Free Republic

Did you know who Ed Cunningham is? Probably not. Cunningham, a college football analyst for ESPN, was unknown to all but hardcore football fans. But by tying himself closely to a politically correct cause – in this case, resigning his position Wednesday, in a protest over concussions in football – he is guaranteed fawning media coverage. The New York Times is leading the Cunningham canonization. With the new college football season for most teams starting this weekend, the resignation seems timed for maximum attention. But the politically correct movement seems much more focused on opposing what is uniquely American than...

Dr. John Lott gave a talk on the Crime Prevention Research Center’s on Mass Public Shootings and Gun-free zones. Unfortunately, the first few minutes of the beginning of the talk is missing. The first reference is to a quote from former President Obama that if guns stop mass public shootings, the US shouldn’t have any mass shootings. Beyond Lott’s response to that point in the video, a list of mass public shootings that were stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. The slides in the talk are based on information in his book “The War on Guns.” . . .

A new report shows gun ownership appears to be more popular than ever in America. One America's John Hines has more from Washington.

Earlier this month, The New York Times ran an article titled "U.S. Rights Unit Shifts to Study Antiwhite Bias" on its front page. The article says that President Donald Trump's Justice Department's civil rights division is going to investigate and sue universities whose affirmative action admissions policies discriminate against white applicants. This is an out-and-out lie. The truth is that the U.S. departments of Justice and Education plan to investigate racial bias in admissions at Harvard and other elite institutions where Asian-Americans are held to far higher standards than other applicants. This type of practice was used during the first...

Dr. John Lott gave a talk on the Crime Prevention Research Center’s new research on the changing face of people who are carrying permitted concealed handguns. The slides in the talk are available here or . . .

The latest cover of the German magazine Stern features a drawing of U.S. President Donald Trump doing a Nazi salute. The caption -- "Sein Kampf" ("His Struggle") -- is an obvious and contemptible allusion to Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiographical book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle"). the implications of this madness have to do with the status of free people everywhere in the face of media tyranny, in the face of a media insistent on indoctrinating us into thinking a certain way, being shocked a certain way, and, above all, dictating to us how to interpret reality even when our own eyes...

Melania Trump is the kind of woman who travels to a flood-ravaged state in a pair of black snakeskin stilettos. Heels this high are not practical. But Trump is not the kind of woman who has to be practical. Heels this high are not comfortable. Comfort is not the point. Neither hers nor yours. Trump is the kind of woman who knows that when she walks from the White House to Marine One there will be photographers, and so she will dress accordingly. [Snip] ... Trump is the kind of woman who refuses to pretend that her feet will, at...

In the United States of today, only liberals and the far-left are allowed to discriminate without fear of penalty and do so with a vengeance. As I have stressed in the past, human nature dictates that we tend to embrace the truth right up until the moment it reflects poorly upon us or our cause. A truth that liberals and the far-left ignore or deny is that over the course of the last four decades, they have put a strangle-hold on the three largest megaphones of our nation by one means and one means only. Discrimination. Those three megaphones being...

My wife and I moved to Houston in June, 2004, at the insistence of the company I worked for at the time. For 18 years prior to that, we had lived and raised our children in Arlington, home of the Texas Rangers and, more recently, the Dallas Cowboys. We moved back to North Texas a year ago in order to be closer to our kids and grand kids, but during our dozen years in Houston, we developed a great and abiding love for that great city, which is now undergoing its worst flood event in modern times thanks to Hurricane...

Tu quoque is a classical Latin term for “you too.” It is sometimes considered a logical fallacy: you do not defend your position, but instead point to someone else’s that is worse—in the fashion of a guilty child seeking to avoid parental discipline by claiming his unpunished brother “did it worse.” But in truth tu quoque is a legitimate argument—if one both defends his position and also points out the hypocrisy of his inconsistent accuser.

Comic delight follows when you are attacked by NBC in a story written by a former fact checker for Rolling Stone . That’s what reporter Jane C. Timm did when she wrote a fact-optional attack on President Trump’s election integrity commission , and me in particular. Timm’s piece is a case study in how rabid anti-Trump interests are undermining the priorities of the electorate that won President Trump the White House. Timm’s attack on the election integrity commission also serves as a nifty example of the furtive assembly line that produces these anti-Trump attacks: Funding by extremist foundations, harvesting...

