Free Republic

As a lifelong reader of newspapers, and a devoted follower of the journalism profession, although not a part of it, I am sad to write this.  It's like a eulogy for a body long dead but failed to be given a proper burial.  Or like the M. Night Shyamalan movie "The Sixth Sense," where Bruce Willis' character walks the earth as a dead man until a boy who can see dead people leads him to realize his own fate and depart. Large, centralized news gathering operations are dead.  The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today--all the old-line...

As regular readers are no doubt aware, shifting demographics are affecting everything from the labor market, to homeownership, to race relations in America. In “The ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Recovery” for instance, we documented the stunning fact that in May, the number of foreign born workers lept 279K which means that, assuming the Household and Establishment surveys were congruent, there were just 1K native-born workers added in May of the total 280K jobs added. Alternatively, assuming the series, which is not seasonally adjusted, was indicative of seasonally adjusted data, then the 272K increase in total Household Survey civilian employment in May would...

In a nation that based its Declaration of Independence on the principle that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” a record 58 percent now say they would vote to elect “a generally well-qualified” atheist as president if their political party nominated such a person. In a poll conducted June 2-7, Gallup asked 771 adults living in the United States this question: “Between now and the 2016 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates—their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president...

Complete Headline: Hillary Clinton is going to lose: She doesn’t even see the frustrated progressive wave that will nominate Bernie Sanders Hillary Clinton went to New York’s Roosevelt Island earlier this month to relaunch her campaign for president. Her first kickoff fell flat, perhaps because she herself didn’t attend, opting instead to send a video greeting card in which people she still insists on calling ‘everyday Americans’ shared their life plans. (To go to school! Plant a garden! Get married!) She came on at the end to say she had plans of her own that include being president, and that...

Last year’s most popular baby names were Benjamin and Emma, but this year the top boy and girl names could actually be the same. 2015 is looking like the year of the gender-neutral baby names, according to a midyear report by BabyCenter.com. Currently, names like Amari, Karter, Phoenix, Quinn and Reese have been making the largest leaps in popularity. “As usual, baby names are reflecting a larger cultural shift,” says BabyCenter’s Global Editor in Chief Linda Murray. “Millennials are an open-minded and accepting group, and they don’t want their children to feel pressured to conform to stereotypes that might be...

The mainstream media (MSM) are hailing the release of recent polls purporting to show “progressive” perspectives on several social issues -- i.e., same-sex marriage, homosexuality, legalization of marijuana, even abortion -- either equaling or, in some cases outstripping, more “traditional” viewpoints. A Gallup poll released on May 22nd, for example, was headlined “On Social Ideology, the Left Catches Up to the Right.”  Never mind that other Gallup polls, such as one released on June 2nd, or one put out on June 4th, provide cautionary findings. The MSM aren’t interested unless “the news” can be spun leftward. This essay explores two...

What do we call me? I’m a 26-year-old writer who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. I’m a straight white man with a single-speed bike and a mustache. I studied liberal arts in college, and I have ideas about stuff, you guys. Millennial? Hipster? Yuppie? All of these, or none? We don’t have a term that quite encapsulates this corner of the despicable millenn-intelligensia. And like any other privileged member of a so-called “creative class,” being called a hipster offends me for its inaccuracy. I demand to be snarked in precise terms. Let's consider something new: Yuccies. Young Urban...

Why are parts of Germany formerly under the enforced secularism of the Communist party rediscovering charismatic religion? In its story of May 16, 2015, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel carried a story tiled (on its cover at least) “Are Evangelicals Winning the World?” [That is my translation. The German wording is “Are Evangelicals conquering…” I substituted the less martial-sounding English “winning”. To the best of my knowledge, there is a remarkable scarcity of Evangelical suicide bombers.] The story states that Evangelical congregations are generally growing in Germany. But it concentrates on two congregations: one in Stuttgart, in western Germany, the...

In “This Is What Happens When A Millennial Tries To Get A Job,” we highlighted 1) high youth unemployment (U-6 at nearly 14%) and 2) the failure of America’s university system to prepare new entrants for the job market, on the way to painting a rather grim picture for America’s newly-minted college graduates. We’ve also been keen to emphasize the fact that the “strong” labor market is anything but, as wage growth is essentially non-existent and upside “surprises” benefit from the now ubiquitous “vanishing worker.” Given this, it’s no surprise that many of America’s best and brightest find themselves serving...

