemnatory. They thus see further and deeper, and feel more strongly, than their conventional...

National Front has given voice to much of working class once represented by the leftSipping a coffee at Le Rouge Limé café in central Paris, Michael Foessel, professor of philosophy at the École Polytechnique, harks back to a time when leftwing intellectuals really mattered. Long gone are the days, he says, of Pierre Bourdieu leading strikes by railway workers, Michel Foucault shifting the debate on prison reforms, or Émile Zola and his plea for justice during the Dreyfus Affair. “We are no longer the intellectual leaders of this country,” says the 42-year-old, wearing jeans and a tweed jacket. “In the...

The office of BGLTQ Student Life at Harvard University has released a new school-sponsored guide telling students to “fight transphobia” and “get the facts about gender diversity.” The guide, which was distributed to students on campus, declares that “there are more than two sexes” and that “gender is fluid and changing,” adding that someone’s gender identity “can be affirmed and/or expressed in many ways,” and can even “change from day to day.”

(Skip) I work at Stanford University but live on a farm between Fresno and Visalia. What one place values does not necessarily mean much in the other. Writing an essay no more impresses my rural neighbors than knowing how to drive a tractor or use a chainsaw is of interest to my Palo Alto colleagues. Rural people who mine, log, farm and build hold a tragic view that they are always but a day away from nature’s revenge — drought, flood or storm — and that the human experience is always a war of sorts. In part, the rural backlash...

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define...

Hillary's coercive centralized planning scheme, which will certainly destroy individual liberty, as history shows, versus Trump's capitalism and freedom plan, which has benefitted America the most, as history definitely shows Bellyaching NeverTrumpers, that group of self-focused “Conservative intellectuals” and “thought leaders,” have done everything possible to sabotage GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign. Short sighted and childishly selfish, they could have helped the Republican nominee construct rock-solid conservative plans… if they were indeed, as Conservative as they profess. “By conservatives,’ I mean actual conservatives, the people who believe in limited government, a strong national defense, American federalism, and who reject...

Roger Simon’s fine book on moral narcissism—I Know Best—provides the basic insight into the mostly silly “debate” about the Hillary vs Trump contest. Roger understands that our ruling class isn’t much interested in understanding the real consequences of policy. With rare exceptions, the debate is about how the American “nomenklatura” feels about advocating one policy or another. It’s all about them, not about the election. In twenty-first century America, almost all of us seem to have concluded that “You are what you say you are. You are what you proclaim your values to be, irrespective of their consequences.” That is...

Donald Trump would make a good president. And so would Ted Cruz. The elite limousine liberals in New York are laughing their @sses off, when they see the supporters of two great conservatives attacking each other. Any intellectually honest supporter of Trump will acknowledge that Cruz was not attacking the average New Yorker. He was attacking New York's left-wing intellectuals, who have the reputation of being the most arrogant intellectuals on the face of the earth. Those elite intellectuals despise average New Yorkers, and they hate the New York Police Department. These intellectuals hate America, as much as the intellectuals...

It could be due to the usual suspects: the dumbing down of culture. The partisanship of politics and cable television, which doesn’t make time for erudition and deep penetration into an issue. The dominance of secularism. Those are all probably to blame for the fact that there are no longer any real Catholic public intellectuals. Note: I did not say Catholic intellectuals. I said Catholic public intellectuals. William F. Buckley. Richard John Neuhaus. Fulton Sheen. These men were Catholic public intellectuals: they created popular magazines, hosted TV shows, wrote both fiction and nonfiction books. Their prose was literary, and they...

Today, 50 years after a notable death, a memorial stone will be placed in an edifice steeped in history.The building is not in our country, and the man being honored is not President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963.Two intellectual giants, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, also died that day. Their passings were overshadowed by the shocking news from Dallas -- just as Kennedy tributes are filling news pages and TV schedules all this month.At London's Westminster Abbey today, a memorial stone in Lewis' honor will be placed in the Poet's Corner of the Gothic church. Lewis...

Late Friday morning of last week, I got interrupted by a call from Katie Pavlich. It's not like I was working - I haven't worked on a Friday morning since I got tenure back in 1998. It's just that I was cleaning one of my favorite .44 magnums and didn't want to be disturbed at that particular moment. Nonetheless, Katie was having some problems with the folks at UNC - Chapel Hill and she needed some help. So I put down my Smith and Wesson and gave her my best advice. For those who haven't yet heard, Katie was invited...

~snip~ An interview with the Hoover economist on his new book, Intellectuals and Race.AmSpec: You’ve written a lot about intellectuals and also a lot about race. Why did you feel a need to put out a separate book on intellectuals and race? Sowell: Parts of this were published originally in the second edition of Intellectuals and Society, although other parts are new. But I wrote it in part because I was correcting a mistake I made, which was that I didn’t listen to my research assistant when she told me that this material should be published as a separate book....