Free Republic

Heather Mac Donald warns us that the quality of scientific research in the United States is in peril, in a must-read essay titled "Diversity Over Discovery," with the subtitle "Biden's war on merit puts America's scientific edge at risk." The immediate subject of concern is President Biden's appointment... to head the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific...

They may look like America – but they don’t think like Americans. This article originally appeared in PJMmedia.com. Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti-American. Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris, whose antipathy for America oozes from her...

It doesn't take a particularly impressive imagination to predict how the liberal media would cover one of former President Donald Trump's sons if he were to have a major crack and alcohol addiction. Stories would begin with the notion that Trump was a terrible father who's too self-absorbed and absent to raise his children right. CNN would certainly strike that pose. But on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," host Brian Stelter was deeply impressed with Hunter Biden's "extraordinary" and "breathtaking" memoir. Stelter gleefully promoted every tabloidish Trump-trashing book -- from Omarosa's to Anthony Scaramucci's -- but he's doing the exact opposite now....

A Minnesota resident captured a video of the bushy-tailed rodent’s drunken smorgasbord A close-up photo of a squirrel sitting on a wooden rail while holding a nut to its mouth. The squirrel has speckled gray and brown fur, and its mouth is open as it goes in for a bite. The background is green and black. It may seem a little absurd, but wildlife getting drunk off of fermenting fruits isn't a rare occurrence. Bats, moose and birds are known to consume copious amounts of fermented fruits. (likeaduck via Flickr under CC BY 2.0) Last week, a wide-eyed, tipsy squirrel...

The racist “antiracist” madness has now come home to my alma mater, Louisiana State University. Before we go further, I should point out that this is the flagship public university in a very red state governed by a Republican legislature and a conservative Democratic governor. The LSU Faculty Senate has a proposal before it — one that a source within the university tells me is fully expected to pass.

Editor's Note: The following piece contains graphic language.The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it. In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson's tweeting that he supports "citizen soldiers" in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science declared that "they...

I have worked in academic science my entire life and I have never seen any sign of racism, systemic or otherwise. On the contrary, I have seen people go to considerable lengths to aid able minorities. Yet a petition is circulating nationally complaining that: women and “people of color” are under-represented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math); that this is “systemic racism;” and that the cure is to change science (although it isn’t put quite like that). If enough signatures can be gathered, the petition is apparently to be published in Science, one of the two leading general-science journals (the...

President Trump has ordered an end to training on “white privilege” and “critical race theory” in the federal bureaucracy. The directive is a good first step toward removing identity politics from federal operations. Next up should be the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted annually to cultivating race- and sex-based grievance in the sciences. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all embraced the idea that science is pervaded by systemic bias that handicaps minorities and women. Those agencies have taken on the job of extirpating such inequity on the...

Last year, students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s most prestigious public schools, marked a map hanging in a hallway with their families’ far-flung places of origin: from Seoul to Beijing to Hyderabad. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of TJ students were white; today, 79 percent are minority, most from Asian immigrant families. TJ is a testament to American meritocracy’s melting pot—but last week, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand announced a plan to reduce the number of Asian students at this selective high school. In a four-hour online...

FROM THE ARCHIVES: In 2013, I received a controversial 600-plus page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity officers teaches that “healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian” men hold an unfair advantage over other races, and warns in great detail about a so-called “White Male Club.” “Simply put, a healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian male receives many unearned advantages of social privilege, whereas a black, homosexual, atheist female in poor health receives many unearned disadvantages of social privilege,” reads a statement in the manual created by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). The manual, which was obtained by the...

There’s pin-demonium brewing at American Airlines. Top brass at the nation’s largest commercial jet carrier is facing turbulence from within after it announced that flight attendants are now allowed to wear Black Lives Matter pins on their uniforms while on duty. The move has irked some of American’s white New York staffers, including those who have spouses or relatives who are cops — because they consider the BLM movement divisive and anti-police, saying it promotes or condones violence. “I take offense to this,” one veteran flight attendant said in an email to airline management obtained by The Post. “Serious offense....

Institutional racism and systemic racism are terms bandied about these days without much clarity. Being 84 years of age, I have seen and lived through what might be called institutional racism or systemic racism. Both operate under the assumption that one race is superior to another. It involves the practice of treating a person or group of people differently based on their race. Negroes, as we proudly called ourselves back then, were denied entry to hotels, restaurants and other establishments all over the nation, including the north. Certain jobs were entirely off-limits to Negroes. What school a child attended was...

VIDEO Former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum just left rehab to reveal that he suffered from ALCOHOL ADDICTION. Got that? ALCOHOL ADDICTION. And Andrew wants you to know that he had to battle against the shame of his ALCOHOL ADDICTION. Oh, and in case you don't know, Gillum suffered from ALCOHOL ADDICTION which he talked about at length in this video about ALCOHOL ADDICTION and only ALCOHOL ADDICTION.

The ancestral homeland of most < a href="https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/samplechapter/0/2/0/5/0205962173.pdf">(black Americans is West Africa). Other parts of Africa—Angola and East Africa—were caught up in the great Atlantic slave trade that carried Africans to the New World from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. But West Africa was the center of the trade in human beings. Knowing the history of West Africa therefore is important for understanding the people who became the first African Americans.That history, however, is best understood within the larger context of the history and geography of the African continent. This chapter begins, therefore, with a survey of the larger...

Faculty wants “dedicated study space” for Black students only, plus enforced “unconscious bias” training. Issuing the ultimate woke wishlist, The Faculty Association at California State university has demanded that all “Black Native, and Indigenous students” should be given free tuition as a “redress for systemic anti-Black racism in the CSU.” The CFA has also charged that “the historical and longstanding infrastructures of universities” should be dismantled because they are “fundamentally grounded in a white supremacist colonial discourse and culture.” Campus Reform reports that the CFA also wants to overturn the ban on affirmative action, and is arguing that “racial pay...

Last month has proven to be catastrophic for the credibility of one of Russia’s most touted air defense systems. The troubles for the Pantsir S1 air defense system in Libya began when Khalifa Haftar’s yearlong Tripoli offensive against the Ankara-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) began to collapse. Believed to have been supplied to the Libyan strongman as early as last year by his backers in the Gulf, the Russian system was meant to be used as a trump card against Turkey’s combat unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) air interdiction operations. Yet, after a major GNA counteroffensive last month, and the...

Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show got a late start on Saturday night due to “technical difficulties” — but when the former New York state judge did appear nearly 15 minutes into her show, her usually perfectly coifed hair appeared disheveled and she seemed to be tipsy in her verbal delivery. “We apologize for the technical difficulties,” Pirro said when she finally appeared about a quarter into the one-hour broadcast after anchor Jackie Ibanez covered for her initial absence. This was enough for the liberal Twitter community to attack her and say that she was drunk. One Twitter member even slowed...

Harvard, the crème de la crème of Ivy League education, has been proudly engaging in racial discrimination — in 2020.  Harvard has a sordid history of employing and supporting racists and engaging in antisemitic limitations on the admission of Jews. But this article isn't about the past; it is about present-day discrimination of a different group of Harvard-hated students: Asians. Asians have had their share of discrimination in American history, recall the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese internment camps as examples. But the Asian U.S. community has proven themselves to be resilient and forward-looking, and they have effectively jumped over...

Here's a part: Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of...

The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system's 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party. It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment. Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis...