Free Republic

Why racial preferences in college admissions hurt minority students -- and shroud the education system in dishonesty. Why racial preferences in college admissions hurt minority students -- and shroud the education system in dishonesty. Affirmative action in university admissions started in the late 1960s as a noble effort to jump-start racial integration and foster equal opportunity. But somewhere along the decades, it has lost its way. Over time, it has become a political lightning rod and one of our most divisive social policies. It has evolved into a regime of racial preferences at almost all selective schools -- preferences so...

If an incredibly diverse film featuring woke politics and broad representation both in front of and behind the camera can't satisfy the mob, nothing will.Will anything ever be enough to satisfy the woke mob? One might think that a cast filled with non-white actors might win them over. Or, maybe a movie celebrating immigrants and Latino culture and identity could excite? But of course not, that would make far too much sense.Movie-musical “In the Heights” is under fire for “insufficient representation” in the cast. Apparently, having a black and Latino cast is no longer sufficient, as intersectionality dictates that this...

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Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said on Sunday that “not much was accomplished, but no damage was done” during President Biden’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. Christie said on ABC's “This Week” that while he didn't believe Biden accomplished much, the president avoided any major mistakes. “I think the bar was low because he didn't get in conflicts with anybody. There wasn't any kind of difficult moments except for the one with Kaitlan Collins,” Christie said, referring to a heated exchange when the CNN White House reporter asked Biden why he was confident Putin would...

Eurointelligence reports Swiss Reject Climate ChangeA climate change referendum in Switzerland just went down in flames led by 18-34 year old voters. After Switzerland dropped its negotiations with the EU, the country has now rejected a climate-protection law in a referendum. Concretely, they rejected all three parts of the law in separate votes: on CO2, on pesticides, and on drinking water. We agree with the Swiss journalist Mathieu von Rohr that this failure is not merely important in its own right, but symptomatic for the difficulties facing Green politics in general. It is one thing for people to pretend they...

Iran’s president-elect said Monday he will not meet U.S. President Joe Biden nor negotiate over Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its support of hardline regional Islamic terror groups. Judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi called himself as a “defender of human rights” when asked about his involvement in the 1988 mass execution of some 5,000 people, the official IRNA news agency reports. Raisi made the comments in his first post-election press conference in Tehran. He warned “the U.S. is obliged to lift all oppressive sanctions against Iran” while demanding a return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement...

Just type the words IRS, Christian, and Bible in your search engine and you’ll get a flood of results, most of them starting with headlines like this: “IRS denies Christian nonprofit tax exemption, saying biblical values are Republican.” Or this, “IRS denies tax-exempt status to Christian nonprofit group because 'Bible teachings are typically affiliated with the Republican Party'.” Naturally, there has been outrage among Christian conservatives over this ruling, pointing to this as yet another example of the IRS’s anti-Christian, anti-conservative bias. That’s also why most of the commentary has focused on the egregious ruling itself, which is being appealed....

Random selection is not generally an approach that most people opt for in the selection of doctors or even restaurants or a movie. However, it appears to be the new model for some in higher education. Former Barnard College mathematics professor Cathy O’Neil has written a column calling for “random selection” of all college graduates to guarantee racial diversity. It is ever so simple: “Never mind optional standardized tests. If you show interest, your name goes in a big hat.” She is not the only one arguing for blind or random admissions. Recently, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced...

CNN anchor Brian Stelter said Sunday on his show “Reliable Sources” that the news media is nationalizing outrage to the point that it is “almost paragraphic.” Time magazine columnist David French said, “What’s really important to understand is we live in something called negative partisanship. That means people are Republicans not so much because they love Republican ideas but because they dislike Democrats. People are Democrats not because they like the ideals but because they don’t like Republicans. There is a market for justification of that animosity. In other words, if I’m on Twitter, at any moment, there’s always somebody...

Stories across Illinois and most of America now report furious parents standing up against what’s bundled under the term “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, widely taught in K-12 schools. Those who know what CRT is don’t like it. A new Economist/YouGov poll found opposition beating support by 58% to 38%. And opponents feel strongly. Those with “very unfavorable” views of CRT outnumber those with “very favorable” views” by 53% to 25%. Opposition is even more intense when specific tenets of CRT are polled. What is CRT? Why the intense opposition? Does only the “right wing” oppose its teachings, as Gov....

