Free Republic

Wednesday is the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist whose 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changed the trajectory of New York and cities everywhere. In the book, Jacobs argued that the preceding century of urban planning had essentially “arisen on a foundation of nonsense”—that the old, white men who advocated for highways and high-rises, wide streets and buildings set back from sidewalks by acres of grass, were not only clueless but were actively destroying American cities. Instead, Jacobs wrote, cities should be built with communities and street-level interaction in mind. […]...

Ghost Squad, a hacking group spawned from the Anonymous hacktivist collective, claims it took down the official websites of the Black Lives Matter movement on 29 and 30 April in a protest against actions taken by some of the campaign's supporters. According to Waqas Amir, a cybersecurity journalist based in Dubai and founder of HackRead, Ghost Squad conducted a series of persistent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the official websites of the Black Lives Matter movement, beginning on Friday 29 April. The DDoS attacks caused the web host for blacklifematters.org to completely suspend the domain, while the blacklivesmatter.com...

If you've felt your blood pressure rise after seeing passengers being served champagne on the tarmac while you're fighting for overhead space in coach, you are not alone. A new study finds that class division in the skies can have a real and occasionally dangerous effect on passengers in both sections of a plane. And when economy-class passengers are forced to pass through the luxurious first-class area on their way to the cramped economy seats, the rate of air rage incidents is more than seven times higher than if there were no first-class seats at all. Researchers report that the...

The so-called “mainstream” national media has developed a penchant for focusing on violence originating from certain quarters while all but ignoring hooliganism emanating from others. The disparity in treatment is due primarily to an agenda being pushed by leftist elements within the media establishment, including, but not limited to, MSNBC and the New York Times.

Leftist Violence & Double Standards When will the media decry the culture of violence of Clinton and Sanders' supporters? May 3, 2016 Ari Lieberman    The so-called “mainstream” national media has developed a penchant for focusing on violence originating from certain quarters while all but ignoring hooliganism emanating from others. The disparity in treatment is due primarily to an agenda being pushed by leftist elements within the media establishment, including, but not limited to, MSNBC and the New York Times. Violence emanating from Trump supporters buttresses a false narrative that many within the establishment media wish to propagate; namely...

A San Francisco police officer was arrested and suspended without pay Friday after a months-long investigation into allegations he made “false representations” on his Department of Motor Vehicles confidentiality form, authorities said.Saqib Aslam, 29, of South San Francisco was charged with felony counts of filing a false document and perjury, officials in the district attorney’s office said.Officer Albie Esparza, a police spokesman, said Aslam put down someone else’s information on a DMV INV 32 form. An INV 32, according to the California DMV website, allows qualified persons, along with their spouses and children, to ask for “home address confidentiality on...

Does the University of Missouri have a death wish? In the wake of capitulating to race grievance demonstrators, Mizzou is already experiencing a decline in applications so severe that it is closing four dorms and a drop in donations that is causing a financial crisis. Although the faculty no longer includes Melissa “I need some muscle” Click, apparently race-obsessed leftists still occupy positions of power. The university’s Faculty Council Committee on Race Relations is digging an even deeper hole for the school. Carly Hoilman of TheBlaze reports: The University of Missouri’s Faculty Council Committee on Race Relations released a video...

I really didn’t want to, butt in the end, curiosity got the better of me so I read the “White Fragility” article linked by dchrist81 yesterday.When you see an event titled Whiteness History Month at a college you can’t expect it to be a celebration of White history. And it wasn’t; rather it is a month long event at Portland (where else?) Community College geared more to eliminating than honoring the White race. (And if you think that’s racist, this event’s definitely designed for you.) In a talk entitled “Imagine A World Without Whiteness,” Harrison declared confidently conflict can only...

the story of a black female stripper who made up a lie to blame a white lacrosse team of a gang rape as a distraction when she needed a defence to prevent the state from taking her children away from her. then a white prosecutor; seeking re-election knowingly, withheld evidence that cleared the lacrosse team. The white prosecutor overwhelmly won the black votes until the truth came out. The first five minutes of "Fantastic Lies" might make lacrosse fans cringe. White privileged athletes. Partyers. A de facto frat house. The labels thrown out, true or not, will likely lure a...

