Free Republic

Liberals love to insist they're on the "right side of history," and their confidence crests in the liberal dominance among historians. Just as the liberal media dominate our evaluation of day-to-day developments, liberals count on their historians to dominate our evaluation of the decades behind us. It's not just historians but our taxpayer-funded storytellers, like the insufferable PBS documentarian Ken Burns. On the day before President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, NPR's "Morning Edition" presented him as an American treasure with no partisan bias. So, skip over the propaganda film on Ted Kennedy he made for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which...

New York City Council Member Antonio Reynoso (D) has introduced a bill to abolish the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) gang database as gang crime reaches a new high throughout the city. By October 2021, more than 100 children aged under 18 were involved in street-gang related shootings. Almost all of the children killed in gang-related violence in New York City are minorities, predominantly black. A police source told the New York Post that, “the gangs are eating these kids alive.” A gang member has also been arrested in relation to the stabbing-murder of a Columbia University student, injuring a...

New York City Council Member Antonio Reynoso (D) has introduced a bill to abolish the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) gang database as gang crime reaches a new high throughout the city. By October 2021, more than 100 children aged under 18 were involved in street-gang related shootings. Almost all of the children killed in gang-related violence in New York City are minorities, predominantly black. A police source told the New York Post that, “the gangs are eating these kids alive.” A gang member has also been arrested in relation to the stabbing-murder of a Columbia University student, injuring a...

When Columbia University in New York City holds its virtual graduation ceremonies for the Class of 2021, it wants to be sure that there are separate ones for certain identity groups. “Complementing our school- and University-wide ceremonies, these events provide a more intimate setting for students and guests to gather, incorporate meaningful cultural traditions and celebrate the specific contributions and achievements of their communities,” the Ivy League university said in announcing a series of graduation ceremonies designed for those groups Columbia has deemed special. The ceremonies begin with one for Native Americans on April 25. Next comes what is called...

Why is Earth pulsating every 26 seconds, and why canÂ’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mystery motion. It could be a harmonic phenomenon, a regular seismic chirp caused by the sunÂ’s energy, or a beacon drawing scientists to its source to begin a treasure hunt. âž¡ The world is weird. We'll show you how it works. In the early 1960s, a geologist named Jack Oliver first documented the pulse, also known as a "microseism," according to Discover. Oliver, who worked at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time, heard...

Bogus-black college professor Jessica Krug once denigrated the death of 15-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz, who was murdered by machete-wielding gang members at a Bronx bodega. Krug, speaking on a Columbia University panel in 2019, implied that Guzman was attacked because he was collaborating against his community as a member of NYPD’s Youth Explorer Program, according to a since-deleted clip of her remarks obtained by the Daily Mail. “That kind of violence against people who are collaborating or working against their communities we have to consider a radical moment in 2018 in which people are using machetes to hack apart a...

Most people think that the two most important names in the Democratic race for the White House in 2016 are Obama and Clinton. However, the two names you should be paying attention to are Cloward and Piven. Don't know who they are? Don't worry, most people don't — but conservative commentator and generally kicka** guy Chuck Norris is going to make sure they do. In an op-ed for WND, Norris explained that the two people — Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven — were academics who came up with a plan to introduce permanent socialism in the United States. Norris...

Markets are superb at turning what participants believe to be facts into prices. An intriguing new National Bureau of Economic Research study on market expectations about climate change looks at the price trends of Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) weather futures contracts. "The evidence shows that financial markets fully incorporate climate model projections," conclude Columbia University's agricultural and resource economist Wolfram Schlenker and sustainable development researcher Charles Taylor. "We find that the market has been accurately pricing in climate change, largely in line with global climate models, and that this began occurring at least since the early 2000s when the weather...

Over 250 news outlets and journalists partnered with Columbia University School of Journalism’s flagship magazine to shape control of “climate crisis” coverage in the lead up to the United Nations climate conference. The coverage-coordination initiative included directing how much time, space and prominence should be devoted to the coverage, and asking that climate “news” be added to seemingly unrelated stories. Some of the biggest media outlets in the country, such as CBS and Bloomberg, joined the effort. But others, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, declined to participate in a project they reportedly feared appeared activist...

Chesa Boudin will serve as San Francisco's next district attorney, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. Boudin, the most progressive candidate on the ballot, won a tight race against interim district attorney Suzy Loftus. Boudin held 85,950 votes as of Saturday afternoon, with about 1,200 ballots left to count, the Chronicle said. Loftus had 83,511 votes. The 39-year-old won the seat following four days of ballot counting in the city's first open election for district attorney in over a century following sitting District Attorney George Gascon's departure to run for district attorney in Los Angeles. "We are all feeling the...

