Free Republic

Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia says that the project has abandoned neutrality and is now “badly biased.” Sanger is no longer involved with Wikipedia, and his co-founder, Jimmy Wales, is a far-left activist. In a blog post on Thursday, Sanger wrote a scathing critique of the bias at his former website. “Wikipedia’s ‘NPOV’ is dead,” Sanger began, referring to the site’s neutral point of view policy. He specifically pointed to the entries for former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump as examples. “The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the...

Columbia University professor and Deputy Chair of the school’s political science department Jeffrey Lax told a conservative student to “drop dead,” and called him a “neo-nazi murderer lover” on social media for agreeing with the president’s efforts in handling the Chinese virus, according to a report by the New York Post.

In 2020 many memes pay homage to the high school and college seniors who were supposed to have a commencement and walk up in robes and square hats to receive diplomas. That is how civilized societies reward teenagers and young adults for wrapping up four years of general education. But the coronavirus changes everything, in the way money behaves in the Cyndi Lauper song “Money Changes Everything.” I wish I could be like the millions of people who can turn out a fulsome praise to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy. Instead, I’d like to pay honor to the class...

In 2020 many memes pay homage to the high school and college seniors who were supposed to have a commencement and walk up in robes and square hats to receive diplomas. That is how civilized societies reward teenagers and young adults for wrapping up four years of general education. But the coronavirus changes everything, in the way money behaves in the Cyndi Lauper song “Money Changes Everything.” I wish I could be like the millions of people who can turn out a fulsome praise to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy. Instead, I’d like to pay honor to the class...

(Reuters) - James Comey, the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director who was fired last year by U.S. President Donald Trump, will teach a course on ethical leadership at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, the school said on Friday. Comey has been by turns castigated and lionized by both Democrats and Republicans for overseeing high-stakes FBI investigations that overshadowed the election campaigns of Trump and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, in 2016. “Ethical leaders lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly...

A professor at a New Jersey university is blaming President Trump and his supporters for the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, claiming it’s their fault African-Americans have been dying at a disproportionate rate. “F--- each and every Trump supporter. You absolutely did this. You are to blame,” was among the comments – several of them containing profanity -- posted on Twitter this week by Brittney Cooper, an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. In another post, Cooper wrote that she and other African-Americans suspect that recent efforts to reopen the country following...

While sitting at home with my bottle of hand sanitizer, I received an email from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) asking me which topics from a list of pressing concerns I would like to receive emails about. The UFT has 200,000 members in New York City alone and is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, which has 1.6 million members nationwide. Following is a list of some of the sixteen topics being advocated by the UFT: Environmentalism/Sustainability, Immigrant Rights, LGBTQ Rights and Issues; Literacy; Political Activism; Racial Justice; Restorative Justice; Student Debt Relief; Women's Rights and Issues. In...

For most of the past century, the United States was the pre-eminent nation in science and technology. The evidence for that is beyond dispute: Since 1901, American researchers have won more Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics than any other nation. Given our history of discovery, innovation, and success, it is not surprising that across the political landscape Americans consider the funding of scientific research to be both a source of pride and a worthy investment. Nevertheless, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the pursuit of government grants would have a corrupting influence on...

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has produced a report titled "Social Justice Education in America." Written by David Randall, it defines, describes, and delineates many of the destructive and deceptive ideas behind the innocent-sounding social justice programs that have mushroomed in American institutions of higher learning. According to this December 2019 report, "in the last twenty years, a generation of academics and administrators has transformed higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy." Identity politics plays a major role in how social justice will be administered. Social justice activists work to increase the "state's coercive power" to decide...

“On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against,” reads the first sentence of Friday’s essay by Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University. Harris is just the latest in a string of academics to levy criticism on Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project. She is the first, however, who actually took part in the project as a fact-checker. During the publication process for 1619, Harris “vigorously disputed” the idea that the American Revolution was actually about preserving slavery....

