Free Republic

Conservatives need to address urban concerns and try to bridge the growing rural-urban divide, rather than just denouncing cities as the malign foil of real America. Chicago, Illinois — Looking out over downtown Chicago on a bright, unusually warm Christmas Eve, I get why people love this city, even though I am not really among them. I’m not a city person, and even if I were, this isn’t my city.This is not just a burst of Christmas cheer. Christmas Day will be over by the time I finish writing this article, let alone by the time it is edited and...

What was once a hub for newcomers is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of its former residents as more and more citizens of the San Francisco Bay Area are jumping ship at a record-breaking pace. This is what happens when one Party has been in control for TOO many years. The cost of living in San Francisco is staggering. Renting a two-bedroom apartment costs $4,650 a month on average, which is the highest rate in the country, and if you want to buy a home in the Bay Area, the median price is $825,000. In fact, people are...

Members of New York’s Muslim Patrol recently became embroiled in a near-explosive altercation outside the Masjid Taqwa in Brooklyn with members of the Bloods, a notoriously violent gang. The Muslim Patrol gained international attention in the fall of 2018 after several of its patrol cars — which look like New York Police Department (NYPD) cars –were spotted in Brooklyn and Staten Island. The Bloods are a violent African-American street gang known for trafficking drugs and guns. This criminal organization has made national headlines with targeted assassinations, drive-by shootings and deadly gun battles with law enforcement. On December 10, a verbal...

Officials at Philadelphia’s Temple University are reviewing a video which features a white student and references to the campus neighborhood as a “ghetto.” According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the video shows the student “in front of images of rowhouses, some with boarded-up windows” along with the caption “going to a city school and walking two blocks off campus for a party.”

New York City police have arrested a 13-year-old male juvenile in the shocking stabbing death of a Barnard College student, sources told Fox 5 News Friday. Tessa Majors, an 18-year-old freshman, was discovered unconscious with “multiple stab wounds about the body” near a staircase in Manhattan’s Morningside Park just before 7 p.m. Wednesday, police said earlier this week. The president of the all-women school says she “was fatally injured during an armed robbery” attempt. A police source told Fox 5 News Friday that the teen confessed to stabbing Majors. The report, citing police, adds that as many as three people...

We haven’t heard much about the Healthy Holly bookgate scandal in Baltimore since May, when former Mayor Catherine Pugh was finally driven to resign from her office in disgrace. At the time, it looked as if she might actually get away with the self-dealing scam she’d been running on the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) for years. It turned out that the city had never gotten around to passing a law against that sort of dubious financial activity. (Both the city and the state rushed to pass new laws after all of this was discovered, but those laws...

... Street gangs and other criminal rings have even abandoned an implicit moral code that prohibits targeting “civilians”—women, children and others not directly involved in their “beefs.” In more than 40 years of working with local anticrime groups and documenting their solutions to youth violence, I have never witnessed the depravity that is occurring today on the streets of black neighborhoods around America. Nationwide, the tragic number of unsolved murders was documented in a 2018 study by the Washington Post that mapped nearly 55,000 homicides in 55 cities. The study identified inner-city areas “where murder is common but arrests are...

This week, a video went viral of a man being detained by police on a public transportation platform in San Francisco, Calif., for eating a sandwich. You can see the police officer in the video below insisting that eating is a violation of the California penal code. They have Sanctuary Cities for Criminal Illegals but you can get arrested for eating a Sandwich in California. pic.twitter.com/EL4XRUKi50— Feisty??Floridian (@Feisty_FL) November 10, 2019 It turns out that while he might be slightly off base, it's mostly true. The California penal code lists eating on public transport property as a "miscellaneous crime"...

David Gilbert, a founding member of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society and member of the Weather Underground, sits in a maximum-security prison in upper state New York in the Wende Correctional Facility. He is serving a, 75 years to life, sentence for being a member of the Weather Underground group who along with members of the Black Liberation Army, robbed a Brink's truck on October 20, 1981. Two Nyack, NY police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady and Brinks guard Peter Paige were murdered during the robbery. Prison has apparently not mellowed Gilbert. He has a book out...

Boston’s city council is getting a new look: its first female majority and a more racially diverse lineup than ever before. Voters on Tuesday elected the council’s first Latina. They also voted in a slate of female candidates. Starting in January, the 13-member council will have eight women. Seven councilors will be minorities, the council’s most ever. Asian American city councilor Michelle Wu says it’s the “new face” of Boston politics. Voters also rejected a ballot question to change the name of Dudley Square in historically black Roxbury to Nubian Square. SNIP The council was a white male bastion for...