President Donald Trump tweeted and retweeted 80 times between Friday and Sunday, a seemingly panicked flurry of activity that showed just how big a threat the Ukraine scandal and impeachment inquiry are. Among those tweets was a quote from Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress, an evangelical pastor from Texas, who warned that if Trump were successfully removed from office, civil war would follow. Apocalyptic rhetoric often flows readily from preachers' pulpits and politicians' platforms. Yet this warning of a looming civil war takes on a different meaning when it appears on the President's Twitter feed -- not only because of...

Scenes from the higher education apocalypse: I don’t know whether Columbia University’s graduate program in English literature is as premier in the field as it was back in the glory days of Lionel Trilling, but yesterday the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this: Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.Ds on Tenure Track. “Alarm” Followed, and the University Responded The story is unfortunately behind the Chronicle‘s paywall, but when you get into the story it turns out the headline is misleading: It should read “No Success” rather than “Little Success,” because the number of Columbia English Ph.Ds placed in tenure-tracked...

President Trump might be openly hostile to the mainstream media, but it was the Obama administration that was engaged in a widespread effort to thwart the media. Which do you think is more harmful to a free press? The full extent of Obama’s actions against the press are only now coming to light. The Columbia Journalism Review reports on a newly released government document showing that the Obama Justice Department engaged in a far more sweeping effort to spy on the Associated Press than previously believed. “In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom,” the CJR...

Spacecraft already navigate our solar system using gravity wells as slingshots. The same basic principles operate in the intense gravity wells around black holes, which bend not only the paths of solid objects, but light itself. If a photon, or a light particle, enters a particular region in the vicinity of a black hole, it will do one partial circuit around the black hole and get flung back in exactly the same direction. Physicists call those regions "gravitational mirrors" and the photons they fling back "boomerang photons." Boomerang photons already move at the speed of light, so they don't pick...

Nimesh Patel learned the hard way how intolerant some college students are in our woke age. And, by comparison, how even the Reddest of Red State types can withstand a shot at their preferred politician. Patel, an Indian-American stand-up and former Saturday Night Live scribe, performed at Columbia University’s cultureShock event earlier this month. The annual event, assembled by the school’s Asian American Alliance, promotes Asian-related art. What happened during his set made headlines nationwide, and deservedly so. The comedian gave the back story behind the moment on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Patel described the scene to Rogan, including the...

A former Saturday Night Live writer and comedian was booted mid-set while performing stand-up comedy at an event hosted by Columbia University’s Asian American Alliance because his jokes were deemed “racist” and “homophobic,"

When will comedians ever learn? Proving yet again that colleges are no places for purveyors of humor, student organizers at a Columbia University event kicked off the stage a comedy writer from the long-running show “Saturday Night Live” after he told some “offensive” jokes. Nimesh Patel was interrupted by members of the Columbia Asian American Alliance about 30 minutes into his routine at the AAA’s “cultureSHOCK: Reclaim” gig. He was, however, “provided” an opportunity to offer closing comments before his exit. According to the Columbia Spectator, the joke that crossed the line was about a gay black man from Patel’s...

The vast majority of Chinese students studying abroad never have contact with authorities from their country, but Chinese government operations on foreign campuses seeking to use and influence students do exist. The head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation warned last year – not naming China specifically – that Australia needs to be conscious of foreign influence in its universities, which affects the behaviour of lecturers and foreign students. The scope of these operations is difficult to determine, but professors at universities around the world have recounted instances of students reporting back to higher officials on the activities of their...

Most pundits interpret the US president’s outbursts as playing to his political base, or preening for the cameras, or blustering for the sake of striking future deals. In fact, Trump suffers from several psychological pathologies that render him a clear and present danger to the world. NEW YORK – Seemingly every day now, US President Donald Trump escalates his policy and personal attacks against other countries and their heads of state, the poor and the weak, and migrant families. Most recently, Trump has championed the heartless separation of migrant children from their parents. Though public outrage may have forced him...

The origin of the Obama administration’s investigation of imaginary Trump-Russia collusion remains murky, but this much is clear: John Brennan, Obama’s Trump-hating CIA director, stands at the center of it. Brennan pushed for a multi-agency investigation of the Trump campaign, using as his pretext alleged intelligence from an unnamed Baltic state. That “intelligence” was supplied at the very moment Baltic officials had their own political motivation to smear Trump. “Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was – allegedly – a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US...