Free Republic

MOBILE, Ala. — Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle "Gabby" Giffords of Arizona had a Navy vessel named in her honor during a ceremony at a Mobile, Alabama, shipyard Saturday afternoon. Giffords joined others including Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, as the USS Gabrielle Giffords was christened in coastal Alabama. The 419-foot ship was built at the Austal shipyard and is the Navy's 10th littoral combat ship designed to operate in shallow waters near the coast. Giffords was badly wounded in a 2011 shooting that left six dead and a total of 13 injured in Tucson. The Democrat left...

A Nobel Prize-winning British scientist says he was forced to resign after sexist comments drew widespread condemnation. Tim Hunt told The Observer newspaper in a story published Sunday that he had been "hung out to dry" after being forced out of an honorary post at University College London and losing his position with the European Research Council science committee. The university and the research council didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The 72-year-old Hunt said he was never given a chance to explain his position. The trouble started when he told the World Conference of Science Journalists in South...

How far will our ideologically demented ruling class push Affirmative Action before people start pushing back? Already it has played a role in destroying our schools, with a liberal judge actually abolishing aptitude tests on the grounds that blacks don’t score as well. But apparently people don’t think it matters whether teachers have any qualifications other than skin color. If being black can get you into the White House, why not a classroom? Maybe airliners crashing into each other will wake people up:

The culture of political correctness has gotten so bad at college campuses that even bleeding heart liberal comics like Jerry Seinfeld feel out of place. The venerable comedian told ESPN’s Colin Cowherd last week that he avoids performing on college campuses, and has been advised by those who have to stay away. From Entertainment Tonight: Seinfeld says teens and college-aged kids don’t understand what it means to throw around certain politically-correct terms. “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice,’” he said. “They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” Tuesday, the Huffington Post published...

Oh my. According to that sourcelink, a sophomore by the name of Anthony Berteaux from San Diego State University decided to write an open letter to Jerry Seinfeld in response to Seinfeld's recent criticism of college students for being too politically correct. I'm fairly certain that Anthony didn't mean for his letter to completely prove that Seinfeld was 100% correct, but that's exactly what it did.

The NCAA threatened sanctions against the school, saying the nickname and logo were hostile and abusive and that UND was not endorsed by one of the state's two namesake tribes. The state Legislature put a moratorium on replacing the nickname until this year. The 15 names still in the running: North Dakota, Blaze, Cavalry, Explorers, Fighting Green, Fighting Hawks, Force, Green Hawks, Nodaks, North Stars, Pride, Roughriders, Spirit, Sundogs and Thunderhawks, WDAZ-TV reported (http://bit.ly/1GdnPJr). One possibility that was dumped Tuesday night was Flickertails, which the school used before adopting the Fighting Sioux nickname.

Jerry Seinfeld is on the micro aggressive trail lately. Like when he lashed out at liberal, PC culture, or when he may the ludicrous claim that your race or gender isn't as important in comedy as whether you're funny or not. But his comments here about gay French kings have really crossed the line. They deserved a voice too. Even better is his jab at Late Night host, Seth Meyers. VIDEO AT LINK Seinfeld even called out Seth Myers for saying he would never make fun of Caitlyn Jenner, which Meyers specified that he only meant on that day... "As...

Kirsten Powers gets it. There is an assault on free speech in this country that is coming from the political left. But the people responsible for it are not liberals. They aren’t worthy of the title of liberal, which presupposes a degree of tolerance for opposing opinions. They are illiberal leftists and they are crushing the free exchange of ideas in this country. To make matters worse, they know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. In other words, they are not ignorant of, or merely indifferent to, constitutional principles. They are at war with them....

Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths. Northwestern “feminist” professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students. Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously, reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species) he was so “scared” and “terrified” of his “liberal” students that he self-censors his comments in class and...

[Snip] One of the best books that cracks the code on what we are living through was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. Mull over the first line of his book’s forward, and you will think he is writing about today: “This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically responding machine – a transformation which can be brought about by some of the cultural undercurrents in our present-day society as well as by deliberate experiments in the service of a political ideology.” That’s from “The Rape...

Like Chris Rock and Larry the Cable Guy, Jerry Seinfeld avoids doing shows on college campuses. And while talking with ESPN’s Colin Cowherd on Thursday, the comedian revealed why: College kids today are too politically correct. “I hear that all the time,” Seinfeld said on The Herd with Colin Cowherd. “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’” Seinfeld says teens and college-aged kids don’t understand what it means to throw around certain politically-correct terms. “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice,’”...