Tear down that cross and toss it in the wood chipper because the American church is toast. So goes conventional wisdom after recent revelations from the Pew Research Center, which found that in just 7 years, the percentage of Christians in the United States dropped nearly 8 points. The news was met with uncontrolled fits of glee from liberal publications like Salon, where author Patricia Miller gloated that the benefits from the decline of Christianity would be, “huge.” No doubt the scores of natural disaster victims around the globe who have profited from all the atheist relief trucks rolling in...

Nearly everywhere, in red states and blue, abortions are down since 2010, with an overall drop of about 12 percent.

Believe it or not, this isn’t another article about Bruce / Caitlyn Jenner, though the wider question of gender bending could probably be squirreled away in here somewhere. Gallup took time out from polling people about the presidential candidates they like and asked Americans their annual set of questions on taboo subjects and how accepting we tend to be of actions which have been traditionally shunned. If you only went by the headline (Once Taboo, Some Behaviors Now More Acceptable in U.S.) you might think that we’ve suddenly morphed into a nation of hedonists, but the phrase “more acceptable”...

Attendance at the Southern Baptist church on Scenic Drive had dwindled to about 15 most Sundays... There was another congregation...that had been meeting in living rooms and whose pastor carried business cards that quoted from John 4:35: “Look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.” Maybe they wanted to buy the church... .... selling to the Arabic Baptists might be their best hope of keeping the church from closing. They prayed and then took a vote, and now, a few miles away in a suburban living room, the members of the fledgling Arab congregation were considering an opportunity they...

Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the...

Christians decided going to church was enough, rather than advocating Christian morals and values. Jews decided even God wasn’t necessary.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 12, 2015 If Ben Shapiro’s simply stated point isn’t enough to drive home the idea that the latest Pew survey on religious life in America reported absolutely nothing new, just check out one of the latest episodes of the Kardashians in which Kim Kardashian has to Google who baptized Jesus before concluding that she wanted to “find a guy named John” to baptize her daughter, North West. What’s worse, the “guy named John” concept, the...

New Evangelization, where art thou? The Pew Research Center reports that the number of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen sharply, to the tune of nearly eight percentage points in only seven years.  The survey, carried out in 2014, was the second "Religious Landscape Study" Pew conducted since 2007. Based on the 35,000 people the institute interviewed, the American populace is 21% Catholic. It was 23.9% seven years ago.  While the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian dropped from 78.4% in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014, non-Christian religions are growing. Islam showed the greatest gains, growing half a percentage point...

Yesterday, we began our high-minded graduation speech to the Class of 2015. We explained how the young graduates were not only the most heavily indebted in history, but also the least likely to be able to pay their debts. Median wages have been going down since these graduates were about five years old… So have economic growth rates. Today, we continue the speech no one wants us to give… You are heirs to claptrap, nonsense, bogus theories, and trillions of dollars in debt. The systems, programs, and institutions your parents set up are mostly worthless scams. Worse, they produce outcomes...

The U.S. has become significantly less Christian in the last eight years as the share of American adults who espouse no systematic religious belief increased sharply, a major new study found. For what is likely the first time in U.S. history – certainly the first since the early days of the country – the actual number of American Christians has declined. Christianity, however, remains by far the nation’s dominant religious tradition, according to the new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The rapid increase in the number of adults without ties to traditional religious institutions has strong implications for...

An extensive study by the Pew Research Center has revealed that Christians are declining sharply in America in terms of population share, while the religiously unaffiliated are rising, and now make up a larger share than American Catholics. The rise of religious intermarriages was one trend linked to the growth of the unaffiliated. The report, which was released on Tuesday, stated: "The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics. Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately 3 percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share...

Christianity is in sharp decline in America, according to new research from the Pew Research Center, making for a significantly less Christian country than that of just seven years ago. The number of Christians dropped by almost 8 percentage points in seven years to 71 percent, and the trend holds across race, gender, education, and geographic dimensions, though Christianity still dominates American religious identity at 70 percent, USA Today said. "It's remarkably widespread," Alan Cooperman, director of religion research for the Pew Research Center, said, according to The Washington Post. "The country is becoming less religious as a whole, and...