Free Republic

DALTON – Democrat Stacey Abrams found herself on the campaign trail this week answering for an earlier call to remove the carving of three Confederate leaders from state-owned Stone Mountain near Atlanta. A Dalton woman expressed concern during a town hall Wednesday about Abrams’ apparent focus on blasting off the “beautiful carving” from the face of Stone Mountain. The woman also inquired about Abrams’ views on the Confederate monuments that are a fixture in many downtowns across Georgia, including Dalton. Abrams called for the removal of the carving last fall in a series of tweets shortly after a protestor was...

A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on Richmond's famed Monument Avenue has been vandalized. Red paint was splattered on the statue's base. The letters BLM, an apparent reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, was also sprayed on the base. Virginia Capitol Police, which is responsible for policing the monuments, told news outlets the vandalism occurred late Friday or early Saturday between patrols. The vandalism occurs a week ahead of the one-year anniversary of the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville that was organized in part as a protest to plans to remove a Lee Statue there. ETC...

Now the Anti-History movement of the left has a new target. A target as big as a city. A new report from Austin, Texas’s Equity Office about existing Confederate monuments suggested changing the city's name. The report identified several neighborhoods and 10 streets named in honor of the Confederacy or William Barton, a slave owner dubbed the "Daniel Boone of Texas," that could be changed, The Austin American-Statesman reported Friday. Austin’s namesake, Stephen F. Austin - also referred to as the "father of Texas" - opposed efforts by Mexico to abolish slavery in the Tejas province, saying freed slaves would...

A group pushing to change the name of iconic marketplace Faneuil Hall is now calling for a national “black-led boycott” of the tourist site after being “avoided and rebuffed” by Mayor Martin J. Walsh, according to its founder. Kevin Peterson said the New Democracy Coalition has been reaching out to the mayor for more than a year and a half about a name change through letters, press conferences and office visits.

SHREVEPORT -- More than a year after four monuments to the Confederate era were removed from the New Orleans landscape, a federal judge has cleared the way for removal of another Louisiana Confederate memorial. Wednesday's ruling in the northwest Louisiana city of Shreveport says the Caddo Parish Commission has the authority to remove a monument outside the parish courthouse. U.S. District Judge Robert James dismissed a lawsuit by a chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

VALDOSTA, Ga. (AP) - Residents of a Georgia city are pushing to change the name of a residential street to Barack Obama Boulevard. **SNIP** Rose says the name should be changed because Valdosta city leaders named Forrest Street in April 1883 for Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was also an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

The commander of F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming has agreed to replace a Bible on a POW/MIA table with a generic “book of faith,” according to documents released by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The MRFF is a militant organization that has fought against Nativity scenes, Bible studies and any outward expressions of the Christian faith on U.S. military installations. The head of the foundation, Mikey Weinstein, wrote in the HuffPost that he is dedicated to fighting “virulent religious oppression” carried out by “incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their...

Here’s a list of all the pages I know of which have been deleted or unpublished indefinitely: Collectively Conscious (915K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Natural Cures Not Medicine (2.3M followers) – Deleted on June 11th, 2018. I Want to Be 100% Organic (700K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Viral Alternative News (500K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Organic Health (230K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Natural Cures From Food (120K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Heart Centered Rebalancing (3.9M followers) – Deleted a few years ago. Awareness Act (1.1M...

The removal of offensive monuments took a unique turn in Seattle. Mayor Ed Murray asked a cemetery to remove a Confederate monument erected in 1926 but also requested the removal of a large statue of Vladimir Lenin. From the Seattle Times: The monument, erected in 1926 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Lenin statue are both on private property. Still, Murray said, he believes they should be removed. “Not only do these kinds of symbols represent historic injustices, their existence causes pain among those who themselves or whose family members have been impacted by these atrocities,” Murray...

Twitter has sharply escalated its battle against fake and suspicious accounts, suspending more than 1 million a day in recent months, a major shift to lessen the flow of disinformation on the platform, according to data obtained by The Washington Post. The rate of account suspensions, which Twitter confirmed to The Post, has more than doubled since October, when the company revealed under congressional pressure how Russia used fake accounts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July, according to the data. The...

