Free Republic

Rape. Decades ago, women who were raped and reported it, particularly those raped by someone outside their race or social class, were often disbelieved and shamed. That is tragic. But how far the pendulum has swung in the other direction! Now, the term “rape” or “sexual assault” is thrown around almost effortlessly, accusations easily made and lives easily ruined. First, the pendulum shift began with feminists pushing the notion that women claiming they were raped should always be believed and never questioned. Presumption of innocence, a foundation of our culture, suddenly went out the window. Consider how quickly the...

On March 24, Towson University won the 2014 Cross Examination Debate Association’s national championship. Towson defeated the University of Oklahoma. What was Towson’s strategy? Inexplicably using the N-word over and over again in an incomprehensible tirade. Here is an actual excerpt (with profanity redacted). See if you are able to tell what Towson is arguing in favor or against: They say the n*****s always already qu***, that’s exactly the point! It means the impact is that the that the is the impact term, uh, to the afraid, uh, the, that it is a case term to the affirmative because, we,...

One of my readers, we'll call him Moses, is the publisher of a mainstream newspaper in California. He wrote me the other day with an insightful observation. Since Moses works in one of the most liberal industries, in one of the most liberal states in the union, I won't divulge his real name. We don't want Moses tarred, feathered and banished to Oklahoma with a scarlet "C," for Christian, emblazoned on his Harris Tweed sport coat. (Note: I have antipathy toward neither Oklahoma – I once lived there – nor Harris Tweed, though I do recommend against wearing Harris Tweed...

When the whole shoddy edifice of the progressive project collapses under its own dead weight, it will largely be because the liberals forgot to breed enough mindless minions to keep shoring it up. The left has always depended on a never-ending parade of credulous children to revitalize its dwindling ranks as the march of time and maturity depletes them. Liberal youth would grow up, look around, realize how progressivism is a disaster, and largely stop buying into the nonsense. But now, young people are wising up earlier. This is bad news for liberals, but great news for America. Our youth...

Leave it to Ann Coulter to get the Left’s panties in a wad over the latest trendy expression of concern: hashtag activism. The pundit tweeted her parody of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag craze, in which several high-profile figures, including First Lady Michelle Obama, have released photographs of themselves with stern visages holding up signs bearing the hashtag. Coulter’s photo features a pouty face and the hashtag #BringBackOurCountry.Needless to say, the Left is up in arms over Coulter’s satire. From Talking Points Memo: Coulter posted a photo to Twitter with her own iteration of the hashtag, in an apparent attempt to...

... These days you can convert everything from real estate to private company stock to hedge fund shares into a charitable kitty. Moreover, depending on what you give, to what kind of charity and how you time your donation, you may get a much more valuable tax break than if you’d just given cash. Example: Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is funding his $100 million commitment to Newark, N.J. schools by donating stock to a supporting organization (a rich man’s donor-advised fund) at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a public charity. If he’d sold $100 million in Facebook shares and...

The right is dropping the ball when it comes to Thomas Piketty’s much heralded and totally flawed book on inequality, “Capital in the 21st Century.” This long and lugubrious opus is really an open sore, replete with so much absurdity that shooting it down should be like shooting fish in a barrel. The left has embraced this rant against capitalism — and conservatives should be tying them to it, to expose where all the class-war rhetoric would really bring us.

Most conservatives, and just about all independents, have a huge misperception of the left. They think that the gulf between conservatism and leftism is primarily about means, not goals. This perception is wrong. It is their goals that are irreconcilable. And until conservatives, independents and the Republican Party understand this, it will not be possible to defeat the left. Take economic indicators. Most conservatives talk and act as if bad economic news disturbs the left as much as it disturbs them. It doesn't. Almost everywhere the left is in control -- in California, for example -- the economic news is...

A superintendent once called a man with a "vision of racial harmony" by the New York Times is being sued "by a principal, four teachers and three other school employees." In 2000, the Times wrote a featured article about Ronald O. Ross soon after he rose to prominence as Mount Vernon's Superintendent of Schools in September of 1998. The piece featured enthusiastic commentary from a fellow teacher calling Ross a man of post-racial intentions. "He will speak to issues most people dance around," said Jeff Yonkers, the president of the Mount Vernon Federation of Teachers. The article also included quotes...

One Nigerian official's wish for Boko Haram: "Find them, kill them." ....... "I love this about America," he said with a tone of, if not love, then certainly reverence. "Find them, kill them. Don't wait for judicial manipulation." As the parents of the kidnapped schoolgirls become more desperate, and their protests in Abuja grow larger, he may be repeating those four words to himself like a mantra.

