Free Republic

Another shot was fired in the never-ending battle over Texas textbooks last week, when Roni Dean-Burren of Pearland, Texas, posted a screenshot of her 15-year-old son’s new world geography textbook. The picture was of a map with a caption that exemplifies—perhaps unintentionally, in this case—the controversial changes Texas has made to its social-studies textbooks in recent years: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” The next day, Dean-Burren—a former Pearland English teacher and now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston—followed...

There’s hardly an evangelical who doesn’t know about Wheaton College. Alma Mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, Wheaton boasts a student body of superior intellect and an education rivaling much of the Ivy League. Wheaton College graduates can boast of presidential speech writers and Speakers of the United States House of Representatives along with doctors and executives and professors and missionaries and pastors across the globe. But Wheaton is different. Founded by an anti-slavery father and son, Jonathan and Charles Blanchard, Wheaton was established as a chain in the Underground Railroad to help runaway slaves. Wheaton’s distinctive has always been...

Every morning at 2 a.m., they heard a kick on the door and a threat: Get up or get beaten. For the next 16 hours, No. 31 and his wife stood in the factory that owned them with their aching hands in ice water. They ripped the guts, heads, tails and shells off shrimp bound for overseas markets, including grocery stores and all-you-can-eat buffets across the United States. After being sold to the Gig Peeling Factory, they were at the mercy of their Thai bosses, trapped with nearly 100 other Burmese migrants. Children worked alongside them, including a girl so...

On Sunday, The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey, a veteran of Newsweek and the Washington Post, furiously tried to connect the Second Amendment to the protection of slavery before the Civil War. Dickey touted how Charles Dickens and "several British visitors to American shores...discerned...[that] people who owned slaves...wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile." He also wildly claimed that "the Second Amendment...was essentially written to protect the interests of Southerners" to crush slave revolts: "To keep slaves in slavery, you needed militias and they needed to be armed. Such is the fundamental 'right' assured by the Second...

German television station ARD has produced footage documenting the slave trade being conducted by the radical terrorist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) through a liaison office in Turkey. Two correspondents from the TV channel filmed a Yazidi family buying their relatives to save them from ISIL and spoke to witnesses. The Yazidi family contacted a liaison office of ISIL in Turkey through a Kurdish man named Abu Mital, who works as an intermediary for ISIL, in order to purchase a mother, her three children and an 11-year-old boy from ISIL and return them to their...

The trial of five Muslim men and two women accused of sexually exploiting a group of young girls over a period of 13 years heard Friday that the girls were worked "like slaves" in between forced sex acts. A witness told a court in Sheffield, northern England, that she and other girls were held under lock and key by Karen MacGregor, who is accused of befriending the girls before making them available for sex with older men. The witness, who was in her teens when the alleged abuse took place and is now 43, told police that she went to...

The world is moved by music. There is, perhaps, no more compelling construction than a melody to elevate and embolden a cause. Anti-slavery abolitionists understood its power and its ability to sustain them when defeat loomed all around. Abolitionists were the targets of intense political persecution and verbal and physical violence. William Lloyd Garrison, by the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, was brutally attacked for his anti-slavery beliefs, nearly lynched in Boston by a pro-slavery mob. There were many songs of abolition to declare Liberty and to encourage those weary in the fight. These stanzas from an anti-slavery hymn,...

The Language of Liberty celebrates the freedom of the individual. The language of Servitude exalts the tyranny of the State. The statements which follow reveal the mighty difference between those who fear the power of freedom and those who relish it. In their own words are revealed the true intentions–in both the past and the present– of those who speak the language of Servitude: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the...

It is amazing how many different ways the same thing can be said, creating totally different impressions. For example, when President Barack Obama says that defeating ISIS is going to take a long time, how is that different from saying that he is going to do very little, very slowly? It is saying the same thing in different words. Defenders of the administration's policies may cite how many aerial sorties have been flown by American planes against ISIS. There have been thousands of these sorties, which sounds very impressive. But what is less impressive -- and more indicative -- is...

In 2014, Sister Hatune Dogan had been rescuing Christian and Yazidi girls from ISIS captivity for eight months, but she was desperate. If only the world could see the harm being done, understand that rescues were possible, people would open their hearts and their wallets, [so she] found an independent British filmmaker, Edward Watts.. In an email dated February 6, 2015, Watts’s producer, Rosie Garthwaite, wrote: "Hatune you will be the lead story in a documentary about women living under IS.” Watts spent nine days in Germany, Turkey, and Iraq with Sister Hatune. She introduced him to Sheikh Khaire, the...

