Free Republic

Former San Francisco 49ers player Colin Kaepernick will remain a free agent for the fourth straight season after no team showed interest in signing the former quarterback-turned social justice warrior ahead of the 2020 season, slated to begin this weekend. The story: Kaepernick became a free agent following the 2016/17 season after his controversial decision to kneel for the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality against black Americans. But as the Black Lives Matter movement spread across America following the death of George Floyd, professional sports organizations, including the NFL, have allowed players to kneel during the...

The Georgia man arrested for stabbing a stranger last month claiming that he “felt the need to find a white man to kill” after watching videos of “police brutality,” has murdered the white cell mate he was placed with following his arrest. Jayvon Hatchett, 19, was charged with aggravated assault and possession of a weapon during the commission of a crime after stabbing a random AutoZone employee in late August. Following his arrest, he was placed in the Muscogee County Jail. If convicted for the initial stabbing, Hatchett could be one of the first people sentenced under a new Georgia...

Republicans say President Trump’s decision to make Hispanic voters a priority is boosting his support with this critical bloc in public opinion polls and threatening Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s prospects in key battleground states. Trump received 28% of the Hispanic vote four years ago. But a fresh national poll from Quinnipiac University pegged the president’s support with this demographic at 36% — despite trailing Biden by 10 percentage points overall, progress reflected in other surveys conducted over the summer. In swing states that will determine the outcome of the presidential race, that level of Hispanic support could push Trump over...

An 11-year-old and a 12-year-old student in Colorado were temporarily suspended from school after they were spotted with an Airsoft gun and a toy gun, respectively, during their online lessons. Story 1: 11-year-old Maddox Blow, who goes to Bell Middle School in Golden, Colorado, told the FOX31 Problem Solvers that he finished a quiz early at one of his online classes and got bored waiting for the others, so he took his Airsoft gun and started fidgeting with it. The teacher noticed Blow playing with the Airsoft gun several hours after the lesson while reviewing the recordings. According to an...

A new study by the University of Washington-Tacoma argues that one of the reasons why minority communities in inner cities experience hot temperatures in the summer is because of systemic racism. Assistant Professor of Urban Ecology Christopher Schell and the co-authors of the study concluded that systemic racism in city planning leads to fewer trees being planted in low-income neighborhoods and, consequently, higher temperatures. Wealthier “urban residential neighborhoods generally have greater vegetation cover, canopy cover, and plant diversity,” reads the paper, titled “The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments.” “The geographic distribution of urban heat islands...

There are a lot of moving parts to this one so let’s quickly recap. There have been 95 straight nights of protests in Portland since the death of George Floyd and on 25 occasions those have been declared riots. Mayor Ted Wheeler has been more vocal lately about denouncing the violence and in response the mob has targeted him at his home with occupations, vandalism, arson and rioting. Mayor Wheeler has now told his neighbors that for their safety he plans to move. Meanwhile, after a pro-Trump individual was murdered in the city Saturday allegedly by an Antifa supporter, the...

Facebook is censoring links to crowdfunding campaigns for the legal defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with fatally shooting two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In detail: Facebook users attempting to share a link to the fundraiser for Rittenhouse launched at the crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo are being blocked for posting it. When they attempt to share the link, a pop-up informed them that it violates the platform’s community standards. The pop-up doesn’t offer any further explanations. Other GiveSendGo fundraisers can be posted to the social media platform.

Google’s search autocomplete feature fails to generate negative suggestions for the term “BLM,” in stark contrast to other search engines. Typing the words “BLM is” on Google currently only returns the suggestion “BLM israel.” It does not show a long list of suggestions, which is unusual for a popular search term and suggests that a list of suggestions formerly existed but was removed. Typing “BLM is ” with a space after “is” generates no search suggestions at all — highly unusual for a search term that has recently seen a massive spike in attention from users.

Jacksonville Jaguars player Tyler Eifert will reportedly honor former St. Louis Police Capt. David Dorn, who was murdered during riots a little over a week after George Floyd’s death. Eifert will pay tribute to Dorn by displaying his name on his helmet, according to Hamilton County, Ohio, Republican Party Chairman Alex Triantafilou. “Got some very good news from former @Bengals player/current @Jaguars player @tylereifert that he will honor fallen police officer David Dorn on his helmet,” Triantafilou tweeted. “Always been a fan of Tyler’s and God bless him!”

Burned-out stores, a torched parking lot and National Guardsmen walking the streets - these are the scenes of Kenosha that Donald Trump will use as the backdrop for a campaign event as he visits Wisconsin today. The president is expected to hammer home his 'law and order' campaign message when he arrives around 1pm EST, meeting with members of local law enforcement and surveying damage caused by three days of rioting sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake. While the city is still counting the cost of the disturbance, the mayor has requested $30million in state aid to help...

Joe Biden’s quick trip to Pittsburgh and his speech there Monday condemning urban violence show Democrats now recognize they made a major mistake in ignoring the problem at their convention. They’ve read the polls and finally realize voters care about the arson, shootings, and looting -- and their own safety. That’s a problem for the Biden campaign, which had almost nothing to say about the violence all summer. Now, they are doing “cleanup on Aisle 6” and there’s a lot of broken glass around. "Rioting is not protesting,” the Democrats’ presidential nominee told the Carnegie-Mellon University audience. “Looting is not...

The Chicago Teachers Union expressed support for the protest outside tech billionaire Jeff Bezos’ home, where demonstrators built a prop guillotine. The teachers’ union has tens of millions of dollars in Amazon shares themselves. The union announced they support the protest in a tweet last week. The post came in response to another tweet that showed protesters outside Bezos’ home setting up a guillotine.

The Democratic nominee went after Trump’s character – the President focused on his opponent’s political sinsPresident Donald J. Trump just gave an impressive and unprecedented State of the Union address from the lawn of the White House…oh wait, it was his 2020 Republication nomination speech. It just felt like a quasi-imperial event. The address was long, too long for an acceptance speech — coming in at over 6,000 words, it took more than an hour. Trump just always has to dwell on all his achievements. ‘I say very modestly that I have done more for the African American community than...

The New York Times this week published a lengthy sympathetic story about three men the paper suggested were guilty of the victimless crime of trying to have sex with underage girls. One of the men was Jace Hambrick, who the Times describes as a nerdy gamer who “wasn’t someone who could meet women at a bar.” So he gave Craigslist a try. There, he met girl who said she was 13, although the Times defends Hambrick by saying he thought she was older than she claimed. “Jus gamer gurl sittin’ home on sunny day,” the girl’s ad read. “we can...

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling has emerged into a fresh controversy after she returned the Ripple of Hope Award bestowed upon her by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization in December 2019, following criticism from Kerry Kennedy. Kerry is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and the president of the organization. “Over the course of June 2020 — LGBTQ Pride Month — and much to my dismay, J.K. Rowling posted deeply troubling transphobic tweets and statements,” Kennedy posted on the organization’s website on Aug. 3. “On June 6, she tweeted an article headlined “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19...

GOP leaders sold a female-friendly version of Donald Trump at the convention, despite dark parts of the president’s history.President donald trump is in trouble with women voters, and the GOP knows it. .... Recent polling suggests that most women do not intend to vote for Trump this November. Former Vice President Joe Biden leads Trump among registered women voters by 21 percentage points, according to an August poll from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, a gap consistently found in surveys taken throughout the summer. (snip) Women voters may determine who wins the 2020 election: They turn out to...

An editor of a peer-reviewed journal that deals with violence is asking students and faculty for research papers that prove the existence of “structural racism” in policing but refused to respond when asked if they’ll accept evidence that contradicts that view, according to The College Fix. The story: Prof. Carlos Cuevas, co-director of the Violence and Justice Research Laboratory at Northwestern University, is asking students and staff to provide papers that are “designed to advance the scientific knowledge about the excessive use of force by some law enforcement officers as applied to members of communities of color.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) is monitoring online conversations and posts in what it described as a “social listening” effort in order to combat what the organization is calling an “infodemic” — the spread of false coronavirus-related information online. The initiative: In a statement on its website, the WHO said it has teamed with over 50 digital companies and social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok, Google, Viber, WhatsApp, and YouTube “to ensure that science-based health messages from the organization or other official sources appear first when people search for information related to COVID-19.” “We’re not just battling the virus,” said...

Patrons at a Washington, D.C. restaurant were ceaselessly pestered and yelled at by a group of protesters on Monday night for apparently refusing to clench their fists in solidarity with the protesters. “White silence is violence,” chanted the protesters, and “No justice, no peace!” in an apparent effort to get a defiant woman to raise her fist like other patrons around her. A separate clip posted online shows protesters harassing a couple who refused to raise their fists as they yell “No justice, no peace!”

CNN changed a chyron during a segment early this week on the violent protests in Wisconsin over the weekend, removing the word “violent” from the chyron—even though the protests were, in fact, violent. During a live broadcast on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer,” the network aired the following chyron: 00:3800:56 8PM CURFEW ORDERED AFTER VIOLENT PROTESTS OVER POLICE SHOOTING OF UNARMED BLACK MAN IN WISCONSIN Several seconds later the chyron was taken down and was then put back up on the screen after the network removed the word “violent” from it: 8PM CURFEW ORDERED AFTER PROTESTS OVER POLICE...