Blacks don't like camping, or visiting parks. Obama thinks white people are to blame. https://t.co/b5v8Ehq9jO— Milo Yiannopoulos ✘ (@Nero) April 29, 2016

A 2016 Fusion Issues Poll surveyed 1,045 adults from ages 18 to 35. The survey revealed how young people feel about a number of social justice issues related to race, especially reparations. For example, 62 percent of young people say they are opposed to the government providing reparations to African-Americans for slavery, while 32 percent support the measure. However, the breakdown is much different along racial lines. For example, 62 percent of Blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics say they support reparations, while a paltry 21 percent of whites are in favor. Moreover, even when it comes to a mere...

Two days after the end of the eighth annual “Stop Hatin’” week at Salisbury University, on April 10, a racially charged drawing was found on a whiteboard in Blackwell Library. Although SU’s administration has not come forward with new information, a faculty member told The Flyer two students were a part of the drawing. “I can confirm two students have been identified,” English Associate Professor James King said, “and are both African American.” King declined to give more information. The SU Police Department is currently investigating the incident as a hate crime. However, they have not named any suspects. This could...

To The Editor, Two weeks ago the “Stand Against Racism” program presented a panel of black activists at the Honors College to talk about their experiences with prejudice. During the Q & A period an audience member asked the panelists what they wanted from whites who wanted to be allies to people of color. They didn’t have to think for more than a moment before the answers came pouring forth. This is what I managed to jot down (paraphrased): Come to our events. Share our social media postings and flyers. Link your organizations with ours. Don’t come to us looking...

President Barack Obama urged Black Lives Matter activists to work with the leaders of institutions instead of “keeping on yelling at them” at a youth town hall event. Obama made the remarks on Saturday — in London, England, well over 3,000 miles from the nearest American Black Lives Matter protester, according to the Daily Mail. “You can’t just keep on yelling at them and you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position,” Obama urged his young British audience. “The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you...

The reparations movement, which calls for compensating the descendants of generations of enslaved Americans going back 250 years, has failed to gain traction in this country for a variety of reasons. Most Americans see slavery as an artifact of the distant past that has no bearing on the nation’s present. And even people who are sympathetic to the reparations idea — and who acknowledge the continued imprint of slavery on society — have often argued that there is no way to distinguish descendants who have provable claims to compensation from those who do not, partly because enslaved people usually went...

Whiteness takes over the 17th Annual White Privilege ConferenceA specter is haunting America. The specter of white privilege, white supremacy and whiteness. What is whiteness? If you ask the radical education activists at the 17th Annual White Privilege Conference,”whiteness” is the source of all human evil. Also it’s the race of the majority of the country. The conference with its 2,500 teachers, school administrators and counselors is a bizarre throwback to National Socialism’s ideological indoctrination of every part of society on the evils of one single race. Attendees wore the conference’s version of Nazi armbands with wristbands reading “Got Privilege”....

resident Obama’s global warming plan would cost America’s poorest families billions annually, according to a report published Thursday by the Manhattan Institute. The study estimates that Obama’s global warming plan would increase the costs of living for the poorest American families an additional $19 billion per year, equivalent to increasing their taxes by 166 percent. The tax increase would also raise taxes on other poor families by an extra $25 billion, equal to a 33 percent tax increase. Living costs for the richest households would only increase by 4 percent.Obama wants to implement the Enviromental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan,...

A year ago, when the death of Freddie Gray and resulting unrest in Baltimore filled the news, the Rev. Kathy Dwyer felt she had to do something. “Every time I turned on the TV, I just felt like I was getting punched in the gut from watching the issue of racism just escalate in our country,” said the white pastor of a predominantly white United Church of Christ congregation in Arlington, Va. In the wake of the continuing deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police officers, some white church leaders say they can no longer check off their racial-justice...

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple reports that The New York Times is getting very serious about diversity goals in recruiting, hiring, and promoting. Chief Executive Mark Thompson raised eyebrows at a gathering of managers on the business and news sides of the newspaper. According to three Wemple sources, “Supervisors who fail to meet upper management’s requirements in recruiting and hiring minority candidates or who fail to seek out minority candidates for promotions face some stern consequences: They’ll be either encouraged to leave or be fired.” …

A group of Harvard Law School activists are demanding the graduate school do away with tuition fees, which they argue are “racially biased.” Members of the group Reclaim Harvard Law School published an open letter Sunday addressed to Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and members of the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — demanding an end to tuition costs that they argue impose an unfair financial burden on students of color, The Harvard Crimson reported. Tuition at the law school will rise to $59,550 for the 2016-2017 academic year, and students are graduating with an average...