Free Republic

There's an independent, subversive, England-loving, purple-haired Goth girl taking online, disgruntled Brits by storm, and it's got the Labour government's knickers all in a twist. Her name is Waifu Amelia Her fictional backstory is that she's a schoolgirl who deeply loves British flags and culture. Wild child that she looks, Amelia is immensely proud of her country and has a real problem with the state of the United Kingdom as it stands today. She sees the hordes of immigrants being allowed to pour into the country not as an asset but as an invasion. Amelia resents that any public manifestation...

The “Islamic Games” are currently scheduled for a public high school in Colleyville, prompting concern about district policies. The Dallas Islamic Games 2026 are currently set for Colleyville Heritage High School, where Muslim groups are planning to take over the entire athletic complex. One of its sponsors is a chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which Gov. Greg Abbott designated a foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organization under Texas law in a November 2025 proclamation. “The board was not aware of this,” said Grapevine-Colleyville ISD Board President Shannon Braun to The Dallas Express. “This is obviously a sporting event....

Provisions in a budget passed in the Badger State this previous summer require that faculty at Wisconsin’s two flagship universities—UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee—now teach at least one course per semester and 12 credit hours each school year. At smaller universities, the requirements are higher. Choleric and incredulous, professors turned to the local paper to vent their outrage. I come here not to critique that policy specifically. There’s a colorable case to be made on either side of it. Perhaps a biologist working at the edge of human knowledge would be better off researching than teaching. Conversely, I feel little sympathy for...

As America enters an era that will seemingly be dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), many question the value of a college education. John Adams College (JAC), a recently founded liberal-arts institution in Provo, Utah, answers the value question by specializing in teaching uniquely human qualities. JAC, formerly Mount Liberty College, was founded in 2019 by professors who were discontented with the college status quo. Tired of college being treated as mere career training, they built a new institution from scratch, dedicated to “preparing men and women to enter the world defending liberty, standing in humility, and upholding virtue.” JAC offers...

If ever a case made plain the clash of values between freedom of speech and the desire of college administrators to compel everyone to support their “progressive” beliefs, Reges v. Cauce is it. This is an important First Amendment case, one in which the Martin Center joined in an amicus brief in support of a professor who was targeted with official retaliation because he spoke out against his university’s “land acknowledgement” policy and substituted his own views for the school’s. What nerve! Before getting into the details of the case, let’s examine the background. Specifically, why do so many college...

Sight-words — a theory about how to teach reading — is absurd. Give me three minutes, and I’ll explain why. The premise is that children can memorize English words without much effort. This is blatantly not true. Our words are hard to remember, and the more words you learn, the more they get in one another’s way. That’s why we have so many non-readers in middle school and high school. (Dirty little secret: Everyone running the school system surely knows this.) Think back to when you had a meal with some friends at a restaurant. Can you bring up the...

Late last year, the Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch penned a widely shared essay on campus “disability accommodations,” the practice whereby students with learning disorders such as ADHD receive extra time on tests or the use of “otherwise-prohibited technology.” The piece did not make for pleasant reading. Among Horowitch’s findings was that, because universities have made “the process of getting accommodations easier,” the share of students who qualify “has grown at a breathtaking pace.” At the University of Chicago, for instance, “the number has more than tripled over the past eight years.” At Amherst, a stunning 34 percent of undergraduates were formally...

Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, jr. announced a reversal of a Biden Administration rule that required federal agencies "to pay daycare providers in advance based on child enrollment. We have seen that the key result of the Biden policy was to enable widespread fraud. Our new rule requires that payments only be provided for verified attendance." Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn) called this change "mistaken. The previous policies enabled penniless Somali refugees to establish highly profitable businesses by submitting the names of prospective attendees. Many parents enrolled their children in more than one...

🚨HOLY COW: This little girl has gone viral for choosing Charlie Kirk as her "Inspiring Hero" presentation in elementary school. Such a beautiful presentation! Follow: @ItsCarterHughes

The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) has published its second “State of the Chief Diversity Officer” (CDO) report. Following up on the 2023 survey, the 2025 study shares some interesting findings. Have efforts to rid higher education of DEI’s influence been, from NADOHE’s members’ perspective, a decidedly undesirable success? The report received responses from 394 CDOs and academic diversity officers (ADOs) and asked how these roles had changed either positively or negatively since 2023. Although one might expect such a study to illustrate that DEI is in danger on higher-ed campuses, the findings don’t convincingly indicate...

“Our school is firmly committed to anti-oppressive practice, policy, and research. Therefore, we expect our … students to adhere to these values. That means recognizing our own biases, privileges, and experiences with oppression. […] While we support and recognize your academic freedom, we expect that your work aligns with the values of social justice and anti-oppression. I expressed concern during our meeting that I worry you do not see value or legitimacy in these values.” That is part of a much longer email one of us received from a social work professor (the program director) in 2023, during a recent...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Toyn-YJsM 19 minute video

In an August City Journal piece, my former colleague John Sailer wonderfully quoted an anonymous professor: “Every day, the universities wake up and break the law.” Just about every faculty-hiring process in America’s colleges and universities discriminates—sometimes barely legally, when it’s just political discrimination to ensure that only radical professors get hired. The education-establishment discriminators do that by drafting job advertisements with specializations that ensure only radicals need apply: a preference for environmental history, human rights, and/or social movements when they’re subtle, a specialization in genderqueer Palestinian sociology with a concentration on community engagement in Dubuque when they’re not. Political...

Probably not her last poem, may God bless her soul, but maybe her best: *** On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Macklin i want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets, & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches. i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp— *** cont'd at da link up der.

YES ‼️ Lincoln Maine School FIRES liberal teacher who used his classroom to support Charlie Kirk being assassinated “Mr. Brewer is dismissed from employment with RSU 67 effective immediately” One day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Mattanawcook Academy's social studies teacher, Derek Brewer, told one of his freshman social studies classes that, number one, he didn't care that Charlie Kirk had died, and number two, he found it ironic that Charlie Kirk was shot, referencing a video clip he had seen in which Charlie Kirk stated that a few people had to be shot in order to protect Second Amendment...

Sir Roger Scruton wrote in How to Be a Conservative that “the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.” Conservative higher-education reformers would be wise to remember this. While there is much excitement in ripping down ridiculous, wasteful, and harmful bureaucracies in universities, the real work of improving them takes attention to detail, expertise, and care. In the past year, Missouri leaders have attempted to balance the exhilarating with the dull when it comes to reforming the state’s higher-education system. On the exhilarating front, the governor published a splashy executive order...

Rep. Jasmine Crockett lashed out at the United States Supreme Court after a major ruling that cleared the way for Texas Republicans to implement a new congressional map. On December 4, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a 6–3 emergency order granting a request from Texas Republicans to stay a lower court injunction that had blocked the state’s newly enacted redistricting plan. The decision allows Texas to proceed with the map for the 2026 midterm elections while litigation continues on the merits. Under the new map, Republicans could net as many as five additional House seats, reflecting...

How to spot saboteurs in K-12 The sabotage of K-12 education is easily implemented by rejecting good methods that work, while simultaneously forcing phony substitutes into classrooms. QED: our experts embraced a far-left ideology that prefers control and leveling. Weirdly enough, our Education Establishment ends up promoting an anti-education agenda. Here are the five most egregious examples of this totalitarian strategy in action: Sight-Words Versus Phonics. All the main European languages are phonetic. You first learn the alphabet, then the sounds represented by the letters; and then the blends of those sounds. This approach has always worked. It's the method...

Jorge Galicia, a Venezuelan exile who has spent the last five years touring U.S. college campuses warning young people about the dangers of socialism, said Saturday he is thrilled with the U.S. military action against his home country that led to the capture of dictator Nicolás Maduro. “Today was probably the happiest day of my entire life,” Galicia told The College Fix in an email Saturday. “God is finally giving us the opportunity to witness a measure of earthly justice through President Trump, his cabinet, and the courageous U.S. Armed Forces,” he said. “As someone who was forced into exile...

Unfazed by the scandal in Minnesota, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is now proposing an even grander program for her state, saying "the biggest problem with what went on in Minnesota is that it was too narrowly focused on needy families. Starting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's plan for universal government-provided daycare for all children--poor and rich alike--we will make this benefit an entitlement for all. Ideally, the government should pay for everyone's needs while each individual contributes taxes according to their abilities." The initial estimate of the cost to fund Mamdani's vision is said to be $6 billion....