Free Republic

Having hunted everyone from high-powered politicians to lowly bureaucrats, China’s graft busters are now trying to reach back in time, scouring old case files to find possible wrongdoing that authorities had overlooked or chosen not to pursue. Communist Party investigators have hauled in a string of long-serving and former officials over the past year for alleged corruption and other offenses dating back decades, in a series of retrospective probes that first gained attention by targeting one of China’s largest coal-producing regions and has since spread across the country. Authorities in the northern region of Inner Mongolia have detained dozens of...

A California police officer with ties to the Proud Boys was fired on Friday, authorities said. Rick Fitzgerald, a former Fresno officer, was removed from the department after video surfaced of him last month gathering with far-right protesters in YouTube footage posted by a former Proud Boy. The ex-officer has previously said in online posts that he previously was affiliated with the Proud Boys and encourages people to join the extremist group, The Fresno Bee had reported in March. He had said on a podcast that he was part of the local Proud Boys group for roughly a year, rising...

Virginia police are investigating an 'anti-racist' Facebook group that named the parents of students who members say are 'against critical race theory'. The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County group - which reportedly includes teachers and school board members - shared personal details of those they say had opposed moves to teach the controversial curriculum. It urged followers to 'gather information' on them and encouraged online hackers to silence critics of the theory, The Daily Wire reports. Parent Cherly Onderchain told Fox News she was on the 'hit list', adding: 'Their goal is silence.' According to Purdue University, critical race theory...

Olbermann: “Let us brace ourselves. The task is two-fold. Terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box. And then he, and his enablers, and his supporters and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees, and the William Barrs, the Sean Hannitys and the Mike Pences, and the Rudy Giulianis, and the Amy Coney Barrets must be prosecuted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it. And to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus."

Marie Cisco was fed up. America was in turmoil, rocked to its core by the brutal killing of George Floydat the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis. Protests against systemic racism and injustice had been raging for five days, and the nation’s theaters were excruciatingly silent in expressing support. Cisco, a producer who has worked with the New York-based National Black Theatre, the Public Theater, Lee Daniels Entertainment and the Apollo Theater, was not surprised by the crickets coming from these institutions — self-professed bastions of liberalism and equality — but she felt hurt and angry all the same....

PHILADELPHIA - Crews are painting over the Frank Rizzo mural in South Philadelphia early Sunday. The Mural Arts Program, which maintains the mural, says it believes the mural is a 'painful reminder' of the former mayor's legacy... “I was appalled they did it in the middle of the night,” South Philadelphia native George Patti said. “Everyone was proud of Frank. I understand the other side, but even if it was divisive, or stands for something bad, I don’t think we should be erasing...

"We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy." Ravelry, a community website for knitters, crocheters, and other textile fans, has banned all content supporting President Trump and his administration in what it described as a stand against white supremacy. In a statement posted to their website, the administrators wrote that posts, projects, patterns, and profiles supporting the president are no longer allowed. The site is the most popular online forum for knitting fans and counts millions of users, as...

UK companies failing to tackle climate change would be delisted from the London Stock Exchange under radical plans for greening the economy being drawn up by Labour. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said he would consider changing the law if necessary to force UK-listed firms to take adequate steps to fight the “climate emergency” facing the planet....

A scandal is developing in Alaska, as the head of the Human Rights Commission (HRC) has been implicated in directly chilling the exercise of the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution. Governor Dunleavy has ordered an investigation of the scandal. The head of the HRC, Marti Buscaglia, became upset over a bumper sticker on a contractor's work truck. The bumper sticker showed the silhouette of an AR15 type rifle, along with the words “Black Rifles Matter.”  It is a pretty standard call to support the Second Amendment. Brenton Linegar owns Sage Mechanical, the small plumbing and air conditioning...

he FBI's investigation of Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, includes a keen focus on a series of suspicious wire transfers in which offshore companies linked to Manafort moved more than $3 million all over the globe between 2012 and 2013. Much of the money came into the United States. These transactions — which have not been previously reported — drew the attention of federal law enforcement officials as far back as 2012, when they began to examine wire transfers to determine if Manafort hid money from tax authorities or helped the Ukrainian regime close to Russian President Vladimir...

