Free Republic

When I was brought up in America it was a nation very different from the one I live in today. I was taught that everyone should be treated with respect and that respect must be the foundation for all of my interactions. Living according to the Christian belief of doing no harm to others became a part of everyday life. Along with this was the knowledge that anything was possible; that the United States was the land of opportunity. “Rugged individualism” was not a mere slogan, it was the focus and basis for taking advantage of opportunities that lie ahead....

False claims of racism and hate crimes related to sexuality seem to be endemic. So desirable is the status of victim that some people, especially those in academia, have been known to vandalize their own cars, attach nooses to their office doors, and otherwise fabricate hate crimes against themselves. Oberlin College, with a history of hysteria over fake hate crimes, even generated worldwide headlines for its overwrought response to a series of “hate crimes” that turned out to be false. We don’t know what percentage of hate crime reports are self-generated hoaxes by the purported victims. Often there is no...

The community rallied behind a same-sex couple after their home burned to the ground, but in a twist, a jury found the couple intentionally set fire to their house.After five days, a jury found Carol Anne and Laura Stutte deliberately set fire to their home, blaming the fire on their neighbor. On May 13, 2011, the Stutte’s insurance company filed the lawsuit in federal court saying they found evidence the couple deliberately set fire to their property and claimed the insurance money.In September of 2010, the Stuttes said the fire was a hate crime after the word “queer” was spray...

Investigators continue their examination of a fire at the Glover Grove Baptist Church of Warrenville, S.C. Fires damaged Glover Grove and some other black churches in the days following nine shooting deaths at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, raising concerns that the incidents were hate-inspired arsons. Now, in the case of Glover Grove, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division has released the following statement, saying it still doesn't know how the blaze started. "Based upon the scene examination and the evidence collected, agents were unable to determine an exact origin or fire cause. As a result, agents were unable to...

The aftermath of the Charleston church massacre has been an interesting thing. Following the nine killed by 21-year-old ninth grade dropout and troglodyte Dylann Roof at the Mother Emanuel AME Church last week, the people of that venerable South Carolina city have given the nation one of our more inspiring spectacles — thousands gathering in prayer and demonstrating for unity and civility. Had the reaction of Charleston been the major story, the massacre — disgusting and tragic as it was — would have told us something good about the basic character of the American people. Your author will go so...

Full Title: Michelle Obama talks about the 'proud burden' she and her husband carry in the White House as she remembers fallen teenager at Chicago high school graduation First Lady Michelle Obama drew on her hometown connections and personal struggles from college and the White House during a high school graduation speech to the classmates of an honor student gunned down in 2013 near the Obama family home. A boisterous crowd of thousands attended commencement for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School on Tuesday in Chicago and heard Obama speak.The school garnered headlines when teenager Hadiya Pendleton...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Have the taxpayers of St. Paul spent nearly $3 million over the past five years to bring chaos and danger to their schools and students? Apparently so. In 2010, the St. Paul school district began a contractual relationship with the Pacific Educational Group, a San Francisco-based organization that tries to help public schools deal with achievement and disciplinary issues involving black students. PEG packages and sells the concept of victimization, for a very high price. It claims that the American education system is built around white culture, tradition and social norms – aka “white privilege” –...

Michelle Obama gave a candid view Saturday of the challenges and emotional toll of being the country’s first black first lady. Obama, speaking to graduates at Tuskegee University in Alabama, described insensitive media questions and derogatory remarks from political pundits that she said have kept her up at night. “You might remember the on-stage celebratory fist bump between me and my husband after a primary win that was referred to as a ‘terrorist fist jab,’ ” she said.

Eastern Michigan University students taped their mouths shut in a silent protest Thursday. The students wrote #ChapelHillShooting across the tape in honor of the deaths of three students from the University of North Carolina. Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were Muslim-American students at the University of North Carolina. They were shot Tuesday, Feb. 10, by their neighbor, Craig Steven Hicks, 46. The Chapel Hill police released a statement Tuesday evening citing a parking dispute as Hicks’s motivation. EMU Junior Layali Alsada and senior Zaeem Zafar created a flyer...

