Free Republic

On Monday, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto expanded on themes he recently wrote about relating to Florida’s thin case against George Zimmerman, the man accused of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2012. Taranto told WSJ’s Mary Kessel that the prosecution of Zimmerman, in the words of one Slate columnist, was supposed to serve as a “referendum” on racial privilege in America. “There’s a word for a trial that is held as a referendum – it’s a show trial,” Taranto said. “We don’t do show trials in this country.” “Why has the press been so convinced from the very beginning that...

U.S. Department of Justice officials have demanded that Los Angeles County, Lancaster and Palmdale pay a total of $12.5 million to residents who the federal government found were victims of harassment and intimidation in the Antelope Valley. The demand coincides with last week´s accusation by the Justice Department that Antelope Valley authorities conducted a systematic effort to discriminate against African Americans who received low-income subsidized housing and that sheriff´s deputies engaged in widespread unlawful searches of homes, improper detentions and unreasonable force. Assistant County Counsel Roger Granbo, (Snip)said the money would go to people whose

When a black mob attacked two reporters in Norfolk, Va., last year, the editor of the Virginian-Pilot newspaper said it was just a “street altercation” and he had no proof of racial motivation. But even the most diehard denier of the epidemic of black mob violence around the country will find this case difficult to explain away: Three white men in Georgia were allegedly robbed and assaulted and almost killed in April by a group of black people, all because of the color of their skin. At least that is what the victims told the local sheriff. Most examples of...

When a group of black men were planning a home-invasion robbery in Fayetteville, N.C., on Friday, they stuck to an M.O. that had succeeded all over the country, but made one fatal error: They chose the wrong home. The residents of the targeted house were home at the time and armed. After what local authorities report as a “gun battle,” two of alleged robbers died. Most home invasion robberies follow the same script: Find a residence in a nice neighborhood where people do not live too close together. Statistics show potential victims are likely white or Asian, though professional athletes...

Deep ideological divisions within the Justice Department’s voting rights section fueled disputes harmful to its operation and often evolved into the harassment of its employees and managers, but there was “insufficient evidence” to show that either the Bush or the Obama administration used the enforcement of voting laws to seek improper partisan advantage, the agency’s inspector general said Tuesday. The long-awaited report, spawned by the New Black Panther Party voter harassment investigation, was released as Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, who oversees the section, is being considered

The desire of intellectuals for some grand theory that will explain complex patterns with some solitary and simple factor has produced many ideas that do not stand up under scrutiny, but which have nevertheless had widespread acceptance — and sometimes catastrophic consequences — in countries around the world. The theory of genetic determinism which dominated the early 20th century led to many harmful consequences, ranging from racial segregation and discrimination up to and including the Holocaust. The currently prevailing theory is that malice of one sort or another explains group differences in outcomes. Whether the lethal results of this theory...

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism. Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. Multiculturalism is a tempting quick fix for groups that lag by simply pronouncing their cultures to be equal, or "equally valid," in some vague and lofty sense. Cultural features are just different, not...

There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels. A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some races were genetically superior to others. Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that...

Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among races, nations and civilizations have been the rule, not the exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope of rational thought — and perhaps even some constructive efforts to help everyone advance. Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, "We owe London to Rome" — an acknowledgement that Roman conquerors created Britain's most famous city, at a time when the ancient Britons were incapable of doing so themselves. No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of that era was likely to imagine that someday...

Time to tell Rove -and more importantly his good-money-after-bad donors- that this Prog Lite schtick will not only fail to attain incremental black/hispanic/+? votes, but will have conservatives going third-party in droves... Out there pimping his so-called 'Conservative Victory Project', Rove claimed in a speech to the California Republican Party's spring convention in Sacramento this past weekend that '(Republicans) need to ... have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we're asking for the vote from.' Yet back in reality, the Obammunists have driven this country to the edge of the abyss economically, socially, and...

If your organization has a policy or practice that doesn’t benefit minorities equally, watch out: The Obama administration could sue you for racial discrimination under a dubious legal theory that many argue is unconstitutional. President Obama intends to close “persistent gaps” between whites and minorities in everything from credit scores and homeownership to test scores and graduation rates.

