Free Republic

In times past, getting your photograph taken with an elected official such as the vice president of the United States would usually be looked upon with celebration and respect. But in the vitriolic political climate in today’s age of President Donald Trump, one college student is finding out firsthand how reverse the world has become. McKenzie Deutsch, an incoming junior at Scripps College in Southern California, posted a photo of herself on Facebook standing between Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., for whom she had served as a congressional intern. That’s when all hell broke...

I spoke this morning with a friend who lives in Germany. Unsolicited, the friend (who assumed, as Leftists always do, given my socio-economic status, that I am a Leftist too) began to trash Trump. I got the usual litany: Trump will kill Americans because he refuses to save Obamacare; Trump will kill Americans and Koreans because he's threatening repercussions if Kim Jong-Un engages in an overtly aggressive act against the US or its territories; and Trump will kill the entire world because he withdrew from the (meaningless, but expensive) Paris Accords. How in the world could Americans elect the racist,...

In Sunday’s New York Times, Kristen Ghodsee paints a glowing picture of women’s lives in the former Soviet Union. From full voting rights in 1917, liberalized divorce laws, high labor force participation – and yes, reportedly better sex – life was supposedly much better for women. Ghodsee writes, “Although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined.” Of course, full voting rights don’t count for very much when there is always only one candidate allowed on the ballot.

Charlottesville is what happens when the Left empowers extremists.In Dallas, a black nationalist activist shot and killed 5 police officers at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally. Instead of condemning BLM, Barack Obama defended a racist hate group whose role model is Assata Shakur, a wanted black nationalist cop killer, at the funerals of the murdered officers. The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism. The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi are lionized as brilliant thinkers instead of hateful racists, Amazon has ordered a black...

The American people were infinitely stupid, and the media celebrated Bill's big victory. But we caught on many years ago, and normal, sane, and undeluded Americans have been storing up all those memories. Trump means payback. We understand it every single time. But don't tell mediots. Let them marinate in their hatred for another seven years -- with a little luck, and then, let's elect another business guy with common sense instead of a political whore.

Senator Elizabeth Warren used a speech to a grass-roots conference Saturday to take direct aim at Democrats’ diminished moderate wing, ridiculing Clinton-era policies and jubilantly proclaiming that liberals had taken control of the party. While not invoking former President Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton by name, Ms. Warren sent an unambiguous message that she believes the Clinton effort to push Democrats toward the political center should be relegated to history. “The Democratic Party isn’t going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill,” she said, highlighting measures Mr. Clinton signed into law as president that are reviled...

<p>Welcome to “Antifa” (the name is a shortened version of “anti-fascist”), the hard left shock troops fomenting a new civil war in America. It is the political version of a ash mob, with no centralized leadership or structure, but with a clear ideology.</p>

The Evil of the Scarcity Meme In order to avoid misunderstanding, let us make clear from the outset that scarcity is an unavoidable fact of life – it is the very thing that impels economic activity. If all material human wants were satisfied and we were living as immortals in the Land of Cockaigne, there would no longer be a reason to plan for the future, to save and invest, and to weigh the opportunity costs of different choices. In this hypothetical scenario, people may for a while engage in the pursuit of various pleasures, many would probably indulge in...

A protester at the Charlottesville, Virginia white supremacist rally on Saturday said that the "f**king Jew-lovers are gassing us man,'' while being interviewed by a Fox News reporter. He also said that he had "survived genocide" at age 6.

Being a Jewish fella, I don't hold much brief for white supremacists and neo-Nazis. But until this Saturday, I hadn't seen a lot of them around lately. And I've been going about the country quite a bit for the last couple of years, hitting roughly half the states, including some like Mississippi where the Klan was once riding high. I'm happy to report that on my visit to the black-owned Two Sister's Kitchen in the capital of that state, Jackson, blacks and whites were both equally, and contentedly in my eyes, braving the criticism of their cardiologists for what is...

Just a little over a year ago, an employee at Yale smashed a stained glass window at the school because he was angry over the image of African Americans carrying cotton. We covered it in this post: Yale employee smashes allegedly racist stained-glass window, Yale won’t press charges. Not only did Yale not press charges, they rehired the employee with much fanfare. Now another piece of campus art has been altered for the sake of political correctness. ***snip***...you may have noticed a stone carving by the York Street entrance to Sterling Memorial Library that depict a hostile encounter: a Puritan...

