Free Republic

The great paradox of the American Left is that it aspires to collectivism, but can only get it through tribalism. Every Democrat presidential primary is a frantic effort by collectivist candidates to amass enough tribal support from different identity politics groups to secure the collectivist nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders, the great socialist hope of collectivism, tried to rope in Latinos and black Democrats, succeeded with the former, failed with the latter, and lost South Carolina. And everything. When lefties switched from class warfare to identity politics, they became hopelessly mired in tribalism. Their old animating principle of an egalitarian...

Angry locals in towns and villages all over the UK have put up signs demanding that second home owners leave and return to their city properties amid the coronavirus outbreak. Londoners and people living in big cities all over the UK are flocking to the seaside and their second homes to escape the virus, drawing the ire of locals. Now, furious locals in St Ives, Cornwall have scrawled messages on the beach demanding second home owners leave. An even more furious sign has appeared in Bala, north Wales, which says 'Go home rats'. It come as the government urged people...

A former victim of a syncretistic religious ceremony in Brazil warns, “The Church must be very clear about the occult influences that form the basis of many of these native practices.” In 1968, Jane Porter, a British Catholic, was living as an undergraduate student in Brazil but after contracting an illness, she fell victim to a “false” healing carried out by an indigenous, pagan religion in a “Catholic” setting. The effects, she says, led to “far greater suffering” lasting for decades. In this interview with the Register, Porter recounts her traumatic experience and expresses her concern that the Amazon Synod’s...

A feeling of “extreme nationalism” has gripped the United States, according to former CBS News anchor Dan Rather. “We have our differences and President Trump has found it to his … advantage to exploit those differences,” Rather said during an interview Thursday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe while promoting his new book. Rather continued: We’re in danger of sliding from extreme nationalism into tribalism. In our country, which is a new experiment in history — first time in history any people tried to be free… we’re constantly trying to perfect it. It depends on [us] as a people, as a...

An excellent in-depth article about the tribalism and victim pandering current in our society. ...The Virtuous Victim possesses a basic goodness that brings life to members of the multiculturalist clan. But as ­Durkheim observed, totems operate in a binary system: The sacred is under constant threat by the profane. The profane forces are in radical opposition to the totem, and they can sometimes take on form as an anti-totem. Members of the clan honor the totem by protecting it from pollution by the anti-totem. The Twitter discussion of the Smollett case brought out some of the multiculturalist clan’s anti-totems. Celebrities...

“Perhaps the most disappointing finding from our studies — at least from our point of view — is that there are no known fixes to this problem.” The Mueller report was supposed to settle, once and for all, the controversy over whether the Trump team colluded with Russians or obstructed justice. Clearly, it has not. Reactions to the report have ranged from “Total exoneration!” to “Impeach now!” Shouldn’t nearly 700 hundred pages of details, after almost two years of waiting, have helped the nation to achieve a consensus over what happened? Well, no. As Goethe said in the early 1800s,...

A young man's thoughts of the current decline of civility and discourse in America today. Warning - occasional language alert

CNN)In a sea of users live-tweeting the Oscars last night, one account stood out: the CIA. Apparently, the agency is into movies -- especially "Black Panther." Throughout the night, the CIA Twitter feed explored the feasibility of the technology seen in the Marvel superhero flick. The agency also tested its followers' knowledge of metals, asking if they thought the fictional metal vibranium is real...

Why did the media fall so swiftly for the Jussie Smollett hoax right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax? The easy answer is bias. And that might have even been the right answer a generation ago. These days the media isn't biased. It's tribal. Bias leads us to make mistakes. But the media wasn't making a mistake when it loudly broadcast false claims with plenty of red flags about Trump supporters wearing red hats. Just as the media wasn't making a mistake when it spread fake news about attacks on Muslim women by Trump supporters after the election. This...

