Free Republic

The implementation of LGBT ideology in the public school system, assisted by the takeover of the entertainment industry and the pushing of progressive politicians, has been phenomenally successful by any standard. When my first book The Culture War came out in 2016, less than five percent of the population identified as LGBT. That acronym has lengthened and scrambled (and will certainly continue to do so) as students are handed scores of sexual and gender identities that they can choose from, with the only boring and uncelebrated identity being “cisgender” or “heteronormative.” (“Cisgender,” according to trans activists, refers to someone who...

Less than half of students at Cambridge University now identify as heterosexual, a survey has found. Around 600 undergraduates took part in the anonymous online poll for student newspaper Varsity last month. Of those, just 49.7 per cent said they were heterosexual... ...The findings of the Varsity poll also tally with a survey by Oxford University’s student paper Cherwell, which found 49 per cent of students identified as heterosexual ...

President Obama's re-election team has already been lauded for its mastery of data and organziation, but a feature in today's The New York Times looks at another secret, and more subtle, weapon: Behavioral science. Reporter Benedict Carey talks to some of the members of the campaign's "COBS" team, an informal group of unpaid advisors who shared their knowledge on the latest academic research and theories on how to influence the public's knowledge behavior. Publicly, the group—which it gave itself the name of "consortium of behavioral scientists"—where just friendly volunteers offering advice. None of the social scientists and psychologists who took...

Candace Owens wants you to know she’s “proud” to not be vaccinated against COVID-19. The New York Times bestselling author says she “trusts her gut” more than she does infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci. “I still have not received the COVID-19 vaccine and have not demanded that any of my employees get it either. I am proud that I committed myself to standing firm against the bribery, media propaganda, coercion, celebrity-peer pressure campaign, plus censorship. I made a personal decision for me and my family,” Owens wrote in a Facebook post Sunday. “It is isn’t easy to swim against...

As my listeners and readers can hopefully attest, I have been on a lifelong quest to understand human nature and human behavior. I am sad to report that I have learned more in the last few years, particularly in 2020, than in any equivalent period of time. One of the biggest revelations concerns a question that has always plagued me: How does one explain the "good German," the term used to describe the average, presumably decent German, who did nothing to hurt Jews but also did nothing to help them and did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime? The same...

Let’s call it progressive peer-group privilege. The older I get, the more firmly I’m convinced of a fundamental psychological fact. We never really leave high school. Of all the forms of pressure that one can apply to a person — political pressure, market pressure, moral pressure — the one that matters most of all is the one that mattered in the lunch room when you were wearing your class ring and letter jacket. It’s peer pressure, the unbreakable bond of the high-school clique. No reasonable person thinks Samantha Bee would still have a job at TBS if she used the...

My daughter is ten. She wants me to download the Musical.ly app on my phone so she can make funny lip-sync videos. Everyone has it, she whines, even the kid whose mom is an FBI agent/social worker/pediatrician/nun. Wow. Well. In that case… I download the app while she’s at school but it won’t let me explore without an account. I create a profile under Chardonaynay47, only to delete that and opt for something less momish — gummibear9.

<p>The idea of Chinese people worshipping wax mangoes because some Pakistani minister didn’t have time to have a proper gift made for his visit to China is indeed quite startling. Of course some people will instantly run into the old stereotype of those perfid Orientals slaves, who have been forever worshipping their tyrants as Gods on Earth. But that’s bullshit. The Chinese have always been a fairly unruly bunch, and the Emperor was never worshipped as a God, unlike the Roman Emperors of our humanistic West.</p>

"The product is good and people want it," President Obama said, touting his health insurance plan to an audience at DreamWorks Animation in November. Yet, for being such an illustrious product, the Obama Administration sure seems desperate for people to get on board. Here are 15 ways the White House, state exchanges, and supporters have tried to sell Obamacare. 2. Quickly followed by Hoe-surance: 3. With a "geek" selfie: These geeks are covered ... are you? #geeksgetcovered Send us your #getcovered stories http://t.co/MMo1RXlWK3 pic.twitter.com/b9BSAGU2hN — The White House OSTP (@whitehouseostp) March 13, 2014 4. With a message from Lebron...

Note: Videos and photos included. SNIPPET: "In 1967, at the Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, World History teacher Ron Jones was asked about the Holocaust by a student. "Could it happen here?". According to the press release accompanying the latest retelling of the events that followed, "Jones came up with an unusual answer. He decided to have a two week experiment in dictatorship. His idea was to explain fascism to his class through a game, nothing more. He never intended what resulted, where his class would be turned into a Fascist environment. Where students gave up their freedom...

