Free Republic

Black Lives Matter activists cite Douglass’s 1852 speech ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ as proof America is evil. They utterly miss his point. Last week on CNN, as contributor Angela Rye accused White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnaney and President Trump of failing to understand the history of black America, she referred to the legendary Frederick Douglass. “Frederick Douglass said about Independence Day in this country, what to the slave is the Fourth of July?” she said. “And I would invite them to even start there, as a reading principle, to see how different we see...

On a very different Fourth of July, when many Americans are wrestling with the racist misdeeds of the country's heroes and confronting an unrelenting pandemic with surging cases, their commander-in-chief is attempting to drag America backward -- stirring fear of cultural change while flouting the most basic scientific evidence about disease transmission. In a jaw-dropping speech that amounted to a culture war bonfire, President Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore to frame protesters as a nefarious left-wing mob that intends to "end America." Those opponents, he argued, are engaged in a "merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame...

The Confederate monuments that are coming down across the United States have once again ignited a generations-old American argument. Though the idea that the war was really about the “noble cause” of states’ rights retains its mystique for some, historians agree that the root cause of the Civil War was slavery. The worst American war in the nation’s history—from the standpoint of casualties, direct costs and indirect consequences—was fought in a vain attempt by the Confederate States to preserve that “peculiar institution.” Now, 155 years later, not only are statues of Confederate leaders being removed in cities from Richmond to...

Howard Zinn’s radical revisionist ‘history’ book, 'A People’s History' of The United States, is the new normal in the American education system. A young high school history teacher, named Annie, posted a TikTok video raving about Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” which she explains will be her new classroom textbook. @historyrulezIf you want to better ‘understand our country, it’s true history, and it’s hope for the future’ read this book!!♬ original sound – historyrulez Howard Zinn’s 1980 left-wing revisionist history book, “A People’s History of the United States,” is a Marxist’s take on American history. This...

On Thursday, June 4, 2020, a 22-year-old activist named Kennedy Mitchum reached out to the publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to express her frustration with their definition of the word "racist:" A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Mitchum felt this was inadequate to fully cover the scope of systemic issues and unconscious biases that affect race relations in America. Growing up in Florissant, Missouri — just a few miles away from Ferguson — she'd grown tired of trying to explain to...

NBC News was called out late Sunday over a pair of tweets it sent about an hour apart that critics said showed bias when reporting on President Trump rallies and the protests that have emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody. NBC News first tweeted a link to a protest in Brooklyn and wrote, “Rally for Black trans lives draws packed crowd to Brooklyn Museum plaza.” About an hour later, the news outlet tweeted out another story, “President Trump plans to rally his supporters next Saturday for the first time since most of the country was...

Political pundit and author Dave Rubin asked, “Where are all the adults in the room?” reacting to the so-called cancel culture sweeping the nation following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. “This thing is out of control,” Rubin told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday. Rubin reacted to the recent resignations of two newspaper editors among other incidents related to "cancel culture.'" New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet resigned last week, amid anger inside the company over the publication of an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., supporting the deployment of the National Guard to help...

HBO Max has removed the Oscar-winning Civil War epic "Gone With The Wind" from its library over concerns about racial tensions following the death of George Floyd. I predicted this would happen in my new book, "Culture Jihad: How to Stop the Left From Killing a Nation." I would sincerely encourage you to get a copy and prepare to defend our great name from the jihadists. I was ridiculed by many in the conservative and the leftist media for my assertion that we were approaching a day when book bannings and movie bannings would become the norm in American society....

Uncle Hugo's and Uncle Edgar's were legendary among the community of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery readers—and now they're gone. Venerable Minneapolis science fiction and fantasy bookstore Uncle Hugo’s and its sister store in the same building, Uncle Edgar’s, which specialized in mysteries, were both burned to ruins last Friday night by rioters. The store took its name from two major awards in the genre fields, science fiction’s Hugo awards, and mysteries Edgar’s. Independent bookstores are a threatened American institution, and Uncle Hugo’s was considered a flagship operation. Owner Don Blyly was noted for his ability to adapt to modern...

