Free Republic

In a solemn, pre-dawn ceremony, the flag that's been flying over Minnesota's State Capitol for decades was lowered for the last time. Voices hushed in a crowd of more than a dozen onlookers at 5 a.m. on Saturday as the flag with Civil War-era imagery was carefully carried from the darkened Capitol rooftop to the building's front steps, where two National Guard members folded it into a tri-cornered shape and presented it to the state's Historical Society for preservation. As the sun rose, a new official banner was hoisted on the same flagpole overlooking St. Paul, a stripped-down design featuring...

Joe Biden's National Park Service under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will remove the statue of William Penn from the park erected in 1982 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his founding of the colony of Pennsylvania. The park is on the site of his original home in Philadelphia. The park, located in Philadelphia near the Delaware River at Sansom and Second Streets, will be "rehabilitated" and that proposal will include an "expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia." The plan was "developed in consultations with the representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware...

POLITICS U.S. military finishes renaming bases that previously honored Confederates BY ELEANOR WATSON UPDATED ON: OCTOBER 27, 2023 / 1:43 PM / CBS NEWS The Army has finished renaming nine installations that previously honored confederate generals with the redesignation Friday of Fort Gordon in Georgia to Fort Eisenhower. The Defense Department has until the end of the year to complete the recommendations of the congressionally mandated Naming Commission. The Naming Commission was tasked with identifying items in the U.S. military named after figures from the confederacy. The commission's final recommendations included renaming nine installations across the country named after Confederate...

It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too. So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze. Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one...

Uruguay will melt down a bronze eagle found on a sunken World War II-era German destroyer off its coast 13 years ago, and recast it as a dove of peace, the South American country's president said Friday. The 350-kilogram (770-pound) "symbol of violence and war" will be turned into a "symbol of peace and union," President Luis Lacalle Pou told journalists in the capital Montevideo. The two-meter (6.5-foot)-tall bird with a Nazi swastika gripped in its talons adorned the stern of the Admiral Graf Spee, a battleship involved in one of the first naval skirmishes of World War II.

For Marxism to take hold, everything that came before it must be burnt to the ground, according to the standards of today’s radical leftists. No matter the historical background, if it does not serve the purposes of the Great Reset’s dystopian agenda, it must be torn down to the ground. Even if it’s something as simple as a name. This has been proven across the culture, from iconic food brands like Aunt Jemima, which is no more – to Sports, where the Cleveland Indians have gone the way of the dodo – across all areas, the illiberal left is on...

HONG KONG — Under the cover of darkness early Thursday, authorities in Hong Kong tore down a public sculpture dedicated to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, accelerating a campaign to erase the crackdown from public recollection and stamp out dissent in a city that until recently was one of Asia’s freest. The 26-foot-tall artwork, known as the “Pillar of Shame,” had stood at the University of Hong Kong for nearly a quarter-century and honored the hundreds, if not thousands, of students and others killed on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese military crushed pro-democracy protests....

RICHMOND, Va. — A rust-colored 1875 almanac, a cloth envelope and a silver coin were found Wednesday in a time capsule that lay hidden beneath a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Virginia for more than 130 years. As intriguing as the water-damaged items were, they’re not what many were expecting to see after state conservators spent five hours gingerly prying the time capsule open. Even the mortar-encrusted lead box was a bit of a surprise.... ...There were three books total. Besides the almanac, there was a tattered book with a pink cover that appeared to be...

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia's public university system won't rename any of the 75 buildings or colleges an internal committee had recommended for changes mostly because of their association with slavery, segregation or mistreatment of American Indians, officials voted Monday. The system's regents voted not to make any name changes, more than a year after they established a committee to study that issue. "History can teach us important lessons, lessons that if understood and applied make Georgia and its people stronger," the regents said in a statement unanimously adopted by the board at a specially called meeting. The regents added that...

Remember a few years ago when Trump suggested that if the left started tearing down historic statues that eventually they would come for people like Lincoln and Washington? Remember how people in the media scoffed at the idea? Well, here we are. This is happening, just as Trump predicted. The city of Chicago is reviewing statues which might ‘offend’ people and Lincoln and Washington are on the list. The Daily Wire reports:

Generations of children have been charmed by the magical tale of the boy who never grew up, but Peter Pan is now on a list of banned movies. Bosses at Disney have blocked anyone under the age of seven from watching the 1953 animated classic on its streaming service over concerns that it portrays racial stereotypes, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Three other long-standing family favourites – The Aristocats, Swiss Family Robinson and Dumbo – have also been removed from children’s accounts for breaching ‘content advisories’ that were recently put in place. Parents have been left dumbfounded after trying...

Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell says he's "OK" with renaming military bases that are named after Confederate Army officers, declining to side with President Donald Trump and other Republicans opposed to the move. The Kentucky senator said he'll live with whatever lawmakers decide as they debate an annual defence policy bill for the military in the coming weeks. Trump has blasted the calls to rename the military bases. "Hopefully our great Republican Senators won't fall for this!" he said in a tweet last week.

The long arm of the PC police has reached back to the ’30s and arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced the late singer Kate Smith. Smith, who popularized Irving Berlin’s song “God Bless America” and was a female pioneer in early television, recorded songs that today in hindsight are viewed as racist. An old friend, Harry Covert, writes to recall the early days of black-and-white TV when he (and I) watched Smith’s television program. Covert remembers one show interrupted by a news bulletin announcing the attempted assassination of Harry S. Truman by militant Puerto Rican activists. He notes that today’s Puerto Ricans...

Berlin is poised to strip the names of streets linked to atrocities committed during its occupation of Namibia and dedicate them to liberation fighters, part of a late reckoning with Germany’s brutal colonial history. After more than a decade of debate, the three main parties in the Berlin Mitte district assembly voted late Wednesday to recommend new names for streets in the so-called African Quarter in the northwest of the German capital, spokeswoman Melita Ersek said. […] The motion to drop the names associated with bloody suppression of Namibia during Germany’s 1884-1919 occupation of what was then called German South...

After years of debate, Yale University announced Saturday it will change the name of a residential college that honors a 19th century alumnus and former U.S. vice president who was an ardent supporter of slavery. Yale trustees said the Ivy League university is renaming Calhoun College after trailblazing computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician who earned Yale degrees in the 1930s, invented a pioneering computer programming language and became a Navy rear admiral. Yale said it was the final decision in a controversy over former Vice President John C. Calhoun’s legacy that had simmered for years and boiled over...

A Yale University employee is out of a job, and the school is out a window, after he used a broomstick to smash a stained-glass window he complained was racist. Until recently, Thomas Menafee worked as a dishwasher for Yale. But he says he grew enraged that, while working at Yale’s Calhoun College, he had to see a stained glass window which shows black laborers harvesting cotton. The window, he said, was an offensive portrayal of slavery, and so on June 13 he impulsively decided to eliminate it by force. “I took a broomstick, and it was kind of high,...

Backlash against a plan to remove prominent Confederate monuments in New Orleans has been tinged by death threats, intimidation and even what may have been the intentional torching of a contractor’s Lamborghini. For now, at least, things have gotten so nasty the city hasn’t found a contractor willing to bear the risk of tearing down the monuments. The city doesn’t have its own equipment to move them and is now in talks to find a company, even discussing doing the work at night to avoid further tumult.Initially, it appeared the monuments would be removed quickly after the majority black City...

Tennessee's rule factory is cranking at full tilt, and Nashville lawmakers want to tell Memphians how to pay for bike lanes, what monuments we can move, and whether or not we can own skunks (seriously). No gas tax for bike lanes A new bill would prohibit spending any gas tax revenues on bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, and "other non-vehicular facilities." Portions of the state gas tax are required to go to cities and counties. Those governments sometimes use the gas tax funds for matching dollars to get federal money for bike and pedestrian projects. The new bill says all of...

Guy Bechor reports that Egypt is in the process of destroying all remnants of its ancient, non-Muslim cultures. It was barely mentioned in the Israeli and global media, but the following event pertains to the whole of Western civilization: Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East. The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East,...

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that South Carolina should remove the Confederate flag from its Statehouse grounds, in part because the nation should unite under one banner while at war. "I think about how many South Carolinians have served in our military and who are serving today under our flag and I believe that we should have one flag that we all pay honor to, as I know that most people in South Carolina do every single day," Clinton told The Associated Press in an interview. "I personally would like to see it removed from the Statehouse...