Free Republic

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher urged students not to go to elite colleges because doing so “just makes you stupid” and that these elite schools are “a North Korean re-education camp” that are racist towards Asian applicants that don’t teach history and “if ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.”

KATY, Texas — From a secluded spot in her high school library, a 17-year-old girl spoke softly into her cellphone, worried that someone might overhear her say the things she’d hidden from her parents for years. They don’t know she’s queer, the student told a reporter, and given their past comments about homosexuality’s being a sin, she’s long feared they would learn her secret if they saw what she reads in the library. That space, with its endless rows of books about characters from all sorts of backgrounds, has been her “safe haven,” she said — one of the few...

A YouTube video of Xinjiang detention facilities has rekindled concern over China's crackdown on ethnic minorities. Researchers say the videos offer new evidence, but many fear for the vlogger's safety.A 20-minute video featuring more than a dozen detention facilities in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has offered fresh evidence and renewed the discussion around China's large-scale crackdown on ethnic minorities in the region. The video was filmed by a Chinese man named Guanguan, who went to Xinjiang after reading a series of articles from US news outlet BuzzFeed News, indicating the locations of several detention centers in the region. His...

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in South Carolina contacted law enforcement officials on Thursday after undercover journalists with James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas pressed the campaign to answer questions about violent remarks made by a paid Sanders campaign staffer. The move by the Sanders campaign to call the police on reporters for asking them tough questions comes after Project Veritas released video earlier this week that allegedly showed Sanders field organizer Martin Weissgerber saying he wanted to kill wealthy people and throw Republicans into camps. The police officer who responded told Project Veritas, “They said they are going to have no comment....

We warned you... #Expose2020 https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1267131863405146124?s=20 

Buzzfeed has done an extensive investigation using satellite imagery to identify the massive network of re-education camps that have been built in the western province of Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party. Some of these camps are truly massive in scale, large enough to hold 10,000 people. BuzzFeed News identified more than 260 structures built since 2017 and bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds. There is at least one in nearly every county in the far-west region of Xinjiang. During that time, the investigation shows, China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands...

“China’s Rising Threat to Human Rights” webinar was hosted by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) on Aug. 21, 2020. | Vimeo/ScreenshotA Uighur woman has called on the Christian community to condemn the atrocities her community continues to face at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, warning that the “tragedy of the Uighur people will be the future of the entire world if this threat is not addressed.”Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of Campaign for Uighurs and a former Uighur service journalist with Radio Free Asia, participated in an Aug. 21 webinar hosted by the Ethics &...

A member of China’s Early Rain Covenant Church says the Chinese Communist Party continues to persecute members of the church by threatening to send their children to government re-education camps or forcibly remove adopted children from their parents. In a video released Wednesday alongside a new report by International Christian Concern, Liao Qiang, a member of ERCC in Chengdu, said that despite shuttering the church and jailing Pastor Wang Yi in December of 2018, the CCP continues to harass its members. Qiang said in the video accompanying ICC's new report on Religious Suppression in China that his family was forced...

Yesterday German outlet Deutsche Welle published an exclusive story based on interviews with four former detainees at Chinese re-education camps in the western province of Xinjiang. All four described a day, after months of incarceration and propaganda, when officials handed them a list of crimes and told them to choose the ones to which they wanted to confess. One prisoner was in a hospital wing inside a camp, suffering from tuberculosis he had contracted during his stay, when he was given the list. The man speaks and reads little Chinese, so fellow inmates had to translate for him into...

Earlier this month the NY Times published a story on leaked Chinese documents detailing the creation and administration of re-education camps designed to brainwash Islamic citizens. Sunday, NBC News published a follow-up, also based on leaked documents, which provides much more information on what goes on inside the camps. Based on the NBC report, this isn’t an effort to root out extremism. China has effectively made even innocuous signs of belief in Islam punishable by a year in a prison-like camp. As one experts says, it’s the “Cultural Revolution on steroids.” The leaked records include a memo laying out...