Julia Beck was booted from the Baltimore LGBTQ Commission because she referred to a male rapist as male even though he says he’s female. They placed this male rapist in a woman’s prison where he proceeded to rape more women. Beck is both a lesbian and a self-confessed “radical feminist” who told her story on an amazing panel at the Heritage Foundation this week: Beck was accused of “violence” for referring to the male rapist as a male. The effort to vote Beck off the LGBTQ Commission was led by the Commission chairman, a man who says he’s a woman...

Every time identity politics has been used by any faction in human history for any reason violence eventually follows.

An Atlanta charter school headed into the new school year by telling students and staff not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning - but instead the "Wolf Pack Chant." Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School announced on Tuesday it will be eliminating the Pledge of Allegiance from its morning agenda to make the institution more inclusive. [Snip] "There are many emotions around this and we want everyone in our school family to start their day in a positive manner. After all, that is the whole purpose of our morning meeting," Zelski said. [Snip] The Atlanta charter school isn't the...

A Santa Barbara city councilman inadvertently let slip the primary purpose of progressivism in 21st century America. The city recently criminalized the use of plastic straws. Speaking to that issue, Councilman Jesse Dominguez said, “Unfortunately, common sense is just not common. We have to regulate every aspect of people’s lives.”

Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa has called for calm after intense violence between protesters and military troops left at least three people dead. The president said he has opened lines of communication with MDC opposition leader Nelson Chamisa to discuss how to "immediately diffuse the situation" and "protect the peace we hold dear". In a series of tweets, he added that an independent investigation into the deadly clashes in Harare that led to troops firing live rounds and beating protesters would be launched. Violence broke out in the Zimbabwean capital after soldiers moved into Harare on Wednesday as protests escalated amid...

Intersectionality, Tribalism and Farrakhan A movement of bigotries can only divide us. March 20, 2018 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. A funny thing happened on the way to the intersectional future. The proverbial knapsack was unpacked in the Women’s March and inside wasn’t just racial tribalism, but racial and religious supremacism. Why do Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March like Farrakhan and his hate group? The Nation of Islam preaches that black people are the master...

A woman was raped, whipped and beheaded before a cheering mob in the Democratic Republic of Congo — as punishment for dishing up “forbidden fish” to a group of rebels who then drank her blood. The atrocity in the main square of Luebo, in the province of Kasaï-Occidental, occurred on April 8 and was captured in stomach-churning video that only emerged this week, France 24 reported. The naked woman is seen being dragged in front of a crowd by members of an armed group claiming allegiance to the Kamuina Nsapu rebel movement. “They said she gave them beans that contained...

Just after last week’s terrorist attack in Barcelona, a pro-Islamic State website posted video from the scene along with a message in Arabic saying, “Terror is filling the hearts of the Crusader in the Land of Andalusia.” Let’s unpack that. “Crusader” is a term jihadists use, pejoratively, for Christians. More specifically, of course, it refers to the Christian soldiers who fought a series of wars, beginning in 1095, to recover Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land from the Muslim armies that had burst out of Arabia four centuries earlier. Andalusia indicates the territories of the Iberian Peninsula that...

I am not a Trump supporter, to say the least. And I don’t agree with most of his policies and rhetoric. That being said, as an entrepreneur and researcher on the subject of fear and rejection, I see all people through the lens of their relationship with rejection. As a result, I found Trump's candidacy fascinating. In my newly published TED talk on rejection, I discussed this phenomenon: that the people who changed the world, against overwhelming odds, were not the people who avoided rejection, but those who embraced it and used it as their power. Unfortunately, the power of...

One of the pictures showed a member holding a folder from the National Democratic Institute, funded in part by Soros' Open Society Foundation. On Election Day, the observers will fan out across Washington, Maryland and Virginia to observe presidential election polling places. On the day after the election, the group plans to address the results. . . . The group sponsoring the convention Ravel is speaking to "free and fair" elections around the world. It has advocated especially for women candidates, and with along with the State Department it called for candidate quotas favoring women.

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