Free Republic

America’s original revolutionaries, along with Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr., all placed the universalist ideals of the Declaration of Independence at the center of this country’s founding. But that paradigm is under vigorous challenge from The New York Times Magazine. Last summer, the magazine began publishing the 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary of enslaved Africans’ arrival in Virginia. In essays, stories, poems, podcast episodes, and more, the Times has grappled with how slavery shaped all that followed.

"A CNN panelist claimed that a father of four, who tagged a phone call with President Joe Biden with the phrase “Let’s Go, Brandon,” was not only being impolite but also harboring feelings “about insurrection.” Ron Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, joined a CNN panel to discuss a phone call between Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, and an Oregon father Jared Schmeck who ended his live-streamed phone call with a less vulgar substitute for “f*** Joe Biden.” The CNN host dubbed the interaction between Schmeck and the Bidens “disrespectful,” “juvenile” and “reprehensible.” He also asked Brownstein for his...

Apocalypse Now.....or is it Apocalypse Again? Back in October, Rolling Stone magazine declared that "Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet." The description of the earthly inferno that would be our inevitable fate due to Manchin was quite gruesome:

I turn 40 today, and I was planning to have a party. The Delta surge made me nervous about it. The arrival of Omicron made me cancel it. The plan was to have an extended house party, with a couple dozen people popping by over the weekend. On the one hand, it would have been an unmasked, indoor event—the kind in which the coronavirus, in all its incarnations, spreads most easily. On the other hand, everyone who was going to be there is fully vaccinated, and most of them, myself included, have been boosted. A month ago, I would have...

When I met with Crystal Mason recently at her home in Rendon, Texas, we sat on a wide couch that served as the center of her domain, with plenty of space for children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. Their photographs filled the house. Mason’s mother called to her from another room, needing advice; later, her eight-month-old grandson, Carter, joined us on the couch after waking up from an afternoon nap. For hours that day, Mason spoke candidly about the illegal-voting case that has consumed her life for half a decade. With us was one of her lawyers, Alison Grinter Allen. If...

The Atlantic's David Frum issued a tweet in which he claimed that one Covid prevention/punitive measure is to "Let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last." Seems the best option is: 1) Keep encouraging vaccines and boosters; 2) Impose vaccine mandates where it can be done; 3) Otherwise return to normal as fully as we can, especially the schools; and 4) Let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 12, 2021 This tweet, which has since been widely circulated and mocked, albeit with horror, by many on the conservative side...

One would think that controlling the presidency, the Senate, and the House would make Leftists happy, but an article published Monday in The Atlantic and amplified Sunday on MSNBC shows that despite all their electoral success, they’re more mendacious, hateful, and paranoid than ever. Ever since Old Joe Biden started pretending to be president of the United States, the Left has been working assiduously to demonize and destroy all opposition to his agenda and to portray Donald Trump and his supporters as enemies of democracy, of freedom, and of all that is good. First, there was the Jan. 6 “insurrection.”...

A visibly frightened John Heilemann warned Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press" that former President Trump will be in a stronger position to launch a "coup" in 2024 than he was in 2020 during a discussion about Barton Gellman's piece in The Atlantic titled "Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun."

Anxiety about the nation’s children, which is at a steady simmer in the best of times, boiled over in the summer of 2020, when the digital soldiers of QAnon occupied the otherwise innocuous hashtag #SaveTheChildren. Around the same time, major social-media platforms had started blocking overt QAnon accounts and hashtags. From their new beachhead, the digital soldiers were able to disseminate a cascade of false information about child trafficking on Instagram and Facebook: Children were being trafficked on the hospital ship USNS Comfort, then docked in New York City, and through tunnels underneath Central Park. As outrageous as these allegations...

The left keeps taking larger leaps into lunacy. This week, The Atlantic published a series of articles that tell us how Donald Trump is poised to destroy our democracy (again!). One is titled, "Trump's next coup has already begun." Did you catch that? If you're sane, you might find yourself asking, "Wait, when was the last one?" After all, a "coup," according to the Oxford Dictionary online, is a "sudden, violent and illegal seizure of power from a government." Merriam-Webster informs the reader that the word comes from the French term, "coup d'etat," which means a "sudden and violent overthrow...