ROME — Pope Francis called for greater openness to migrants and refugees Sunday, joining the United Nations in celebrating World Day of Refugees. “Let us open our heart to refugees; let us make their sorrows and their joys our own; let us learn courageous resilience from them!” the pope urged the crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for his weekly Angelus message and blessing.

WASHINGTON, Thursday, June 20. The entire army of invasion was set in motion this morning by a rumor that the rebels were extending their lines and advancing within reaching distances of our own outposts. The Sixty-ninth was early in the day advanced to Ball's Cross Roads. The battery of the Eighth was placed so as to cover the four roads diverging at that point. The Twenty-eighth was moved up to support the Sixty-ninth. The Ohio Regiments were in position in advance of the Sixty-ninth, and the Connecticut Regiment occupied the point at the junction of the Leesburgh Turnpike with the...

<p>Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media.</p><p>The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps.</p>

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…… ” So goes the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair exactly 68 years ago today. Their execution casts a morbid shadow over Plath’s book, just as it did over the United States, and it is seen by many as the nadir of America’s engagement with the cold war. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in...

More than 300 cases of heart inflammation after Covid-19 vaccinations have been reported in young people, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday. “The case are rare,” she said. “Over 20 million adolescents and young adults [have been] vaccinated in the United States.” The teenaged boys all looked like they were having heart attacks. They complained of chest pain and general discomfort, and tests looked at first as if they were suffering an acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack. But they weren’t. Instead, the seven youths ages 14 to 19 were suffering from a very...

I never celebrated Father’s Day growing up. My father left my mother after three years of marriage when I was 15 months old. With the debilitating legal impediments of Jim Crow still on the books in Charlotte, N.C., my father left Mom with two kids, one on the way, no skills, and no support. He was now free. I was fatherless. That was April 1960, four years before LBJ declared his “unconditional war on poverty.” My father choosing to abandon his family was a seismic event that disrupted the trajectory of our lives for good. Strangely, 1960 was also seismic...

Remember long gas lines under President Jimmy Carter? Gas is now over $3 per gallon. This is higher than it was under the Carter administration, $2.40, when accounting for inflation. Under Trump, it dropped under $2. We’re about to see deja vu of the Carter years with inflation, as Biden creates a legacy of attacking poor and low-income Americans right after entering office. He’s fostering this by handing out massive amounts of paper money in stimulus funds to special interest groups, and the pet pork is about to continue in his massive $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which is really a...

In Germany as in the United States, the Left pursues its agenda at the expense of the truth, ignoring the reality of jihad violence and wildly exaggerating a terror threat from so-called “right-wing extremists.” If the facts don’t match the narrative, alter the facts to fit the narrative. “Greens look for neo-Nazi – find German-Iranian!,” translated from “Grüne suchen Neonazi – finden Deutsch-Iraner!,” JournalistenWatch, June 17, 2021: With their clumsy attempt to ascribe a racist motive to a dramatic attack on a playground in Dortmund, the Greens have now fallen particularly hard on the nose. What happened: On May 9,...

To many in America, the West coast and the East coast seem to be the only regions that matter. There’s California, New York and Washington, DC. Why bother with flyover America? But as I traveled across America, I realized that it is flyover country that truly makes America great and provides its solid ground of values and patriotism. When my son accepted a call to Edenton First Baptist Church in Southwestern Ohio, we had to use Google to find it. Edenton doesn’t have any businesses, just a few homes, Stonelick Lake, and my son’s church. Just weeks before, there was...

After vehemently rejecting the possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 virus being leaked from a lab in China for more than a year, suddenly the American left-liberal has started to consider the possibility. When former president Donald Trump had suggested the possibility, it was dismissed as his wild imagination, but now that president Biden has ordered a probe into the possibility, the media is forced to wake up and question the national origin theory of the virus. The lab-leak theory got another boost after thousands of mails of Dr Anthony Fauci were obtained under Freedom of Information Act revealed that Wuhan Institute...