Free Republic

Politicians are so busy squabbling over extremism that they are failing to tackle it. Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, the Home Office website published a letter from the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to the Education Secretary, Michael Gove. In it, Mrs May asked some rude questions about why his department had not acted earlier to investigate accusations of Islamist infiltration of schools in Birmingham. This was heat-of-the-night stuff. One government department is not supposed to publish its attacks on another. The error was tacitly acknowledged: on Thursday afternoon, the letter was taken down from the website. As has been reported,...

College campuses across the nation recently played host to “Cinco de Drinko”-styled parties celebrating the Mexican holiday “Cinco de Mayo,” which commemorates the Battle of Puebla. Steadfast Mexican national-holiday-legitimacy defenders did their best to try to stymie the partygoers before they could ignorantly and shamelessly appropriate Mexican culture for their own tequila-drinking needs. One particularly brave cautionary poster was posted outside of Haines Hall on the UCLA campus on Monday: In the wake of these dark festivities, at which bumbling white people dared speak high school-level Spanish and wear certain types of hats, I would like to follow in this...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label? Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read...

In an interview with Yahoo News surrounding the 40th anniversary of his comedic masterpiece "Blazing Saddles," co-writer/director Mel Brooks blasted present-day political correctness and says he was "lucky" to have made the film in the days when he still could: "They can't make that movie today because everybody's so politically correct. You know, the NAACP would stop a great movie that would do such a great service to black people because of the N-word," says Brooks. "You've got to really examine these things and see what's right and what's wrong. Politically correct is absolutely wrong. Because it inhibits the freedom...

Northwestern University continued to stumble over diversity issues this week as Mexican students voiced disagreement with a campuswide letter that advised students not to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by engaging in racially-offensive activities, such as eating tacos and drinking tequila. The letter was sent to students via e-mail, and published in The Daily Northwestern last week. Leaders of Alianza, a Latino student group, and the Associated Student Government called on students to remember that Cinco de Mayo commemorates Mexico’s victory over France in the Battle of Puebla. It is not a day to throw a sombrero-themed party, they said. “Some...

...Towson University won the 2014 Cross Examination Debate Association's national championship. Towson defeated the University of Oklahoma. What was Towson's strategy? Inexplicably using the N-word over and over again in an incomprehensible tirade. Here is an actual excerpt (with profanity redacted). See if you are able to tell what Towson is arguing in favor or against: They say the n*****s always already qu***, that's exactly the point! It means the impact is that the that the is the impact term, uh, to the afraid, uh, the, that it is a case term to the affirmative because, we, uh, we're saying...

¡Ay caramba! Imagine the cries of offensive ethnic stereotyping or worse if Fox News had observed Cinco de Mayo by having one of its yanqui persons of pallor staggering across the set in a sombrero while chugging from a pint bottle of tequila? But it happened on MSNBC, so the PC police probably won't make a peep about it. At the today's transition from Way Too Early to Morning Joe, there was producer Louis Burgdorf with his Halloween-store sombrero and pint bottle. Way Too Early host Thomas Roberts encouraged Burgdorf "to drink the whole thing and eat the worm," meaning...

“White privilege.” We’ve heard the phrase used often among left-leaning publications and throughout the esteemed halls of academia. Colleges and universities in America dogmatically teach the narrative that the playing field is unfairly balanced against minorities, while leaving the impression that whites have a cake walk and should not be proud of their achievements. After all, they’ve got it relatively easy. Tal Fortgang is a freshman from New Rochelle, NY who published this remarkable article in The Princeton Tory. It comes via The College Fix: ------------------------------------------------------- There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that...

The leader of the Liberty GB party Paul Weston, who was arrested on Saturday for breaching a Section 27 Dispersal Notice, is now possibly facing imprisonment for 2 years. Mr Weston, a candidate in the 22 May European Elections in the South East, was arrested on 26 April in front of Winchester Guildhall for quoting in public a passage critical of Islam written by Winston Churchill, using a megaphone. He spent several hours in a cell at Winchester Police Station, after which the original charge of breaching a Section 27 Dispersal Notice was dropped and Mr Weston was 're-arrested' for...

Don’t you just love classic Disney movies? Animated cinematic adventures that espoused the importance of life values, growing up, and racism… Well, that’s what some lefty professor is arguing at Syracuse University. Apparently, the Jungle Book is just chock-full of racism (and not because of “man-cub’s” strange desire to remain uncultured). Professor Robert Thompson told Yahoo Movies (um… this article was forwarded to me – like most people, I don’t actually visit Yahoo Movies) that the Jungle Book is racist because of something to do with Louie Armstrong. Apparently, when Mowgli meets the Ape King, young children are being brainwashed...