It happened without a Summer of Love, without Timothy Leary, without a groovy anthem or a shaggy new national look. In the past decade or so, there’s been a silent revolution in American culture, one at least as profound as the ’60s upheavals. We’ve hardly taken notice of it, because it happened in people’s minds instead of in the streets, happened in ordinary people instead of in the elites and the punditocracy. Compared to just a few years ago, we have a completely different set of ideas about what constitutes acceptable behavior. As Caitlyn Jenner puts it in her new...

I suspect that somewhere, there is a top secret organization that does nothing all day but look for innovative and novel ways that society offends one group or another. How else do you explain this? CBS Pittsburgh: The Port Authority is looking into bus slogans that some are calling offensive. Officials say they’ve recently received complaints that one of its slogans, “Ziggin Zaggin,” is offensive when read backwards, seeming to spell out a racial slur. Are you kidding me? Backwards?  im Ritchie with the Port Authority says they will remove the messages from buses. “… due to recent complaints about how this message...

Modern progressive college students have become so militant they’re frightening their own like-minded professors, according to an account posted by one such professor on the website Vox. The professor, using the pseudonym Edward Schlosser, claims to have taught for nine years and currently works at a midsize state college. Over that time, he says, students have decisively shifted to become so protective of their fragile emotions that defying their sensibilities can be “suicidal” for one’s career. “Things have changed since I started teaching,” Schlosser writes. “The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this,...

“Liberal Professor: My Liberal Students Terrify Me” — so naturally, he goes to Vox.com, the home of Matt “Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do” Yglesias and Ezra “Not everything the Nazis touched was bad” Klein to spill his worst fears. In response, Ace of Spades writes, if a leftwing professor is feeling terrified by his fellow leftists still in the larva stage, “Then all is right. Terror is virtue, Robspierre said. It is through terror that we compel virtue”: I say it’s sort of worth reading because the writer is such a...

Oxford Union Admits It Is 'Institutionally Racist' After Cocktail Row The historic Oxford Union debating society has passed a motion declaring itself “institutionally racist” after it promoted a “Colonial Comeback” cocktail at an event last week. A meeting was held to address the issue of the offensive cocktail, which was advertised on a poster showing black hands in chains during a recent debate over Britain making reparations to former colonies. During the meeting society treasurer Zuleyka Shahin proposed the motion, arguing that the cocktail was “symptomatic of a wider problem” of racism at the union. Co-chair of the Campaign for...

EAG News reports that the public school district of St. Paul has spent $3 million over the past 5 years to work with “Pacific Educational Group, a San Francisco-based organization that tries to help public schools deal with achievement and disciplinary issues involving black students.” PEG’s educational philosophy: That standard curricula are inherently biased against black students due to “white privilege”. Curriculum changes, however, were not at the top of their list. Instead, St. Paul schools were required to revise discipline policies in order to cease suspending black students, instead punishing them via “time outs” from the classroom, along with...

1) If Islam is really a religion of peace, as opposed to a particularly violent religion, then why do so many people and organizations across the world refuse to show Muhammad cartoons out of fear that they'll be murdered by devout Muslims for doing it? 2) If illegal immigrants are supposed to help our economy, then why weren’t they helping the economies of the poor nations they fled? 3) Given that Hillary Clinton’s nearly accomplishment-free political career has been based on riding the coattails of a serial adulterer who has humiliated and cheated on her over and over, isn’t Hillary...

[Snip]... To be honest, the BSA hasn’t been doing well for a while. Membership has been steadily declining for decades, and recent decisions to go full Episcopalian—and you never go full Episcopalian—haven’t helped. But with this decision, and the resulting onslaught of righteous indignation, we see just how far a once-proud paramilitary organization has fallen. Why the change? The cynic in me, the one who remembers how long it took to evacuate us when we were sleeping in the woods without shelter and the skies opened up in biblical fashion that one weekend, thinks the BSA is now run by...

400 pensioners in Munkedal are being thrown out from “the Peoples House” after a so-called asylum baron decided to buy it and convert it to a home for new Swedes from the third world. Local Social-Democratic politician Åsa Karlsson looks forward to the new citizens.“It’s an income for the municipality to get new citizens” – she saysThe Peoples House in Munkedal has for years been a meeting spot for pensioners and several hundred engage in the associations and activities but now its time for them to pack their bags and move out so that an asylum baron can profit (at...