At a time when the news is filled with stories about small business owners making humongous sacrifices to save their employees' jobs, and corporations and governments are running ads saying 'we're all in this together," billionaire wifey investor Laurene Powell Jobs (estimated net worth: $32 billion), whose cash keeps the leftwing Atlantic Monthly afloat, has pulled a Bloomberg on the Atlantic Monthly staff, and laid off a large number of them. Her minions did it just as unemployment hits double digits, so with the job market collapsed, these newly laid off staffers can get ready for new careers as Walmart...

The world over, people feel lied to, unheard, and pushed aside. They no longer have any faith in their leaders. They’re lashing out against their governments and health officials, in some cases by rejecting the COVID-19 vaccine. Populism, a political expression of this mistrust, is correlated with vaccine hesitancy. In a 2019 study, Jonathan Kennedy, a sociologist at Queen Mary University of London, found a significant association between the percentage of people who voted for populist parties within a country and the percent who believe vaccines are not important or effective. Past research has similarly found that populists around the...

“Blood is not thicker than morality,” radio host and author Laura Schlessinger once noted. This comes to mind when pondering how Fox News’ normally astute Tucker Carlson, who generally exhibits more philosophical depth than is the television news norm, stumbled a bit last Tuesday night. At issue was a Tucker Carlson Tonight segment about TV host Chris Cuomo’s “indefinite suspension” from CNN for using his press connections to help his brother, ex-NY governor Andrew Cuomo, craft a defense against the sexual misconduct allegations that ended his political career. Carlson had much to say that was true: Chris Cuomo is a...

I have a Ministry to the homeless in my city, and boy this article really Nails the insanity. A couple days ago one guy asked me to charge his tablet because he broke his charger. An hour and a half later he had called the police claiming I stole his tablet. The police officers told him he's no longer wanted downtown for lying about this to them. Now I understand a little more. The newer versions of meth are causing people to be bipolar and paranoid all at the same time along with their inability to communicate. This guy has...

The Atlantic published an essay on the eve of Thanksgiving, calling on readers to utilize family Thanksgiving get-togethers to “deprogram” and sow doubt in conservative relatives, suggesting that one may even succeed in changing their mind or perhaps “need to report [them] to the FBI!” In an essay penned by Daily Beast contributing editor Molly Jong-Fast titled “Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving,” the left-wing pundit called the national celebration “terrible” and “no one’s idea of a great time,” though insisted using the time to “deprogram” relatives could make it worthwhile.

I don't speak Arabic -- though I recently ordered the beginner module from Rosetta Stone which still sits in its wrapper on my desk shelf. (I am in the Arab world a lot however and learning more each trip) Perhaps after the conventions.But a friend, Foued Mokrani, speaks Arabic just fine -- and reported on his Facebook page the following after watching a film during a flight to Paris:I watched the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and noticed they translate the word ''gay" to ''pervert" in the Arabic subtitles!! Very dumb.Mokrani responded:Somehow there is no decent word to say...

HBO star said 'what's going on in the schools' was going to be 'the issue' in future elections... Bill Maher sounded the alarm Friday night about next week's Virginia gubernatorial election, which could go to Republicans for the first time since 2009. Maher began the show's panel discussion by pointing out that Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe "should walk away with it" since resident Biden won Virginia by 10 points and McAuliffe previously served as the commonwealth's governor, 2014-2018. Instead, Maher noted, the race is "neck and neck," with GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin over an issue that Maher reminded viewers he...

Many Americans fervently believe that the Second Amendment protects their right to bear arms everywhere, including at public protests. Many Americans also believe that the First Amendment protects their right to speak freely and participate in political protest. What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives. This is not hyperbole. Since January 2020, millions of Americans have assembled in public places to protest police brutality, systemic racism, and coronavirus protocols, among other things....

Far-left Democrats were dealt a big blow as former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, was defeated by Cuyahoga County Councilwoman Shontel Brown in a much-anticipated special US House primary election. With 96.5 percent of precincts reporting, Brown led Turner by 4,380 votes out of more than 71,000 votes cast. Turner conceded the race soon after 10 p.m. local time, telling supports: “On this night, we will not cross the river.” The contest in Ohio’s 11th District, a deep-blue constituency that includes most of Cleveland, parts of Akron and several majority-black precincts in between...

There is an Atlantic article this month that chronicles author Emma Green’s interview with Kyle Mann, the managing editor of the Babylon Bee. The title, The Christians Who Mock Wokeness for a Living, explains to Ms. Green’s audience what the article is intended to do: chastise America’s new newspaper of record for being rather un-Christian. What it actually does is prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the left has absolutely no sense of humor… “Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” – Martin Luther King…at least when the joke is...