Yet another police stand-down in another Democrat-controlled city took place on Sunday. This time, the Antifa-led riot took place in a familiar place – Berkeley California, where a group called “Patriot’s Prayer” had planned to hold a peaceful demonstration of the exercise of free speech, a rapidly-dying concept in our country wherever Democrats are in control. Lacking confidence in the intent of the Berkeley police to provide adequate security, Patriot’s Prayer cancelled its event, but a few of its members showed up anyway to exercise their supposed constitutional right to assemble and speak. That was when they were set upon...

Former US Congressman Ron Paul has joined a growing list of independent political journalists and commentators who’re being economically punished by YouTube despite producing videos that routinely receive hundreds of thousands of views. **snip** The notion that YouTube would want to economically punish a former US Congressman for sharing his views on US foreign policy – a topic that he is unequivocally qualified to speak about – is absurd. Furthermore, *the “review requested” marking on one of Paul's videos reveals that they were initially flagged by users before YouTube's moderators confirmed that the videos were unsuitable for a broad audience.*

Washington (CNN)As the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the US in more than a decade took aim at Texas, President Donald Trump's White House engaged in an age-old Washington tradition: the Friday news dump. Transgender individuals? Banned from joining the military. Convicted Sheriff Joe Arpaio? Officially pardoned. Controversial White House adviser Sebastian Gorka? Out of a white House job. All three headlines popped after 6 p.m. Friday as TV news broadcasts and websites turned their attention to Texas, where Hurricane Harvey was preparing to make landfall as a Category 4 hurricane -- the most powerful to hit the US...

Thursday night CNN (the first Fake News outlet bestowed a “press” bureau by Cuba’s totalitarian regime) ran a “documentary” on Elian Gonzalez. You know that look on your pooch’s face when he promptly fetches a Frisbee, tail-waggingly returns it, and you’re massaging his face and neck while cooing: “GOOD-BOY!” Well, please don’t take this personally, amigos: but (very briefly) picture your joy and gratification in the pooch-scene on the faces of Castroite apparatchiks-- and your quivering, slobbering, tail-wagging pooch as CNN. CNN really outdid themselves this time. They satisfied every lust of their Cuban suitors, ignoring over 15 years of...

Yet as one of the videos shows, the news van's headlights were pointed at the memorial before, during, and after the incident, illuminating it as the suspect spray-painted the monument. Channel 12's team arrived in the parking lot of Wesley Bolin Plaza just after 4:40 a.m., the video shows, seconds after the vandalism suspect rode up on a bicycle. The suspect appears to have ridden or walked near the van before and after the incident, which is still being investigated by the Arizona Department of Public Safety. In contrast, West reported on the morning news, and also in a live video on...

ESPN has been working hard for several years to establish itself as just another sermonizing member of the liberal media, most audaciously by hailing "Caitlyn" Jenner with an award for "courage" in 2015 for facing down such tortures as the disrespectful use of "incorrect pronouns." Soldiers who lost their lives in combat hadn't a fraction of Jenner's bravery, according to their judgment. Now, ESPN has shown its true colors, which is to say: The people there are idiots. In the wake of the media's Charlottesville feeding frenzy, it reassigned a college football announcer named Robert Lee away from covering the...

If you’ve been wondering how the fake news media would treat the Trump Administration’s response to the disaster that Hurricane Harvey is about to produce along the Texas coast, wonder no more, because the shameless sleaze balls who run Salon.com have already let the cat out of the bag. There will be no honest reporting, there will be no honest analysis, there will be no real information conveyed by the fake news media to Texas residents for whom information will be crucial in the coming days. The fake news media/Democrat Axis of Sedition narrative is set, and it will be...

In the wake of the presidential election, we’ve all been asking simplistic questions about how Donald Trump won. Was it economics? Was it racism? Was it misogyny? Did it come down to identity? We know that it can’t have been just one thing, and that President Trump’s triumph was a concoction of many things. Nonetheless, several factors came together in a peculiar way, with serious electoral consequences. Millions of white voters began to see themselves more openly not as white supremacists but as white identified. It is no secret that the president has capitalized on the increasing salience of race...

Sigh. If only President Trump denounced neo-Nazis as passionately and sincerely as he castigates journalists. What could be an easier task than distancing oneself from Nazis or violent white supremacists? Yet Trump manages to make it infinitely complicated — and then get distracted by self-pity and excoriate reporters for committing journalism. The key strain of his sulfurous speech in Phoenix on Tuesday was an extended attack on “dishonest” reporters (including at “the failing New York Times”). Look, we in journalism deserve to have our feet held to the fire. We make mistakes all the time, and too often we are...