Free Republic

Have you ever been listening to someone talk and have déjà vu, even though you’ve never seen or heard of the person speaking, and the interview you’re watching happened just a few hours ago? I have. Once. A couple of weeks ago. I was listening to Tucker interview Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese native who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. She eventually immigrated to the United States and has lived here for 40 years. As I was listening to her talk about how the Cultural Revolution rolled out and how she was seeing many of the same things...

America’s Red GuardsThe communist history of using children to forward political goals.In August 1966, communist leader Mao Zedong commenced “Red August,” a campaign amidst the wider Cultural Revolution to wipe away the “Four Olds” of Chinese society: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. He infamously used university students, and other younger children, as foot soldiers to carry out mass beatings and destroy important cultural and historical institutions.The outsized rule of juveniles and young adults in the subsequent massacres perpetrated by the Red Guards was not at all unique. In Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, children were also enlisted...

Bright Sheng is a professor of composition at the University of Michigan. He was born in China in 1955; when he was a child, the Red Guards took away his family piano. Nevertheless, he grew up to become a widely celebrated musician: He received a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship in 2001, and has twice been a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in music. His undergraduate students should certainly count themselves lucky to be able to learn from him. Instead, they are demanding the university fire him for rendering the classroom an unsafe space. The administration is looking into the matter, and...

A students' union pays for £12-per-hour 'safe space marshals' to police external speakers to make sure they do not voice views that are offensive to the audience. King's College Students' Union requires marshals to attend events with a phone in hand so they can take 'immediate action' if anyone expresses opinions though to discriminate against ethnic or sexual minorities.

Michael Crook, a Briton whose Communist father moved to China before the Second World War, was one of a handful of foreigners living in the country when Mao launched an all-out class war. snip Far from worrying that he too could come under suspicion because of his Western background, he was among the first of his classmates to sign up for the Red Guard – the fanatical student group that became the revolution’s most devoted enforcers. snipThat Mr Crook is unapologetic about the Mao era is perhaps unsurprising given his family history. His father, David, fought for the Communists in...

Updated 9:30 p.m.—Occupiers held a general assembly meeting and voted unanimously to hold the building until they are arrested. There were about 40 outside and 10 inside. The ones inside asked for welding gloves and dispatched a committee to find pallets behind grocery stores to build barricades. At one point, in an ironic moment for people who are trying to claim their use of public space as a First Amendment right, they shouted at news reporters asking them to stop filming. "We'll make you stop," one said when asked what they would do. "We'll keep shouting until you stop." Updated...

June 14, 2009Obama's Other Controversial ChurchBy Andrew Walden "This is a guy (former Weatherman terror-bomber Bill Ayers) who lives in my neighborhood ... the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago - when I was 8 years old - somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense." -- Barack Obama on the Campaign trail, 2008 As President Obama prepared to commemorate D-Day, the Associated Press dug up old details and photos to write a warm fuzzy story about the WW2 service record of Obama's maternal grandfather...

The following are a series of short clips documenting the death of Bian Zhongyun, the first female principal beaten to death by the Red Guards in the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.     Part I   Part II   Part III   Part IV   Part V   Part VI   Part VII   Part VIII   Part IX   Part X