Free Republic

A recent poll [2] found that 51 percent of Democrats supported criminalizing hate speech. It also found that the same number of self-described liberals supported its criminalization.Liberal self-identification has hit its highest mark [3] in decades while the ranks of the moderates have declined. And while the idea that the liberal and the moderate are opposites may be a troubling one to those who still think of liberalism in classical terms, the modern liberal is really a leftist in denial.When William Voegeli writes in the Claremont Review [4] about the crisis of political correctness, it is about a clash between...

Hillary Clinton on Tuesday ventured to Florissant, Missouri, not far from Ferguson, Missouri to talk about the “hard truths” about race and racial injustice in the wake of the church massacre in Charleston South Carolina. One of those hard truths is that one of her role models was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, someone who believed, as did the shooter at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, that the black race should be exterminated.

WASHINGTON: Following outcry from several groups, a prestigious American university has decided to rescind its suspension order against a student who displayed a Hindu swastika on his residence hall's bulletin board. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) welcomed the move to rescind the interim suspension order by the George Washington University (GWU). HAF associate director of public policy, Harsh Voruganti, said that the decision reflects the facts of this case and the efforts by Hindu organisations to educate campus officials about the sacredness of the Indian swastika. The small, bronze, swastika was displayed by the student on March 16 on a...

In a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say there is a link between political ideology and the ability to exert self-control. In a series of three studies with more than 300 participants, the authors found that people who identify as conservative perform better on tests of self-control than those who identify as liberal regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender.

Pope Francis’s aversion to air conditioning may be red hot, but he himself is comfortably cool. In his encyclical Laudato Si’, published today, the pope lambasts wasteful consumerism and unchecked human economic activity as a root of climate change, singling out one product in particular for censure: the air conditioner. “A simple example [of harmful habits of consumption] is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning,” Francis writes. “The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.” But ironically, Francis probably...

I had no intention of commenting on the recent shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina church.........Alas, the Huffington Post, in the person of veteran propagandist Terry Krepel, forced my hand. In an article published Monday, “Did Right-Wing Media Influence Dylann Roof,” Krepel cites me first and foremost among Roof’s influences. For the record, he also cites WND and the American Thinker.

During Monday’s episode of the ABC daytime talk show “The View,” Whoopi Goldberg and the crew were fooled by a fake news website that claimed pastor John Hagee of San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church wanted women prosecuted if they said “God” during sex.

Obama had the opportunity to bring solace and comforting words to a nation, a people, and a state in the aftermath of the Charleston, South Carolina, mass murders. But that would have been expecting Obama to at least pretend to be something other than the pernicious charade and anti-Constitution neo-Leninist he is.

Watching this video of Justin Sullivan says a lot about self-training for an ISIS lone wolf, something we have continually warned about. The Morganton teenager told an undercover FBI agent he planned to kill as many as 1,000 Americans in support of ISIS, according to documents released Monday. Neighbors now reveal that Justin Nojan Sullivan, 19, was training to become an ISIS lone wolf and was arrested Friday at his home, according to a release from the North Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office. Sullivan’s destructive pattern of statues(?) and his desire to kill his parents is not foreign to Islam where...

The Undercurrent posted a clip of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush taking question while walking through the hall at the Road to Majority Conference sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in which he said he “embraces” the current “reduction of carbon emissions.” When asked about his climate change position Jeb said, “I continue to embrace the reduction of carbon emissions that have taken place.”

Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever loved the latest HBO documentary on "gun carnage," as the Monday headline has it. Online, the headline was "A deep wallow in gun-related senselessness." It was "remarkably good" and "notably free of a direct anti-gun harangue," Stuever wrote, but he was still depressed that HBO was only preaching to the liberal choir ("people already horrified by gun violence and gun culture") and the film "won't ever be seen by those who most need to see it." Requiem for the Dead: American Sp

Last August, a 28-year-old former US soldier traveled to northern Iraq where he joined the Assyrian Christian militia Dyvekh Nawsha which means “self-sacrifice” in Aramaic. It's a privately funded group numbering in the hundreds under the command of the Kurdish peshmerga that is fighting ISIS in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. Martin Himel reports.

When it comes to energy supplies — and therefore carbon dioxide emissions and climate change — who are you going to believe? Pope Francis, or BP? Whether you love the pope and hate BP, or vice versa, doesn’t matter. What matters when discussing energy availability, climate change, and poverty are hard numbers and simple math. And the latest edition of BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, which was released eight days before Pope Francis issued his encyclical on climate change, is chockfull of numbers that expose the pope’s failed climate math. Indeed, an analysis of the two documents reveals the...

In the hot days of summer, the progressive revolution that took over cities and even the national government is frenziedly devouring itself. The media is pounding away at Hillary Clinton, not because it cares about her foundation’s dirty deals or the contents of her email server, but because it doesn’t trust her ideological commitment. If the media were sure of that, both stories would have been treated like Benghazi; mocked, ridiculed, falsely fact checked and then buried in a haunted Indian graveyard under the New York Times building at midnight. Instead the media pined for Elizabeth Warren. When the Native...

The "harshest of the harsh gun laws" do little to stop people with criminal or evil intentions, former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik tells Newsmax TV. In an interview with "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth, the author of "From Jailer to Jailed" said the "roughest gun laws" in cities and states "really make no difference. When the bad guys want to get guns, they get them and they use them for what they want." "I don't blame the guns," he said. "I don't blame gun owners. I don't blame the gun manufacturers. … I blame the people that use...

There are people who have never fired a shot in their life who do not hesitate to declare how many bullets should be the limit to put into a firearm’s clip or magazine. Some say ten bullets but New York state’s recent gun control law specifies seven. Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting — even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun. This uninformed and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate so futile and so...

"It is apparent that this case was filed to pursue the political purposes of the Brady Center and, give the failure to present any cognizable legal claim, bringing these defendants into the Colorado court where the prosecution of James Holmes was proceeding appears to be more of an opportunity to propagandize the public and stigmatize the defendants than to obtain a court order which counsel should have known would be outside the authority of this court."

The Cardinal couldn't have been more polite, but it didn't take much reading between the lines to get what he was asserting: that when it comes to the encyclical on the environment, Rush Limbaugh doesn't understand what the Pope was saying. On today's Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace played a clip of Rush saying that the encyclical "is suggesting is that everyone should vote for the Democrat party. How in the hell else do you interpret it when the Pope sounds like Al Gore on global warming and climate change?" Responded Cardinal Donald Wuerl: "one of the great blessings of...

Voters who disagree with the Democratic party’s platform are only a few Confederate flag sightings away from donning a hood and burning some crosses, apparently. Is this why the U.S. is “essentially a nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race, as former Attorney General Eric Holder famously said?

It’s hard to imagine how the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church that left nine dead could have been worse, but a top Democratic strategist says the shooting would have been a “horror” if the black parishioners were armed. “Now I cannot imagine the horror that could have occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started, and you have a full-scale gunfight,” said Democratic advisor Bob Shrum on Friday’s episode of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.” “You might not even have three survivors,” said Mr. Shrum, a top campaign aide to now-Secretary of State John Kerry during...