Free Republic

Montclair State University officials violated the freedom of speech of a group of its students by shutting down a peaceful gun rights demonstration on campus last year, a lawsuit filed Wednesday claimed.MSU sophomore Mena Botros, president of Young Americans for Liberty, and two fellow students on Sept. 10, 2019 donned orange jumpsuits and posed as criminals while holding signs mockingly supporting “gun-free zones," according to the lawsuit.Some of the signs stated "every civilian gun is a threat” and “criminals for gun free zones.”Though the students were “peacefully expressing their ideas in a common outdoor area of campus,” a university police...

...the most interesting part of liberal writer George Packer’s widely noticed recent Atlantic essay, “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.” The article details his dismay at the identity politics/standards-shredding orthodoxy that has overtaken New York’s public schools under leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio. (Is he still a candidate for president, by the way? I’ve lost track. . .) Packer here sounds like a late-60s liberal who is about to move to a New York suburb for better schools for his kids. Worth reading the whole thing if you have time, but the interesting part to me begins in...

New York Times editor Tom Wright-Piersanti, under fire for racist and antisemitic tweets, also had some choice words for the product his current employer publishes, as a series of more controversial tweets before he went to work at the Times reveals. The New York Post has uncovered tweets demonstrating that Wright-Piersanti, while employed at Newark’s Star-Ledger newspaper in New Jersey a decade ago, had a particular fondness for the use of the word “douche.” “Wright-Piersanti’s Twitter page suggests he adores the word ‘douche,’ which crops up more than a dozen times,” the New York Post‘s Keith Kelly wrote Thursday evening....

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Build America Bureau has finalized a direct loan of $225 million for the Interstate 10 Corridor Project, a critical step forward for one of the most highly anticipated regional transportation and mobility improvements in Southern California. Construction will begin in early 2020 on the four-year project in San Bernardino County, which will include the installation of express lanes (also known as toll lanes) between the Los Angeles County line (near Montclair) and Interstate 15 (just west of Fontana). The low-interest federal loan, which closed on May 3, is through the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation...

MONTCLAIR, NJ — The Montclair Public School District is rolling out a new initiative this year: "all-gender restrooms" in each building. Superintendent Kendra Johnson alerted local parents and guardians about the restroom changes as part of a "Welcome Back" letter sent at the beginning of the school year. According to Johnson, 2018-19 will be the first year that the district has at least one "all-gender" restroom in each school building.

The Rev. Clenard Childress Jr. calls out abortion for what it is: a mass genocide of the most innocent.Childress, a leading pro-life advocate in the Black community, discussed the hypocrisy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in a July column, citing statistics about the disproportionately high number of abortions in the Black community.Childress listed five “undeniable and inconvenient truths” about abortion, including the shocking fact that more than 20 million African American children have been aborted in the United States. That amounts to about 1,800 aborted babies in the Black community every day.Abortions hurt every...

The former "Cosby Show" actor job-shamed by some media outlets over the weekend with photos showing him working at a Trader Joe's in New Jersey to make ends meet, said Tuesday he was so upset that he quit his job. Geoffrey Owens "I was really devastated," Geoffrey Owens, who lives in Montclair, said during an interview on Good Morning America. But Owens said the outpouring of support he received on social media from the entertainment industry and beyond helped him through it. "The period of devastation was so short because so shortly after that, the responses my wife and I...

If you live in New York City and are at a stage in your life when you're contemplating a move to the suburbs (or your friends have begun to leave the city en masse), you've probably heard of at least one of these towns in Essex County: Montclair, Maplewood, and Glen Ridge. That's because these three spots, all accessible via New Jersey Transit trains, are eternally popular among NYC expats looking for more space and a little more greenspace for their green. "We have a lot of people coming from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City and Hoboken," says Stacie Levy of...

Haven’t gotten a chance to post this one, but it needs to be posted. From the Star Ledger: How every town in N.J. rates on income inequality Despite what Montclair wants you to believe, outside of the typical wealth enclaves like Saddle River, Far Hills, Deal and the like, Montclair ranks as pretty much the most unequal large town in New Jersey. There are few towns in NJ that show such a blatantly obvious amount of geographic segregation as Montclair, less than 1 mile separates some of the wealthiest residents of NJ from some of it’s poorest.

In homes in Montclair and across North Jersey, residents are breaking bread with Syrian refugees, sharing food and conversation. These dinners, aimed at fostering understanding and communication, are being organized by the Syria Supper Club, a group firmly rooted in the township. NJ 11th For Change, an organization founded by Montclair residents, continues to host protests at the New Jersey offices of Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-11, pressuring him to hold town hall meetings. Houses of worship, residents and some shops in the township have put up signs with the same message — “No matter where you are from, we’re glad...