American racism is starting to remind me of American alcoholism. At the founding of the republic, in the days when beer was thought of as "liquid bread" and a healthy nutritional breakfast, Americans drank about three-to-four times as much as they do now. Today the United States has a lower per capita rate of alcohol consumption than almost any other developed nation, but it has more alcoholism support groups than any other developed nation – around 164 groups per million people. France, which drinks about 50 percent more per capita than America, has one-twentieth the number of support groups. The...

Ah, to be a member of Big Media when the white Republicans gather to nominate their white ticket for the White House. It's like shooting white elephants in a white convention center, what with their unbearable whiteness of being -- so "non-diverse," as Big Media strenuously signal their audiences. Gallup tells us Republicans are 87 percent white and Democrats are 63 percent white. But even when Republicans are not white -- which occurs despite Big Media efforts to fool viewers (conservative websites observed that NBC failed to post speeches by non-white Republicans at its website, while MSNBC cut to its...

Dangerous and chaotic scenes rock cities on big holiday While most Americans were commemorating the nation’s birthday, racial violence, lawlessness and animosity marred Independence Day celebrations in Georgia, Florida, Ohio, California and Illinois. Chris Rock started the day off with a bang: “Happy white peoples Independence Day,” he tweeted. “The slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks.” In Chicago, Ill., some were enjoying the celebration until they were set upon by a mob of dozens of black people intent on violence. One man was taken to the hospital, where he remains in good condition. Eleven black people were...

General Assembly Overrides Vetoes on Budget, Fracking, Racial Justice ActPerdue goes 0-for-3 at close of GOP's first session as majority in 140 years By Barry Smith Jul. 3rd, 2012 RALEIGH – An override of Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue’s budget veto highlighted a day of votes in which the Republican-controlled General Assembly shot down the governor’s vetoes three times. The General Assembly on Monday night voted to override Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto of the state budget bill, clearing the way for adjournment and allowing lawmakers to go home to campaign for the November 2012 general election. Lawmakers also overrode vetoes...

Back in 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said we were "a nation of cowards" on matters of race. Permit me to be brave and run a few assertions by you just to see whether we're on the same page. There should be two standards for civilized conduct: one for whites, which is higher, and another for blacks, which is lower. In other words, in the name of justice and fair play, blacks should not be held accountable to the same standards that whites are and should not be criticized for conduct that we'd deem disgusting and racist if...

George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch crime captain who shot dead 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, originally told police in a written statement that Martin knocked him down with a punch to the nose, repeatedly slammed his head on the ground and tried to take his gun, a police source told ABC News.

Trayvon Martin and the Politics of Racial Guilt Daniel Greenfield March 26, 2012 In Daily Mailer,FrontPage When at the beginning of March, Allen Coon, a thirteen-year-old boy, was set on fire by two black teenagers who told him, “You get what you deserve, white boy,” this did not prove to be an occasion for national soul-searching. But the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by a Hispanic neighborhood watch captain after a scuffle between the two men has led to hysterical media coverage, state and federal investigations, civil rights marches, lynching threats from the Black Panthers and a statement from Obama...

A reminder from the mainstream, tax-supported media: if you oppose ObamaCare, that may be because you are a white racist who hates our black president. That's the gist of Shankar Vedantam's story this morning on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, which reports on a new study published by Michael Tesler in the American Journal of Political Science. Tesler presents data "that suggest that the racial attitudes of ordinary Americans have shaped both how they feel about the health care overhaul, and how intense those feelings are." In particular: Tesler finds that blacks have become increasingly supportive of health care under...

Suddenly, there is a lot of discussion about whether or not we live in a "post-racial society." With the 2012 presidential election right around the corner, I can only conclude that, despicably, "race-baiting" will be a major component of the left's and the White House's Obama re-election campaign. Recently, a black publication interviewed me for an article, the topic being "Is America a post-racial society?" Then, flipping through the TV channels, I caught a bit of two blacks on CNN discussing whether or not America is a post-racial society. It's coming up everywhere lately.I am just giving you a heads-up,...