Free Republic

CNN’s decision to drop Marc Lamont Hill has met with resistance on the left, with some prominent progressives calling for the network to rehire him and challenging the widely held view that his comments before a United Nations panel were anti-Semitic. Harvard professor Cornel West, “Avengers” star Mark Ruffalo, Democratic Rep.-elect Rashida Tlaib, and a host of journalists were among those who rushed to Mr. Hill’s defense after CNN released the liberal commentator last week following an uproar over his speech. Mr. West said he was in “deep solidarity” with Mr. Hill, while Mr. Ruffalo said that “[c]riticizing Israel is...

California Democrats will be taking another stab at requiring all public colleges and universities to stock the abortion pill, anticipating a different outcome with a new governor taking over the helm in January. Democratic state Sen. Connie Leyva on Monday introduced the latest version of the bill, the College Student Right to Access Act, during the first day of the Senate's session. The legislation would make abortion pills available to students at schools associated with the University of California and California State University. A similar bill was vetoed in October by outgoing Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who said there was...

A coalition of women's rights organizations filed an appeal to the High Court of Justice arguing that Israel's recently-relaxed gun laws are causing more women to be murdered. According to Ynet, the ten different organizations say that a recent uptick of murders are the direct result of a decision by Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan to allow veterans of IDF infantry units to obtain personal handgun permits. In addition, the appeal claims that 40% of all women are murdered in Israel by handguns compared to only 28% in the OECD. "There is a clear and proven connection between the extent...

When 19-year-old Kam Brooks was admitted to a behavioral health care facility in Sanford, Florida, after having suicidal thoughts, a nurse following her usual procedure asked the teen to remove personal items, including a bra. “It’s a chest binder, not a bra,” Brooks, who identifies as neither male nor female but as gender nonbinary, responded before changing into a long-sleeve shirt and gray sweatpants. During another interaction at the same facility, Aspire Health Partners, a nonprofit that caters to low-income patients, a counselor asked if Brooks was "male or female." This question, Brooks lamented, ignored the possibility that someone could...

Political power couple Bill and Hillary Clinton are in Toronto today, spending a very special evening with their supporters to the north. Toronto is part of the small handful of cities on their North American tour. The tour is a series of conversations called "An Evening With The Clintons" - guests are invited to buy tickets and sit down with the Clintons as they tell stories and discuss important issues of today and the future.

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life. One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has...

Nietzsche cautioned those who fight monsters to take care lest they become monsters themselves. He should have also warned those pretending to fight monsters, whose imagined enemies are really projections of their own evils. Consider Antifa, those self-styled anti-fascists who recently made headlines for harassing the family of Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The paucity of actual Nazis in this country would seem to make Antifa superfluous, but they have a talent for detecting fascists everywhere. Having determined that practically everything and everyone (themselves excepted) is fascist, they spend their free time going about in black shirts smashing things and...

Leftism pretends to be a system of thought, but it is nothing more or less than a secular religion. It is godless, but godlessness is the most bigoted and intolerant of all belief systems, [snip] What is the religious dogma of leftism? There are several sacraments, each made utterly resistant to treason, experience, or logic by the druid clergy of leftism. (1) There are immutable classes of victims and victimizers beyond remediation except through a constant procession of human sacrifices. (2) There are institutions that demand more and more resources and that can never been considered failures. (3) Nations are...

Democrat Stacey Abrams says she can’t win the Georgia governor’s race, effectively ending her challenge to Republican Brian Kemp. Her speech Friday effectively puts a stop to the contest. The final result had been in doubt for 10 days after the election.

Published in 1818, Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias” imagines a London long-since abandoned—the English civilization is gone. Collapsed. The city is a new Rome. A half-forgotten memory like Babylon. Troy. "…We wonder—and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place." Perhaps this is London’s destiny—perhaps it’s ours too. After all, many of America’s greatest cities are decaying before our very eyes. Consider Detroit. Its population plummeted by 63 percent since 1950,...

Dominic Chacon, a Field Manager for the O’Rourke campaign in El Paso, Texas, expressed his concern in getting supplies to the caravan migrants. “I’m going to go get some food right now, like just some stuff to drop off, cause they need food and blankets,” said Chacon. “Do you know of anybody that has blankets and s**t?” We got permission to give them some of these waters, so we can take some of the waters too.” Anapaula Themann, a field organizer for the O’Rourke campaign, insists that the purchase of supplies for the illegal aliens remain a secret in a...

