Free Republic

I first read Thomas Sowell in college -- no thanks to my college. At the majority of America's institutions of "higher learning," reading Thomas Sowell was a subversive act in the early 1990s when I was a student. It remains so today. Why? Because the prolific libertarian economist's vast body of work is a clarion rejection of all the liberal intelligentsia hold dear. Among the left's most corrosive ideas is the concept of perpetual and permanent racial victimhood, which social engineers pretend to rectify through federally mandated, taxpayer-subsidized preferential policies. Sowell's groundbreaking academic analyses of these programs in the...

What if a man was convicted of crimes he didn’t commit … just to appease the Black Lives Matter mob? Conservative Review Senior Editor Michelle Malkin explores that possibility in the explosive debut episodes of “Michelle Malkin Investigates.” She examines the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma City police officer who was convicted on multiple counts of rape and sentenced to 263 years in prison in January for crimes he says he didn’t commit. Was there reasonable doubt? In “Daniel in the Den,” Malkin explores whether the half-white, half-Japanese officer was convicted based on dubious evidence, unreliable testimony, and immense...

Wasn't one vapid pretty boy named Justin from Canada enough? At least Justin Bieber is eye candy without the heartburn. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, is the twinkly-eyed boy toy who makes informed adults wanna hurl. For more than a year, the liberal Canadian prime minister enjoyed drool-stained global press coverage as the "hot hipster" and "dreamy sex symbol" with great hair and a tribal Haida tattoo. He basked in Ryan Gosling-esque memes about his commitment to feminism and touched off "Trudeau-mania" with a series of shirtless selfies and photobombs. But this weekend, the sane world saw the baby-faced...

How many more broadcast bust-ups will it take before America finally decides to make its presidential election debates tolerable again? I can't take it anymore. Can you? For the past three cycles -- 2008, 2012, and 2016 -- I've chronicled the depressing, systemic bias of left-leaning partisans whom the Commission on Presidential Debates routinely installs as "moderators." It would be one thing if these activists posing as journalists were upfront about their political preferences. But they continue to star in phony debate theater wearing their dime-store costumes of objectivity. The even bigger farce? Masochistic Republican Party bosses let them get...

Once was a shock. Twice was an outrage. Thrice is a nightmare that won't end. Over the past three years, my family's private, individual health insurance plan -- a high-deductible Preferred Provider Organization -- has been canceled three times. Our first death notice, from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, arrived in the fall of 2013. Our second, from Rocky Mountain Health Plans, came last August. Three weeks ago, we received another ominous "notice of plan discontinuation" from Anthem informing us that the insurer "will no longer offer your current health plan in the State of Colorado." Every time we...

"It could all come down to Colorado." That's the latest conventional wisdom from presidential poll watchers. But it may not be legal American citizens in my adopted home state who choose the next commander in chief. Instead, it could very well be foreign noncitizens voting illegally in the Rocky Mountains -- and in other crucial swing states -- who seal our country's fate. Former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler identified nearly 5,000 noncitizens in Colorado who voted in the 2010 general election. Gessler's office uncovered upwards of 12,000 noncitizens registered to vote. Liberal groups who oppose stronger election system...

Whatever happened to "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar"? Whither "Girl Power"? When did Rosie the Riveter's "We Can Do It!" give way to Hillary the Haranguer's "We Can't Handle It"? It's 2016, and the Democrats' feminist heroine running for commander in chief is whinnying about being -- wait for it -- interrupted. Quick! Prepare a complaint to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Poor, fragile, defenseless Hillary Clinton is a victim of the international human rights crime of serial conversational obstruction. Mainstream media outlets (also known as the Coalition of Liberal Narrative-Benders For Hillary)...

Old age and illness have not dulled the tongue or treasonous soul of convicted jihad-enabling lawyer Lynne Stewart. She's as vile and violence-promoting as ever. Freed from prison two years ago on "compassionate release" after being diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, the flaming 76-year-old radical is still championing left-wing massacres against the police. And still kicking America in the teeth. The Associated Press reported over the holiday weekend that the mouthy menace remains stubbornly devoted to "armed struggle." Translation: Sicko Grandma Stewart — as unrepentant and unapologetic as the rest of her rotten hippie pals in the bloodthirsty Weather Underground,...

The Loathsome Cowboy rides again. Ken Salazar, President Obama's disgraced ex-interior secretary and former U.S. senator from Colorado, was named Hillary Clinton's White House transition chair on Monday. The pick confirms that a Clinton presidency would not only be Barack Obama's third term ideologically, but also culturally. As in the Democratic culture of corruption. Ken Salazar is a thug. Before stepping down as Obama's interior secretary in 2013 "to spend time with family," Salazar threatened violence against a local Colorado Springs Gazette reporter who had the audacity to challenge one of the ten-gallon hat-wearing bureaucrat's cronyism-tainted deals. At issue: How...

Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient Captain Humayun Khan died heroically. But his exceptional courage in Iraq and his Muslim father's post-Democratic convention histrionics on TV do not erase the security threat posed by killer warriors of Allah infiltrating our troops. Don't take my word for it. Ask all the forgotten Gold Star moms and dads who have lost their children because politically correct pushovers at the Pentagon looked the other way at the Muslim military menace. Don't take my word for it. Just re-read the ignored warnings issued by Muslim soldier Nidal Hasan, the vengeful mass murderer who gunned...

