Free Republic

In a striking paradox, pro-meritocracy conservatives and pro-DEI Democrats alike can revel in the schadenfreude of Claudine Gay’s fall from grace—because her antics are just that ridiculous. In a since-deleted post to X, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard law professor, high-profile criminal defense attorney, and former college dean said Gay’s disgraced resignation was… “Karma.” You might recall the name from headlines a few years back—Sullivan once served as a faculty dean for Harvard’s Winthrop House, a position from which he was ousted after he agreed to represent Harvey Weinstein, in large part, due to Gay’s influence. Here’s this, from...

The concern about potential dilution of punishments for plagiarism is troubling. It underscores broader worries about ideological shifts impacting academic integrity. Striking a balance between fairness and maintaining the standards of meritocracy is crucial to preserve academia's credibility. The use of strategic weapons to counteract such trends highlights the escalating ideological battles within educational institutions. The outcome will undoubtedly shape the future landscape of academia and its foundational principles.

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story...

Andrew Slavitt, a former executive at the technology company tasked with saving HealthCare.gov and current second-in-command at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was granted an ethics waiver by the Department of Health and Human Services to begin working with his former company immediately.The waiver was granted despite Republican lawmakers’ concerns about Slavitt’s potential conflict of interest. The Daily Signal revealed those concerns in a story yesterday.Slavitt, a former OptumInsight/QSSI group vice president, left the company last month to work as the principal deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Obamacare and HealthCare.gov. His...

A new listing on a federal government job board is raising constitutional questions, as Capitol Police are looking to hire their own prosecutors. The listing for an attorney position, posted July 29 on USAJobs.gov, says in the description that the employee would "serve as a Special Assistant United States Attorney" in the Capitol Police's District Offices. The salary is between $145,094 and $186,368 per year. "This position is to represent the United States Government primarily prosecuting individuals and/or groups who have engaged in threats and/or acts of violence against Members of Congress, their staffs, United States Capitol Police employees, visitors...

New York Times story seen as effort to put spin on bad news Long before the New York Post's blockbuster, election-eve stories on Hunter Biden's laptop in 2020, investigative reporter and author Peter Schweizer documented the Biden family's international business of selling access to the White House for millions of dollars. Schweizer's 2018 book "Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends" and a follow-up, "Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite," presented evidence that five members of the Biden family cashed in while Joe Biden was vice president.

Canadian-born Diane Bederman called Trudeau a 'sanctimonious, self-serving, self-righteous, inept, unethical, immoral, and corrupt man, who can now add evil to the list.' Canadian-born Jewish author Diane Bederman blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as an “immoral” and “evil man” for the leader’s targeting of the vaccine free, saying the lessons learned from the Nuremberg Trials have been forgotten. “Here we are in 2022 and our leaders are scapegoating the non-vaccinated, blaming them for the continuation of the pandemic. Like other evil leaders, they divide rather than unite,” Bederman wrote in an January 10 opinion piece titled “Is Comparing Covid Policies...

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said on this week’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show” that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would do anything that former Donald Trump told him to do, “no matter how wrong or unethical.” Schiff said, “One of the most frequent questions I get from my constituents around the country is what do they really say. And this story of this chance meeting on a plane with Kevin McCarthy and him going off to completely misrepresent a conversation, you can see how duplicitous so many of my colleagues are. That conversation was in 2010. It was...

A high-ranking US Army officer has resigned and given up his pension after almost 20 years of service because of what he called President Biden’s “unethical, immoral and tyrannical” vaccine mandate. Lt. Col. Paul Douglas Hague said in a resignation letter tweeted by his wife, Katie Phipps Hague, that he was resigning from his 19-year career primarily because of the Pentagon requirement that all US military members be jabbed by mid-September. Katie Hague said in the tweet that her hubby was “walking away from all he’s worked for and believed in since he was an ROTC kid at UGA.” Hague,...

My research in bioethics focuses on questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good. To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic? ... But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight...

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is a master of prevarication and deflection. He holds an M.S. in BS and a Ph.D. in vacuous excuses. He’s a professor emeritus of duplicity and deception. As a prodigious suck-up, he’s the Eddie Haskell of lawyers. We can expect Rosenstein’s skill set to be on full display Wednesday when he finally and belatedly appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee as its first witness in an investigation into the origins and evolution of the fallacious Trump-Russia collusion probe. During his ignominious tenure at the Justice Department, Rosenstein was at the center of the Russia...

