Free Republic

In left-wing circles, being a victim is considered a badge of honor and anyone who is not a victim must be a “perpetrator.” The latter group, of course, includes “old white men.” A term which, incidentally, is always used with condescension, but should never be regarded as an expression of racism or sexism.  But does encouraging people to see themselves primarily as victims actually help anyone at all? Doesn’t it just make them feel helpless and remove their sense of agency? The message is: “Your life situation is the way it is for structural reasons, so you have no chance...

Ex-Access Hollywood staple Shaun Robinson is taking former co-anchor Billy Bush to task for arriving late to the Black Lives Matter movement. Responding to Bush’s Extra Q&A with colleague Nate Burleson about the George Floyd protests, Robinson harrumphed on Twitter, “I appreciate you being an ally now. But, if you want to talk about the pain White Privilege causes African Americans, you should probably also talk to the Black woman who sat next to you on the set of Access Hollywood for years.” TVLine has reached out to Bush’s rep for comment. Robinson and Bush’s tenures at Access Hollywood overlapped...

It’s a common refrain: We have bubble-wrapped the world. Americans in particular are obsessed with “safety.” The simplest way to get any law passed in America, be it a zoning law or a sweeping reform of the intelligence community, is to invoke a simple sentence: “A kid might get hurt.” Almost no one is opposed to reasonable efforts at making the world a safer place. But the operating word here is “reasonable.” Banning lawn darts, for example, rather than just telling people that they can be dangerous when used by unsupervised children, is a perfect example of a craving for...

There’s a moment in the new Hillary Clinton hagio-documentary on Hulu when the former presidential candidate complains that it took her an hour every day to have her hair and makeup done during the 2016 campaign. “It’s a burden, believe me,” she says in Episode 2 of ‘Hillary.’” “I calculated it, and I spent 25 days doing hair and makeup, and I knew that the men I was running against don’t have to do any of that. Get up, take a shower, shake their head, they were ready to go.” But no one forced her to endure high-maintenance grooming. She...

On November 27, 2019, Harvard University denied tenure to an ethnic-studies professor specializing in Dominican identity. Students and faculty at Harvard and across the country sprung into protest mode. The failure to tenure Lorgia García Peña, they said, resulted from Harvard’s racism. NBC Nightly News, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other outlets covered the controversy from the same angle. In fact, García Peña had been catapulted into the academic firmament with a speed that most non-intersectional professors can only dream of. She has been showered with benefits. Thirty-one percent of Harvard’s tenure-track professors lost their tenure bids...

Police have arrested a 38-year-old black man from Orange Country, NY, for stabbing five Jews in the home of a Hasidic rabbi in Monsey on the seventh night of Hanukkah. If you’re a New Yorker or a Jew or both, you’re asking why. Why has yet another African-American attacked Jews? Why has black-on-Jewish assault become a continuous feature of life in and around New York? Why now? The answer: Because the country is seized by the politics of victimhood, and there’s nothing that self-pitying “victims” find easier than blaming Jews for their misery. The names given to the bogeymen of...

President Trump derided rival billionaire Tom Steyer as a "wacky" and "crazed & stumbling lunatic" on Sunday, after Steyer -- who was one of the prominent liberals to receive a threatening suspicious package last week -- said he "absolutely was blaming" Trump for creating an atmosphere in which "anything can bubble up, and anything is bubbling up." Steyer fired back quickly, writing that Trump's comment was "unthinkable ... in the midst of the horrible political violence." The Twitter conflagration erupted after Steyer's wide-ranging interview with CNN's "State of the Union," in which the hedge fund manager called Trump "corrupt," and...

Idaho’s post-secondary schools have joined the legion of left-leaning institutions that are using their campuses as state-sponsored platforms for intolerance, division, and victimhood. Hurt in the process are students, taxpayers, and donors to college scholarship funds, all whom are misled in believing they’re paying for “higher education.” Witness Boise State University’s interim president, Martin Schimpf, whose most recent newsletter offered up a buffet of braggadocio about the school’s reinforcement of the “otherization” of students and staff. Schimpf noted the school’s expenditure of thousands of dollars for “Rainbow Graduation” and “Black Graduation,” new staff to aid “students of color,” and more....

VALDOSTA, Ga. (WCTV) -- Valdosta State University seniors are taking their last steps across campus, but some students are having second thoughts about walking across the stage at graduation. Next weekend's commencement ceremonies at Valdosta State are bringing some controversy with them. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp will be speaking, and that isn't sitting well with some students. VSU administration has told students they planned to invite the governor to speak at commencement, regardless of who won November's election. Last month, the university announced Kemp would deliver the commencement address, and it's been stirring up a lot of controversy on campus.

