Free Republic

Who cares about the Redskins? Probably not first lady Michelle Obama, who turned her sights on insulting the Romani minority community Monday. While describing her struggles as a working mother, the usually politically correct first lady used the racial slur, gypped. “The first thing I tried to do, which was a mistake, was that I tried the part-time thing… I realized I was getting gypped on that front,” Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts at the White House Summit on Working Families. “What happened was I got a part-time salary but worked full time.” The term “gypped” is a racial slur...

The U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s cancelation of federal trademark registration for the name Washington “Redskins,” after ruling it disparages Native Americans, puts pressure on team owner Daniel Snyder and the National Football League (NFL) to change the name but falls far short of settling the issue. The split, 2-1, decision by unelected trademark board members shows the increasingly heavy hand that politics is playing in the activities of the private sector, since the ruling followed recent public calls for a name change from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The team counters that the long-standing “Redskins” name...

I apologize in advance for some of the terminology in this column. Much of it may make you angry, upset or downright sick to your stomach. It’s not that I use the name “Washington Redskins,” it’s that I talk about the Internal Revenue Service on page 2. Again, apologies. This week the American people were taught a valuable lesson – never underestimate the willingness of white progressives to be offended on behalf of people who aren’t and to impose their will on those who didn’t ask for it. (What tribe do you suspect these protesters are from?) The U.S. Trade...

Poll: Should the Washington Redskins change their nickname? Results # of votes % of votes Yes 1219 51% No 1191 49% Total Votes 2410

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Tim Graham. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office found its way to the front page by declaring the word "Redskins" was offensive and therefore unworthy of trademark protection under a 1946 law that proscribes trademarks for "immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter." MSNBC anchor Joy-Ann Reid reported this news with an obscenity warning before airing a clip of Sen. Harry Reid: "And I just warn people, he does use the name of the team. So, I'm just going to warn you guys about that in advance." She's not alone. Liberal sports writers refuse to...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the Washington Redskins trademark registration, calling the football team’s name “disparaging to Native Americans.” The landmark case, which appeared before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, was filed on behalf of five Native Americans. It was the second time such a case was filed. “This victory was a long time coming and reflects the hard work of many attorneys at our firm,” said lead attorney Jesse Witten, of Drinker Biddle & Reath.

Is there anything more intolerant than the Tolerance Brigade? At the Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin agrees with Bloomberg’s Stephen Carter on the rise of a new McCarthyism, this time imposing penalties for dissent from progressive orthodoxy rather than tolerating debate on a broad range of issues. Both use attempts to silence argument in academia as the flash point that exposes this thought-police mentality. Carter recently wrote about the attempts to intimidate Douglas Laycock, an opponent of same-sex marriage, and explicitly invokes McCarthyism as the dynamic in play: A law student and a recent graduate, spurred on by the advocacy group...

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...