One of the most prevalent arguments used in favor of socialized medicine, revamping the 1993 Eligibility Law for military service, nuclear disarmament, and almost every other leftist issue--is the same argument we caution teenagers against: peer pressure. "Everyone else is doing it, why can't I?" is a phrase that seems to echo from adolescence and, thanks to our current President, throughout politics. I can almost picture Mrs. Soetoro asking the young Barack, during one of his formative four AM lectures, "if everyone else was jumping off a cliff..." In response to that adage, somehow he learned to say, "yes." During...

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in. "Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes. In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the...

If Sen. Barack Obama loses the presidency or wins by far narrower margins than the double-digit lead some mainstream media polls predict, his weak performance will not be the result of the so-called “Bradley Effect,” which holds that black candidates underperform at the polls due to latent racism. Rather, the true culprit will be something public opinion scholars call the “Spiral of Silence Theory.” In the 1970s, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann introduced a provocative and startling theory of mass communication she called the “Spiral of Silence.” Noelle-Neumann argued that when mass media create an impression that the majority of...

n army of Internet avengers has set out to destroy Lori Drew and her family. With ruthless efficiency, they have learned the identity of the suburban St. Louis woman whose cyberspace meddling appears to have played a role in the suicide of a 13-year-old neighbor girl. They have published her address, phone numbers and photos, and harangued the clients of her advertising business. The Drew family has fled its home. Their teenage daughter is living apart from her parents, for her safety. The advertising business is closed. And still the online avengers forge on, seeking the whereabouts of Lori and...

Just when we were starting to think they'd forgotten about them, Apple has posted three new "Get a Mac" television ads: • Podium: In which PC exhorts the sufferers, "Don't give up on Vista!" Direct link via YouTube. • Boxer: Some people just want a computer that's simple and intuitive, that works they way they do. The ring announcer's closing quote is an instant classic, "Actually, my brother-in-law just got a Mac and loves it!" Direct link via YouTube. • PR Lady: PC hires PR lady to smooth over Vista disappointment and downplay Mac OS X Leopard in effort to...

IT is the ultimate in peer group pressure – coral reef fish that can change their sex depending on who they hang out with, scientists have discovered. A recent study by a team of Australian and American scientists have found changing sex is common among coral reef fish such as the juvenile bluehead wrasse. Dr Philip Munday, from Townsville's James Cook University, said the wrasse had adopted the unusual strategy so that each fish could increase its chances of breeding within a complex social structure. "It turns out that social effects are really important to whether a bluehead wrasse becomes...

Home-schooling is thriving across the country as more parents choose to take personal responsibility for their children's education. The rapid growth of home-schooling caused home-school critic Rob Reich to say in the April 18 issue of Family Circle magazine, that "today everyone knows someone who's home-schooling." As a result of the growth of home-schooling, more people are coming into contact with home-schooled children. Consequently, it is likely that home-schooling will continue to gain acceptance as a viable education alternative.

I was giving blood today at work. For those of you who haven’t given blood recently, there are some major changes in how the blood is collected. It used to be that blood was taken by swabbing your arm with rubbing alcohol, and then a needle was placed into the vein in your elbow, and the blood was collected in a sterile bag. That part is still the same. However, there is now a choice of how one gives blood: the conventional way, or a new way called “power red”. This involved a complex machine which takes a portion of...

Let me preface by saying that this thread is aimed at discussing kids who are dealing with socially driven syndromes or disorders. In a thread in the very near future, we will discuss family members with special physical needs: Down's syndrome, autism, Alzheimer's, et al. There is a lot of ground to cover on this subject and it is difficult to know where to begin. All of us have heard, I am sure, that Americans (particularly children) are more obese today than we have been in the past. Are our children becoming food addicts or couch addicts? How do we...

Let's talk about sex On Everwood, the WB's family drama about life in a small Colorado town, Ephram (played by Gregory Smith) has been in love with Amy (Emily VanCamp) since the show's first episode in the fall of 2002. Their tumultuous journey to coupledom spanned the show's first two seasons, which corresponded with their sophomore and junior years in high school. The pair faced many obstacles, most of them resulting from the fact that Amy's boyfriend, Colin, was in a coma. Finally, at the end of last season, Amy and Ephram made it through the wilderness and began dating....