When you need something done, call a retired cop. That's how Blue Light Friday at the White House came together last week. Unlike the lame duck occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., I have little experience as a community organizer. So I asked retired New York Police Department officer John Cardillo if he could help me turn out his law enforcement friends, families and supporters to honor the fallen. His one-word answer: "Yes." Our mission: Bring a blue hue to the People's House in Washington, D.C. -- in the wake of the Dallas and Baton Rouge police ambushes -- since Barack...

My 12-year-old son couldn't remember the phrase "take a walk down memory lane" last week, instead describing a stroll through "nostalgia road." I knew it would come in handy. Put on your hiking boots and join me for an educational trip down good ol' nostalgia road. It seems like yesterday when Champion of Wimmin Maureen Dowd, bemoaning the lack of sympathy for anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan, declared in The New York Times that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." No ifs, ands or other hedging qualifiers. Absolutely absolute. And it was just a...

It’s safe to say CR Senior Editor Michelle Malkin wasn’t a huge fan of “Divider in Chief” President Obama’s speech at the Dallas memorial service Tuesday afternoon. The memorial was held to honor the lives of the five fallen police officers killed in the Dallas ambush last Thursday, but, as expected, Obama also used it as a platform to discuss race relations in America. When the president transitioned into politics Malkin was quick to – well, let’s just see what she had to say:

Something wicked happened in Idaho's rural Magic Valley. The evil has been compounded by politicians, media and special interest groups doing their damnedest to suppress the story and quell a righteous citizen rebellion. On June 7, a brief news item appeared on local Twin Falls, Idaho-based KMVT about a "reported sexual assault that possibly occurred near the Fawnbrook Apartments" five days earlier. Unconfirmed accounts of the alleged crime on conservative-leaning websites, plus reports from area members of anti-jihad activist Brigitte Gabriel's Act for America group and longtime watchdog Ann Corcoran's Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, culminated in coverage on the powerhouse...

The home of the “Happiest Place on Earth” has been breeding killer jihadists and Muslim zealots for years. Omar Mateen, the cold-blooded mass murderer who gunned down 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub and wounded 53 more before police took him out late Sunday, may have worked alone. But he operated in the larger context of a teeming, terror-coddling paradise. While tourists from around the world soak up sunshine and dreams at Disney World, Islamic extremism festers around them. Schools: The Muslim Students Association, founded by the radical Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose stated purpose is to wage “grand jihad”...

From runways to red carpets to Instagram and Snapchat, celebrity overexposure is inescapable. We're drowning in underboob. Bombarded with sideboob. Nip slips. Crotch slips. Bare-bottom flashes. All of the above, all at once. The problem, my fellow Americans, is not that we live in an age of wardrobe malfunctions. It's that we live in an age of dignity malfunctions. It's one thing for the notorious Kim Kardashian, sex-tape celebrity-turned-sex-tape celebrity, to trounce into the Rome Opera House flashing her cartoon cleavage and industrial-strength Spanx for the cameras as she did last weekend. The trouble is that the Kardashian deviancy is...

The gun-control lobby has a new target: Your children’s Lego sets. A new "study" touted by libs decries the prevalence of weapons in the brick construction kits: I kid you not. The gun-grabbers have their panties in a twist over harmless fantasy play with teeny-tiny plastic parts. LEGO building kits are becoming increasingly violent as toy manufacturers are engaged in an “arms race” to appeal to children, a New Zealand study says. Researchers at the University of Canterbury concluded from research that examined LEGO catalogues from 1973 to 2015 that weaponry is now included in 30 per cent of...

The left has concocted a lucrative category of politically correct victims: "climate refugees." It's the new Green racket. U.S. taxpayers will now be forking over untold billions to ease the pain allegedly inflicted on "carbon's casualties" by industrial activity. By contrast, those who have suffered as a direct result of government incompetence by federal environmental bureaucrats continue to get the shaft. Consider the plight of two tribes: the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Louisiana and the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. The New York Times splashed a viral story on its pages this week spotlighting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's...

Circle this date on your calendar: April 22. I’ll be in Chicago that day attending what may be a very significant milestone in American politics and domestic policy. It’s going to be a wake and a wake-up call, part memorial and part protest.If you are a so-called American “STEM worker” in science, technology, engineering or math, if you have college-age children studying in the STEM fields, or if you have younger children who aspire to work in STEM industries and you are concerned for their future, you should do everything you can to join us.April 22 is the last day...

"Where is my 1095-A? This is what it must be like dealing with a government agency in a third world country." That was the lament on Twitter of just one poor citizen this week trying to get his tax records in order. Nationwide, hard-working Americans are struggling to meet the April 18 IRS filing deadline. Standing in the way: the bumbling Obamacare bureaucracy. In Minnesota, an estimated 18,000 people who were on health insurance plans last year offered through MNsure, the state Obamacare health insurance exchange, still haven't received their 1095-A form. It's the "health insurance marketplace statement" required to...