Free Republic

Students campaigning for the decolonisation of British universities are now demanding that a statue of Queen Victoria is removed from a college campus - because of its 'racist colonial connotations'. Campaigners are set to join a march at Oxford University, on Wednesday, demanding that a statue of the long-reigning monarch be taken down from Royal Holloway, University of London, because she 'sanctioned colonial exploits' . They will be among hundreds of students from campaigns across Britain at the 'Mass March for Decolonisation', calling for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

Well pull up a chair and let ole Outlaw Morgan tell you why Trump will win. Why he's gonna beat Hillary Clinton, and let's talk about the 2nd Amendment, the 1st Amendment, Germany, Sweden, illegal immigration and more.

Yale University's basketball captain mysteriously left the school before posters accusing the team of supporting sexual misconduct were put up on around campus. Jack Montague had led the Bulldogs to the top of Ivy League conference with two games left to play. But officials at the elite New Haven, Connecticut, school say he won't be coming back to the court in the midst of a bizarre controversy. It appears that no formal allegations have been made against him or other members of the team. According to the Yale Daily News, posters have been put up around campus saying: 'I stand...

St. Jude cited racial concerns in asking Decatur County to change the name of its annual hunt. For the past 40 years, Decatur County has hosted a hunting event to raise money for the patients at St. Jude Children’s Hospital. So far, it has raised $4.5 million. Decatur County Mayor Mike Creasy said the hospital is now threatening to turn down the donations unless the county changes the name of the event. For decades, the event has been known as the Decatur County World’s Largest Coon Hunt. The Coon Hunt Board told Channel 4 that St. Jude has threatened to...

HUMAN beings have an appetite for moral outrage. You see this in public life — in the condemnation of Donald J. Trump for vowing to bar Muslims from the United States, or of Hillary Clinton for her close involvement with Wall Street, to pick two ready examples — and you see this in personal life, where we criticize friends, colleagues and neighbors who behave badly. Why do we get so mad, even when the offense in question does not concern us directly? The answer seems obvious: We denounce wrongdoers because we value fairness and justice, because we want the world...

Before political correctness, our soldiers were free to fight back. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A century before American soldiers fought Muslim terrorism in the Middle East, they fought it in the Philippines. Their attackers were Moro Muslims whose savage fanaticism appeared inexplicable. A formerly friendly Muslim might suddenly attack American soldiers, local Muslim rulers promised friendship while secretly aiding the terrorists and the yellow left-wing press at home seized on every report of an atrocity to denounce American soldiers as murderers whose honor was forever...

At Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park... some employees are... scratching out that etched slogan {"Black Lives Matter"} on the company's "signature wall," a space partitioned for visitors' and employees' signatures, and rewriting "All lives matter" over it. Gizmodo has reported (and SFGATE has confirmed) that to combat the action, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an internal note to his employees, urging them to stop writing over the "Black lives matter" inscriptions. Calling the behavior "disrespectful" and "malicious," Zuckerberg chided responsible parties for the incidents.

Just how bad colleges have become when it comes to free speech and toleration for anyone who disagrees with those who hold power cannot be underestimated. Many Americans who think back fondly on their college days decades ago are shocked to learn the truth. Toward that end, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has just released its Top Ten list—the worst colleges and universities in the country last year when it came to freedom of speech. Introducing the list, FIRE’s president Greg Lukianoff writes, “The past year will be remembered as the year that freedom of speech (or...

The University of Oklahoma is kicking off the “Year of Diversity” by trying to shame students into admitting their “privilege.” The Gallogly College of Engineering website states the school will “celebrate diversity” through events that “enhance awareness of the issues faced by underrepresented members of our engineering community and promote GCoE’s inclusive climate that is welcoming of all differences.”

