Free Republic

On April 2, 2024, the claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" went viral on X (formerly Twitter): Though the 3.3 million people who viewed this statement (at the time of this reporting) may not be aware, this claim is part of an long-standing genre of online memes that use a misleading statistic to minimize the importance of slavery to antebellum America. The actual percentage reported in these memes varies, Snopes has observed, from 1.3 percent to the present 1.6 percent. As Snopes reported in August 2019, the statistic to which these memes refer is most...

Russia and China Vie for Najin Port Russia is trying to strengthen ties with North Korea, citing a "China threat" in Korea and the Far East. The Gudok, the daily newspaper of Russian Railways, said in an article Tuesday, "If China takes control of Najin port in North Korea, Russia may suffer huge losses in the project to link the TKR (Trans-Korea Railway) and the TSR (Trans-Siberian Railway)." Gudok is published by Vladimir Yakunin, the president and CEO of Russian Railways and one of the closest allies of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Sources say the report can be viewed as...

“We need immigrants in this country,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler said Thursday during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing. “Our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants — many illegal immigrants.” “The fact is, the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level,” he continued. Nadler is adamantly anti-life, and given that abortion is responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn American children, it’s unlikely that he’s sincerely concerned about the United States’ replacement rates.Nadler’s remarks recall the Democratic party’s past reasoning for supporting slavery....

In case you’re wondering, corporate America has gone so far to the dark side that they might never find their way back. Just like science, medicine, education, and the military, US corporations have gone woke, eagerly carrying the torch for progressive globalists determined to turn the world into a dystopian, bug-infested nightmare for the average person. Meanwhile, the global elites will continue to jet around on private planes, savor the finest cuts of red meat, and sip champagne through plastic straws. Clearly, the rules only apply to us lowly commoners.One such turncoat corporation is Tyson Foods—a company many of us...

As leftists look to cancel Christopher Columbus and today’s annual holiday commemorating him — that is, the man who discovered this land that is the United States of America — they’re also looking to replace the great explorer with a day of their own. That new day for these cultural revolutionaries, celebrated all the way up to the level of their president, one Joseph Robinette Biden, is something called Indigenous Peoples’ Day.How ironic this is.Among the sins that leftists try to peg on Columbus is slavery. And yet, many of their indigenous peoples, including the so-called “civilized” among them, in...

Liberal comedian Bill Maher got into a tense exchange with musician John Mellencamp on Monday after the "Pink Houses" singer-songwriter claimed only 1% or 2% of Black people living in America today have better lives than slaves. During an appearance on Maher's "Club Random Podcast," Mellencamp revealed he wrote a song called "From the Cotton Field to the Playing Fields" that he never recorded because he believed it was "wrong." The song’s message was an attempt to show how White people love to have Black entertainers and often exploit them.

On this date in 1711, a Janissary captain in Ottoman Egypt was beheaded in Cairo as the “Great Insurrection” gave way to the last gasp of Mamluk power in Egypt. Mamluks (or Mameluks) — enslaved soldiers who had evolved into a military caste — had ruled Egypt from 1250 until absorbed by the Ottoman Empire in 1517. Now nominally under the power of the sultan, Mamluks remained as beys (district governors) and were drawn into a labyrinthine political environment that boiled down to a contest for rent collection from the lucrative country. The relative power in Egypt of the Ottoman...

The City of San Francisco, the bayside burg that gave us Nancy Pelosi and sidewalk toilets, is now proposing the ultimate in nonsense – a few million bucks of reparations for everyone whose grandparents came from the right continent at the right time. Actually, it’s more generous than that, because you may also be eligible if you were a victim of the Drug War – that is, if you were a scumbag drug dealer justly imprisoned for slinging poison before the narcotics were effectively legalized by the same leftists whose hometown proposes this giveaway. Well, if a bunch of people...

Not in my HUGE back yard! 156-unit low-income housing project sparks outrage in billionaire's playground Nantucket - where Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and former Secretary of State John Kerry spend their summers Plans to build an affordable housing project on Nantucket, Surfside Crossing, were first submitted in April 2018, and have been hotly contested ever since Developers want to create 156 homes on a 13.5-acre site, with 70 percent designated for people who live on the island year-round They said 15 of the homes and 24 of the condos would be sold for between $261,000 and $373,000, but locals say...

A task force was set up in California to make proposals for slavery reparations Descendants of slaves in California could receive $223,200 each, it speculated That would total $569billion - more than the entire state expenditure in 2021 Nearly 6.5% of California residents - 2.5M - identify as Black or African American A focus of the task force has involved reimbursing for 'housing discrimination' The task force was formed due to a bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 ~ A reparations committee in California has suggested that descendants of slaves in the state could be compensated $223,200 each...

