Free Republic

America woke up this weekend to the news of the deadliest civilian mass shooting in the nation’s history. The senseless tragedy will undoubtedly evoke anger, sadness and helplessness. In the meantime, many will forget to think and talk about Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s crime and his “summer vacation” jail sentence: three months for the vile sexual assault of an unconscious woman. As a sociologist, I was struck not by the abrupt shift to a new moral crisis, but by the continuity. Sociologists look for the bigger picture, and in my mind, Mateen’s crime didn’t displace Turner’s. Yet the media simply...

See Something, Say Nothing A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Govt. Submission to Jihad One day after a prominent U.S. Muslim leader reacted to the November 2015 Paris attacks with a declaration that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has nothing to do with Islam, President Obama made the same assertion. Who exactly is the enemy we face, not only in the Middle East but also within our borders? Is it “murderers without a coherent creed” or “nihilistic killers who want to tear things down,” as some described ISIS after 130 people were brutally slain and another 368 injured...

Donald Trump, the most prominent Republican right now, suggested on national TV on Monday that President Obama is possibly complicit in Sunday's horrific terror attack in Orlando. And maybe, Trump hinted, the president is even somehow involved. On Fox & Friends, the presumptive GOP presidential candidate said, "He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands—it's one or the other and either one is unacceptable." "Look," he continued, "we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind. And the something else in mind—you know, people can't believe...

After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.

Tonight at the Tony Awards, the Hamilton cast will not be using their prop firearms when they take to the stage, according to a new report. The cast have consciously decided not to use the musket props during their highly-anticipated performance following the tragic mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando in the early hours of Sunday morning that left 50 people dead."Our thoughts are with the families and friends of those affected. The Tony Awards dedicate tonight's ceremony to them."

And Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida warned against “sensationalizing” the story. Immediately the mainstream media and government and law enforcement officials have as their top priority of protecting Islam from criticism or scrutiny. Their kneejerk response to every jihad massacre is to regard Muslims as its victims, rather than scrutinize the motivating ideology of the killers. Instead of making sure no one thinks ill of Islam, they should be asking what it is about Islam that makes these jihad massacres keep happening.

“War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength. This was the slogan of George Orwell’s fictional English Socialist Party (INGSOC) of Oceania, from his timeless dystopian novel “1984.” Orwell depicted a mind-control technique employed by INGSOC called “doublethink,” which “describes the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.” If the malleable masses could be made to believe self-contradictory, patently absurd and empirically impossible concepts as true, went Orwell’s thesis, they could then be made to believe, or do, anything. We have entered an age that George Orwell might never have imagined....

Unfortunately it took a scandalous retraction three years later to admit it as the study's authors originally reported that the results indicated that conservatives had psychotic personality traits and liberals had traits associated with high social desirability.  This much-touted research study in fact revealed just the opposite: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was...

Hoo-wee, the New York Times will really have to extend itself to top the boner and mother-of-all-corrections at the American Journal of Political Science... The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed... The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly,...

Speaking at a judicial conference in D.C. on Thursday night, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren unleashed one of her strongest attacks yet on presumptive GOP nominee and "wannabe tyrant" Donald Trump over his rhetoric on judges -- and his troubles over Trump University. "Donald Trump is a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who has never risked anything for anyone and serves no one but himself," she told members of the American Constitution Society. "And that is just one of the many reasons why he will never be President of the United States."

Remember the time a presidential candidate suggested that Gandhi used to run “a gas station down in St. Louis.” No it wasn’t Trump. That was Hillary Clinton. Had Trump said it, we would still be hearing about it. But since Hillary Clinton was responsible for it, it went down the memory hole. Along with her more recent “Colored People Time” gag.