"Yesterday morning, we received a very bizarre letter from Google issuing us an ultimatum," Shane Trejo, media relations director of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Michigan, wrote on The Liberty Conservative. "Either we were to remove a particular article or see all of our ad revenues choked off in an instant. This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control."

Whole Title: 'Get my work off your walls!': Ivanka Trump hit by protest from artists demanding their work be removed from her famous home because they're 'embarrassed' to be associated with her family A growing group of artists is hitting back against Ivanka Trump, with some even demanding the president-elect's daughter take their work down off her walls. A collection of New York artists have banded together to protest Donald Trump through his daughter, with a campaign called 'Dear Ivanka'. The colorful crusade was created by the Halt Action Group, which was founded by curator Alison Gingeras, dealer Bill Powers,...

By now we’ve all heard how the contentious election, and the surprising result, has frayed friendships — especially on social media. Hillary Clinton supporters, angry and dismayed at the result, have chopped Trump-loving friends off their friend lists. But the culling seems to be progressing beyond just active Trump supporters. Now, some people who are insufficiently anti-Trump, even if they didn’t vote for him, are getting the boot. Dorian Davis, an adjunct professor of media in Washington, DC, has noticed a slide in his friend count because, he suspects, he’s not “critical enough of Trump.” “If you post anything even...

Much like the lie known as “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” rumors and unsubstantiated allegations continue to flow freely on the University of Missouri campus, with some of the worst of it coming from student body president Payton Head. Head, who had previously claimed he was called the “n-word” from a passing pickup truck — one of the actions that led to the school’s president, Tim Wolfe, resigning on Monday — was at it again on Tuesday. This time, he took to social media to warn students about the KKK being on campus, according to Twitchy.com: There’s only one small problem...

Name the missing word in the following sentence from tonight's Associated Press report on the current situation at the University of Missouri: "On Friday, the now-former chancellor issued an open letter decrying racism after a swastika smeared in feces was found in a campus dormitory." The obviously missing word is "allegedly," as in, "was allegedly found." That word is also missing in sentences found in three separate reports at the New York Times. On October, 24, the Washington Post unskeptically accepted the recounting of the incident in a report shortly after it — ahem, allegedly — occurred. There's a really...

Ben Carson said Thursday that the names of two people he has previously identified as victims of his childhood violence are "fictitious." "I don't like to generally bring them in, the names I used for instance are fictitious names because I don't want to bring people into something like this because I know what you guys do to their lives‎," Carson told reporters in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Ben Carson's career in politics 13 photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson's comments follow a CNN investigation published earlier Thursday that probed his descriptions of his violent past. He has said he...

Telegraph.co.uk Google wants to monitor your mental health. You should welcome it into your mind Yes, you should tell the computer what you're thinking By James Kirkup 6:24PM GMT 28 Oct 2015 The use of technology to track and treat mental illness is deeply worrying but sadly necessary Next week, Dr Tom Insel leaves his post as head of the US National Institute of Mental Health, a job that made him America’s top mental health doctor. Dr Insel is a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist and a leading authority on both the medicine and public policies needed to deal with problems...

One of the dangers of the the social internet is the potential to destroy someone. We have seen it with liberals attacking conservatives over issues. But, rarely have we seen it when one group attacks itself. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today about how a person at the Brookings Institution think tank was deliberately attacked by Senator Elizabeth Warren. What’s pretty clear is that it was organized behind the scenes and launched. It wasn’t random. You might have read about thought police in science fiction. They aren’t science fiction anymore. What was his crime? Using cost-benefit analysis, Robert...

Writing online, author Elisa Gabbert answered one of her reader's questions about whether he should stop writing because of his "privilege" of being white and male. An anonymous reader asked Gabbert: "I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community—but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t...

A human rights activist and writer is dismayed that there are no laws that allow the imprisonment of those who state certain offensive positions, such as Bill Maher and Phil Robertson. If the United States were a "civilized country" like those in Europe, Tanya Cohen wrote for Thought Catalog, then Robertson, a reality show star on A&E's "Duck Dynasty," "would have been taken before a government Human Rights Tribunal or Human Rights Commission and given a fine or prison sentence for the hateful and bigoted comments that he made about LGBT people." Among the types of speech that should be...