President Trump's spy chief is declassifying information that shows former CIA Director John Brennan "suppressed" information intelligence showing Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election. Fox News chief White House correspondent Ed Henry said Tuesday evening that "it could get sticky" for Brennan, who served as CIA director under former President Barack Obama, for his role in developing the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference that determined with "moderate" to "high" confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin sought to boost President Trump's 2016 election chances. "There's other intel that may have been more...

A viral clip from comedian Jimmy Kimmel was edited to remove some important context. On his Thursday night show, late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel used a clip of Pence at the nursing home to suggest there was nothing inside the boxes. "Since it was going so well and also because he didn't realize he had a mic on, Magic Mike decided to keep it going," said Kimmel. "Listen in closely here." Kimmel then cut to video showing the vice president inquiring about the last boxes in the van before being told they were empty. "Well, can I carry the empty ones?...

I Believe Tara Reade. I’m Voting for Joe Biden Anyway. The importance of owning an ugly moral choice. By Linda Hirshman Ms. Hirshman is the author, most recently, of “Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment.” May 6, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET Let’s be clear: I believe Tara Reade. I believed Anita Hill, too. Remember the buttons? I wore one. What’s the constant here? Joe Biden, then the bumbling head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Long before Ms. Reade, before the reports of the rubbing and...

Facebook on Wednesday announced the first 20 members of its Oversight Board, an independent body that can overturn the company’s own content moderation decisions. The oversight board will govern appeals from Facebook and Instagram users and questions from Facebook itself, although it admitted it will have to pick and choose which content moderation cases to take due to the sheer volume of them.  The board will receive cases through a content management system that is linked to Facebook’s own platforms. They will then discuss the case as a group before issuing a final decision on whether the content should be allowed to stay...

BEIJING (Xinhua) -- China Monday expressed strong opposition to embroiling China in U.S. electoral politics, in response to a memo exposed by news outlet Politico that urged U.S. Republican candidates to address the COVID-19 crisis by aggressively attacking China. The 57-page strategy document, obtained by Politico last Friday, is focused on three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus "by covering it up," that Democrats are "soft on China," and that Republicans will "push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic," Politico summarized. "Why have some political forces in the United States spared no...

A note to Atlantic magazine: George Orwell's 1984 wasn't meant to be a how-to guide..... A couple of people writing at The Atlantic magazine see a fantastic silver lining in the current coronavirus outbreak. Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods see the pandemic as a great opportunity to bring about more censorship along with surveillance of the public as they exulted on Saturday in "What COVID-19 Revealed About the Internet." Just so you would know where they were coming from, the subtitle was "In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the...

US Senator Amy Klobuchar, the failed Democratic presidential candidate from Minnesota, was on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" shilling for Joe Biden's campaigning and making outrageous and false statements about President Trump using Democratic talking points. It was hard to flag all of the lies and distortions, but one really took the prize: Klobuchar claimed that Trump had advised the public "to chug bleach" to kill the COVID-19 virus. Of course, Trump never said any such thing, but Stephanopoulos made no attempt to correct any of Klobuchar's falsehoods. Maybe Klobuchar imagines herself as the Vice Presidential pick for "Clueless Joe."

video at link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0nfRlkEW3w

Today is Earth Day, a day that was founded in part by a murderer known as the "Unicorn Killer" (Ira Einhorn). Wikipedia, along with several other sources I've found, has written him out of the history--a couple sources just dusted him to the side. He committed homicide against his girlfriend, too gruesome for me to detail. Long live Earth Day.

The New York Times suggested Saturday that statements by Sean Hannity of Fox News helped encourage a Brooklyn bar owner to take a cruise regardless of the risk of coronavirus, which killed him. The headline of the article, as it appeared in the Sunday print edition, was: “‘Fake News’ and a Possibly Ill-Fated Trip.” (The online headline: “A Beloved Bar Owner Was Skeptical About the Virus. Then He Took a Cruise.”) The problem: the Times quoted a remark Hannity made eight days after the man left for the cruise. Later, the Times inserted that information as a comment from Fox...