Free Republic

...reported opposition to song Howard Bryant’s latest long-winded essay about racial division in professional sports contains remarks from an anonymous “high-ranking Red Sox official” about his desire for the team to stop playing "God Bless America" at Fenway Park. “Recently a high-ranking Red Sox official told me — nearly 17 years after the towers fell — that he really doesn’t know why the team still plays ‘God Bless America,’ but he knows this: The team would ‘get killed’ publicly if it was the first team to stop doing it,” Bryant writes. Despite the “high-ranking official’s” opposition to “God Bless America,”...

While “Avengers: Infinity War” has dominated the box office in recent weeks, a new documentary about a different kind of hero has still managed to draw crowds. “RBG,” a look at the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (the glass-ceiling shattering jurist who became a meme), secured the 10th slot at the domestic box office this weekend with $1.16 million. That’s a major feat considering that the non-fiction film, directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, was showing in just 180 screens. Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media’s collaboration launched in limited release on May 4, with...

David Horowitz’s Twitter feed was besieged after he pointed out the obvious. Left-wingers have spent the last few days attacking David Horowitz for challenging the Equal Justice Initiative and its efforts to foment anti-white racial hatred by presenting the odious practice of lynching as an exclusively white instrument of racial oppression and terror used against blacks. But history is rarely as clear-cut as radical leftist ideologues pretend.  Lynchings were carried out in an atmosphere of mass hysteria where enraged individuals acted to eliminate the perceived risk that a guilty person might go unpunished. If the black lynching victim was alleged...

As we know, one way activists like to energize a serious campaign is to make them fun. That’s the approach taken by a group of young UK campaigners who want to shine a light on the lack of on-screen diversity. In what one local communications director described as the PR stunt of the day, a group of young black Londoners, going under the banner Legally Black, have reimagined the posters of famous movies and TV shows such as Titanic, Harry Potter and Doctor Who by replacing white actors with black leads. “If you are surprised it means you don’t see...

Ta-Nehisi Coates has signed on to write a new Captain America comic book series, with the first issue to be released on the Fourth of July this year. "I'm not convinced I can tell a great Captain America story — which is precisely why I want so bad to try," Coates said.

When Barack Obama spoke at the 12th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, MA, many of us scratched our heads as to why the event was off-the-record. No photography, recording, or social media posting about Obama’s appearance was allowed. Obviously, he would not be talking about golf. But, with over 3,500 people in attendance, there was no way this speech would be hidden for long. As expected, a recording of Obama’s appearance was leaked. Obama said a lot of things over the course of an hour, but I’d like to focus on his claim that, while some people in...

Evangelicals across the country are mourning the death of Billy Graham, an influential preacher who died in his home in Montreat, North Carolina, on Wednesday. But while some are celebrating his legacy, others are grappling with the lasting damage his actions have done to their communities. Over the course of Graham's 99 years of life, he reached millions of Christians around the world and had an outsized impact on the national political landscape. For many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, however, Graham was a crusader against them, one whose efforts shaped the religious right into an anti-LGBTQ political...

An activist group has launched a voter registration effort aimed at black voters at screenings of the “Black Panther” movie nationwide. Members of the Electoral Justice Project, an offshoot of the Movement for Black Lives, are seeking to “mobilize the black electorate” and increase political engagement with the #WakandaTheVote campaign, the website Blavity reported. Wakanda is the fictional African nation featured in the long-anticipated Marvel film “Black Panther.” Kayla Reed, Jessica Byrd and Rukia Lumumba founded the Electoral Justice Project last year, and told Blavity that the movement has been effective “because we meet our communities where they are,...

Blackness invites speculation. The very idea of a global African diaspora creates the most fertile of grounds for a field of what-ifs. What if European enslavers and colonizers had never ventured into the African continent? More intriguing yet: What if African nations and peoples had successfully rebuffed generations of plunder and theft? What if the Zulu had won the wars against the Voortrekkers and the British, and a confederation of Bantu people had risen up and smashed Belgian rule? What if the Transatlantic children of the mother continent had been allowed to remain, building their empires with the bounties of...

In 1998, exactly twenty years before Black Panther, the first Marvel Comics superhero made its theatrical debut. It was the vampire known as Blade. And he was black. To be fair, there had been a handful of films based on Marvel properties before this—but 1944’s Captain America was a black-and-white serial film, 1989’s The Punisher and 1990’s Captain America were both direct-to-DVD, 1994’s Fantastic Four was never released, and though it’s a cult classic, the less said about 1986’s Howard the Duck, the better.

