Free Republic

A better future for poor Americans trapped in Baltimore and across the country must start with a fact-based analysis of how we got here and who has been responsible. Fact: The last Republican city council member in Baltimore City left office in 1942. That is 73 years of solid Democrat city councils. Fact: The last Republican mayor of Baltimore City left office in 1967. That is 48 years of unbroken Democrat control of the mayor’s office. Fact: The Maryland Senate is currently 33 Democrats to 14 Republicans. Fact: The Maryland House is currently 90 Democrats to 50 Republicans. Fact: The...

When the forces of American progressivism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, those who would one day be labeled as conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians found themselves quite ill-prepared for the intellectual and political onslaught. Perhaps the best analyst at the time progressivism emerged, somewhat surprisingly, was E.L. Godkin, the venerable founder of The Nation. t was the rights of man that engaged the attention of the political thinkers of the eighteenth century. The world had suffered so much misery due to the results of dynastic ambitions and jealousies, and the masses of mankind were everywhere so burdened by the...

Start the video at 28:29. This woman blames Baltimore riots entirely on decades of rats and the fatherless homes they caused.

Will the next presidential election be won by a lie? Truth has long since been replaced by “narratives” on the American left. Rather than discuss genuine issues and objective facts, progressives prefer to make up a politically effective story. It doesn’t matter whether the story is false, as long as it sways the public’s emotions and wins the day. The ends justify the means. This “lying game” strategy often shows up in politically sensitive scientific debates. In honor of Earth Week, let’s look at one of the patron saints of environmentalism, Rachel Carson. Carson wanted to eliminate DDT, the most...

Left-wingers and progressives in America are becoming insufferable, are they not? It's quite apparent that they have no desire to "live and let live," but want to force their delusions off onto everyone else. You will live, think, and do as the Left tells you, whether you like it or not. Even in the pettiest of way, they can't help themselves. Take, for example, this story coming out of the University of Oregon. To summarize for the reader, a student named Elle Mallon, who was running for office in student government filed a number of grievances against a rival student...

Hillary Clinton, without a hint of irony, has reportedly called for “toppling” the 1 percent. So the putative favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination intends to target those who — like herself, her husband and the benefactors of her family foundation – are the wealthiest of the wealthy. If Mrs. Clinton is seeking to upend a system that pays off a select group of elite insiders who profit by undertaking cronyistic, anti-free market acts, I applaud her. But if Mrs. Clinton is rather seeking to punish the few who have amassed great wealth by producing goods and services for their...

The "Black Lives Matter" campaign is based on as big a lie as the "campus rape culture" lie; the Rolling Stone magazine gang rape at the University of Virginia fraternity lie; the gang rape by the Duke University lacrosse team lie; the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" Ferguson lie; and all the other lies that animate leftist hysterias. Building hysterias based on falsehoods is a primary modus operandi on the left. One can even say that without hysteria there is no left. First a lie or exaggeration is manufactured. Then it is repeated over and over by the mainstream media and...

Modern day feminists are brainwashing an entire generation of women into believing they are helpless, inferior creatures who are incapable of buying birth control, coping without abortion, raising a family, using a gun for self-defense, getting married or working with men because the Sandra Fluke's of the world are nothing more than sexual objects trapped in a meat-eating, misogynistic society. Essentially, according to the genetic scholars at Salon magazine, it has become feasibly impossible for those human beings with two "X" chromosomes to function, let alone to be responsible for their lives. Yes, the sorority sisters of Sappho actually want...

I.S.S. Gives Way to New League for Democracy The New York Call - November 19, 1921. Organization's Birth Celebrated at Dinner in Yorkville Casino - Will take in Non-Collegians.With the avowed purpose of "mobilizing the brains of the middle-class in the service of the labor movement," the League for Industrial Democracy has come into being on the framework of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The new organization's birth was celebrated by a dinner at Yorkville Casino last night, addressed by Robert Morss Lovett, president of the League; Scott Nearing, Norman Thomas and Roger N. Baldwin. The league, according to Mr. Thomas,...

"When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. 'Grab its motherf---ing leg,' she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped." Thus started a 9,000-word article in Rolling Stone magazine about the supposed rash of campus rapes across America. The writer, Sabrina Erdely, began with the horrifying story of Jackie, a college girl who found herself raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia while two other men, including her...