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army has begun minor operations to try to quell the unrest in Hong Kong. This is a step that the Chinese hoped to avoid. For one thing, they wanted to portray the unrest as minor, not requiring their intervention. For another, they did not want issues raised about Chinese human rights violations, which inevitably emerge in such interventions. At a time when China is trying to portray itself as the global alternative to the United States, it doesn’t want other countries, particularly those in Europe, noticing human rights abuses.This strategy took another huge blow with...

Someone inside the Communist Party of China took a very brave decision to leak 400 pages of documents about the country’s crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang province to an American newspaper. The documents shed some light on the creation of the camps, showing they were a response to a demand from President Xi Jinping for a crackdown on Muslim extremism. President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants...

Anyone observing academia from within would know that most of the research coming out of a majority of social science departments is meaningless and irrelevant. ItÂ’s a self-referential racket that squanders money on bureaucratic nonsense and on research subjects completely dissociated with normal life and policy.Had it not been so, right now there would be scores of scholarships and funding to find out the causality behind a single puzzling phenomenon: What explains otherwise virulent, hyper-activist, and volatile Islamic countries and jihadist groups being completely subservient to China?It is, of course, unthinkable that India, the United Kingdom, the United States,...

Since America’s chattering class has spent a freakish amount of time this past week debating what does and doesn’t count as a “concentration camp,” here’s something much closer to the traditional definition. This is more accurately regarded as an internment or reeducation camp, I suppose, since the goal is brainwashing, not hard labor unto death. But the scale of the concentration is vast: Last August the Journal that upwards of one million Muslim Uighurs, roughly seven percent of the population of China’s Xinjiang region, had been packed off to 1,300+ camps for “reeducation.” A more recent estimate by CFR...

The NFL is going to bankroll a “social activism boot camp” for professional athletes in February, according to a new report.“The league has agreed to finance a social activism boot camp at Morehouse College in February,” ESPN’s Jim Trotter reported on Monday.The boot camp will reportedly take place over two days and will include professional athletes from other leagues besides the NFL. “And then, the organizers of that curriculum will work with the players throughout the year to try and teach them to get their message out and be most effective with it,” Trotter added.The NFL has also reportedly agreed to...

An academic and author is offering courses for white people teaching them how to cope with their 'white fragility' - and tickets for the lectures have sold out. The City of Seattle is offering the class through its Office of Arts and Culture, with Dr. Robin DiAngelo taking students through the course.

If the Chicago social-studies teacher Gregory Michie waits for a textbook to teach his students about the Black Lives Matter movement, the first seventh-graders to hear the lesson won’t be born for another seven years. Despite the historical implications of that movement, bureaucratic timelines all but quash any possibility that students might learn about today’s events from an actual history textbook in the near future. According to Anthony Pellegrino, an assistant professor of education at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, many school districts receive new books on a seven-year cycle. However, in some states, schools don’t receive new books for 10...

The report, "Stagnation Generation", calls for the social contract between young and old generations to be renewed, as millennials are at risk of becoming the first generation to earn less over their lifetime than earlier generations. According to the report, in the U.K. today's 27 year olds are earning the same amount as a 27 year old would have 25 years ago. "A typical millennial has actually earned £8,000 ($10,587) less during their twenties than those in the preceding generation – generation X," the report claims. ... Meanwhile, young people are failing to get onto the property ladder. The report...

(CNSNews.com) – A couple who hosts occasional wedding ceremonies on their New York farm have lost an appeal to overturn the $13,000 in fines levied against them by the state’s human rights agency, which ruled that their refusal to host a wedding for two women was discriminatory. On Jan. 14, the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Third Department, upheld the agency’s order and the fines, a decision the Alliance Defending Freedom - which represented Robert and Cynthia Gifford - said amounted to confirming, “that the government can punish the Giffords for declining to coordinate a ceremony that conflicts with...

RALEIGH, N.C. – Dozens of magistrates in North Carolina have refused to perform weddings since a law went into effect allowing officials to refrain from performing the ceremony. The state court system says it's received 32 notices from magistrates since a law took effect June 11 allowing court officials who for religious reasons oppose gay marriage to opt out of performing all marriages. The law exempts court officials with a "sincerely held religious objection" and is designed for those opposing gay marriage. The law also gave the recusal option to some register of deeds workers issuing marriage licenses. Elected officials...