Free Republic

The attempted denigration of Jane Austen reveals how upscale, white elites view caring about anti-racism as a marker of status.The woke may regret going after Jane Austen. Last month it was reported that exhibits at the Jane Austen Museum were being revamped as staff are“re-evaluating Jane Austen’s place in ‘Regency-era colonialism’ in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.” This attempt to evaluate Austen according to the American upper class’s current racial obsessions mostly reveals the blind spots those obsessions encourage. Many of Austen’s fans were furious at this attempted denigration of the great authoress. This anger was intensified by...

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) stated that we have to make sure teachers “feel safe” returning to school and that she doesn’t know the specific details on whether it’s safe for schools in Chicago and Washington, D.C. to re-open. Co-host Joe Scarborough asked, “Are the teachers’ unions dragging their feet too much on this?”

An 11-year-old boy died after he shot himself in his California home during a Zoom class this week, according to a new report. The pre-teen was attending the virtual class with his microphone and camera turned off when he took his own life just after 11 a.m. Wednesday in Woodbridge, a community in Northern California’s Central Valley, KOVR reported.

In cities like Baltimore, MD, it’s not easy for a black Republican to run for office. It may sound like a cliche, but stories like this show that in these cities, the opposition will stop at nothing to maintain the status quo. This reality became even more evident during a Zoom debate between candidates seeking to become the next mayor of the city. Pastor Shannon Wright is a black Republican candidate who is attempting to end the streak of Democratic domination of the office of mayor. But, as a conservative running in a heavily blue city, she has run into...

Working-class parents without college degrees aren’t capable of overseeing their own children’s education, according to comments State Sen. Jeanne Dietsch (D-Peterborough) made during a House Education Committee hearing on Tuesday. Dietsch was speaking on behalf of a Senate bill that would repeal a law allowing the state Board of Education to create an alternative program for granting graduation credits, which became Learn Everywhere. “This idea of parental choice, that’s great if the parent is well-educated. There are some families that’s perfect for. But to make it available to everyone? No. I think you’re asking for a huge amount of trouble,”...

A student’s father has brought a class-action lawsuit against Rutgers University, seeking refunds for tuition, fees and room and board after the school moved classes online to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. The suit, filed May 20 in Middlesex County Superior Court, accuses the university of breach of contract, unjust enrichment and conversion for “continuing to reap the financial benefit of millions of dollars from students."...The suit was filed by a man identified only as John Doe, the father of a student enrolled at Rutgers during the spring 2020 semester. It claims the student missed opportunities to view videos or...

Places like Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are usually packed with tourists and wealthy people who own second homes in the summer. But the coronavirus has made summer arrive early for many of these small towns as people from large cities flee to their second homes hoping to avoid infection. The locals in many of these places are not pleased at having these summer people show up, potentially bringing the virus with them, to a place where medical services are extremely limited. The company that owns the hospitals in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket has been asking people to stay away:

First lady Melania Trump’s classy ability to handle attacks on her while keeping the focus on her and the president’s agenda steady is a top reason Republican women are flocking to support President Trump, according to a new survey. In a deep dive into the reasons women back the president, the survey put Trump’s accomplishments and his wife at the top, and said that she is a sign that the president has good “judgment.” The survey from the Frontier Center, provided Friday to Secrets, said, “Female supporters included First Lady Melania Trump as one of Trump’s greatest assets as she,...

June 19, 1992: This is the only in depth sit down interview Red Skelton did in his entire career. This interview won the Iris Award for Best International Show.

Working class communities deserted Jeremy Corbyn and Labour in huge numbers after Boris Johnson's vow to get Brexit done, a damning new election analysis shows today. The Tories won over the DE social class made up of the unemployed and unskilled workers by 13 points, an astonishing gulf for a Conservative leader. The lead, 47 per cent to 34 per cent - swallowed up Jeremy Corbyn's three point advantage among the same group in the 2017 election. And it also dwarfs the eight point lead that Ed Miliband enjoyed in 2015, which prompted his resignation as Labour leader. In more...