A Saint John, N.B. man has reached local hero status after a blown tire led to a blowout with the city because the auto body shop owner decided to fix potholes on his street, only to be told to undo the work or face a fine. Three weeks ago, Mike Defazio blew out a tire after hitting a foot-deep pothole on Broadway Avenue at Simpson Drive, where he owns an auto body shop. The next day, while working outside his shop, he watched a hearse try to navigate around the pothole on the way to a funeral and the 60-year-old...

Republican Sen. Tim Scott doesn’t vote according to the color of his skin, Assistant Democratic Leader Rep. James Clyburn complained in a Thursday Washington Post article.“If you call progress electing a person with the pigmentation that he has, who votes against the interest and aspirations of 95 percent of the black people in South Carolina, then I guess that’s progress,” he told the Post.Clyburn’s argument was featured in a generally favorable article about Scott’s practice of briefly working alongside his constituents in South Carolina without revealing his identity.The comment from Clyburn, age 73, stands in contrast to a comment from...

Mike Rowe the star of “Dirty Jobs,” his long running series on Discovery Channel sought out and performed a huge variety of jobs that actually got his hands – and the rest of him – dirty. He showed what others do every day to keep the country running with plenty of food, fiber and mobility. Mike was seen on a dairy farm shoveling cow manure, inside an Air Force transport plane fuel tank; in factories and farms cleaning out sumps; slaughter houses dealing with offal; crawling into places that a claustrophobic (not homophobic) like me would panic in. I only...

Monica Lewinsky's Vanity Fair essay has provided those of us who lived through those months an opportunity to re-hash the spectacle it became, and allowed younger Americans an opportunity to finally "meet" the girl who inspired oh-so many of the Clinton jokes they've grown up on and discover who Beyoncé was singing about. It also provides us an opportunity to accurately pin-point the exact moment when the term "liberal" became synonymous with "Democrat." With the Monica Lewinsky affair, liberalism in America officially died and marked the moment when the left sold out all principles in the name of "der Party"...

HOUSTON (CBSDFW.COM) – Deputies with the Harris County Precinct One Constable’s Office say a man has been terrorizing a neighborhood in the Woodland Heights area of Houston by going to the bathroom in several yards at night. “We’ve had reports from six to eight neighbors out there that someone is actually coming into their yard and defecating — generally on their driveways,” said Sgt. J.C. Mosier. Authorities believe the unknown man is committing the act between 1:00 and 4:00 a.m., but a motive for crimes has not yet been established. “I think the neighbors are laughing about it, but that’s...

Recently there have been quite a few cases of liberals arguing in favor of certain public policies on the basis of principles that they usually oppose or, at a minimum, ignore. For example, a concerted media campaign is underway arguing that we should increase the minimum wage so that people with jobs are not also collecting government benefits. Yet the people behind the campaign are not people who normally argue for either less government spending or fewer handouts to lower income people. Generally, when you notice somebody arguing using the other side's principles, that should be a signal that their...

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is being run out of professional basketball for racist comments he made in private while both Democrats and Republicans rightly cheer. Racism, many in the media would tell you, is no longer acceptable in America. But that’s a lie. Racism in America is dying, but it’s not dead yet. It’s being kept alive by the Democratic Party. I recently went to New York to see Bryan Cranston on Broadway play President Lyndon Baines Johnson in All The Way. It was an excellent performance, but it was an incredibly well-crafted piece of propaganda. The hero,...

A Republican candidate for US Senate was kicked out of a recent interview for having the audacity to point out a reporter’s disrespect and liberal bias. The unforgivable sin was committed by Oregon Republican Mark Callahan, after a reporter equated his skepticism of global warming to believing in the Easter Bunny, and writing down “blah, blah, blah,” as a fellow Republican answered a similar question. Yes… Offending paper-skinned, pen-wielding, liberal journalists is clearly a sin so grave that even candidates for US Senate find themselves censored and silenced. The drama began when Callahan chastised reporter Nigel Jacquiss for mocking a...

Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary Fall to Grace tracks the evolution of New Jersey’s disgraced, self-dubbed “gay-American,” former governor, Jim McGreevey. In one passing scene, McGreevey enters a church ostensibly more welcoming than the judgmental Catholic Church of his childhood. The message board on the church front reads -- and this is a close paraphrase -- “Lord help us overcome the sins of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.” Had the message board been bigger, the good pastor might have added nativism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. In a postmodern world that prides itself on “non-judgmentalism,” these have emerged as the seven new deadly...

A fifth grade worksheet in Florida declares that the Federalists were different than the anti-federalists because they “believed in a strong national government that would have power over the states.” The Federalists believed in a central government, but it was to be a “limited government.” The anti-federalists believed that there should be no central government, and pushed for full sovereignty of the states. The Federalists, according to the worksheet, included “John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton.” While it is true that the Federalists wanted a central, or a “general,” government, the worksheet does...