Free Republic

A Brit gives an entertaining talk on how to properly insult a 'progressive'.

LONDON – The British government is urging school leaders to use their “common law powers” to search student lunches and potentially confiscate any items they deem “unhealthy or inappropriate.” Education minister Lord Nash tells Express, “Schools have common law powers to search pupils, with their consent, for items. “There is nothing to prevent schools from having a policy of inspecting lunch boxes for food items that are prohibited under their school food policies. “A member of staff may confiscate, keep or destroy such items found as a result of the search if it is reasonable to do so in the...

First the flag, now monuments honoring the Confederacy may be coming down. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is pushing for the name of a park in the city to be changed. The park is named after Robert E. Lee and it is the latest push to erase history related to the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina last week. A member of the Baltimore chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans said the hatred of the flag is an attempt to hide history. Elliot Cummings told WBAL, "We are becoming like the Taliban....

Our inalienable—God given—rights as set down in the Constitution are under attack. It’s the agenda of the American left to implement an unholy, “live for today” secularism which will destroy the virtues and truth contained in our founding documents. The strength of our republic was derived from a higher authority. Our government was designed to prevent any group amassing so much power that the society at large would be harmed. It is our culture that should drive politics, not the other way around. Today’s politicians demean that culture and subject the American people to tyranny. The Obama Regime in particular...

If it seems to you that the Left has, collectively, lost its damned mind as the curtain rises on the last act of the Obama administration, you are not imagining things. Barack Obama has been extraordinarily successful in his desire to — what was that phrase? — fundamentally transform the country, but the metamorphosis is nonetheless a good deal less than his congregation wanted and expected. We may have gone from being up to our knees in welfare-statism to being up to our hips in it, and from having a bushel of banana-republic corruption and incompetence to having a bushel...

Dana Haswell Corbin had no idea she was bucking conventional political wisdom when she wore her pale blue “Bernie for President” T-shirt months before a primary vote in any state, let alone her native Pennsylvania. Conventional wisdom dictates she is supposed to like Hillary Clinton's “unique and historic candidacy” as a woman on the cusp of walking away with the Democrats' nomination. But Corbin says she likes Bernie Sanders, Vermont's “democratic socialist” U.S. senator, because of what she describes as his frank talk and his authentic voice on progressive issues. Corbin's sentiment is by no means a trend away from...

If you are a person who still believes even some of what you hear and see from the mainstream media and its lackeys on the "alternative" Left, then you deserve everything you get from them. If you are not, then you are probably as disgusted as I am with the outright lying that goes on in the name of "news reporting" from the cultural Marxists and other elements of the radical Left. Two recent stories in particular highlight the blatant dishonesty of the Left in its efforts at pushing its agenda. The first of these is the recent "tweaking" of...

Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths. Northwestern “feminist” professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students. Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously, reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species) he was so “scared” and “terrified” of his “liberal” students that he self-censors his comments in class and...

Speaking on Fox News Channel’s The Five, pundit Greg Gutfeld said that “gay marriage, in my opinion, is a conservative idea.” He noted that the left “generally hates traditions” and is all about “breaking with traditions,” and that gay marriage offers conservatives an opportunity to “embrace a tradition” that strengthens families and communities. I should acknowledge that Gutfeld spoke without notes, unscripted, live and off-the-cuff. I often talk with inexactness when I’m speaking live. Live speaking is a perfect venue to make mistakes. It’s easier to type your thoughts and have the benefit of reflection, revision, and a word processor....

I appreciate it when leftists get off script, dispatch with the propagandist talking points and say what’s really on their minds. “Progressives” hate natural marriage. And they hate the natural family. But they do so love big government. In an article for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation titled, “Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?” Joe Gelonesi, host of “The Philosopher’s Zone” radio program, calls the natural mom-dad biological family a “weathered institution ever more in need of a rationale for existing.” While he admits that it may be premature to “abolish the family and put children into care of...