Understanding where you fall in the American economic class system isn't as simple as pulling out a calculator or looking at a pay stub. How Much Should I Save? Myriad forces shape individuals' economic class and their views on where they rank alongside other Americans. When asked how they identify their social class, 62% of Americans said they belonged to the upper-middle or middle classes, according to a 2017 survey from Gallup. In determining their social class, people often don't just think about income, experts say, but about other factors, including education, location and family history. Larger economic trends...

The effects of Donald Trump’s presidency on the American economy are widely debated, but there’s at least one field of production whose boom is indisputably a result of his election: the conservative voter ethnography industry. Since Trump’s rise, article after article has tracked down Trump voters in some small town in a formerly Democratic state. The pieces vary in tone — some are journalistically objective, others are more personal — but they all seem to end with the author silently shaking their head, confounded by the unbreachable irrationality of these voters. Monica Potts’s recent opinion piece in the New York...

You can get away with calling something "white trash" in polite company, on cable television and in the headline of a magazine article. An article in The New Republic once posed the question of whether President Trump might be "a white trash icon." For some reason, the term manages to come across as less offensive than most other racial slurs. Yet "white trash" could be called the Swiss army knife of insults. It's deft in its ability to demean multiple groups at once: white people and people of color, poor people and people who "act" like poor people, rural folks...

(CNN)Donald Trump is not worthy of his upcoming ceremonial state visit to Britain, suggested London Mayor Sadiq Khan on Friday, saying that the US President is not "in the same class" as his predecessors. Most US presidents have not made state visits to the UK—the exceptions are Barack Obama, who visited in 2011 and George W. Bush, who visited in 2003. "History tells us only two [US] Presidents have had a state visit," Khan said during an interview on British radio station LBC. "President Trump is not in the same class as those two." "Of course we should have a...

More than a few are still trying to figure out why college tuition costs have skyrocketed in the past few years. This may help explain why.

From the outset, several top-tier Democratic presidential candidates are pushing for new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and attempting to portray themselves as best positioned to fight the country’s yawning inequality gap. It is an indication of how much the Democratic Party is shifting and how far the candidates are willing to go to appeal to the party’s energetic liberal faction. The debate over wealth — particularly with billionaires in the field and Democrats challenging a president whose riches helped get him to the White House — is a dominant theme of the early primary season. Among the first advisers...

Hosts of tonight's New Year's Eve celebration in New York City Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper butted heads with Times Square security after event organizers told them that CNN would not be invited back next year if they didn't relinquish their umbrellas. Rain lashed Manhattan as revellers in Times Square rang in the New Year and adhered to strict security measures that did not allow umbrellas in the area.

Daniel Bonthius was never much interested in politics before Donald Trump came along. Both his parents are involved in the labor movement, but he earned a musical theater degree in Boston and moved to New York City to make it as an actor. Like many of the city’s aspiring actors, Bonthius, 33, was waiting tables and working for an event planner—and had been doing it for most of a decade when Donald Trump obliterated the political system in 2016. After the election, a shocked Bonthius invited friends over to his home in Sunnyside, Queens, a one-time Irish enclave that has...

Late Monday night, the White House showed off the finishing touches of first lady Melania Trump's first state dinner, as she and President Trump will host French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife at the executive mansion tomorrow. Reporters were briefly allowed into the White House and were greeted by gold table settings, gold silverware, gold candlesticks, gold wine glasses, gold chairs – situated elegantly around puffs of green and white flowers – in the candlelit state dining room. At each of the 130 place settings there was a menu, with the White House seal and the fleur-de-lis, which were...

Roseanne made a triumphant return Tuesday night, blowing past projections with a 5.2 adults 18-49 rating and 18.2 million total viewers for the debut of its revival, which drew 10% more viewers than the original series finale 21 years ago. While nostalgia was expected to bring in eyeballs, no one predicted such a huge turnout on premiere night for the blue-collar family sitcom with a Donald Trump-supporting protagonist, especially among the younger demographic. But then, few predicted that Trump would become the Republican nominee and would win the presidential election when he first announced his candidacy.