Free Republic

The reparations panel in California is now recommending up to $1.2 million per resident, but Democrat Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri clearly thinks that’s not nearly enough. She wants a cool $14 trillion in reparations payments. That’s more than half of the U.S. GDP.

Progressives who’d decided that “soft on crime” is a winning message in urban America got a well-deserved wake-up call Tuesday, as Philadelphia Democrats tapped Cherelle Parker as their nominee, and so near-certain to become the city’s 100th mayor. Like our own Mayor Eric Adams, Parker won voters over with her promise to address public safety and quality of life concerns. She explicitly vowed to restore stop-question-and-frisk (conducted constitutionally) as a policing tactic and to get more beat officers on street patrol. The progressive darling was Helen Gym, backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson....

The NAACP's national board of directors has issued a formal travel advisory for Florida, warning black and LGBTQ people against visiting the state due to Governor Ron DeSantis' policies. 'Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,' states the advisory issued on Saturday night by the civil rights group.

American higher education is undergoing several revolutions at the same time. The DEI revolution, ongoing for decades, has reached a tipping point. The professorial class and campus administrations are close to cementing it as the official ideology of American universities. However, a rearguard action, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, finds its state legislature aiming to eliminate the DEI offices that symbolize and spearhead this radicalization, pointing toward an education that emphasizes professional competence and reasonable patriotism. Soon, shrinking enrollments and a demographic cliff will strain many colleges and universities to the breaking point. Enrollments, 20.5 million in 2011,...

For climate advocates, the growing state deficit unveiled in the revised 2023-24 state budget offers some bad news, some good news and a great deal of uncertainty. The good news is that despite California’s projected budget shortfall jumping from January’s estimate of $22.5 billion to the new estimate of $31.8 billion, the state isn’t planning additional cuts for climate projects. That leaves intact a five-year plan to spend $48 billion on climate. “We were really expecting there to be another round of massive cuts to the climate budget,” said Jamie Pew, climate fellow with the progressive group NextGen Policy. So,...

Recently, a witness at one of California’s reparations hearings demanded “where’s the money?” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that the state miscalculated its deficit by $10 billion seems to answer that question. As his reparations Task Force demands as much as $1.2 million per eligible black resident, Newsom recently balked at cash payments. After years of using reparations as a political issue and insisting that such payments are a moral imperative, many are pushing back that this bill is now due. A card will just not do. The new figure puts California’s debt at a towering $32 billion. There are various...

A Florida teacher under investigation for showing Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Strange World (2022) to a group of students has spoken out online... Jenna Barbie (@becomingabetterbarbee) shared a six-minute TikTok video identifying herself as the teacher involved and defending her actions. She explained that all parents, including the one who lodged the initial complaint, previously signed permission slips allowing teachers to show PG movies... ...The first-year teacher said she showed the film to some of her and a fellow teacher’s students after they finished taking standardized tests. It related to their current lesson plans about earth science and ecosystems.

Approximately 60 students at a Kansas City high school walked out of classes Wednesday to protest a veteran teacher who had written a op-ed criticizing school diversity policies and allegedly doesn’t use students’ “preferred” pronouns. Caedran Sullivan wrote late last month in The Lion that she could “no longer stay silent” about the Shawnee Mission School District “fostering a toxic environment” with its DEI trainings. “There is repeated white shaming and a preoccupation with white people as the ‘oppressor,’ including staff field trips with a focus on ‘systemic racism,’ Sullivan wrote. “The white saviorism and virtue-signaling at DEI meetings is...

Parents and taxpayers need to know what’s going on in the Shawnee Mission School District (SMSD). As an English teacher employed in the SMSD for 15 years, I can no longer stay silent about the state of our schools. I will be attacked and threatened, but for the good of our district and the students with whom we are entrusted, I must speak out. This is too important. Amidst a worsening teacher shortage that saw SMSD pay $3.5 million to out-of-state agencies to recruit and retain more educators, we are losing good teachers because of an imposed divisive rhetoric that...

Oakland teachers and the Oakland Unified School District reached agreement on Saturday evening on providing “reparations” for slavery for black students, though an ongoing strike still continues. As Breitbart News has reported, the teachers’ union went on strike earlier this month to demand salary increases and a variety of policy changes, including “reparations” for black students — who, ironically, they were denying access to education by going on strike with just a few weeks left in the 2022-23 school year.

As we sit comfortably in our homes, having dinner with our families, crime rates are going up all around us. That is to say that criminals are no longer relegated to the inner cities; they've evolved to suburbs and rural areas as they seek new and more vulnerable targets. For several decades, one of the major dreams of the middle class has been to own a home in the suburbs. Now, under the guise of prohibiting discrimination based on race, religion, sex, etc., Democrats have proposed regulations that would force jurisdictions that accept HUD funding to "promote equity in their...

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga) hammered GOP opposition to the flood of immigrants flowing across our southern border, calling it "more white oppression of the Black man. Just when we are on the brink of getting reparations for the slavery and discrimination inflicted on us by white supremacists, Republicans want to cut off our access to the cheap labor we will need to support our raised standard of living." Echoing remarks previously uttered by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wa), Johnson said "I want to ask my colleagues across the aisle who will clean our mansions, cook our meals, wash our laundry, tend...

California Democratic state Sen. Steven Bradford is warning African Americans not to get their “hopes up” for massive reparations payments from the state. Bradford’s message comes after the California Reparations Task Force recommended over the weekend that the state pay up to $1.2 million in reparations to each eligible Black resident. The state lawmaker, who served on the task force, claimed that it’s possible that Black residents could receive cash payments “if the money’s there,” but argued that receiving million dollar checks in repayment for historical discrimination is “not happening.” The reparations panel held a public meeting in Oakland, California,...

As a seventy-year resident of Springfield, Ill, I was amazed and amused that there was an article in the Wall Street Journal, a supposedly reputable, savvy business newspaper touting Springfield as a great place to buy a house. It is as if the reporter doesn’t know how to read, think, analyze, and ask questions before regurgitating something. WCIA TV writes:Springfield was featured in a national publication as one of the best housing markets.An article in the Wall Street Journal published earlier this month listed Springfield, Illinois as number 17 out of 300 for towns on the WSJ/Realtor.com Emerging Housing Markets...

When NFL players took a knee during the National Anthem in 2016, a tradition was born at Rainbow Oaks Restaurant. Owners Duke and Jonell Maples, who remodeled and reopened the restaurant in 2009, decided to start playing the National Anthem at noon, seven days a week. "It was my way of waving my middle finger at the NFL," said the retired Marine. The restaurant is filled with patriotic memorabilia and American flags. A Marine Corps flag flies under the American flag atop the restaurant and inside, it's obvious the clientele has support for and by the military and law enforcement....

Anybody who has been following the actual scientific research and debates about climate already knows that the enterprise is hopelessly compromised by politics.Yet in the case of climate research, we shouldn’t be surprised. Literally trillions of dollars are at stake, as well as the ability of the Establishment to take control over every aspect of our lives. It would be a wonder if money and politics DIDN’T come to corrupt the entire field.Unfortunately, the politicization of that field opened the door to politicizing every aspect of science, and that effort is bearing fruit. There are few areas of study where...

But new tools show promise in tackling growing symptom of academia’s “publish or perish” culture When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report. “It is just...

Northwestern University has long been a school hostile to free speech. My alma mater was ranked 197 out of 203 universities for free speech in a major survey by FIRE. (Fortunately, my other alma mater, the University of Chicago, was ranked number one for free speech). This month showed why Northwestern developed a reputation for speech intolerance and a lack of ideological diversity. Northwestern University’s Associated Student Government suspended the funding for the College Republicans due to objections to posters for an event featuring writer and critical race theory critic James Lindsay. The justification was a poster featuring a skull...

Just 2 out 10 black and brown students in Oakland public schools can read at grade level Just as teachers’ union head witch Randi Weingarten is doing her media image rehab tour, California teachers’ unions are determined to remind everyone that they’re monsters who thrive on destroying education inside and outside the classroom. Oakland teachers went on strike Thursday after seven days of negotiations failed to produce a new contract for the 3,000 members of the Oakland Education Association. “They’re neglecting their duty,” OEA president Ismael Armendariz said outside Manzanita Elementary School. “The district and the union have been having...

A Phoenix woman was found dead along a hiking trail — and police believe foul play may have been involved and have released a video of a person of interest spotted running near the scene. Lauren Heike, 29, was found on Saturday at around 10:30 a.m. along the trail on 6500 East Libby Street near her home, nearly 24 hours after she went out, police said. Phoenix officers originally received a call about an injured person spotted on the trail, but it was confirmed to be Heike’s body, which appeared to have suffered “trauma.” Phoenix Homicide Lt. James Hester told...