I don’t mean to bash Mr. Yerby, who opined that “North American slavery [was] indisputably the most abysmally cruel system of bondage in the whole of human history,” but his opinion is objectively disputable. See what you think. The following is from 2010. I was reminded of it when a guest in this post pointed out that Americans were not the first to export black Africans as slaves. I share it every now and then, usually when someone assumes that I know nothing about the 1400-year-long sacking of my father's home continent. But, with past slaving and slave-holding being all...

7,976 views Jun 23, 2020 The second part of a compilation of audio recorded interviews with former slaves which were mostly taken in the 1930s and 1940s. 0:00 Video Beginning 00:06 Aunt Harriett Smith, Texas (1941) (Good Audio Quality) 34:23 Celia Black, Texas (1974) (Good Audio Quality - Watch Out for Squeaky Door Near the Beginning) 55:37 Laura Smalley, Texas (1941) (Good Audio Quality) 1:45:05 Uncle Billy McCrea, Texas (1940) - (Good Audio Quality) 2:06:04 Annie Williams, Virginia (circa 1937) (Poor Audio Quality) 2:10:19 Aunt Phoebe Boyd, Virginia (1935) (Medium Audio Quality) 2:49:31 Mrs. Williams, Virginia (circa 1937) (Medium Audio...

A UAE-led heritage project is shedding new light on the origins of Zanzibar’s Stone Town.Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an original settlement at the Unesco World Heritage site in Tanzania that dates back to the 11th century.It proves the town — previously thought to be an 18th century Omani Arab town — was actually established much earlier by local Swahili people, archaeologists believe.During a major dig this summer, they unearthed traces of homes, cooking pits and significant amounts of pottery from this era.They were then able to pinpoint the settlement’s transition to stone buildings by the 14th century...Stone Town became...

North Korea has offered to send 100,000 soldiers to bolster Russia’s invasion attempt in Ukraine, Russian state TV has claimed. The pariah state’s offer of military assistance could not be immediately verified, but it was seized upon by Russian defense pundit Igor Korotchenko There are reports that 100,000 North Korean volunteers are prepared to come and take part in the conflict,” Korotchenko said on Russian Channel One. Korotchenko was notably interested in what he called the North Korean’s “wealth of experience with counter-battery warfare” — a telling remark given reports of Ukraine’s long-range artillery success since acquiring US-made HIMARS rocket...

Nike has decided to fully exit Russia three months after suspending operations in the country due to its invasion of Ukraine, the sportswear giant announced Thursday. The company has no announced plans to exit China due to that country’s gross human rights abuses and organized use of slave labor in making Nike products. Nike initially suspended operations in Russia on March 3, a week after Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine in an attempt to take over the neighboring nation. However, Nike seems to have been motivated to leave the country entirely by the prospect of new criminal...

Democrats haven’t been this upset since we freed the slaves

Defiant members of the media and other liberals have responded to the recent lifting of the travel mask mandate by taking selfies of themselves wearing masks on their recent travels and insisting to social media users that they feel safer from COVID-19 this way. After U.S. District Court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s travel mask mandate on Monday, there was some fear online from liberal media figures who didn’t feel safe enough going bare-faced on an airplane or Uber ride. MSNBC host Tiffany Cross posted a photo of herself on a flight wearing her black mask. Her...

My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings. "He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him," my father told me. Nwaubani Ogogo's slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria. People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and...

A compromised political elite is responding to a virus likely juiced up in a Chinese bioweapons lab by adopting scientifically unprecedented, Communist-style social controls. When Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called last year for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, China retaliated with tariffs. Domestically, a cohort of Beijing-friendly former ambassadors, foreign and defense ministers, and state premiers dutifully reminded the public that China’s status as Australia’s biggest trading partner makes antagonizing the regime a risky business. Beijing sycophants have recycled versions of this talking point for years, rationalizing China’s contempt for Western universal values, territorial aggrandizement, repression of...

Mihrigul Tursun, a survivor of China’s concentration camp system, urged the National Basketball Association (NBA) in remarks to Breitbart News on Friday to condemn China’s human rights abuses. Tursun also warned star player LeBron James, one of China’s biggest business partners in the league, to distance himself from the regime “because money cannot do everything.” Tursun was participating in a march Friday organized by the East Turkistan Government in Exile in Washington, DC, the purpose of which was to demand that the administration of President Joe Biden act to protect the Uyghur people from the ongoing genocide they are enduring...