In 2018 alone, including the most recent carnage at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, there have been 47,220 gun-related incidents resulting in 11,984 deaths in the United States, according to data compiled by Gun Violence Archive, an independent data-collection and research group. That breaks down to 157 incidents and 40 deaths a day and does not include 22,000 suicides. Of the total fatalities, 548 were children, while 2,321 were teenagers. www.marketwatch.com

From the occasionally used cortex department: Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Friday at a campaign event that the United States’ blueprint for beating global warming needs to be the same as the blueprint the U.S. used for defeating Nazi Germany in the 1940s. “So we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And so we’ve been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before.” “None of these things are new ideas,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “What we had was an existential...

Actress Kristen Bell raises controversial questions about Snow White, consent, and it's all tied into the #MeToo movement. She may have forgotten that it's just a movie. When it's 2018 and nothing surprises you anymore, then it's no wonder a 38-year-old Kristen Bell is asking kids if they think it's weird that Snow White gets kissed in her sleep. Nevermind the fact that it's a fictional children's movie that kids love, but that doesn't matter. Bell just wants to be a nuisance and make people roll their eyes. Her bizarre point was made on the Parents.com website. To answer her...

This is all a long preface for setting up notice of Thomas Edsall’s column in the New York Times today, Over the past 18 years, the Democratic electorate has moved steadily to the left, as liberals have displaced moderates. . . From 2001 to 2018, the share of Democratic voters who describe themselves as liberal has grown from 30 to 50 percent, according to data provided by Lydia Saad, a senior editor at the Gallup Poll. . . Well-educated whites, especially white women, are pushing the party decisively leftward. According to Gallup, the share of white Democrats calling themselves liberal...

Last week, a trolling campaign organized by right-wing internet users spilled over onto Twitter. The campaign, which was born in the fever swamps of 4chan and Reddit message boards, involved creating hundreds of fictional personas with gray cartoon avatars, known as NPCs. These accounts posed as liberal activists and were used to spread — among other things — false information about November’s midterm elections.

I have been thinking for years about the language that the Left uses, such as "We will fight for _____", or "this is a struggle", or "you cannot be civil with...", or "fight in the streets", just to name some familiar and recent examples. The lexicon of the Left is clear and consistent - rational discussion is not tolerated. They don't value the dialectic. Heck, they don't even know what the dialectic is. What worse, the Left doesn't understand what the Constitutional right to assemble and protest means. They think it means they can assemble to physically intimidate their opponents...

Some parents are proud when their kids are kind, generous, loving and compassionate. Feminist parents are proud when their kid CRIES after encountering a non-feminist. That’s exactly what Maggie Gyllenhaal’s daughter did. She’s obviously proud, because she told the story to everyone on “The View.” “She ran into somebody recently, a little girl her age, who said she wasn’t feminist and my daughter was astonished … she came home and cried to me about it,” she said. The View ✔ @TheView @mgyllenhaal shares about her 12-year-old daughter, who she calls an activist: "She ran into somebody recently, a little girl...

Been working on a response for a Quora query, You are a devout Bible-fundamental Jesus believer. Or devout Catholic or Mormon. Why do you and your religious principles support and defend President Trump? Otherwise, why wouldn't you? I only worked on what the alternative to Trump would mean so far. Any suggestions for this? "Devout Bible-fundamental Jesus believer" best fits evangelicals, and even considering the alternative from that overall perspective should suffice for now, as illustrated by this (imperfect) analogy: You are at a port along with many other people, trying to continue on a long journey to get to...

“Eighty percent of Americans see political correctness as a problem. And I think it’s our problem,” Maher explained. “And I don’t know why more mainstream liberals don’t denounce the political correctness that they must know in private conversations is insane.” When asked to define political correctness, Maher cited the apology astronaut Scott Kelly issued this week after he was criticized for quoting Winston Churchill on Twitter. “[Kelly] had to issue an apology for that for quoting Churchill because Churchill I guess Churchill lived by the standards of the 19th Century,” Maher said. “This is the guy who saved us from...