Every year, many thousands of American parents find that the son or daughter they sent to college has been transformed by college into a leftist. For left-wing parents, this may be a blessing, but for parents who are not leftist—not to mention conservative—it is often painfully jolting. It is jolting because their beloved child now holds America in contempt; prefers socialism to capitalism; regards all white people and police as racist; believes the Bible, Christianity, and Judaism are not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense; no longer believes men and women are inherently different—or even that male and female objectively exist;...

Race provocateur extraordinaire Jesse Jackson made famous a slogan in his run for the Presidency in 1988. It was Keep Hope Alive. Thirty years later the American Left has replaced the word hope with another four letter h-word: hate. They hate Republicans, they hate white male conservatives, they hate Trump, they hate the unborn, they hate the American flag, and they hate the police. The Left sees so much potential in using hate as a political weapon that they have built a hate industrial complex. If they don’t keep hate alive, the bottom of their identity politics strategy collapses. Enough...

In the latter half of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, as Catholic immigrants poured in from Ireland and Eastern Europe, an anti-Catholic wave spread over a mostly Protestant United States. The majority slur then was that Catholic newcomers’ first loyalty would be to “Rome,” not the U.S. Anti-Semitism grew even more deeply rooted, marked by Ivy League quotas on Jewish applicants and exclusionary clauses against Jews in clubs and neighborhoods. It was no accident that the Ku Klux Klan often targeted Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans. In the late 19th century, with the influx...

Christine Blasey Ford is the latest poster child in the feminist cult of victimhood. She achieved that status by claiming she was physically attacked at a high school party by Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh three decades ago. She immediately became the perfect useful idiot whose false memories and false allegations are being fully exploited to postpone the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. She is the latest symbol of oppression among anti-Trump women activists. Instead of characteristics like honor, integrity and courage, feminist heroines must first and foremost be victims, real or imagined.

On Not Being A Victim Re'eh 5778 Making a series of programmes for the BBC on morality in the twenty-first century, I felt I had to travel to Toronto to have a conversation with a man I had not met before, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Recently he has recently become an iconic intellectual for millions of young people, as well as a figure of caricature and abuse by others who should know better.[1] The vast popularity of his podcasts – hours long and formidably intellectual – suggests that he has been saying something that many people feel a need to...

White people can be exhausting. “It’s work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers’ questions about Blackness. “It’s work to always be hypervisible because of your skin — easily identified as being present or absent — but for your needs to be completely invisible to those around you. “It’s work to do the emotional labor of pointing out problematic racist thinking, policies, action and statements while desperately trying to avoid bitterness and cynicism. “Quite frankly, the work isn’t just tedious. It can be dangerous for Black women to attempt...

We are living in the age of the victim. We live in a culture that worships at the altar of the victim. Americans everywhere are looking for others to blame. If I trip in my neighbor’s yard—it’s his fault. If I hang out at Burger King until I look like a Whooper—somehow Burger King is to blame. On the surface this may be a comforting approach to life—always having someone else to blame for our own faults, failures, and flaws. But the truth is, it is one of the most destructive and cynical lies out there! Here’s what it costs...

My friend was even annoyed by praises showered upon Billy Graham in response to his death. Though he would deny it, my friend has a deep hatred for whites. And yet I have witnessed God use him to bless people. I've come to realize that neither facts nor truth can penetrate my friend erroneously viewing white Americans as blacks' nemesis. Therefore, I am praying for God to heal his vengeful heart against white Americans. On the bright side, I caught an interview with black Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, a hero of mine. Justice Thomas said he is worn down...

Justice Clarence Thomas decried the contemporary culture of victimhood during remarks Thursday, telling an audience at the Library of Congress that constant aggrievement would exhaust the country. Ever a touchstone for controversy on racial issues, the justice related a story from a recent trip to Kansas, where a black college student told him she was primarily interested in school work, and less interested in the political tumult gripping college campuses. “At some point we’re going to be fatigued with everybody being a victim,” he said. Thomas has struck similar chords throughout his public life. He appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox...

When I was a child I became curious, as children sometimes will, about my family history. Although my grandfathers were dead, my grandmothers were alive, and I asked them what they knew about our origins. The answer: not much. But they provided me with a few names, enabling me to draw up the rudimentary beginnings of a family tree. Later, I spent a good deal of time in the New York Public Library's genealogy room, trying to trace my ancestry back from those names. (There was no Internet then.) I didn't get anywhere with my father's side of the family...

I must admit I have never in my life purchased a ticket to a sports event. I am not a sports enthusiast. But I am an American black citizen, and I have had it up to the gills with black people who embrace victimhood. I also highly resent my being expected to do the same in order to affirm my “blackness.” Black victims these days, for the most part, are the product of decades of Black Americans being used primarily by white progressive leftists to advance an anti-American agenda. The current brouhaha surrounding the despicable behavior of NFL athletes toward...