Free Republic

During the past three fiscal years, $4.1 billion in federal money from taxpayers has been flowing to LGBT initiatives in the United States and around the world, an Epoch Times investigation has revealed.From Oct. 1, 2020, through Sept. 30, 2023, the U.S. government issued more than 1,100 grants to fund LGBT-promoting projects around the world, according to the Epoch Times review of a federal spending website.The scope of projects varies widely.Plans to create a "safe space for LGBTQ youth and adults to seek support and resources" earned a $1.8 million grant from the U.S. government in 2022 for the LGBT...

The trans movement may not be the culmination of the culture war. It probably isn’t. I just lack the imagination to discern what out next stop might be. If we haven’t reached peak madness, we have at least hit bingo on the trans insanity card. Happily ignorant of Dylan Mulvaney — the New York Post has a useful backgrounder here — I now learn that he has secured a deal with Nike as a sports bra model even though he “sports” a male appendage and his “transition” to “womanhood” appears not to have gone beyond the possible sprouting of nipples....

For the second straight year, President Trump proposed to eliminate federal funding for arts programs and public media and broadcasting as part of the government's budget plan for the next year. And, for the second straight year, he failed -- and funding will actually increase for arts programs in the proposed spending bill the president signed on Friday (March 23), helping to avoid another possible government shutdown at the 11th hour. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) -- the latter of which funds public television...

Taxpayer-funded 'philosopher' calls belief in God The National Endowment for the Humanities is giving over $50,000 for a study on propaganda to a philosopher who thinks watching Fox News can brainwash liberals. The project, "Propaganda and Belief in the Modern World," is a book-length study on the "psychology of belief formation." Eric Mandelbaum, a "philosopher and cognitive scientist" at City University of New York, received fellowship funding in the NEH's latest round of grants under the Trump administration. Mandelbaum writes that "one can end up believing anything" in an article that concludes liberals can be brainwashed by watching Fox News....

Obama gave taxpayer money to jarring ‘dog-fighting pitbulls’ art exhibit and even libs are horrifiedAmerican taxpayers are often shocked to discover the strange places their money goes. One of the inevitable issues with big government is that public money is spent on the pet causes of whoever is in power–and citizens rarely find out about it. In a jarring case of wasteful Obama-era spending that even liberals are criticizing, the federal government gave $300,000 to a “modern art” exhibit in New York’s Guggenheim museum that features eight aggressive pit bulls strapped down to wooden tread mills facing each other....

... The reason why I say that the case for abolishing the NEH, as proposed in President Trump’s budget, just got stronger is that it funded an egregiously political hatchet job of a book that was recently published, namely Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean. Using phrases like “radical right” and “stealth” are sure to get accolades from leftists who love a good horror story about their supposed enemies. Never mind that any fair account would have to say that there is nothing stealthy in...

The professoriate is fighting what it perceives as federal budget cuts to higher education proposed by the Trump Administration. Yet and still, it is difficult to find those cuts in the Trump budget proposals. "We already knew from the Trump administration's initial 'skinny' budget proposal, released in March, that higher education would be on the chopping block," Kelly Hand writes on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "The fleshed-out budget proposal released on May 22 details cuts that would have a devastating impact on student aid, the arts and humanities, scientific research, and international...

Several key Republican lawmakers are expressing support for the programs, which, since their near-death experiences during the culture wars of a generation ago, have taken pains to counter accusations of coastal elitism by making sure to distribute their grants widely across all 50 states. -snip Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who is the chairwoman of a crucial Senate appropriations panel that oversees the endowments, said in a statement, “I believe we can find a way to commit to fiscal responsibility while continuing to support the important benefits that N.E.A. and N.E.H. provide.” Her backing, like that of some other...

President Donald Trump today released his “America First” budget blueprint which calls for slashing non-defense-related discretionary spending by $54 billion and completely eliminating funding for many independent agencies and federal programs. Among those that will be completely defunded are the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. “Our Budget Blueprint insists on $54 billion in reductions to non-Defense programs,” Trump said in the introduction to his budget blueprint. “We are going to do more with less, and make the government lean and accountable to the...

President Donald Trump’s reported plan to gut federal spending by $10.5 trillion over the next decade includes eliminating three of iconic agencies defended as cultural mainstays by many Democrats. The next administration is working on plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Hill reported Thursday. Combined, the three departments cost around $741 million in 2016, and is a small part of a host of budget reforms needed to cut more than a trillion a year from the federal budget. Eliminating funding to the Corporation...