Just weeks before last year's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney announced a new commission to recommend "how to best tell the real story" of the Confederate-era and other statues on Monument Avenue, a tree-lined street known as one of the city's tourist destinations. Then the white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, some 70 miles away. They rallied around a statue of Robert E. Lee that had been slated for removal during an August weekend that turned violent. The next week, Stoney added to the Richmond group's charge: The commission would examine the possible removal or...

President Trump called the National Security Agency's recently announced mass-deletion of call records "a disgrace" Tuesday, and appeared to link the purge with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of possible campaign collusion with Russia. The NSA said last week that it began deleting call records on May 23 from a three-year period beginning in 2015 after "technical irregularities" resulted in "the production to NSA of some [call records] that NSA was not authorized to receive." Trump suggested there was more to the story.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports the Richmond School Board voted 6-1 Monday to rename J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School to Barack Obama Elementary School.

A Richmond, Virginia, elementary school will switch its name from that of a Confederate general to that of the nation's first black President. On Monday, the Richmond school board voted to rename J.E.B. Stuart Elementary as Barack Obama Elementary School. Members of the school's community submitted ideas for a new name and students at the Richmond school, which is 95% African-American, voted among seven choices. The top three finalists were: Barack Obama, Northside and Wishtree. Last year, a school board in Mississippi dropped the name Jefferson Davis, for the president of the Confederacy, in favor of naming an elementary school...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is allowing Ohio to clean up its voting rolls by targeting people who haven’t cast ballots in a while. The justices rejected, by a 5-4 vote Monday, arguments that the practice violates a federal law intended to increase the ranks of registered voters. A handful of other states also use voters’ inactivity to trigger a process that could lead to their removal from the voting rolls. Justice Samuel Alito said for the court that Ohio is complying with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. He was joined by his four conservative colleagues. The four...

/begin my excerpts N. Korea Punishes Those Linked to Bus Crash with Chinese Tourists... Four were Shot and Military Leadership Replaced According to N. Korean sources, four people were shot as a punishment for the bus crash which led to the death of 32 Chinese tourists, many of whom are left-wing (hardcore communist) Chinese academics. Hwang Yong-shik, the chief executive of Korea Kumgang Group (KKG), and its commissar were among the executed. In addition to the news of Hwang's execution, the sources also said that Kim Jong-gak, Director of General Political Bureau, and Park Yong-shik, Defense Minister, also took the...

The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) are gearing up for a new round of purges, even as they struggle to recover from the initial culling that followed the failed coup of July 2016.Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli announced April 18 that a secret cell of 3,000 officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) affiliated with alleged coup mastermind Fethullah Gulen, a Sunni cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, had been identified. All of them, he promised, would be dismissed. As of May 18, some 550 officers and NCOs had already been arrested. According to government investigators, senior leaders of the so-called Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization (FETO),...

<p>AP) — A nearly 80-year-old statue depicting a European settler with a weapon in his hand towering over a Native American that some say celebrates white supremacy has been dismantled by crews in southwestern Michigan’s Kalamazoo.</p> <p>And at the University of Michigan, regents have voted to strip a former school president’s name from a campus science building because he lent his scientific expertise to groups that were in favor of selective reproduction, also known as eugenics.</p>

Students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, are demanding the removal of white and European authors from a mandatory humanities course at the college. Reed College caved to student protesters in April after they demanded that white authors be removed from the college’s Humanities 110 course. Now, the course will focus primarily on ancient Mediterranean authors. Reed College professors have responded with confusion at the allegation that the Humanities 110 course is “too white.” “The idea that Hum 110 is a ‘white’ course is very strange to me,” Jay Dickson, a professor of English, recently said in a comment to...

I wrote at RedState for 12 years, from shortly after its founding in 2004 to the end of the 2016 primaries, and I continue to value many of its current and former writers as friends, so it is with a lot of sadness that I learned of this morning’s summary firing of its Editor-in-Chief, Caleb Howe, and about half of the site’s writers. The site will go on, and has retained a number of talented people who will still be worth reading, but this clearly marks the end of an era and the end of the site’s distinctive grassroots anti-establishment...