Eddie Johnson, the beleaguered Chicago Police superintendent, is reportedly set to announce his retirement this week -- a move that comes just days after Johnson said he was only considering resigning and amid an investigation into an incident in which officers found Johnson asleep in his car at a stop sign. Johnson is expected to put an end to his 31 years of service in the city’s police department later this week, sources told the Chicago Tribune on Wednesday. He's overseen policing in Chicago -- one of America's most crime-ridden cities -- since 2016. If Johnson steps down by the...

Several weeks ago, I met up with a friend in New York who suggested we grab a bite at a Scottish bar in the West Village. He had booked the table through something called Seated, a restaurant app that pays users who make reservations on the platform. We ordered two cocktails each, along with some food. And in exchange for the hard labor of drinking whiskey, the app awarded us $30 in credits redeemable at a variety of retailers.

The "progressive," so to speak, vision of politics and public life envisions tighter and tighter government control over economic life, along with looser and looser controls over human behavior. I think you'd refer to the overall design as a paradox: a clash of methods and objectives. Elizabeth Warren wants corporations subjected to unprecedented government oversight. Austin's and San Francisco's ruling classes favor, for the homeless, just about all the freedom you could imagine to use the public streets as a bedroom or restroom, in the name of, I don't know ... liberty? Liberty for those who avail themselves of these...

Despite Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declaring the nation's capital a "sanctuary city" for those who violate federal immigration law, one city councilman believes that additional legislation is needed to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement from removing illegal aliens from the city. WTOP reports that Ward Six Councilman Charles Allen has called for an emergency meeting this Tuesday to discuss a new bill that he says would stop all city agencies from cooperating with ICE unless given an explicit court order. This means that local police and other D.C. government officials would be barred from "sharing information with ICE, complying...

(CBS News/ KMOV) -- After over a year of secret construction, Planned Parenthood announced its newest abortion facility on Wednesday: an 18,000-square-foot mega-clinic in Fairview Heights. The new location is just 13 miles away from Missouri's last remaining abortion clinic, a facility in St. Louis fighting to keep its license. Since August 2018, Planned Parenthood has used a shell company to construct the facility, leaving no public trace that the former medical office would become one of the largest abortion clinics in the country. CBS News first visited the site in August, while it was still being built. Colleen McNicholas,...

If you’re looking to enjoy some tailgating at “Hawks Alley” right before this weekend’s Seahawks game, you’re likely going to compete with homeless tents and dilapidated RVs for the space.“We’ve had issues with employees going about their business being threatened,” Erin Goodman, executive director of the SoDo Business Improvement Area, told KOMO’s Kara Kostanich. There’s supposed to be a cleanup in the area, but it’s scheduled for after this weekend’s Seahawks game. KOMO reports the city won’t move the date due to staffing issues. If the homeless are as aggressive during game day as they are during a normal weekday,...

A man holding his 5-year-old daughter jumped onto subway tracks in the Bronx during Monday's morning rush, killing himself but thankfully only leaving the child with minor injuries, police said. The man had the girl cradled in one arm when he jumped in front of the train as it rounded a curve and slowed at the Kingsbridge Road station just before 8 a.m., police said. The man, identified as Fernando Balbuena, was killed by the Manhattan-bound train — but the girl lived, getting trapped underneath. With the help of two strangers, the little girl crawled her way to safety. One...

CHICAGO -- At least 26 people were shot, five of them fatally, in citywide gun violence over the weekend. Saturday, a man wanted for shooting a woman in the Fulton River District earlier in the week was shot by police during a prolonged manhunt that began after he shot a Chicago police officer in Englewood on the South Side. Michael Blackman, 45, was shot about 3:35 p.m. following an "armed encounter" with officers near 64th Street and Bell Avenue, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a tweet. Blackman was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn in critical...

Liberal activists took to the streets in New York City on Friday to save the planet. Then they left all their trash for someone else to clean up.

Nine people were shot, two fatally, during a 30-minute time frame in Washington, DC, despite the district’s gun licensing requirement, “assault weapons” ban, and ban on “high capacity” magazines. WUSA9 reported that the incident occurred Thursday night, and consisted of “two men armed with AK-47 style weapons [firing] dozens of shots in the apartment courtyard on Columbia Road.” Gabby Giffords’ gun group, the Giffords Law Center, reported that in addition to an “assault weapons” ban, a “high capacity” magazine ban, and licensing requirements, the district also has a 10-day waiting period for gun purchases, a purchase limit of one handgun...