Some time ago, burglars in England scrawled a message on the wall of a home they had looted: "RICH BASTARDS." Those two words captured the spirit of the politicized vision of equality — that it was a grievance when someone was better off than themselves. That, of course, is not the only meaning of equality, but it is the predominant political meaning in practice, where economic "disparities" and "gaps" are automatically treated as "inequities." If one racial or ethnic group has a lower income than another, that is automatically called "discrimination" by many people in politics, the media and academia....

The metropolitan police department for the largest city in the United States is ceasing to function, according to a report in The New York Post.While the New York Police Department has continued its work of policing dangerous and violent criminal activity, quality of life policing has nearly come to a complete halt when statistics from December 20 to December 30, 2013 are compared with that same period this year. Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from...

Future attorneys have an obligation to face violence and sexual assault in a different way than most. Attorneys belong to a profession that requires many to look squarely at the world's horrors. They prosecute serial killers. They defend accused rapists and child molesters. A lawyer leading a class-action suit might pore over depositions describing harrowing deaths from cancer or children burned up in cars during crashes. Sometimes that will happen even as the attorney's father is dying of cancer, or her kids are the same age as the ones killed in the rear seats above the faulty fuel tanks. Even...

The problem with a victim culture is that so many people want to join the ranks of victimhood that eventually you run short of oppressors. As I say in my new book (personally autographed copies of which make a Christmas gift your loved one will cherish forever), Elizabeth Warren is the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out, but a dubious claim to be one 32nd Cherokee was enough to persuade Harvard Law School to promote her as their first "woman of color". No wonder so many Democrats prefer her to Hillary: The first "woman...

My heart is broken. Another young man, because of poor decisions, has died prematurely. And it never had to happen. What has followed has turned a tragic death into an absurd circus of rioting, racial rhetoric, and redirection.Injustice happens every day. But do we even recognize what injustice actually is?For many, not DVR’ing their favorite TV show is an injustice. For some, not matching their accessories with their outfit is a tragedy worth writing about. For others, having their favorite overpaid professional sports team lose a game is worthy of a bloody brawl to release the anguish.There is real injustice all around...

NOT GUILTY

Colleen Hufford of Moore Oklahoma may be missing her head, but the real victims are Muslims, or so we are being asked to believe. In fact, according to the Imam of the Islamic Institute of Boston, Islam suffers a “double hurt.” And here I thought Ms. Hufford had it bad. The imam should know, after all, it was his Institute’s “resident scholar” who was reportedly the former imam of the Oklahoma mosque attended by Alton Alexander Nolen, aka Jah’Keem Yisrael, who wielded the knife separating Ms. H’s head from her body. And the leadership of that Oklahoma mosque agree that...

The perpetual siren call of victimhood. Oh, how alluring, how comforting, how most pleasing is the mantle of victimhood. So pleasing, in fact, that even when the claim to victim status is tenuous at best, some people cannot restrain themselves from rushing before the news cameras to inform the world of how they have been mistreated. Pátio ergo sum. I suffer, therefore I am. Witness the case of Keith Jones, a firefighter in Oakland, Calif., who recently had a brief but mildly tense encounter with an officer from that city’s police department. Jones, 43, was leaving an Oakland Raiders football...

The Harvard Law professor who mentored President Obama and the first lady during their time in Cambridge has compared the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Speaking with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, Charles Ogletree also compared the police shooting of 18-year-old Brown to the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. “Looking at what’s happened, this is just like the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, when everybody was very upset trying to figure out what was going to happen,” he said. “It’s like the killing of Trayvon Martin two years ago. “This is...

The world of feminism is a strange one. Some of us might see the cause as lost and irrelevant, while others might see it as an essential part of equality. There may have been a time when feminism served its purpose in North America, but it's difficult to justify its need today, especially since most of the archaic laws that barred women from doing basic things have been abolished. Since women won the right to vote and become CEOs, modern feminism seems to have deteriorated into mindless sophistry. From advocating for free contraception to complaining about "cat calling" and exaggerating...

Friends and family of a teen who died after a Miami Beach police officer shocked him with a Taser will mark the one year anniversary of his death with music, poetry and a film. Wednesday evening they gather at the abandoned restaurant where police say they caught the 18-year-old Israel “Reefa” Hernandez spraying graffiti on the walls.