Free Republic

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said recently he opposes paying government reparations to the descendants of American slaves, has a family history deeply entwined in the issue: Two of his great-great-grandfathers were slave owners, U.S. census records show. The two great-great-grandfathers, James McConnell and Richard Daley, owned a total of at least 14 slaves in Limestone County, Alabama — all but two of them female, according to the county “Slave Schedules” in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. The details about McConnell’s ancestors, discovered by NBC News through a search of ancestry and census records, came in the wake of...

Reparations: My 2 Cents (A Black Perspective)Among the more un-Constitutional acts being proposed by Democrats is one of “reparations”; the idea that some form of compensatory payment needs to be made to the descendants of Africans trafficked to and enslaved in the Americas because of the Atlantic slave trade. Not only is it a personal insult, I believe the proper response by those who oppose it should not be to go on defense. Our opposition has exposed a major flaw in their ideology, and as Real Americans, now is the perfect time to exploit it. Let’s start with this: if...

<p>PLEASANT PRAIRIE, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Ten men were involved in the shoplifting incident at a Pleasant Prairie North Face on June 1, according to a criminal complaint.</p> <p>Police say the men were in and out of the store within 30 seconds to a minute. They all entered at the same time, went into a corner of the store and grabbed several jackets off each rack before running out of the store.</p>

<p>NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. federal court documents show Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández and some of his closest advisers were among the targets of a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation.</p> <p>A document filed by prosecutors on Tuesday in the Southern District of New York mentions Hernández as part of a group of individuals investigated by the DEA since about 2013 for participating “in large-scale drug-trafficking and money laundering activities relating to the importation of cocaine into the United States”.</p>

Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris is descended from Irish slave owner Hamilton Brown, the namesake of Brown’s Town in Jamaica, who recruited massive numbers of Irish migrants to Jamaica to work on his sugar plantations after the British empire abolished slavery. Kamala Harris’ father Donald Harris wrote an essay entitled “Reflections of a Jamaican Father” for Jamaica Global Online, in which he made a startling admission (emphasis added): “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of...

Police arrested a Salt Lake man Friday who they say murdered University of Utah student Mackenzie Lueck, who has been missing since June 17. "It is with heavy heart that I address you today," said Salt Lake Police Chief Mike Brown. Ayoola Adisa Ajayi, 31, was arrested at 9:20 a.m. at an apartment complex at 1028 S. West Temple. He is expected to be charged with aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping and desecration of a body, according to Salt Lake Police Chief Mike Brown.

Salt Lake City police have charged a man with murder in the killing of missing University of Utah student Mackenzie Lueck, officials announced Friday. The suspect, identified as Ayoola Ajayi, was taken into custody Friday morning and also faces charges of aggravated kidnapping, desecration of a human body and obstruction of justice, Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown said. "I will not be saying the killer’s name again," an emotional Brown told reporters.

How do you know if you're living in a free society? Here's a quick test: Are you allowed to say obviously true things in public? Or are you forced to lie? As George Orwell put it in "1984": "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." But what if that freedom isn't granted? What if you're required to repeat things that you know aren't true? What if everyone who hears you knows perfectly well that you're lying, but they can't say so out loud? What if everyone is...

Did I hear Cory Booker correctly?

Forget about how we’d pay for reparations or who would be eligible. The point isn’t to make things right, but to re-make America. What do we mean by reparations? Writing recently in the Washington Post, Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University, argues that “reparations should repair what white supremacy still breaks. Atoning for the legacy of chattel slavery is simply not enough.” That is, reparations must be broad enough to encompass the many crimes and injustices perpetrated against black Americans throughout our history, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. The effects of these injustices, says Cashin,...

About reparations, a skeptical President Barack Obama in 2016 told reparations proponent Ta-Nehisi Coates that it would divide the country. Obama said: "It is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation's resources over a long period of time to make that right. ... So the bottom line is that it's hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts." The polls...

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was "to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice." Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means...

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said her constituents want to see reparations for descendants of slaves in the form of "direct payment." Tlaib hopes the House has a "serious conversation" about voting on H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, after the reparations hearing that took place last week in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.

President Trump on Monday said he doesn't believe the federal government will pursue reparations for descendants of slaves, an idea that has gained traction among some Democrats. "I don’t see it happening," Trump said in an exclusive interview with The Hill. The House Judiciary Committee held the first hearing on the issue in a decade earlier this month, and a handful of Democratic presidential candidates seeking to challenge Trump in 2020 have broached the idea. "I think it’s a very unusual thing," Trump said of the possibility of reparations. "You have a lot of — it’s been a very interesting...

True to form on the intersectionality front, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill to extend the idea of reparations to LGBT people. While far more limited in scope than frequent calls for slavery reparations to black Americans, the proposal blames the U.S. government for withholding benefits same-sex couples allegedly should have received before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). On Friday, Warren re-introduced S. 1940, the Refund Equality Act, which would allow same-sex couples to amend past tax returns. According to a report from the Joint...

Democrats aiming to buy Black votes by promising to force non-blacks to pay them damages for the injustices of slavery were stunned by the opposition of two Blacks testifying at a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. Columnist Coleman Hughes opposed reparations, saying that they “would insult black Americans, further divide the country, and insult descendants of slaves victims without their consent.” His testimony was roundly booed by Democrats attending the hearing, prompting Chairman Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn) to put down his piece of fried chicken long enough to ask the audience to “chill. Granted, this is unorthodox testimony coming...

The Butt-hurt that reparation seekers are feeling is what's called Demoroids. They've been deceived into thinking that the cure for this is Reperation-H. But it's not. Part of the treatment is to stop voting for the party that's been screwing them.

A congressional hearing was held on a bill to study reparations for blacks as payback for slavery. Reparations is simply another worm Democrat presidential candidates will put on the hook of their fishing rods to catch black votes. I am a black man who is proud, grateful, and understands how blessed I am to be born an American. My response to the Democrats' reparations scam is, “Please stop!”. Please stop telling black Americans that we are crippled, inferior and are helpless children who can only succeed via government handouts, lowered standards and special concessions. Just stop it! The Civil War...

Reparations. Like every other issue for the Socialist—whoops—Democrat Party, it’s one steeped in massive pandering, misinformation, class warfare, racism, and lunacy.I’m black. And white. So would the white side of me have to pay the black side of me? Oh, and you don’t even have to be a citizen to be paid this magical money that will heal all historical wrongs and make everyone more “equal.” The #BlackLivesMatter movement wants “undocumented persons”, who never experienced the bondage of slavery in this country, to receive reparations, too. The struggle is real!Everyone is a victim, including rich and powerful black politicians, thought leaders...

The debate over reparations for descendants of slaves catapulted from the campaign trail to Congress on Wednesday with an impassioned plea from actor Danny Glover and others for lawmakers to address compensation for America's blighted heritage of racism and Jim Crow laws. Glover, who told a House Judiciary panel that his great-grandfather was enslaved, called a national reparations policy "a moral, democratic and economic imperative." It was Congress' first hearing in a decade on the topic and comes amid a growing discussion in the Democratic Party on reparations and sets up a potential standoff with Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch...