Free Republic

I am skeptical that our efforts as conservative parents to produce conservative offspring will materialize. Even with the best of intentions, the odds are not in our favor to successfully counter the Democrat-Media Complex, the educational system, and pop culture. That doesn’t mean there aren’t success stories (some in my own family), but I hear more about the failure and the disaffection it engenders in conservative families. Conservative parents have learned the hard way that how your kids turn out depends on a host of factors that, at some point during the maturation process, are way beyond our control --...

A woman cried as she pleaded with a masked sharia officer to stop whipping her in a public ceremony in Indonesia's deeply conservative Aceh province on Wednesday. The 22-year-old woman, who was being punished for having pre-marital sex, was among three people who were publicly whipped 100 times

See also: In defense of Fox NewsThe continued listing to port of Fox News, which rose to prominence precisely because it cut through the politically correct swamp fog that passed as media news just as Donald Trump sliced through the swamp itself on his way to the White House, was on full display on Fox News Sunday when host Chris Wallace joined Democrats whose latest charge of Trump racism occurred when Trump reminded Baltimore Rep. Elijah Cummings that conditions in his rat-infested congressional district were worse than conditions in ICE detention centers on our porous southern border with Mexico. Chris...

Despite America's improving economic state as of late, a new study suggests millennials are not weaning themselves off of their parents' money particularly well – or at all. According to the poll, 46 per cent of millennials (that's anyone born between 1981 and 1996 typically) "admitted their parents help them with basic costs like their cell phone bill, their groceries, and their rent." Similarly, 48 per cent said their parents were their first stop for financial support above a bank loan or savings.

The official story is that northern Iraq is at peace. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) has largely been defeated; the Iraqi Army and its allies are in charge. But for Christians, the persecution continues. Those who can are getting out. Those who stay are preparing themselves for more violence. "Things are bad more than any other time," Fr Behnam Benoka tells me at his church in Bartella, a ghost town protected, if that's the right word, by soldiers with Kalashnikovs. "It's harder even than before Isil." ...

The lyrics of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe include the words "With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me ..." The enemies of our Republic need to be transfigured. Rep. Ilhan Omar, tweeting her thoughts about July 4 stated, "Today gives us all a chance to reflect on how far we have come as a country and how much further we have to go to achieve full equality for all people. We are at a tipping point for progress." This rebuke of our socio-political system contrasted with her joyful dancing at the...

As reported in the Washington Examiner, the Communist Party activists who burned two American flags outside the White House on July 4th also called for a “world without America.” This is nothing new. America’s enemies, from the USSR to Iran, have long called for our demise. Internally, red diaper babies and their parents, unions, Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter activists, Occupy Wall Street squatters, home-grown Islamic terrorists, La Raza agitators, social justice warriors and economic justice 99 percenters, hippies and hipsters, progressives and liberals, and too many in the Democratic Party have long inveighed against our existence. In their eyes,...

Our society is sick, not in a twisted and deranged way, but in a manner that’s more subtle, much more dangerous and self-destructive to the moral fabric of our social construct.   Experts have been screaming from the rooftops for years about the detachment children and adolescents feel in today’s modern age of social media.  We’re assaulted 24/7 with a relentless drumbeat of political noise and continuous news coverage that would beat a dead horse not just into the next life but into another dimension eight times removed.  So when something like what happened to me last week occurs, I...

The comic magazine's ability to rib culture, politics, and business shaped the boomer mentality, and we should be grateful.The comics community is abuzz with the news that Mad magazine will, after two more issues, cease publication of original material and abandon newsstand distribution, becoming a reprint title available only in comic book shops (with the exception, Hollywood Reporter reports, of one special issue a year of new content). Mad began life as a comic book in 1952, the brainchild of then-obscure New York cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, published by William Gaines' E.C. Comics. Through his work in Mad's formative years and...

SERKIT is officially coining two terms that it is hoped will catch on. "Americaphobia" and "Americaphobic".

The left claims to be a compassionate party. They say the government must be more prominent to protect those who cannot take care of themselves. Their declarations sound noble, but they are not. Instead, America and our society are a more dangerous place because of leftist policies. The Second Amendment was written for self-protection from the government. A well-armed society is capable of keeping a tyrannical government at bay. The left knows this, and that is why they continuously attempt to pick away at gun rights. A comforting byproduct of the Second Amendment is the ability to have a firearm for self-defense....