Before Charlie Bucket got a golden ticket to a world of pure imagination, Willy Wonka began a corporate empire of innovative candies that took the world by storm. To tell that story, Warner Brothers are looking to enlist the director of Paddington and its sequel, Paul King, according to The Hollywood Reporter. WB has been rumored to be interested in making a Willy Wonka prequel since at least 2017, with Ryan Gosling rumored to be interested in the title role. Regardless of whoever gets to wear the top hat, however, King and producer David Heyman are apparently in negotiations to...

Trayvon sparked a movement that stands up to fascism and white supremacy. We need to hold him in our memories. February 5th marks five years and 339 days since Trayvon Martin’s memorial service; it would also be his 23rd birthday. The day is necessarily somber. Nearly six years ago, Trayvon’s death at the hands of white supremacist vigilante violence indicated the beginning of an escalating attack on Black lives and demanded that this nation confront its overtly racist past and present. The urgency of #Justice4TrayvonMartin turned into a global urgency to fight for Black lives — one which persists today....

Jeff Bezos’ blog, also known as the Washington Post, one of America’s most important newspapers which back in in the day was a bastion of investigative journalism, rewrote its State Of The Union headline following a massive backlash on social media from progressives/liberals or whatever you want to call the far left/social justice mob. The initial headline was tweeted by WaPo approximately one hour before the POTUS delivered his SOTU speech. The front-page headline reads: “|A call for bipartisanship”: https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/958554913486884864

A leading art gallery is facing a furious backlash after taking down a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece in a bid to 'provoke debate'. Manchester Art Gallery has temporarily removed John William Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs in an attempt to rethink historical artwork that 'presents the female body as either a 'passive decorative form' or a 'femme fatale'.'

It's a fine life, indeed! Hamilton's Tony-winning director Thomas Kail has signed on to direct a new film remake of Oliver! produced by Disney, Deadline reports. Rapper Ice Cube is slated to play the villainous Fagin in the movie musical that will feature a screenplay by Emmy winner Danny Strong (Empire, Game Change). Featuring a book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart and based on Charles Dickens' classic novel Oliver Twist, Oliver! follows a young orphan who escapes a workhouse and lands among a group of thieves headed up by Fagin. The show's beloved tunes include "Food, Glorious Food," "You've...

Elizabeth Warren might never live down the charge of falsely claiming Native American roots. The controversy emerged during the Democrat’s successful Senate run in Massachusetts in 2012, and it continues to dog her. In the throes of the 2016 presidential race, then-candidate Donald Trump tagged her with the nickname Pocahontas, and he has trotted it out virtually every chance he gets — even at a White House ceremony to recognize Native American soldiers who fought in some of the fiercest battles of World War II. Warren’s central offense dates back to the mid 1980s, when she first formally notified law...

Stunning Audacity – Clinton Tweets Support For Iranian Protests She Previously Helped Destroy…

If there’s a reason why Hollywood should just stay out of politics, especially gun politics, and this is your classic example. Ed Asner and Ed Weinberger, a screenwriter, decided to teach the National Rifle Association a history lesson on the left wing site Salon. It dropped a little before Christmas, and it ended with both men getting a face full of buckshot. They argued that our Founders were pro-gun control, which is odd given that the first shots fired in our American Revolution at the battles of Lexington and Concord, were in response to British soldiers trying to seize our...

Volunteers have criticised the Red Cross charity after receiving a communication telling them to remove crucifixes from the walls of their branches as the organisation looks to become more secular. The Belgian branches of the international aid organisation received an email from the Provincial Committee of the Red Cross in Liège to remove all crucifixes. André Rouffart, president of the Red Cross in Verviers, said: “We were asked to respect the principles of the Red Cross”, and not to distinguish between race or religious belief 7sur7 reports. Mr. Rouffart said there had been pushback from volunteers and other members on...

RUSH: By the way, I’m told Twitter is blowing up. I’ll tell you, folks, some of this stuff, I’m just getting sick of it. There is apparently a children’s book depicting a gay Santa in a biracial marriage, and now a gay nativity scene is being popularized called gaytivity, two Josephs kneeling over the baby Jesus. And there’s an article in a feminist publication called Refinery 29, describing the scene. “What if it wasn’t Mary and Joesph who met their child that night, but instead Murray and Joseph? Or Marty and Joseph?” Because, after all, they say, Jesus had two...