Former Vice President took aim at President Trump’s comments that “many sides” led to violence at a white supremacist rally Saturday. “There is only one side. #charlottesville,” Biden tweeted. There is only one side. #charlottesville — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 12, 2017 Trump had refused to single out the white supremacists who held the rally in Charlottesville, Va. in his condemnation of the violence there. A car struck a crowd of counter-protestors at the rally, leaving one dead. Two others were killed during the protests after a helicopter crashed. Those victims were Virginia State Police Department officers who were in...

Some attendees at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference in New Orleans on Friday turned their backs on White House adviser Omarosa Manigault after she repeatedly did not take the bait to answer loaded questions about her personal conversations with President Donald Trump and involvement his administration. The black journalists turned their backs on Manigault even though she said she disagreed with Trump’s joke about how he did not want police to be “too nice” by putting their hands on top of the heads of “thugs” while throwing them “into the back of a paddy wagon.” Trump’s joke...

Skip Bayless and 100,000 Change.com signers are calling for a boycott of games this NFL season if Colin Kaepernick isn't signed. Director Spike Lee is planning a pro-Colin rally in front of NFL headquarters on August 24. Kapernick, the seven-year veteran quarterback, caused controversy last year by remaining seated or kneeling during the National Anthem, declaring, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color." He choose to opt out of his contract with San Francisco in March and has remained unemployed since.

In their passion to achieve a government-crafted utopia, the liberal/progressive movement often does more harm than good. This is because their tool of choice – the government – can only apply superficial solutions that come with harmful side effects. Efforts to correct “income inequality” and “fight poverty” through government entitlement programs are a prime example. As columnist George Will recently asked and answered, “[W]hat if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral – bad choices and the cultures that produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social salvation through economic abundance.”...

University of Virginia police dispersed a gathering of far-right protesters on the Charlottesville, Va. campus Friday night ahead of a planned demonstration by white nationalists, white supremacists and alt-right groups on Saturday. Police arriving on the scene declared the protest on Friday an "unlawful assembly" and told demonstrators to disperse, video footage of the gathering shows. Unlawful assembly declared at @UVA pic.twitter.com/y3UvphNYH3 — Allison Wrabel (@craftypanda) August 12, 2017 Protesters holding torches clustered on the campus in an apparent lead-up to a Saturday demonstration protesting Charlottesville's decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Whatever the reason, far too many people have a pitiful grasp of reality: natural climate fluctuations throughout Earth history; the intricate, often fragile sources of things we take for granted; and what life would really be like in the utopian fossil-fuel-free future they dream of. Let’s take a short journey into that idyllic realm. Suppose we generate just the 25 billion megawatt-hours of today’s total global electricity consumption using wind turbines. (That’s not total energy consumption, and it doesn’t include what we’d need to charge a billion electric vehicles.) We’d need more than 830 million gigantic 3-megawatt turbines! Spacing them...

In 1960, only 10% of children were raised without a father in the home.Today, 40% are.There are many reasons behind this sobering statistic. The clichéd case of a man knocking up a woman, and then leaving town never to return certainly still occurs.But sometimes a man’s ex-wife petitions for primary custody of their kids, and sympathetic family courts unjustly grant this request about 80% of the time.And there is an increasing number of women — who for various reasons cannot or do not want to raise their children with a boyfriend or husband — who intentionally choose to become...

Editor’s note: The following excerpt on “Teepee Etiquette — The Unwritten Law of the Lodge,” was taken from The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore (1912) by Ernest Thompson Seton. Seton said he gathered these maxims on American Indian hospitality “chiefly from observations of actual practice, but in many cases from formal precept.” They’re still largely apropo for modern hosts entertaining visiting guests in their “teepee” (though your mother-in-law may disagree).Teepee Etiquette — The Unwritten Law of the Lodge Be hospitable.Always assume that your guest is tired, cold, and hungry.Always give your guest the place of honor in the...

Editor’s note: As one of the fathers of modern bodybuilding, Joe Weider founded the International Federation of Bodybuilders, created the Mr./Ms. Olympia contests, and published numerous fitness magazines. He also developed several weight training programs in the 1950s, many of which were available by mail-order. Weider was interested in helping his clients build the whole man, and along with the booklets on bodily development he sent out to subscribers, he sometimes included pamphlets on how to strengthen other aspects of their lives like dating and career.Below you’ll find one of these pamphlets on “How to Make Women Like You.”...