Free Republic

Since the late 19th century, school yearbooks have been a ubiquitous and mostly unchanging element of American school life. Decade after decade, they deliver a predictable mix of class, club, and team photos, cheesy graphics, and cringey comments. But the most consistent feature of yearbooks may be what they don’t include—references to political upheaval or resistance movements. As public schools across the United States face heightened censorship and the threat of funding losses for noncompliance, school yearbooks remind us that there is nothing new about political censorship in schools. A few rare examples also reveal that there some students and...

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird hardly needs an introduction, as I expect everyone in the world has read it, or has seen the film starring Gregory Peck. (If you haven’t read it, perhaps you should.) Lee, incidentally, went to visit the film set, and had this to say about Peck: “an inspired performance. In some mysterious way, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch transcended illusion.” If that seems a tad clichéd and not especially insightful, then I’m afraid to say that this is the general tenor of the nonfiction pieces in The Land of Sweet Forever , alongside eight previously unseen...

(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City.

Men aren’t vanishing from fiction. The truth is more complicated (Cannot be posted due to FR rules.)

President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that Americans may "not even have income tax to pay" in the near future, saying tariff-driven revenue could allow for the historic elimination of the federal income tax under his tenure. Trump told a press gaggle after his cabinet meeting that "at some point in the not too distant future you won’t even have income tax to pay," arguing that revenue the government is collecting under his administration is now "so great… so enormous." "Whether you get rid of it or just keep it around for fun or have it really low, much lower than...

Avatar: Fire and Ash has had its first few screenings for press on Monday, and the early reaction suggests James Cameron can celebrate yet another billion dollar box office mega hit. While official critics reviews for Fire and Ash are embargoed till closer to the film's Dec. 19 release date, 20th Century Studios allowed press to release social media reaction to screenings this week. The third installment in Cameron's groundbreaking Avatar series, sees the action return to Pandora after the events of 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water, and introduces the "Ash" people, fire-themed Na'vi clan. Fire and Ash stars...

A graduate assistant was removed from her position amid investigations into a contested discrimination report filed by a disgruntled student who repeatedly referenced the Bible in an essay response to an article about gender stereotypes — for a course taught by a transgender instructor. In her essay, which was supposed to cover “how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender,” University of Oklahoma student Samantha Fulnecky presented a Biblically-fueled tirade against the notion that there are multiple genders. The psychology course’s professor, graduate student Mel Curth, who uses “she/they” pronouns, failed Fulnecky on the grounds that she neglected...

These are some texts my mother has sent me: ‘They found a mole on my back . . .’ ‘I think Janet may have been contacted by ISIS . . .’ ‘Madeline, the guest room is haunted . . .’ For the reader’s peace of mind: the mole was benign, Janet has not been contacted by the Islamic State and the guest room, well, that remains to be seen. I’ve always accepted my mother’s overuse of ellipses as an idiosyncrasy of an elderly texter. But she doesn’t reserve the ‘. . .’ for ominous messages. When I told her the...

A new research project by Israeli and international scholars has digitally transcribed the texts featured in hundreds of thousands of fragments from the celebrated Cairo Geniza, as well as thousands of additional Hebrew manuscripts, the National Library of Israel announced on Monday. The project, dubbed MiDRASH (which is meant to loosely correspond to Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script), was launched in 2023 after securing a €10 million ($11.5 million) grant over six years from the EU’s European Research Council (ERC). Virtually all the 400,000 fragments from the geniza have...

A staff member at a Buddhist temple heard a knock while explaining to a relative how to get a death certificate.A 65-year-old Thai woman has just experienced everyone’s worst nightmare: waking up in a coffin. On Sunday, the Wat Rat Prakong Tham Buddhist Temple outside of Bangkok posted a video of a white, open coffin in the back of a pickup truck. Inside is an extremely thin woman dressed in an orange skirt and a white top, clearly moving her arms as bystanders watch in shock. Emergency workers then move her onto a gurney and load her into an ambulance....

Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho too! Stephen Curry looks darker than usual? This advert is effective in bringing in black buyers and white sports bros. Googoo gets creative You tube put this in my feed for whatever reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pONa8nrKxlU

Leftist ideology is so patently sick and wrong that recruitment focuses on children too young to have developed a sense of moral revulsion. The idea is that attitudes implanted in defenseless minds at a very early age can lead to a lifetime of voting for Democrats. That’s why the liberal anti-sacrament of abortion is promoted via books aimed at children as young as 5 years: Amelia Bonow, the abortion activist most well-known for creating the “Shout Your Abortion” social media movement, has published a children’s book about abortion… The book is entitled Abortion Is Everything. Marketed toward children from ages...

The woman Larry Summers asked for advice on how to get “horizontal” with in emails to Jeffrey Epstein is a high-flying economist, The Post can reveal. The ex-Treasury Secretary was referring to Chinese macro-economist Keyu Jin, 43 — then a tenured London School of Economics professor and Harvard graduate — and daughter of a top Chinese associate of President Xi Jinping. In several messages from 2018 and 2019, married former Harvard president Summers, 70, confided in his “wing man” Epstein about a woman he was chasing and delivered blow-by-blow updates of his pursuit. Jin Keyu speaking at the World Economic...

The central theme of The Cherry Orchard is that of social change. Written in the early 1900s, the play depicts a Russia on the brink of revolution. As the aristocracy’s power wanes, former serfs experience freedom, and a burgeoning middle class takes root, the central characters of the play—representative of the upper, middle, and lower classes—find themselves struggling to negotiate their relationships, loyalties, and anxieties about the changing socioeconomic landscape of their country. Through The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov dramatizes the concerns of several social strata, showing how the emergence of a middle class in Russia disrupted and negatively impacted the...

Rep. Brad Sherman blamed Elon Musk’s X algorithm for serving him saucy pictures amid a potential scandal involving him scrolling through softcore pornography in public. The 71-year-old California Democrat was photographed looking at pictures of lingerie-clad girls on his tablet while on a flight. The pictures of Sherman were posted to X by the Dear White Staffers account, an account made of a “group of Capitol Hill staffers working to expose poor working conditions.” The images were later reposted by Donald Trump Jr.

What did Jesus really know about the Book of Enoch and the Nephilim giants? Does the Bible hint at “extraterrestrials” cohabiting with mankind in a forgotten golden age? Glenn Beck sits down with ‪@TimothyAlberino‬ for a mind-blowing conversation that connects the dots from Genesis 6 to the coming post-human apocalypse. As futurists like Yuval Harari openly declare the end of humanity, gene editing, artificial wombs, IVF, and transhumanism are rapidly remaking man in a new image. Alberino issues a chilling wake-up call to Christians: “There’s only one qualification for redemption at the cross of Christ — you must be human.”...

Road lanes across the country are to become narrower to stop cars overtaking cyclists as part of a new war on motorists, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Official guidance quietly published last week on the Government's website states that the standard width of a road lane in Britain – which for almost 150 years has been 12ft – is no longer appropriate because of the safety risk posed to cyclists. Instead, lanes on local roads should either shrink no more than 10ft 8in wide or expand to at least 12ft 10in. Critics say space constraints in towns and cities...

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University of California, Irvine professor Charis E. Kubrin has been awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology -often considered the field’s Nobel Prize equivalent- for decades of research challenging the notion that immigrants bring crime to their new communities, officials announced Thursday. A jury comprised of field experts and fellow professors selected Kubrin and her co-winner, Mark Lipsey of the Peabody Research Institute at Vanderbilt University, for their work. Lipsey was also recognized for his research demonstrating that rehabilitation programs can be effective for convicted offenders and reduce their crime rates. Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at U.C....

Can you imagine that? They don't care. "I just made a motion to bring it straight to the dadgum floor and they blocked it. They blocked it!" "I tried to do unanimous consent, tried to get the Epstein files, get it straight to the floor to cut out all this nonsense. And, you know, and the Democrats blocked it oddly enough!" "Now here they've had it for four years and they, obviously, if there was something there about Trump, they would have released it." "This is politics. It has nothing to do with doing what's right!" "And it's Washington DC...