Free Republic

Google was thrown into turmoil last night after the company fired James Damore, author of a manifesto defending viewpoint diversity and a fact-based approach to the alleged gender gap in tech. In exclusive interviews with Breitbart News, more Google employees are now speaking out in support of the manifesto. Damore’s ten-page manifesto, which was met by an immediate backlash, described a climate of fear, in which employees who challenge prevailing leftist narratives at the company are faced with immediate threats to their career. Damore’s own experience appears to confirm this. Breitbart News is exclusively publishing a series of interviews with current and...

This post is about an issue that is by now a bit dated (though the topic as such certainly isn’t), but we have only just become aware of it and it seemed to us worth rescuing it from the memory hole. In late 2013, the then newest issue of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) defined a new mental illness, the so-called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD. As TheMindUnleashed.org informs us, the definition of this new mental illness essentially amounts to declaring any non-conformity and questioning of authority as a form of insanity. According...

Anonymous comments, even positive ones, damage trust in the news media. Despite their ubiquity on news sites around the Internet, a movement against anonymous comments sections has slowly gathered steam over the past few years. The first call to action came in 2010 when the American Journalism Review said, “It is time for news sites to stop allowing anonymous online comments.” Since that bold declaration, a wide variety of media outlets, including ESPN, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Sporting News and USA Today have either banned anonymous posts on their sites or eliminated comments sections altogether. In August 2013, the...

Graham Nash feels optimistic that young people will once again change America for the better. So while he’s frustrated by political ideals surrounding issues like global warming and marriage equality, he realizes that “those powers against progress” will naturally run their course. “They will all die at one point and the children will take over,” Nash said. Then he added: “Do you know anybody under 25 that gives a damn whether you marry a man if you’re a man or if you marry a woman if you’re a woman? No.” …

Al Feldstein, who took over a fledgling humor magazine called Mad in 1956 and made it a popular, profitable and enduring wellspring of American satire, died on Tuesday at his ranch in Paradise Valley, Mont. He was 88. His wife, the former Michelle Key, confirmed the death. In recent years, he was a wildlife and landscape painter in Montana, outside Livingston. Mr. Feldstein had been a writer and illustrator of comic books when he became editor of Mad four years into its life and just a year after it had graduated from comic-book form to a full-fledged magazine.

<p>LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.</p> <p>The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.</p>

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Barack Obama plans to begin addressing America's immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as "policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system," said the official, Cecilia Munoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in...

HANOVER, N.H. (AP) — A former Dartmouth College teacher and medical school researcher sent e-mails to some of her former students saying she plans to sue them because they "harassed, compromised, abused or discriminated against" her. Priya Venkatesan, 39, who received her bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in 1990, last week e-mailed the former students in her Science, Technology and Society course with the news that she is pursuing a federal civil-rights lawsuit against some of them. Venkatesan, now at Northwestern University, said in an interview with the Valley News that she is still searching for a lawyer to take her...

From the Wall Street Journal: Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights. Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name...

What happens when a dozen prominent law professors from across the legal spectrum - from Robert Bork to Alan Dershowitz - petition the judge in the Libby case to give credence to the concept that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's constitutional authority in prosecuting the case is in question? U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton will have to address the issue next week when he has been asked by Libby's attorneys to consider releasing their client on bond pending appeal of his conviction for perjury and obstruction of an FBI investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to reporters....

JEDDAH, 28 December 2006 — A two-day conference organized by the Makkah-based Muslim World League yesterday called for a consultative commission in order to take legal action against those who abuse Islam and its Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and Islamic sanctities, at local and international courts of justice, the Saudi Press Agency said. The conference titled “In Defense of the Prophet” called upon Islamic countries and governments to stand united to defend the Islamic faith and its Prophet. It denounced the smear campaigns to tarnish the image of the Prophet and urged Muslims to make all-out efforts to...

The Oscars may be over, but parents still need to teach their kids to laugh at Tinseltown's left-wing celebrities, says best-selling children's author Katharine DeBrecht. Her highly anticipated new book lampoons stars Streisand, Madonna, and Cruise, and was given out in Oscar gift bags. It is available in stores today.LOS ANGELES, March 7 /PRNewswire/ -- With Academy Awards being handed out to movies about racist cops, gay cowboys, and communist sympathizers, Hollywood has declared an outright war on traditional values. But instead of getting angry at the movie business, parents should teach their kids to laugh at it, this according...