Georgetown University has announced it will rename two buildings which were named for former presidents with ties to slavery. No word yet on the Jesuit university recanting all the honors it has bestowed on pro-abortion politicians. Now, according to the Washington Post, the Jesuits owned slaves and sold them to pay off debt? Wow. I'd never heard that. That's a pretty large and glaring gap in Matt's historical knowledge right there. Kind of embarrassing, huh? So that's clearly a bad thing the Jesuits did. But it seems to me that it's kinda' interesting the timing of G'town's decision to rename...

As the world prayed for Paris, more than three thousand miles east another atrocity was being uncovered in Iraq - two mass graves containing the bodies of older Yazidi women. Sophy Ridge explains why we can't ignore them In the desert dust of Sinjar, in north west Iraq, a walking stick lies on the ground. Strewn casually alongside it are a couple of pairs of scissors, some household keys and a shoe. Bank notes flutter in the dirt. But, if you look a little closer, the scene becomes a horror show. Clumps of hair and fragments of bone poke grotesquely...

Election Day 2016 will produce a shattering crash larger than anything the pundits anticipate because the revolutionary economic and social changes occurring in the United States have now pushed both the burgeoning new majority and the conservative Republicans’ counterrevolution beyond their tipping points. The United States is being transformed by revolutions remaking the country at an accelerating and surprising pace. Witness the revolutions in technology, the Internet, big data and energy, though just as important are the tremendous changes taking place in immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the family, religious observance and gender roles. These are reaching their apexes in...

Rubbing Resentments Raw is a main theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s analysis of the Alinsky model of community organizing and political activism to gain power by conflict over the establishment. Her senior dissertation on “There is Only the Fight” not only reveals the continuing, enormous effect of Saul Alinsky on Hillary Rodham today, but also shows the immersion in his philosophy that directs her drive to become America’s first woman president. She says of her role model: “Saul Alinsky is more than a man who has created a particular approach to community organizing; he is the articulate proponent of what...

--SNIP-- Her story highlights the brutal realities of human trafficking in Mexico and the United States, an underworld that has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Mexican girls like Karla. Human trafficking has become a trade so lucrative and prevalent, that it knows no borders and links towns in central Mexico with cities like Atlanta and New York. U.S. and Mexican officials both point to a town in central Mexico that for years has been a major source of human trafficking rings and a place where victims are taken before being eventually forced into prostitution.

... Although Trump glibly describes "Operation Wetback" as moving undocumented immigrants "waaay south," this program was at best inhumane and at worst horrific. Back then, the government rounded up suspected undocumented immigrants and sent them deep into the Mexican interior, where they were abandoned with next to nothing. The transports across the border were reportedly "indescribable scenes of human misery and tragedy." In one instance, 88 deportees died from heat stroke in the desert. Other deportees were sent to the Mexican Gulf Coast by ship, in vessels described by historians as an "eighteenth century slave ship" or "penal hell ship."...

Many of my columns speak highly of the wisdom of our nation's founders. Every once in a while, I receive an ugly letter sarcastically asking what do I think of their wisdom declaring blacks "three-fifths of a human." It's difficult to tell whether such a question is prompted by ignorance or is the fruit of an ongoing agenda to undermine American greatness. Let's examine some facts about our founders and slavery. At the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, slaves were 40 percent of the population of southern colonies. Apportionment in the House of Representatives and the number of electoral...

n an online rant, a Bronx public school principal has likened standardized testing to slavery, redlining and crack cocaine in damaging the lives of minorities. “Public school high-stakes standardized testing is a form of modern-day slavery, and it is designed to continue the proliferation of inequality,” Cornerstone Academy for Social Action Middle School Principal Jamaal Bowman says in an Aug. 31 blog entry titled “The Tyranny of Standardized Testing.” “America was born of horror for black people and that horror continues today for brown and poor people as well. Slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, crack cocaine and now standardized testing were...

This weekend, Ben Carson did what he does best. He clearly and plainly stated a mainstream conservative view that most Republican politicians dare not utter — in this case, that the debate over abortion is comparable to the debate over slavery. Speaking to NBC’s Chuck Todd, Carson said: “During slavery — and I know that’s one of those words you’re not supposed to say, but I’m saying it — during slavery, a lot of slave owners thought they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave, anything that they chose. And what if the abolitionists had said,...

With Bernie Sanders advocating socialism in America, and Hillary Clinton saying she “loves Denmark,” how do the people who actually live under socialism feel about their life? According to the meme above, socialism in Denmark isn’t going nearly as well as Americans think. The Blaze reports on how Socialism actually led to the death of millions of people in the 20th century: