Free Republic

Prof. David Collum ’77, chemistry, has come under fire from both students and administrators for a series of Thursday night tweets defending police officers that pushed and severely injured an elderly man. In a graphic film that has since become viral, a 75-year-old white man could be seen lightly brushing up against Buffalo police — who donned heavy tactical gear — as he approaches them. In response, two of the cops shoved the man, causing him to fall and hit his head. As the man lays bleeding and unresponsive, over a dozen officers appear to simply walk away, failing to...

THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA: “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” I don’t know how anyone will respond to the facts I am going to present, because they really haven’t responded to any of our questions or challenged any of the facts in our last few shows other than “Hey, don’t call him a ‘czar!’” But I can’t make this piece of the puzzle fit, unless this piece is about...

The crackdown on legal firearms ownership, which was announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on May 1, is another shining moment in the long history of dysfunctional Canadian gun control proposals. It will accomplish nothing in particular, but will come at considerable public expense. It will not improve public safety, nor will it will please either side of this contentious debate. What it will do is give both Liberals and Conservatives an opportunity to fundraise off the issue — one could be forgiven for wondering if that’s literally the only point to any of this. So, again: a textbook example...

...True liberals are leaving the authoritarian left in droves. We are witnessing a movement in real time of people who used to consider themselves to be part of the left leaving it and becoming politically homeless. They have varying reasons for this, but it’s primarily because the authoritarian left has lost the plot. Many in the #WalkAway movement leaving the left find themselves politically homeless because they don’t see our side as any better. Focusing on pragmatic populism only works for a little while, then many start questioning where we are going. This is why we need to have a...

In 2016, I was in the greenroom for a Fox News segment, where I met a charismatic actor named Antonio Sabato Jr. I had never heard of him. Born in Italy, he became, he told me, a "proud American citizen." He called himself a "Christian conservative" and said that he recently came out in favor of presidential candidate Donald Trump and planned to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Given Hollywood's hostility toward Republicans, let alone pro-Trump Republicans, I assumed Sabato's career was likely in decline, if, in fact, he ever really had one. Why else would...

Since the coronavirus came on the horizon, media figures have been stoking panic, leading to mass shortages of basic health supplies, business travel cancellations, and market drops, all while the confirmed disease number hiked yesterday to around 0.000002 percent of the U.S. population.So far, U.S. cases of the basic seasonal flu outnumber coronavirus cases by a factor of 45,000 (using federal stats for this year’s flu and real-time tracking of coronavirus confirmations). The flu season has even been especially bad this year, with between 20,000 and 52,000 deaths, compared to 29 so far from coronavirus.According to infectious disease expert...

Hollywood is one leg of the Axis of Indoctrination, with media and academia completing the trifecta. There are some outspoken nonliberals in Hollywood. Self-described "libertarian" Clint Eastwood comes to mind. But the list is short. A month before the 2016 election, I met a young actress at a party. She just arrived in Los Angeles from Michigan and excitedly told me about a meeting scheduled the following morning with one of the major agencies in Hollywood, an agency she hoped would represent her. For an actor, getting an agent -- especially with one of the major firms -- is...

The city of Charlottesville, Virginia, will not honor the birthday of Thomas Jefferson this spring for the first time since World War II. The Washington Post reports that the city will instead celebrate the demise of slavery this coming Tuesday. The holiday is known as Liberation and Freedom Day. It will commemorate when Union troops arrived in the city in March 1865 and freed enslaved people. The change is the latest example of this southern city reckoning with its history. It began when the city tried to remove its Confederate monuments. That inspired white supremacists to stage the deadly 2017...

Following his public support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, Antonio Sabato Jr. says Hollywood ousted him. “I had to sell everything,” Sabato, 48, told Variety -- in an interview published on Tuesday -- about leaving Tinseltown not too long after Trump won the presidential bid. "I had to pay all my debts," he continued. "I was blacklisted. All my representatives left me, from agents to managers to commercial agents. I literally had to move, find a new job to survive and take care of my kids.

Members of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" U.S. Olympic ice hockey team are under fire for sporting "Keep America Great" hats at a recent rally for President Trump in Las Vegas. The team initially was invited to be in a separate photo line with the president at last week's rally, but they later appeared onstage, according to The Washington Post, with many wearing the hats. Trump had invited team captain Mike Eruzione, 65, along with other players to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the "Miracle on Ice" game in which they beat the four-time defending gold medalist Soviet Union team...

Voting in the United States has long been considered both a right and a responsibility. But one California lawmaker hopes to make casting a ballot a legal obligation. Assemblyman Marc Levine introduced a bill last week that would essentially require every registered voter to cast a ballot — even if it’s an empty one.

A bill to scrap Lee-Jackson Day as a holiday in Virginia has now passed both the House and Senate. Lee-Jackson Day, established over 100 years ago, is observed annually on the Friday preceding the third Monday in January. It honors Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, both native Virginians. Critics of the Lee-Jackson holiday view it as a celebration of the state's slave-holding history that’s offensive to African Americans. Many cities and counties have opted not to observe it. The bill passed the Senate last month with a vote of 22-18. The bill then passed the House...

A bill that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to Virginia's nondiscrimination law cleared committees in the House of Delegates and Senate this week and appears to be on its way to becoming law in the Old Dominion. A version of the bill known as the Virginia Values Act was shepherded through the Senate committee by Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria). In the House, it was sponsored by Mark Sickles (D-Franconia), where it passed by a 16-6 vote, with all Democrats and three Republicans voting in favor. The mood among activists was celebratory. Democrats hold a 55-45 majority in the...

The pro-gun masses had their day at the Virginia Capitol Monday. But mathematical reality quickly set in Tuesday morning as a Democratic-led House of Delegates panel easily dispatched nearly a dozen Republican-sponsored gun bills. The proposals would have made it easier to carry guns in places of worship, allowed concealed carry without a permit, limited gun-free zones and strengthened mandatory sentencing rules for gun crimes. They hit a legislative buzzsaw in a public safety subcommittee, just as Democratic-sponsored gun-control bills did when Republicans controlled the General Assembly. “Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be the first to go...

by Joe Callen Trump Derangement Syndrome just hit Christmas! Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has removed a cameo scene featuring an appearance from Donald Trump in its broadcast of the film Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. A 10-second cameo scene in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York — which shows Donald Trump giving Kevin McCallister (played by Macaulay Culkin) directions to the hotel lobby — has been removed by Canadian Broadcaster Corporation (CBC). “Excuse me, where’s the lobby?” asks the Home Alone 2 character Kevin McCallister in the film. “Down the hall and to the left,” responds Donald Trump. Watch the cameo scene below:

“We should continue to impeach him until we actually get our way,” Congressman Gallego exclaimed. Speaking to Vice News on the eve of the historic impeachment of President Trump, Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego gave away the Democrats’ game plan for 2020.

The Department of Justice sided with college students reprimanded for promoting free speech by slamming Jones County Junior College’s “Orwellian,” “draconian,” and “unconstitutional” treatment of them in a Statement of Interest filed on Monday. The DOJ made explicitly clear that public colleges cannot “trample” on their students’ First Amendment rights. In a news release from the DOJ announcing the Statement of Interest filing, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division clearly stated, “Repressive speech codes are the indecent hallmark of despotic, totalitarian regimes. They have absolutely no place in our country, and the First Amendment outlaws all...

The "immense" rise in sales of high-emission sports utility vehicles means they now outsell electric cars in the UK by 37 to one, research has found. As a result, overall exhaust emissions from new cars have been increasing, not declining, for the past three years, says the UK Energy Research Centre. SUV sales are jeopardising the UK transport sector's ability to meet EU emissions targets, it said. Prof Jillian Anable of the UKERC said this made "a mockery" of UK policy. "Effectively, we have been sleepwalking into the issue," she said. "The decarbonisation of the passenger car market can no...

More than 300 ads from President Trump’s re-election campaign were removed by YouTube and Google over the summer for “violating company policy,” according to a new report. The video ads paid for by Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., ran for several days on YouTube before being taken down, an investigation by “60 Minutes” found Sunday. When quizzed on why the ads were pulled, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said some of videos were “not approved to run,” before deferring any further questions to Google’s online transparency report, which keeps an archive of political ads. But the...

A glaring sign of our intelligentsia's decrepitude is their absolute lack of interest in understanding either the Brexit vote or the election of Donald Trump. With a few notable exceptions, those who claim to spend their lives doing the public "thinking" that must surely require higher faculties than possessed by common people, have shown no intellectual curiosity for the social shifts of our day. You would think people who do thinking for a living would find the events in the U.K. and the U.S. fascinating and historically compelling, if for no other reason than that neither outcome was expected by...