[] this is part two of a three part trifecta on the utter catastrophe that has befallen what was once America's jewel in her industrial crown, namely her inner-cities. In part one, we looked at the locust-like plague that drugs, especially crack cocaine, has inflicted on America's cities. Today, we'll look at the political perfect storm of Democratic policies that have not only allowed this to happen, but in fact, fostered it. And in part three, we will struggle to find some solutions to this multi-generational mess. I think the short form is that America's cities were once home to...

Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and even William Jennings Bryan. Ely, a mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the “Wisconsin school” of progressivism, believed that “God works through the state in carrying out His purposes more...

Have a look at this article, whose nominal subject is academic freedom and whose implicit subject is the crudity and ineptitude with which a professor at a third tier state university can go about instructing his students: [Liberty Counsel’s] complaint relates to Grace Lewis, a high school student enrolled at Polk State through the Florida Virtual School Full Time program … Liberty alleges that Russum is a “radical ideologue, bent on imposing his views on students, in violation of acceptable academic standards and the U.S. Constitution.” As evidence, it cites multiple elements of the syllabus and assignments for the...

Although the chaos in Baltimore has seemingly come to an end, the damage is done. Buildings are in shambles, and owners have to rebuild their businesses with nothing left of their livelihood except some garbage and burnt pieces of plastic. There are so many heartbreaking stories of individuals affected by the riots, but this one takes the cake. This mom is trying to figure out what steps to take after the “peaceful protestors” destroyed her severely disabled son’s medical equipment, leaving him with nothing. According to the Washington Post, Laporsha Lawson grabbed her disabled son Khai’Lee Sampson and fled to...

Believe it or not there is actual evidence that illegal immigration does depress wages for the native-born but you are not likely to hear about it in the multitude of classes that touch on various “diasporas.” “In studies at meat-packing plants, when illegal immigrants are taken out, wages went up,” Professor Philip Cafaro pointed out in a panel discussion at the National Press Club last Thursday sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Cafaro teaches philosophy at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He has amassed a multitude of research on the subject, much of it on display in...

Everyone knows that the self-styled progressives and others on the Left are inveterate liars. Not a day goes by that some left-wing activist or talking head won't be found on our television screens or in our newspapers uttering some falsehood designed to make the leftist agenda more palatable to the masses or to cover up the disasters being caused by it. They lie to us, and they lie to each other as well. The lower ranking "progressives," the "foot soldiers" out there spreading the disinformation at a demotic level, typically do so without even understanding that the news they're spreading...

When Bay Guys Talk: Whether they’re gays continuing to force more of their radical anti-freedom agenda off onto us or radical Muslims pushing for sharia law in our communities, we’d better get serious about organizing ourselves to oppose them Everyone knows that the self-styled progressives and others on the Left are inveterate liars. Not a day goes by that some left-wing activist or talking head won’t be found on our television screens or in our newspapers uttering some falsehood designed to make the leftist agenda more palatable to the masses or to cover up the disasters being caused by it.

In a stunning slap at her team, liberal pundit Kirsten Powers is charging in a new book that the left is so intolerant of alternative views that it will use sexist and even racist language to shout down women and blacks who don't champion Democratic causes. Kirsten Powers, a USA Today and Daily Beast columnist and designated "liberal" on Fox, confessed in her new book that the left aggressively tries to "silence people" who don't fall into the liberal line. In The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, she calls out the lefty tactics, especially how they belittle...

The U.S. has become significantly less Christian in the last eight years as the share of American adults who espouse no systematic religious belief increased sharply, a major new study found. For what is likely the first time in U.S. history – certainly the first since the early days of the country – the actual number of American Christians has declined. Christianity, however, remains by far the nation’s dominant religious tradition, according to the new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The rapid increase in the number of adults without ties to traditional religious institutions has strong implications for...

Start the video at 28:29. This woman blames Baltimore riots entirely on decades of rats and the fatherless homes they caused.