On Aug. 28, 1964, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke the immortal words, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Amen. The people judging his children by the color of their skin at the time were Democrats who ruled the south, birthed Jim Crow and lynched thousands. Today, 50 years after that speech, Democrats still judge people by the color of their skin but now have added sexual orientation, gender and any...

Dartmouth College has a problem. Protestors occupied the president's office at the Ivy League school a couple of weeks ago and demanded more "womyn or people of color" faculty, coverage of sex-change operations on the student health plan, and "gender-neutral bathrooms," among other things. Now Dartmouth President Philip J. Hanlon has responded with a call "to end the extreme behaviors that are in conflict with our mission." But Hanlon's aim seems focused almost exclusively on the campus fraternity system, and his solution -- a committee to look into "high-risk drinking, sexual assault and inclusivity" -- appears more a way to...

I've written about the hijacking of language by the Left and some of its manifestations. There are many other aspects of it, like the wounds inflicted on grammar by the use of "they", "them", "theirs" in reference to a singular subject. For example: "Everyone knows what they are doing" or "The user must log in with their password". This is done only because it's politically incorrect to use "he", "him", "his", to cover both men and women, as it allegedly gives men a status of superiority (the same as in saying "man" to mean "the human species"). Politically correct writers...

What if you believed that the planet might not have warmed up the last two decades, even though carbon emissions reached all-time highs? Or, if the earth did heat up, you thought that it was not caused by human activity? Or, if global warming were the fault of mankind, you trusted that the slight increases would not make all that much difference? The Los Angeles Times would not print your letter to the editor to that effect. The CEO of Apple Inc. might advise that you should "get out of this stock." Or maybe if you were a skeptical climatologist,...

In reality this entire hoopla was not sprung up by native Americans, but a VERY small group of "progressives" who apparently split from their comrades who busy themselves protesting the pledge of allegiance, nativity displays and the like. Dignitas News was able to infiltrate a high level meeting of the Progressive PC Police team, as they discussed the ongoing dispute over the Washington Redskins team mascot and branding. The following are excerpts from their strategy meeting: NE Patriots-On top of being potentially anti-British, it harkens to our militaristic past. How about the New England Global Villagers? NY Jets-Commercial air transit...

In a sign of respect, cadets from the United State Military Academy at West Point removed their shoes and military caps as they entered the Muslim Federation of New Jersey in Jersey City this afternoon. --The cadets began their three-day cultural field trip Thursday. Before they end their journey tomorrow, the cadets will have visited Egyptian churches, various mosques and Islamic centers, Jewish synagogues, Mormon communities and more.

Silicon Valley is in an uproar. Angry blog posts have been written, resignations tendered, and boycotts organized, with no sign that the furor is likely to abate. Seeing such ruckus, a casual observer might assume that some fallout had finally resulted from the shocking revelation that several of the largest names in the technology industry—including Google, Apple, Intel, and others—have secretly colluded to drive down wages among software engineers and executives for the better part of the past decade. In fact it concerns nothing of the sort, but rather the appointment of a man named Brendan Eich to the role...

Speech taboos are meant to silence patriotic dissentWhen I was in high school in Detroit, there was a great deal of emphasis on clothing. As I became increasingly interested in fitting in with the “in crowd,” fashion supplanted academic achievement in my hierarchy of importance. My grades plummeted and I became a person who was less pleasant and more self-absorbed. My mother was very disappointed, because she thought I had enough insight and intelligence to avoid the flypaper trap of acting like everyone else. Fortunately, after wasting a year pursuing acceptance, I realized that my dreams went far beyond silk...

President Obama entered office promising to restore the sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics and reason is being waged on behalf of politically correct politics. After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the president attempted to convert national outrage into new gun-control legislation. Specifically, he focused on curtailing semi-automatic "assault" rifles. But there is no statistical evidence that such guns -- semi-automatic rifles that have mostly cosmetic changes to appear similar to banned military-style fully automatic assault weapons -- lead to increased gun-related crimes. The promiscuous availability of illegal handguns does. They're used in the vast majority of...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Officials at a Northern California high school acted appropriately when they ordered students wearing American flag T-shirts to turn the garments inside out during the Mexican heritage celebration Cinco de Mayo, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the officials' concerns of racial violence outweighed students' freedom of expression rights. Administrators feared the American-flag shirts would enflame the passions of Latino students celebrating the Mexican holiday. Live Oak High School, in the San Jose suburb of Morgan Hill, had a history of problems between white and Latino students on...