Free Republic

An I’m-so-cute-and-clever reporter recently asked the president if he deserved to be re-elected given the number of deaths from coronavirus, noting that the number is greater than American fatalities from the Vietnam war. People can always find something as a point of comparison as if that automatically adds weight to what they are implying. No doubt this reporter thought stats from the Vietnam war added gravitas to her query. In any case, her disrespectful and rude question didn’t deserve to be dignified with an answer. But Trump answered her anyway. Unfortunately, he didn’t use the opportunity to his advantage by...

Don McLean, the 74-year-old singer best known for his 1971 hit “American Pie,” says he is not impressed with the music of today. The singer-songwriter believes times have certainly changed since his early days in the music industry, and he’s claiming there is no longer music of substance when he turns on the radio. The folk-rock singer sat down with Tom Cridland for his YouTube series “The Greatest Music of All Time” to reflect on his musical career highlights. During the candid conversation, McLean partially discusses his political views, claiming that politics no longer “really mean anything,” and he likened...

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked. The first sentence set the tone: “The battle...

The American electorate is more divided than at any point in recent memory...A consideration of America’s recent past is essential to understanding why polarization defines the character of our contemporary moment and how such division has reached its fever pitch. Lucky for us, the academic study of the culture wars has found its most comprehensive text to date in Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America. For Hartman, the beginnings of our politically fraught moment can be found not in the debates over the implementation of the New Deal or the battles over temperance as other historians have...

The “Population Bomb” Bombed. The Book Inspired by Darwinism that Triggered a Wave of Repression Around the World April 26, 2019 by Jerry Bergman, PhD In 1968, the “year’s most important book,” what Greg Garrard[1] called a neo-Malthusian classic, The Population Bomb, by Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich, “made dire predictions and triggered a wave of repression around the world.”[2] Authored by an evolutionary biologist known for his “groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies,” it became a best seller, and turned the author into a celebrity.[3] The book “would become one of the most influential books...

In honor of her 79th birthday today, this playlist is Anita Bryant's 1968 album of classic hymns.

A celebrated book and a major museum exhibition revealed the harrowing tale behind the image of a wounded Marine. Their version was wrong. ============================================================== The fighting in Hue City, Vietnam, was as intense and confusing as anything the Marines there had ever seen. It was mid-February 1968, and American and South Vietnamese forces were desperately trying to counter a surprise onslaught that became known as the Tet offensive. First Battalion, Fifth Marines had breached the city’s historic Citadel. Radio communications were out. From front-line positions, Marines ran back a block or two to give updates to commanding officers and to...

(Warning: You May Find Some Of This Offensive And Or Disturbing) "...We have been here now for twelve and one half hours by my reckoning and we still don't know who the next President of the United States is...." NBC Anchorman Chet Huntley At 7 AM Eastern Time Wednesday November 6, 1968- I was watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on the morning of Wednesday November 6th, 1968 as I awoke around 7 am from a short nights sleep for an eight year old, probably not much more than four and a half hours. We still didn't know who the...

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators. Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what...

This week, the Miss America Organization announced that it’s eliminating the swimsuit competition in an effort to focus less on women’s appearances. It’s not clear what, exactly, the beauty pageant will be about now that it’s trying to deemphasize the “beauty” part. In any case, the decision coincides with the 50th anniversary of a feminist protest that criticized the contest as a sexist “cattle auction.” The Miss America pageant has courted controversy ever since it began as a 1921 newspaper “bathing beauties” contest and marketing scheme for Atlantic City, New Jersey. In the beginning, the controversy stemmed from conservative critics...

Fifty years ago tonight, a great American political party was murdered by its own children and closest friends. The party in question was the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and JFK, which perished during the riots in Grant Park, Chicago, on the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the party’s national convention. Its children in this case were the rioters from the anti–Vietnam War Left. After killing off the traditional liberal Democratic party they despised, they would go on to take over the corpse and make it the host of America’s radical Left, from Jerry...

…..He's "really concerned," just as most people who don't know anything about politics are. It's interesting that he mentioned violence in the streets on this, the 50th anniversary of the "Days of Rage" that blew up the Democratic convention in 1968. That convention and the violence that surrounded it defined the New Left and that generation of activists. So could it really happen today? Those were entirely different times. America was a different country, young people were different, and the issues were a matter of life and death for many. As much as the left tries to gin up hysteria...

Back in London, at the piano in his Cavendish Avenue bachelor pad, Paul played it for John and Yoko. When he got to the line “The movement you need is on your shoulder,” he told them, “I’ll change that, it’s a bit crummy.” John replied, “That’s the best line in it!” John heard this new tune as Paul cheering him on in his romance with Yoko. “I took it very personally,” John told Rolling Stone in 1968. “‘Ah, it’s me,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’ He says, ‘No, it’s me.’ I said, ‘Check. We’re going through the same bit.’ So we...

In August 1968 Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to crush a burgeoning democratic reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Here is a recap of the shock intervention that reined in the Soviet satellite state, its aspirations for democracy warded off for another 20 years. "At 11:00 pm, Soviet, Polish, East German, Bulgarian and Hungarian troops crossed the Czechoslovak border," AFP reported early on August 21, picking up Radio Prague's announcement of the overnight invasion. Tensions had been mounting between then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the reformist government that had taken over in the Central European state. In...

Here is pop nugget from the past that only more "seasoned" Freepers will remember. Released in 1967, it was a Top 30 hit in America and had an otherworldly vibe to it. Very trippy and psychedelic. I can almost picture Frank asking his daughter what the hell she and Lee were smoking to come up with this one. I was just a small boy when this was popular but I remember hearing it on the radio. The accompanying video I linked here has a post apocalyptic "Planet of the Apes" feel to it. I did not discover the video until...

Foster Brooks roast of Hubert Humphrey

1968 - A Year When Many in the Church Drank the Poison of the World Msgr. Charles Pope • June 19, 2018 • Corner of 7th & N Street NW, Washington D.C., April 8, 1968There was something awful about the year 1968. Fifty years later we are still reeling from its effects. Perhaps we do well to ponder the deep wounds that still fester today.I was a young lad at the time, and almost everything I saw on the television news terrified me. Harrowing nightly reports from Vietnam (where my father was stationed) detailed that day’s casualties; I always...

"heads lying in pools of blood. The calmest one in the room was Ethel (Kennedy). Robert Kennedy had a rosary in his hand, at one point he asked the people to stand aside to give him air.....there was an awful lot of excitement and an awful lot of confusion and hysteria among practically everyone here....." NBC reporter Charles Quinn describes the scene when Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles early in the morning of June 5, 1968 "get the gun Rafer" Radio reporter Andrew West as the struggle with assassin Sirhan Sirhan is underway In the early hours of...

(Warning: Some readers may find some passages to be disturbing) "And here's to you Mrs. Robinson, Jesus Loves You more than you will know....whoa whoa whoa" At the end of May in 1968 I went into the kitchen, sat down and ate my breakfast before heading off to school hearing those words over and over again. Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" was a hit song, at the top of the charts, being played on the radio in my kitchen and radios everywhere. It connected with me where I was, a child eight years old, with "dee dee's" and "dah, dah's",...