Free Republic

Has America spent the last few hundred years misunderstanding the Declaration of Independence? That's what Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, believes. According to Allen, the paragraph beginning 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' has been misinterpreted thanks to a rogue period that was not in the original document. And that could completely transform our understanding of how the Founding Fathers viewed the role of government, The New York Times reported.The line as it is most commonly reprinted reads: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,...

Has America spent the last few hundred years misunderstanding the Declaration of Independence? That's what Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, believes. According to Allen, the paragraph beginning 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' has been misinterpreted thanks to a rogue period that was not in the original document. And that could completely transform our understanding of how the Founding Fathers viewed the role of government, The New York Times reported.

How panicked should we be about the rise of Donald Trump? A professor at Harvard, Danielle Allen, recently published a widely shared op-ed piece in the Washington Post likening his rise to that of Hitler... ...such Hitler hype has happened before, and been unwarranted. Steven Hayward, author of “The Age of Reagan,” recalls the rhetoric: Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”

Every Fourth of July, some Americans sit down to read the Declaration of Independence, reacquainting themselves with the nation’s founding charter exactly as it was signed by the Second Continental Congress in 1776. Or almost exactly? A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by the National Archives contains a significant error – smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less. The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, concerns a period that appears right after...

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported an important effect of the 2008 presidential campaign: For the first time, traffic at left-leaning political Web sites overtook traffic at right-leaning competitors. The Drudge Report and Free Republic had the largest number of unique visitors in September 2007, but in September 2008, that honor went to the Huffington Post. Political strategists have been analyzing the impact of the Internet on American political communication since at least the mid-1990s.

Yada, yada, yada. ~~snip~~ The growing power of rumor is part of a much larger transformation in the way that voters receive information about politics. The old model was a vertical one, where professional journalists delivered their reports to a largely passive audience through television or newspapers. The new model is horizontal, where folks get information from each other and actively pass it on, through e-mail, text messages and viral videos. Everyone is a potential broadcaster. This "democratization of information" has many benefits - more sources, more perspectives, more choices. In a forum Steve moderated for The International Journal of...

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama's background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that arguably set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: "Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion." That statement was contained in a press release and it spun a complex tale about the alleged ancestry of Obama, who is Christian. The press release was picked up by the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site and spread virally and steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and, ultimately, books. It continues...

Dr. Danielle Allen An Attack That Came Out of the Ether Scholar Looks for First Link in E-Mail Chain About Obama By Matthew Mosk Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, June 28, 2008; C01 ...Poring over these early articles on the topic, Allen noticed what she thought was an important pattern. In each instance, someone had posted the articles on the Free Republic Web site, prompting a discussion involving the same handful of people, with several expressing a desire to spread the word about Obama's supposed faith. ...The attacks on Obama are different, Allen says. The level of anonymity, the technical...

Sticks and stone may break your bones - but words can destroy. Think about the Swift Boat campaign and what it did to John Kerry in 2004 and what rumors of a secret love child did to John McCain's bid for the White House in 2000. ~~snip~~ The Internet is making it easy to set these little fires and fan them into a blaze of untruths, and this election has become so intense that groups wanting to undermine the other guy have sunk to a new level. Unregulated attack groups like the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, called 527s...

...How important is calumny today? In 2000, calumny effectively led to John McCain's defeat in South Carolina. That smear campaign against him used robo-calls and fliers, and e-mail also played an important role, as the New York Times reported in February 2000. Arguably, calumny defeated John Kerry in 2004, and the infamous Swift boat television ads of that summer were, importantly, preceded by an aggressive Internet campaign begun that January that included perhaps the first viral campaign e-mail: a computer-generated image of Kerry and Jane Fonda beside each other on a podium at an antiwar rally. The image originally emerged...

The Washington Post published a June 28th piece geared to protect Barack Obama from the nagging rumors that he is a secret Muslim, rumors that have been circulating since 2004. The Post's Matthew Mosk penned an attack on Free Republic, based on an Obama flak who claims she has somehow discovered that Freepers are to blame, if not initially responsible, for floating the Barack-is-a-Muslim chain email that so many millions of Americans have found in their email boxes over the last four years. But, the Washington Post's article is so filled with assumptions and a singular desire not to...

In the Blogosphere, Lightning Strikes Thrice    O'Malley Blames GOP Plot For Rumors (MD GOVERNOR'S AID FIRED FOR FREE REPUBLIC POSTS)    No Bids but Lots of Bite at Budget Panel Hearing (NCPAC Mentioned)    Ehrlich: "Rogue Operation" (free republic/Gov. Ehrlich story about Mayor O'Malley's cheating)  click here for more info back story licks there as well as better discussion :)  Jim Robinson's short and cryptic reply re what really happened in the Md Gov mess and Free Republic: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1341174/posts?page=20#20  MD4Bush posted, "Yeah, he cheats on his wife. I heard that he is not allowed in the house and is...

The Washington Post published an article today in the Style section about researcher Danielle Allen's efforts to track down who is behind allegations that presumed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Hussein Obama (Illinois) is a Muslim. Allen is an Obama supporter who works for the Institute for Advanced Study.The article was written by Matthew Mosk. A curious choice for The Post considering Mosk's involvement in the nefarious MD4Bush scandal in which Mosk claimed to have been given access to a Free Republic poster's account to expose a Maryland GOP government appointee who was alleged to have commented on rumors that...

Beckwith responds to The Washington Post. The first thing I have to say about "An Attack That Came Out of the Ether," published by The Washington Post on June 28th, is that at NO time was I ever contacted by this woman, Danielle Allen.  I spoke to two male Post reporters, who spoke to me over the phone for a period of months.  The first contact was in the fall of 2007.  They told me they were trying to track down the source of emails they considered negative to the Obamamessiah. Allen obsesses about the "Muslim" Obama stories, but steers...

Was Danielle Allen violating federal law by using tax-exempt facilities to do Obama campaign research? What are Allen's links to Obama and his campaign? The Washington Post is silent on these critical questions. NEW YORK news conference: WASHINGTON POST NAMES AUTHOR ANDY MARTIN AS OBAMA SOURCE ANDY MARTIN Executive Editor ContrarianCommentary.com 'Factually Correct, Not Politically Correct' FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: ATTENTION DAYBOOK/ASSIGNMENT EDITORS ANNOUNCEMENT OF NEW YORK NEWS CONFERENCE JUNE 28, 2008 OBAMA AUTHOR ANDY MARTIN RESPONDS TO WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE NAMING MARTIN AS THE SOURCE OF COMMENTS ABOUT OBAMA'S RELIGIOUS ROOTS MARTIN ACCUSES WASHINGTON POST OF CREATING "MANCHURIAN SURROGATE" FOR...

The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation's most brilliant minds. The missive began: "THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."

The Washington Post has published an unintentionally amusing article this morning about one Danielle Allen, a "razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist" at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. Allen, with doctorates from Cambridge and Harvard, won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation genius grant a few years ago and now conducts studies at the Institute, where, according to the Post, "she works alongside groundbreaking physicists, mathematicians and social scientists. They don't have to teach, and they face no quotas on what they publish. Their only mandate is to work in the tradition of Einstein, wrestling with the most vexing problems in the universe." And...