The Pioneer City County Museum director who made a social media post saying all republicans should die has resigned from her position. Melonnie Hicks formally submitted her resignation to board members Friday, effective as of 5:00 p.m. Her resignation comes three days after she made a post to personal Facebook page during primary elections that reads, “I hope every single one of you pieces of s*** that votes republican, dies today.”

Politicians across the Western world like to speak fondly of the “middle class” as if it is one large constituency with common interests and aspirations. But, as Karl Marx observed, the middle class has always been divided by sources of wealth and worldview. Today, it is split into two distinct, and often opposing, middle classes. First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle...

We are in trouble in America because we have millions of uneducated young people who think they are "woke" – who believe America is basically evil, and always has been. If the New York Times gets its way, there will be more such Americans. The Times has initiated, along with the Pulitzer Center, something called the 1619 Project. 1619 was the infamous year in which slavery was introduced into Jamestown, and thus, into America. This curriculum is now being peddled to school districts in every state of the union. The idea of the 1619 Project is that without the slaves,...

“A government is like everything else: to preserve it, we must love it.” When he was young, Thomas Jefferson carefully copied those words — a quote from the great political philosopher Montesquieu — into his “commonplace book,” the private journal he kept as a student for future inspiration. “Everything, therefore, depends on establishing this love in a republic,” the passage continued. “And to inspire it ought to be the principal business of education.”

Two recent stories that dominated academic Twitter were the cancellation of the Western Art History course at Yale and the incorporation of the 1619 Project in the school curricula in Buffalo, New York and Washington DC. Though political centrists on Twitter were outraged, no one noted that those two incidents are thematically similar. Without understanding the connection, fighting back against indoctrination throughout the education system will be impossible. Consider the situation at Yale. Yale’s administration ended a decades-old course on the Western canon because it is arguably too big a field to cover. The course, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance...

A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on our nation. The leftward political bias, held by faculty members affiliated with the Democratic Party, at most institutions of higher education explains a lot of that disappointment. Professors Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens document this bias in "Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges." Langbert and Stevens conducted a new study of the political affiliation of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states. For party registration, they...

Skip Indeed, students reported that they worry less about censure from faculty than from peers. Skip An alarming 25.5 percent of survey respondents said it would be appropriate to “create an obstruction, such that a campus speaker endorsing this idea could not address an audience.” This authoritarian view was held by about 19 percent of self-identifying liberals, 3 percent of moderates, and 3 percent of conservatives. Skip Also troubling were the undergraduates who reported having kept an opinion to themselves in the classroom, even though the opinion was related to the class, because they were worried about the potential consequences...

A Cambridge academic has proposed a radical new way to solve climate change – letting humanity become extinct. Patricia MacCormack, a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, has just released her new book The Ahuman Manifesto, which will officially be launched in Cambridge today (Wednesday, February 5). The book argues that due to the damage done to other living creatures on Earth, we should start gradually phasing out reproduction. But rather than offering a bleak look at the future of humanity, it has generated discussion due to its joyful and optimistic tone, as it sets out a positive...

Mary Grabar's book, 'Debunking Howard Zinn,' takes aim at the celebrated historian who is as influential as he is ideological and dishonest. Howard Zinn’s book, The People’s History of the United States, is one of the most famous American history textbooks ever written. His goal was to change the way Americans saw their own history by writing from the perspective of those he called “underdogs.” In doing so, he thoroughly distorts the true historical record and paints America as an inherently unjust nation.Mary Grabar believes that at the root of his agenda is a desire to see America turned into...

Last week, I received a phone call from a professor who teaches in another department here at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington (UNCW), where I have taught for the past 27 years. He was reporting a case of possible discrimination, which resulted in a professor being denied tenure thus losing his livelihood very soon. When I received the call, I immediately began asking questions to assess the validity of his concern. After just a few questions, I came across some information that will shock the conscience of any clear thinking, rational individual. By way of background information, professors...