Dr. Leon R. Kass, the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics under former President George W. Bush, has written a report entitled “The Meaning of Life – In the Laboratory”. Kass discusses the morality surrounding the US government’s funding of “research on human embryonic stem cells, cells derived from early embryos produced by in vitro fertilization in assisted-reproduction clinics.” According to the report, the use of human embryos is justified by the advancements of science which demands that...

In July, the (NEH) sponsored a workshop on “History and Commemoration: The Legacies of the Pacific War in WWII” for college professors in Hawaii. Professor Penelope Blake, a veteran professor of Humanities at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., was one of 25 American scholars chosen to attend the workshop, but was reportedly disheartened to find the conference “driven by an overt political bias and a blatant anti-American agenda.” Professor Blake is now reportedly calling on Congress to implement better oversight over the NEH. In a letter addressed directly to her Illinois congressman, Rep. Don Manzullo, Blake documents conference details...

Poor Jim Leach. In August 2009, when the former Republican congressman was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Barack Obama had not yet exhausted his charisma. The renegade Republican had cast his lot with the man who campaigned on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” explaining that he decided to break ranks and support Obama’s candidacy because “never in American history was the case for a course change more compelling in international relations and because I had become convinced that seldom had a more natural humanist been chosen to represent his party for national office.”Mr. Leach...

The US government under Obama, through the National Endowment for the Humanities, recently used US taxpayer money to fund a conference that accused the US military of atrocities. Only coming to light in the last several days because of an intrepid professor by the name of Penelope Blake, the anti-American conference was held over the summer in Hawaii and was known by the misleadingly benign title "History and Commemoration: Legacies of the Pacific War." Since this story broke, there have been rightful calls to withhold funding to the NEH, and Professor Blake herself appeared on Hannity last night to discuss...

Government watchdogs are blasting taxpayer-funded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that send college professors on free vacations and pay for programs on topics like the "cultural significance of the circus poster" -- just a few items on an eye-popping list of questionable NEH projects.

Former U.S. Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) has been appointed by President Barack Obama to be the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. Leach, who represented Iowa in Congress for 30 years before a surprising 2006 defeat at the hands of Democrat Dave Loebsack, made headlines in 2008 when he publicly endorsed Obama for president over Republican John McCain. Last November, Leach and former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright served as emissaries for President-elect Obama at the international economic summit....

Like Rodney Dangerfield, the humanities in Washington "don't get no respect." Not as much as they should, anyway. We're a company town and the company makes politics. But like a blind squirrel who finds an acorn once in a while, politicians and the journalists gather occasionally with others who crave more profundity than the noise in political rhetoric to listen to the annual >Jefferson Lecture. "The training of the intellect was meant to produce an intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction but it also had practical goals of importance to the individual and the entire community, to make the humanistically trained individuals...

This November, Judy Blume was presented with a medal from the National Book Award Foundation. The same day, Madeleine L’Engle received a medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Though both authors are best known for their books for teenagers, they couldn’t be more different. Blume made her name as the writer of Deenie, Forever, and other young adult novels known for their sexual themes and explicit descriptions. Typically, many of the articles written to celebrate her medal pictured Blume as a sort of big sister who provided guidance and reassurance about premarital sex, masturbation, and similar topics. Washington...

The late, revered President Ronald Reagan is being enlisted in an all-out campaign to lift President Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. Even before President Reagan died on June 5, fifty-eight U.S. senators signed a letter asking President Bush to remove those restrictions. Now many of those senators, from Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) to Republican Orrin Hatch (Utah), are pointing to Reagan’s long illness and death as the perfect justification for why such research is needed. But embryonic stem-cell research requires creating a human embryo and killing it. As President Bush recognizes, this raises profound moral objections. And what the...

<p>Lynne V. Cheney yesterday gave fourth-graders from Arlington's Francis Scott Key Elementary School a quick tour of America's continuing struggle for human freedom and announced the administration's second selection of classic books for the nation's schoolchildren.</p> <p>Surrounded by 18 9- and 10-year-olds before panels of the former Berlin Wall at Freedom Park in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney caught the class off-guard with her first question: "Can anyone tell me what a minuteman is?"</p>