My newsfeed must be set for “shock.” Never does a day go by that there is no something outlandishly alarming featured as a story, somewhere, illustrating the insane march of modern culture. Much of me would like to think that the problem is in the newsfeed and not in the culture itself. However, on a basis that is frequent enough to be alarming in itself, I find something in my daily experience that confirms the insanity in my newsfeed. I can only conclude that the world is getting stranger by the day. I recently saw a story that proclaimed God...

Everybody does.Let’s start here: Julia Roberts reveals original ending for ‘Pretty Woman’ — and you’d be shocked.In an interview in Variety magazine this week Julia Roberts revealed that the original ending of Pretty Woman as written was anything but the fairy tale ending of “prostitute-falls-in-love-with-a-rich-john-and-they-both-live-happily-ever-after.” She explained that the original script was “really dark and the ending was really heavy.” In fact the original script ended with Robert’s character, the prostitute Vivian Ward, left sprawled out in a dirty alley where Richard Gere’s character, Edward Lewis, had chucked her out of the car. For good measure, and to get the...

FULL TITLE: Kindergarten teacher pens shocking viral post about why she quit her job, slamming parents whose unruly kids 'throw tantrums' and 'flip tables' because they aren't taught to behave or ever 'told no' at home A former teacher has revealed the various reasons she decided to quit her job as a kindergarten teacher in a Facebook post. Jessica Gentry, 34, from Harrisonburg, Virginia, took to Facebook on Thursday, June 13, to reveal the reason she quit her job at Stone Spring Elementary School after 12 years of teaching. The mother-of-one listed a number of reasons that drove her to...

Suicide rates among young people are rising, reaching the highest levels since 2000, a study published Tuesday finds. But most alarming, the researchers said, was a 21 percent rise in boys aged 15-19 dying by suicide in 2017 from the year before. "Previous studies talked more of an increase in female suicide, but what we’re showing is that rates among males are also increasing rapidly," Oren Miron, the study's lead author and a research associate in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, told NBC News.

Here is an interesting news item, right out of progressive ideology. I wanted to highlight this because the role of expertise has been, in my experience, one of the most misunderstood aspects of progressivism. Millennial dads have pathetic DIY skills compared to baby boomersIn this story, the "shocking" statistics are reported: Many millennial dads reported not owning a cordless drill (46%), a stepladder (49%), a set of screwdrivers (38%) or even a hammer (32 percent) — an item owned by 93% of boomer dads. Why the decline in DIY? Now this article tries to chalk it up to increases in...

Can you stand one more addition to the discussion on the Ahmari-French debates? The most positive assessment I can make of Sohrab Ahmari’s side of the argument is that many of us on the Right want to believe that we have a free and fair system for expressing our views and attempting to get the government to enact the policies we want, and under the law, we do. But in practice, the deck is stacked particularly high against conservative Christians, and some of our country’s most powerful institutions are less inclined to even give lip service to the concept of...

In my capacity as a certified, government-inspected old coot, I have taken particular interest in the bubbling excitement over the 75th anniversary of D-Day. It takes me back -- not to D-Day itself, when I was in knee pants, but to the 18th anniversary thereof in 1962. Darryl Zanuck's "The Longest Day" brought to stirring cinematic life on that occasion Cornelius Ryan's D-Day book of the same title. I still find great satisfaction in Zanuck's film, but here's what I remember about 1962. We -- well, a lot of us -- who went to see it wore coat and tie...

Few companies appeal to more disparate corners of American society than the Walt Disney Co. , so count us among the bewildered to see Disney CEO Bob Iger march to the front lines of the culture wars. Mr. Iger told Reuters this week that it would be “very difficult” for Disney to continue filming its movie and television content in Georgia if a new state abortion law takes effect. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard. Right now we are watching it...

A study, led by UK Brunel University London psychologist Dr. Michael Price, found that physically weaker men are more in favor of socialism (“social and economic equality”) than stronger men.The study by Michael Price, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington (London School of Economics), psychologist James Sidnaius (Harvard U.), and psychologist Nicholas Pound (Brunel U. London), “Is sociopolitical egalitarianism related to bodily and facial formidability in men?,” is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, 38:5 (September 2017), pp. 626-634.Citing prior research showing several aspects of male face shape and appearance, such as height-to-width ratio, to be linked to ability to compete for resources in...