I've been following political developments in Europe closely for the past ten years, and I'm sensing a qualitative difference just in the past few months. People are being prosecuted and convicted for "hate speech" in Denmark, which used to be immune to such nonsense. People are being arrested for criticizing immigration on Facebook. And in the PowNed news video below, you'll see a man being arrested at a PEGIDA protest in The Netherlands for wearing a silly pig hat. The translator includes this summary of what happened: There is a protest with hardly a Mohammedan in sight. One of the...

Two weeks ago, the University released the final version of its diversity and inclusion action plan, which could not have been compiled without the exhaustive efforts of students throughout last semester. “There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” said David, an undergraduate whose name has been changed to preserve anonymity. Throughout the year, he has worked to confront issues of racism and diversity on campus.

An international law firm won't sponsor student activities at Harvard anymore after its money was used to pay for an event on Palestine.

Yesterday, Adam Falk, the president of Williams College, disgraced himself, the college that he leads, and the institution of free speech that he has claimed to support. He did this by disinviting John Derbyshire, the mathematician and commentator, from speaking at Williams for a student-run program called "Uncomfortable Learning," a series specifically designed to bring serious but alternatives points of view to the expensive (this year's tab, $63,290) and coddled purlieus of Williamstown, Massachusetts, where nearly all the faculty are left-leaning and the students, with rare exceptions, are timid if irritable politically correct babies.

I completely reject the category of hate speech. I'm always surprised to find that so many people treat the category of hate speech seriously. You hear them having discussions along the lines of, "Is this hate speech? Is that hate speech? And I find myself thinking: "What are you doing? Why are you treating the idea of hate speech as a measurable, scientific thing when its nothing of the sort? To my mind, the category of hate speech is as ridiculous, and as abominable in fact, as the idea of thoughtcrime. And my mission in life or at least this...

Taylor Swift hit out at Kanye West as she accepted her gong for Album Of The Year at the Grammy Awards on Monday night. The 26-year-old singer noted that she is the only woman in history to have won Album Of The Year twice in a thinly veiled attack against the rapper, 38, after Kanye claimed last week that he made the pop star famous. 'As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I want to say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who...

Free speech and enlightenment values are under attack in our universities. In the worthy name of defending the weak and marginalised, many student activists are now adopting the unworthy tactic of seeking to close down open debate. They want to censor people they disagree with. I am their latest victim. This is not quite the Star Chamber, but it is the same intolerant mentality. Student leader Fran Cowling has denounced me as racist and transphobic, even though I’ve supported every anti-racist and pro-transgender campaign during my 49 years of human rights work.

The University of Portland has launched a “Speak Up” webpage that encourages students to report “incidents of discomfort” to its Public Safety department. “We ask members of our community to SPEAK UP and report alleged incidents of discrimination and incidents of discomfort regarding observed or experienced interactions of intolerance,” the university states on the webpage.

Southern Oregon University plastered its campus with posters asking students to check their privileges in various areas — including their “size privilege.” The posters were placed “all over campus” by the school’s Bias Response Committee, according to an article in The Siskiyou​, the school’s newspaper.

A ruling class that loses its grip on reality is going to have problems, and so is the society it governs. So the people have an obvious interest in restraining rulers who start acting destructively…that function now seems out of reach. Public life has largely been nationalized and internationalized, and discussion has—in spite of sniping and occasional guerilla attacks—been captured and pacified by mainstream scholars, pundits, and journalists. In a mass society with ever weaker family, religious, and communal ties, the educated and ambitious care only for career, so they get along by going along. To do so they have...

In my correspondence regarding the events in Cologne, an editor of a Russian newspaper asked a natural but discouraging question. Perplexed, he asked me: "Where were the German men?" Indeed, for those of us who grew up in Soviet Russia, it would be inconceivable that some drunk young people could publicly mock and harass girls on New Year's Eve in the very center of Moscow or Saint Petersburg. If they dared to do this, they wouldn't survive until the morning; they would become "martyrs" and would have their way with 72 virgins in a completely different realm. Ethical codes, embedded...