Free Republic

Protesters have defaced a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist Matthias Baldwin, dousing it with paint and spray-painting the word “colonizer” on the pedestal. It was not immediately clear if the protesters were part of an organized group such as Antifa. The graffiti has since been cleaned off the statue, as Joe Walsh, a member of the Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park, told National Review in an email. The statue itself stands outside Philadelphia City Hall. The statue was vandalized at some point during the days of demonstrations that occurred in Philadelphia, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office said in an email....

Agents detained Anthony Smith, a social studies teacher and one of the organizers of the Philadelphia Coalition for Racial Economic and Legal Justice (Philly for REAL Justice), at his home Wednesday morning, his attorney Paul Hetznecker said. His arrest came just days after he was lauded in an article in Philadelphia Magazine for his activism. U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain has scheduled a news conference Thursday to announce the indictments on charges related to “police vehicle arsons.” Sources familiar with the investigation said it is tied to the unrest that roiled the city in May after the police killing of...

Former Los Angeles and Oakland Raiders defensive end Anthony Smith was accused of murdering four men over the course of a decade, and he was convicted Thursday for three of those killings.

Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity "Germans - think with your blood!" Bismarck's exhortation goes far to explain why liberal thinkers have often had difficulties with nationalism. It exalts the visceral above the intellectual and conformity above individuality, it is suspicious of internationalism, and neurotic about "foreigners", and its bottom line always seems to be the use of force to secure the national way of life or "national identity" - what German pioneers of nationalism called the Volksgeist. The era of nationalism, launched by the French Revolution, has been the era of "total" world wars, in which nation-states have...