The Left is fond of smearing those who do not share their value system as "fascist." The latest target is the current 'presumptive' GOP Presidential nominee. To the Left, "fascist" is a buzzword for an implied, undefined "evil." In fact, fascism is a definable political ideology that has an extensively documented history, in theory and practice. Fascism is a left-wing ideology; a bundling of trade-union syndicalism, futurism and statist collectivism. Fascists hold that private property can only be tolerated so long as it serves the public via its agent, the State. That most certainly is not a conservative principle, is...

In a 9-page letter dated yesterday and posted to his blog, Ortel calls the Clintons’ charity the “largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever attempted,” adding for good measure that the Clinton Foundation is part of an “international charity fraud network whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion, measured from 1997 forward.” Ortel lists 40 potential areas of fraud or wrongdoing that he plans to expose over the coming days.

Hillary Clinton has a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality that left White House staffers scared stiff of her explosive — and even physical — outbursts, an ex-Secret Service officer claims in a scathing new tell-all. Gary Byrne, who was posted outside the Oval Office when Bill Clinton was president, portrays Hillary as too “erratic, uncontrollable and occasionally violent” to become leader of the free world, according to advance promotional materials exclusively obtained by Page Six. The allegations from Byrne, a 29-year veteran of the military and federal law enforcement, threaten to derail her campaign days before she is expected to clinch...

Conservatives care about logic. Liberals care about emotion. Conservatives care about whether a program works or not. Liberals care about how supporting a program makes them feel. Conservatives take the positions they do because they believe they’re best for society. Liberals take the positions they do because they make them feel and look compassionate or superior to hold those positions. Once you understand those basics, it’s very easy to see why both sides hold the positions they do on most issues and to comprehend why there’s so little middle ground. Once you get the mentalities, you can predict where each...

Playing the role of Judas Goat, leading people to be oppressed in the name of liberalism worked just fine for Maya Dillard Smith right up until it was her daughters who were asked to accept deep voiced men in their lady’s room. Backing every socially destructive scheme the ACLU could conjure up was a comfortable way of life for Smith, who was the interim director of a Georgia ACLU chapter. Making landlords rent to newly released vicious prison inmates, forcing employers to hire incompetent lazy and counter productive workers and forcing “Heather Has Two Mommies” type books onto 2nd grade...

Among all the rivers of money that have flowed to the Clinton family, one seems to raise the biggest national security questions of all: the stream of cash that came from 20 foreign governments who relied on weapons export approvals from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Federal law designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, military hardware and services to foreign countries. In practice, that meant that Clinton was charged with rejecting or approving weapons deals — and when it came to Clinton Foundation donors, Hillary Clinton’s State Department did...

Complete Headline: Nervous, Hillary? Clinton ditches New Jersey event to campaign in California amid fears that Bernie could embarrass her as he closes the gap to just two points Hillary Clinton is heading back to California earlier than expected, wanting to pull of a win over a surging Bernie Sanders Sanders is dedicating almost all of his time and energy to upset Clinton in the California primary, being held a week from Tuesday Today Hillary Clinton marched in a Memorial Day parade for her adopted hometown of Chappaqua, New York Today Hillary Clinton changed her schedule for the week, canceling...

In a 4-3 ruling, the Iowa Supreme Court banned lower courts from imposing life sentences for murders committed by teen-aged offenders. The ruling came in the case of Isaiah Richard Sweet, who was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for fatally shooting his grandparents. Justice Brent Appel wrote that "a life sentence for a crime such as this is disproportionate. The victims were old and fairly close to a natural death. For their grandson to be sentenced to a life term that could easily amount to multiple decades is a punishment that I believe the victims themselves would have...

"Pocahantas." For a long time I've been busting on Marco Rubio people, and the class -- Upper Middle Class College-Educated -- so enthused about him.* I've said this before, but this class, in particular, is extremely bully-able. Their class itself is is the product of liberal social cues and mores. College being one of the main prerequisites of class entry (other prerequisites: That your parents are also college-educated), this class is particularly sensitive to threats to their social status by liberals.** Any class whose credentials are monitored by a progressive/archliberal dominant cadre is going to be easily whipsawed into conformity...