Free Republic

First Lady Melania Trump was a rose in a red embroidered and sequined gown as she and President Donald Trump hosted a formal dinner at the Winfield House for Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles on Tuesday in London, England. Mrs. Trump emerged from yesterday’s iconic fashion statement (A custom white hat by her personal couturier Hervé Pierre! Gasp!) in a red wool crepe gown by Givenchy’s Clare Waight Keller — a Brit, herself, and the first female creative director at the Parisian fashion house who famously designed Meghan Markle’s wedding gown. The Givenchy number is from the brand’s...

Are you a propagandist? If you write nonfiction intended to persuade, yes, by a broad definition, you almost certainly are. Here are fifty terms for, and definitions of, forms of propaganda, at least one of which such writers will likely employ in a given piece of content. Propaganda (the word is from a New Latin term meaning “propagating,” synonymous in this connotation with publicizing) has been defined as “communication intended to shape perceptions, manipulate cognition, and direct behavior.” That’s a broad definition — a narrower one would limit propaganda to willful, prejudicial manipulation of information — but it helps writers...

Four people were arrested over the weekend after Anchorage police say they are responsible for an East Anchorage shooting that left one person dead earlier this year. On March 30, Tion Price was killed after a shooting at an apartment in the 300 block of Oklahoma Street. Price, 19, was shot in the upper body and pronounced dead at the scene. According to a release from the Anchorage Police Department at the time, another man was shot in the upper body and transported to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries. A woman was also assaulted and transported to a...

First Episode of Science Uprising Is Out: Fake Science and Toxic Materialism Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC June 3, 2019 What if the way the culture directs us to think about our own biological origins is based on a vast, highly influential myth? The myth is materialism. It’s the idea that only material stuff actually exists, while what we thought are immaterial or spiritual realities — the mind, free will, the soul — aren’t real at all but are just fobbed off on us by the brain. That’s the theme of the first episode of Science Uprising, an aggressive new counterprogramming...

The early U.S. Congress wanted every “free able-bodied white male citizen” between the ages of 18 and 45 to be an armed member of a militia, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin. The historical perspective amid a progressive effort to restrict and even confiscate guns comes from T.J. Martinelli, an author and reporter in Washington state, who wrote about Congress and guns at the Tenth Amendment Center website. He points out that it was 227 years ago this month that Congress adopted the Militia Acts of 1792. The pair of statutes allowed the president to lead state militias in time of...

A record-breaking number of spellers — 562 — competed their hearts and minds out during this week’s 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. And a record-breaking number beat the bee, with eight contestants crowned “co-champions” at the conclusion of Thursday night’s finale. For the rest though, a word (or words) got the better of them. Whether their elimination was controversial or incontrovertible (both knockout words in round No. 3), whether it left them feeling dubitative, stolid, or even, say, inured (round No. 3 again), these unlucky competitors made a typo, and got dinged for it — literally dinged,...

DeWayne Craddock: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know DeWayne Craddock, a public utilities engineer whose name frequently appeared on city notices, was named as the mass shooter who opened fire “indiscriminately” at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center, killing 12 people and wounding others, in the nation’s latest horrific active shooter event. The Wall Street Journal and CNN reported that Craddock was the shooter; Heavy confirmed the name through police scanner audio, which you can listen to later in this article (be forewarned that it is very disturbing). Officers named DeWayne Craddock as the shooter to dispatchers early on in...

President Donald Trump tweeted Friday in celebration of LGBT Pride Month, which begins in June, and repeated his administration’s call for the international community to decriminalize homosexuality in countries where it is illegal. Trump has frequently been attacked by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) activists on the left, particularly for his administration’s policies on transgenderism. Trump has barred transgender individuals from serving in the military, and reversed Barack Obama’s policies encouraging public schools to provide for transgender bathrooms. His administration also recently insisted on sticking to a definition of sexual discrimination that refers to biological sex. More broadly, however,...

Cheap renewables won’t stop global warming, says Bill Gates “Electricity is just 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Gates. “There is no substitute for how the industrial economy runs today.” When financial analysts proposed rating companies on their CO2 output to drive down emissions, Gates was appalled by the idea that the climate and energy problem would be easy to solve. He asked them: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put...