.....a spotlight has been cast on Hunter Biden's ventures not only in Ukraine, but in China, while Joe was vice president. Republicans are demanding that he testify on his work before Congress. For almost six years, the Hunter Biden China-connected firm has moved more than $2.5B into various automotive, technology, energy, and mining endeavors. Analysts point to the “ethical challenges” of Hunter doing such deals in China while his father was in the White House. “At a time when the Obama administration was trying to pivot to Asia, a policy that ultimately fell flat, one has to at least stop...

From a Moving Boat This video from out in the wild internet shows a person blasting away at an entire group of boars with a pistol from a moving boat. Even with the problem of wild hogs and boars here in the U.S., there are better ways to rid of the them. This is just crazy on so many levels, starting with the fact that one guy hands his 'buddy' a loaded handgun, and then the shooter unloads on the animals. They all looking like they were on a joy ride than on a hunt. This video was purportedly taken...

We’ve seen it time and time again: politicians will promise voters the positive change that they desire, only to conform to the current power structure in the end. Obama promised hope and change; Bernie promised much of the same, and then endorsed Crooked Hillary; and Trump will likely cave to the establishment as well, if he hasn’t already. And let’s not forget that all the people I just mentioned are strongly implicated in one instance of corruption or another. So, why does almost every politician turn out to be unethical? To answer this question, let’s consider the teachings of one...

The Clinton Foundation has confirmed it accepted a $1 million gift from Qatar while Hillary Clinton was U.S. secretary of state without informing the State Department, even though she had promised to let the agency review new donations from foreign governments. Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011 to mark the 65th birthday of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton's husband, and sought to meet the former U.S. president in person the following year to present him the check, according to an email from a foundation official to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta. The email, among thousands hacked from Podesta's...

The Justice Department moved Tuesday to fight a federal judge’s order that its lawyers undergo mandatory ethics training, digging in after the DOJ was accused of misleading the courts over President Obama's immigration executive actions. In filings Tuesday, the department said the order would "far exceed the bounds of appropriate remedies" and would cost the department millions. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, of Texas, had issued the order earlier this month, after alleging DOJ attorneys misled him about the implementation of Obama’s executive orders on illegal immigrants.

Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's vice-presidential running mate, sold stock in US banks on the same day he attended a confidential meeting where top level officials disclosed the sector was heading for a deep crisis. The congressman on Monday denied profiting from information gleaned from the meeting on 18 September 2008 when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, then treasury secretary Hank Paulson and others outlined their fears for the banking sector.

Governor Terry Branstad is crediting Ted Cruz for running an "old-fashioned", 99-county campaign that yielded victory in Monday night's Iowa Caucuses, but Branstad is joining the chorus criticizing Cruz for "questionable" campaign tactics. "This thing that they distributed on Caucus night saying that Dr. Carson was likely to drop out and his supporters should support Cruz, that is, I think, unethical and unfair," Branstad said this morning. "I think there'll be repercussions to that." Cruz has apologized to Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who finished fourth in the Caucuses on Monday night. Iowa Congressman Steve King, a Cruz backer, helped spread...

Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s most trusted confidante, is increasingly becoming a central figure in the email scandal that’s haunting her boss on the campaign trail, as Republicans and federal judges seek information about Clinton’s communications while she was running the State Department. The 2016 Democratic front-runner on Monday told a federal judge that Abedin — long considered her boss’s keeper and even dubbed her “shadow” — had her own email account on Clinton’s now infamous home-brewed server, “which was used at times for government business,” Clinton acknowledged. That’s an unusual arrangement, even for top brass at the State Department. Abedin...

Let’s say, just for kicks, you murdered your husband (or wife). Your neighbors have been suspicious ever since your nightly arguments suddenly stopped, right around the time you put something large in your trunk and drove off in the middle of the night. Now they see you driving his car and putting his suits and golf clubs up for sale on eBay. The police find your explanations implausible and contradictory, and then you tell the cops to direct all future questions to your lawyer. The good news is that you have fans. Some neighbors think you’re the cat’s pajamas. They...