The mystery of the anti-Hillary Clinton, pro-Donald Trump vandals who continued to deface a beautiful children’s mural took a while to solve. Power Stretch Studios in Montclair, New Jersey, had suffered a fire in September, and its windows and door was boarded up. Two days after the Nov. 8 presidential election, someone wrote on the boards: “Lock her up,” a popular refrain against Clinton amongst Trump supporters during his campaign. A studio employee painted over it, but the vandals returned, writing ”America Has Spoken” with Trump’s face drawn next to it. Gina Shaw, a friend of studio owner Hakika DuBose,...

It isn’t difficult to guess the reasons why a late-term abortion clinic in New Jersey didn’t want pregnant employees to be working there. It could be bad for its $1.8 million-a-year business. The Pilgrim Medical Center, a Montclair abortion clinic that advertises same-day, late-term abortions, recently lost a discrimination lawsuit filed by three former employees who said they were fired after becoming pregnant, according to the Wall Street Journal. Now, the abortion facility is filing for bankruptcy. Nicholas Campanella, the abortionist who owns the facility, has a reputation among his staff for “not lik[ing] pregnant employees,” according to the lawsuit....

It’s odd watching a group of left-wing academics buck up each other’s spirits after they’ve encountered the cold, cruel world outside academe. Such a gathering was on display at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago this month whenever the Radical Caucus of the MLA met. “The failure of communism did not result from Lenin, Stalin and Mao,” Grover C. Furr of Montclair State University told the group. “These were some of the greatest men in the world.” “Socialism preserved the contradictions of capitalism, such as differentiations in pay. We should abandon the term ‘socialism.’ Marx and Engels did...

At the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2014 convention in Chicago, delegates defeated a resolution to boycott Israel akin to one proposed by the American Studies Association (ASA), which had put forward an academic boycott this past year with the public support of Stephen Hawking. At the MLA, though, the delegate convention failed to pass a resolution to support an academic boycott in a fairly close vote, as reported by Inside Higher Ed. Instead, the MLA delegates passed a resolution to ask the U.S. State Department to consider a boycott of Israel for occupying Palestinian territories. This was a far cry...

A Scholar For Stalin By Rocco DiPippo FrontPageMagazine.com | March 16, 2005 For twenty years, Grover Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, where he educates students in his peculiar worldview, which is an updated Stalinism and in which America is the world’s biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. While his academic expertise is English literature, he presents himself as an expert on communism, and scours academic forums like the Historians of American Communism net, defending Joseph Stalin and calling America’s role in bringing down the Soviet Empire a moral outrage. “Was there...

Unrepentant Domestic Terrorist and "small-c" Communist to speak at Montclair State University Event Details:  Special guest, Bill Ayers, speaks about the interaction between education and activism. Talk will be followed by a book sale/signing and discussion. Ayers is scheduled to speak at 8:15 PM Fellow Tea Partiers, ACTION ALERT!!! YOU are invited to a Tea Party Rally/Protest to take place this Thursday evening, March 24th!!! The location is Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey (in Essex County, close to the border with Passaic County). A number of New Jersey-based tea party organizations – including but not limited to the...

<p>WASHINGTON — Ten Russian intelligence officers have been arrested for allegedly serving as illegal agents of the Russian government in the United States, the Justice Department announced Monday.</p>

Montclair might be one of New Jersey's more progressive communities, but even in a town known for its tolerance, a working fetish "dungeon" -- complete with a spanking bench, "interrogation cell" and stocks -- doesn't belong on the busy downtown strip. So says the township attorney in a decision that has bitterly disappointed Ed and Karen Dougherty, aka "Master Ed" and "slave Duchess," the owners of Dressing for Pleasure, a Bloomfield Avenue shop that sells fetish clothing and tools of the bondage-and-discipline trade, from flogs and paddles to masks and spiked collars. For years, the couple hosted discreet "play parties"...

VIDEO: Watch Fox 5's coverageA man being sought for shooting and killing his estranged wife to death while she watched one of their children swim at a Montclair YMCA had been ordered in October to have no contact with her. Kenneth A. Duckett was under a restraining order that specified no contact with Monica Paul, but allowed him to have visitation rights with their two children, said Paul Loriquet, a spokesman for the Essex County Prosecutor's Office.  "Basically, it was like a curbside drop-off," Loriquet said. The couple had separated in August, but it was unclear when they had...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- To draw attention to the way abortion disproportionately affects the African-American community, black pro-life advocates will be protesting outside the upcoming annual meeting of the nation's largest organization representing blacks. The NAACP protest will also reach the Democratic presidential candidate. Rev. Clenard Childress, a New Jersey pastor, told LifeNews.com about the protest and said pro-abortion presidential candidate Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton will be at the convention.  "Because 2008 is an election year, the presidential candidates will undoubtedly speak at the convention. This gives us a national stage to make our case to the...