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argued last week that the recent Alabama abortion bill is “unconstitutional.” In an interview with Berkeley News, UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argued that the recent Alabama abortion bill is “unconstitutional.” “The Alabama law is clearly unconstitutional,” Chemerinsky said in the interview. “And it’s what’s next. Whatever federal district court, whatever (U.S.) Court of Appeals, hears it would have to declare it unconstitutional. Now, that doesn’t mean that the court will have to take the case. It could be that the lower courts declare it unconstitutional, and the (Supreme Court) decides...

As sure as the Sun rises in the East, Univision senior anchor Jorge Ramos will find a way to renew his all-too-frequent calls for anti-gun legislation. A recent opinion column mashes violence in Mexico with incidents in the United States in order to make the same old points. The column, titled “Run, Hide, or Fight”, rehashes some of the same old tropes that Ramos has been peddling for years. This brief sampling below pretty much sums up the entirety of the column: *In the United States there are said to be more guns than there are people. In some areas...

Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) introduced a bill Monday aiming to tackle the problem of teacher debt. The bill, the Consider Teachers Act of 2019, amends the TEACH grant program to resolve problems where some of those grants were inadvertently converted into loans that must be paid back with interest. "The TEACH grant is an important program to incentivize teachers to serve in neglected communities, but 12 years of poor government management has turned these grants into groans for thousands of teachers," Braun said in a statement."To show our appreciation for America's great teachers, let's get off...

Full Header: "An insider at the San Francisco psychiatrist association convention gives us a whiff of why they're called 'shrinks'" Remember the golden era of blogging, around 2005 or so, when blogging was really good? Back then, people who were experts, or else really, really, observant, blogged with photos and told us all about the world around them, observing the absurdities the media was missing. Think of the all-time greats, such as Zombietime, or Tim Blair, or well, you probably have some favorites. It's not there much anymore, but happily, there are still some instances of this kind of blogging...

Full Header: White South African farm activist is stabbed and beaten to death at her home in horrifying hammer attack A South African activist who spoke out against attacks on white farmers has been found stabbed and beaten to death on her own farm. Annette Kennealy, 51, was killed on a smallholding in Limpopo province on either Monday night or Tuesday morning where she had been staying with an employee, police said. The alarm was raised by Ms Kennealy's mother, Kim Labuschagne, after she tried and failed to get in touch with her daughter on Tuesday. A male relative then...

President Donald Trump's order to declassify documents explaining the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation is "all nonsense," Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Thursday night. Nadler said there's no "basis" to examine the origins of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation. He called it an "imaginary scandal."

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However, I eventually came to understand that I was without question guilty of hatred and bigotry. True, I was brought up in a culture whose axioms I imbibed with my mother’s milk -- also white -- but that is no excuse. I never thought to examine the issue independently, which makes me equally guilty of laziness and congenital myopia. I now feel great shame to have believed that science, medicine, art, technology and the rest of it constituted anything more than a mere whimsical distraction, that white European males comprised anything other than an evolutionary mistake, and that the world...

On Tuesday, NBC’s Today show seized on a highly questionable survey claiming that many college students across the U.S. were being forced to choose between “tuition or food.” Correspondent Jacob Soboroff even went so far as to claim that “The strong U.S. economy is a myth to many American college students.” “Eating or education? Jacob Soboroff with an eye-opening look at the cost of college and its toll,” co-host Savannah Guthrie teased late in the 7:00 a.m. ET half hour. Just minutes prior to the segment, fellow co-host Craig Melvin repeated the melodramatic sentiment: “Tuition or food? How the rising...

Attack, attack and attack; but don’t stop there. Make each new attack more extreme, more ad hominem and more vulgar. Ignore all evidence to the contrary and accuse the investigators of wrongdoing, then switch in mid-stride to accusing the investigators of being bullied into a wrong conclusion. Attack and attempt to humiliate President Trump’s children; crudely belittle his youngest child. The aforementioned is the Democrats’ reasoned approach to cogent debate regarding why they have a better plan for moving America forward than President Trump. In reality they are succeeding only in making President Trump a sympathetic figure. But they’re too...

During a town hall in Claremont, NH, 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg referred to President Donald Trump’s presidency a “hostile takeover of the Republican Party” as he discussed the idea of a generational shift. “I believe we’re living through one of those transitions between moments in American history as consequential as the one that brought us the new deal, or the dawn of the Reagan era — which I would argue is actually a 40-year period that is only now come crashing to a halt with the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the current president,” he told...