Free Republic

Oh, how exciting… Now you can be a good little liberal, even when shopping for fresh produce and certain off-brand whiskies. According to a politically obsessed hack over at the Washington Post, some other politically obsessed hack has developed an app so you can wander through your daily life without ever losing sight of partisan political squabbles. The new smartphone app allows users to scan the barcode of consumable products in the grocery store, and it divulges the corporation’s political leanings. (I just found out that Fiji Water has switched from heavily Republican, to entirely Democrat… Ugh.)It’s so nice to...

When Ideology Trumps Science: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos on Global Warming Jay W. Richards August 6, 2014 1:15 PM | Permalink I finally had a chance to watch the twelfth, penultimate episode of Cosmos, "The World Set Free." I was out of the country in June when it originally aired, but since there's no doubt the series is headed into the schools and remains relevant, I'll take this opportunity to comment. The episode stands out from most previous installments. Just when we've grown accustomed to circuitous narrative threads with obscure segues from one topic to the next, we get...

Remember when you could have fun at someone else’s expense? Not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way. Ribbing your friends, your enemies, and just about anyone you had a funny comment about was a time-tested way of having a little fun in life. It wasn’t personal, and nothing and no one was off limits. That day is done. The political correctness movement ruined honest political discourse, funny movies and decent sitcoms, and now it’s sucking the joy out of everyday life for people uninvolved in any of those things. It may seem like a lifetime ago, but...

(Offensive Language Warning) Sunday on HuffPost Live, comedian Joan Rivers and host Marc Lamont Hill were discussing the country getting too politically correct in our race descriptions when the 81-year old said the "n-word" and then attempted to balance it out by racially with a Jewish insult, who is Jewish. Lamont Hill looked stunned by Rivers using the word and balked when Rivers said "get over it." Lamont Hill shot back, "It's tough though," and moved on to the views questions segment. ...more (w/video)...

Couple Avoids Jail: Will Keep Record Store Open by Judith Schumann Weizner Back Issues of Heterodoxyhttp://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=337(April/May 2000)The Musikants Today, Ernest and Sylvia Musikant are breathing easy for the first time in many months , having won an eleventh-hour reprieve of the prison sentence they were to begin serving this morning for a violation of the Racial Equity in Employment Act.The couple, whose classical record store, We’ll Get Bach To You, has been a fixture on Manhattan’s West Side since 1968, had been ordered to report to the Federal Race and Hate Crimes Correctional Facility on Ward’s Island to begin their...

Political Correctness: Despite the latest example of word-use insanity, naming a helicopter after the Indian nation that handed the U.S. Army one of its most ignominious defeats is a sign of respect, not racism. In 2012, military blogger Crispin Burke reports, American Indian leaders were on hand to bless two brand-new UH-72 Lakota helicopters, named after the Lakota Sioux, the tribe that gave Col. George Custer a final exam on the proper use of light cavalry in combat at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The two choppers, christened Eagle and Turtle for prominent Indian symbols, have honor feathers...

The audacity of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in canceling the trademark of the Washington Redskins is frightening. When the government is in charge of deciding what is offensive and what is not, and has the power to punish the "offenders," we move further away from a free society and closer to a tyrannical nanny state. We are not talking about a political issue that should have Democrats and Republicans coming down on different sides, but rather the fundamental freedom to express oneself, which is a part of the fabric of America. In the case of Dan Snyder, who...

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...