Indiana has gone from becoming a standard-bearer in the battle for religious liberty, to a routed coward who unhands the ensign, careful not to trip over the pole on the way to the rear. State versions of the federal RFRA are a red herring, which in no way inform legislative or social policy, except in very specific situations (such as a city council passing a narrow ordinance compelling businesses to participate in same-sex weddings—just to pull one out of a hat). We conservatives take it for granted that those city ordinances will now be passed in Indiana, as they have...

“It is when the majority in a country becomes weak, indifferent and confused that a criminal minority, beautifully organized like all gangs, seizes the power”, wrote Ayn Rand in her open letter To All Fifth Columnist. Speaking about the tragedy of today, Rand concludes that “by remaining unorganized, mentally unarmed, indifferent and confused, we are serving as innocent Fifth Columnists of our own destruction”. This indifference in America to cultural issues that we believe are seemingly unimportant is akin to the appalling fascination of watching a man being hanged with the slowly dawning realization that it is a reflection in...

(Snip) They [Christian small business owners]are in this sense more like religious believers under compulsion in a society with an established church than like believers denied the freedom to exercise their religion. Liberals are in this respect right to say they’re not trying to kill religious liberty. They’re trying to take it back to something like the form it had in the Anglo-American world when the Anglo-American world had a formal state religion—except now the state religion is supposed to be progressive liberalism. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416421/church-left-yuval-levin

Internal dissension not only blunts the Republican attack; it hands Democrats a convenient stick with which to beat them. No one on the right, whether conservative or Republican, thinks this is a healthy situation. Why, then, is it the case? What is it that unites Democrats that Republicans lack? Anyone who pays attention to politics can see that when Democrats attack, they speak from the same text, and when they vote, they march in lockstep. If one Democrat says the wealthy must pay their “fair share,” all Democrats do — regardless of the merits of the charge. If their leaders...

Why do so many young adults paint absurd caricatures of Christians who request government protection of their religious freedoms, arguing their true goal is to ban gay men from sitting at the local lunch counter? Why do they spread falsehoods about legislation, insisting that bills like the one recently signed by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence will unleash a Republican-led Jim Crow revival aimed at the LGBT community? Why do so many people, Gen Xers and younger, invent a monster of anti-gay bigotry and keep screaming the monster is real despite a mountain of contrary facts standing before them? The answer...

Everywhere we turn the Democrats are sounding more like Benito Mussolini every day. They’ve become the fascist party. Fascism is a system of government where the party in power forcibly suppresses opposition and criticism. We’re seeing over the issue of same-sex sexuality, ‘gay rights,’ homosexuality, whatever you want to call it. Any opposition will be shut down, fined, and put out of business. The call for toleration is the foot in the door to political, economic, and social repression, and once the objective has been achieved, toleration discarded. The ideological door is now shut. No more debates, and you will...

The New York Times was abuzz March 5. The board of trustees of South Carolina’s Erskine College—a small, liberal arts college historically associated with the Presbyterian church—had issued a statement declaring that the school considered “all sexual activity outside the covenant of marriage [as] sinful and therefore ultimately destructive of the parties involved.” Not only did the trustees affirm what has been standard Christian belief and practice since … well, the beginning of Christianity, but they even stated: “As a Christian academic community, and in light of our institutional mission, members of the Erskine community are expected to follow the...

1) “In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you, there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.” —Seymour Hersh2) “I haven't seen American Sniper, but correct me if I'm wrong: An occupier mows down faceless Iraqis but the real victim is his anguished soul.” – Max Blumenthal3) “Put a man in uniform, preferably a white man, give him a gun, and Americans will worship him. It is a particularly childish trait, of...

We in America have a problem with media bias. Who or where does it come from? What did those people say, write, or do? Did it evolve by multiple steps, or by one step? When did the use of narrative get introduced? In an attempt to answer some of these questions and others, the result is a paper that I have recently written, here. I put it up online for all to read and examine, and I hope there will be those who will take the time to follow the footnotes back and read the original source material. These are...

When Democrats talk about middle class Americans, they almost inevitably use them as a cudgel to attack the rich. On the other hand, bizarrely, Republicans seem to spend much more time defending the rich from attacks by the Left than talking about what they’re going to do to help the middle class. That’s unfortunate because middle class Americans are the backbone of the country; yet their interests always seem to take a backseat to those of the wealthy, the poor and the naked self-interest of BOTH political parties. There’s nothing wrong with giving the poor a hand-up or making sure...