Free Republic

It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too. So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze. Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one...

Boston police confirmed to Boston 25 News officers took a suspect into custody for allegedly breaking the arms off a statue of Jesus Christ on a crucifix outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross Tuesday night. A bystander had a camera handy to record the vandalism. Video shows a figure dressed in green climbing the statue and attempting to pry the body off the cross by swinging from the hanging torso. The Archdiocese and Cathedral are now reportedly looking to replace the statue. The Cathedral of the Holy Cross did not immediately respond to a request or comment from The...

Last week, an 8-foot-tall, golden statue was unveiled atop a New York state courthouse in New York City. It stands alongside several other, older statues of classical design.According to the artist, Shahzia Sikander, the statue is meant to be a representation of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her support of abortion rights.This is a statue of a demon. Not only that, it’s OBVIOUSLY a demon, horns and all. It’s like something terrifying from an archeological dig of a civilization that practiced human sacrifice. It is designed to unsettle & spread ugliness. It’s on top of...

The National Cathedral in Washington DC has decided that they too want to join in on the re-writing and recasting of history in response to the 2020 George Floyd Summer of Love. The stained glass windows in the National Cathedral show different scenes from throughout American history, which I'll admit is bizarre for a "church" but pretty normal for a national monument in DC. Four of the stained glass windows previously featured depictions of two Southern Civil War generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson: A tribute to the South and a symbol of national healing and forgiveness after the...

Residents of Palm Springs, California, are a bit butt-hurt over a proposed AIDS memorial sculpture looks suspiciously like a human anus. The design, which is meant to honor individuals who have lost their lives to HIV and AIDS, is facing backlash for its “inappropriate connotations,” according to KESQ. Palm Springs residents are not fully convinced that this should be the artistic representation of these deadly diseases, according to the outlet. Mock-ups of how the Downtown Park installation might look show a nine-foot-tall wheel of limestone with striations converging on a hole in the center. The donut-shaped sculpture by Phillip K....

Former Hong Kong leader Tung Chee-hwa has accused the United States and Taiwan of orchestrating the “well-organised” recent protests against the Hong Kong government. Tung, vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, also warned on Wednesday that there could be no compromise with those who challenge Beijing’s sovereignty and damage the city’s stability. He said he remained firmly behind the Hong Kong police and Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor. He called on Lam’s government to listen to public opinion and solve long-standing problems such as housing, health care, education and pensions. “Some young people have vented their anxiety...

Environmental protest groups have been targeting art history's greatest treasures to raise awareness about climate change. Climate activists turned up the heat this year, decrying the global environmental crisis by targeting internationally renowned art museums’ greatest treasures—and leading many onlookers to wonder how their actions actually connect with the greater good. Just last week, protesters from Just Stop Oil glued themselves to Vermeer’s iconic Girl With a Pearl Earring in the latest of their ongoing art demonstrations, previously focused on the U.K. The same group blasted a Rolex store in London with orange paint less than 24 hours later. In...

Denver, Colo., May 26, 2023 / 13:15 pm Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco said Thursday that prosecutors’ decision to reduce the charge against activists who destroyed a parish’s statue of a saint from felony to misdemeanor sends the signal that attacks against the Catholic Church can continue with impunity. “It is clear to me that this course of action would not have been taken with anyone else. In fact, if the same kind of offense had been committed against another religious congregation or group, it would almost certainly have been prosecuted as a hate crime,” Cordileone said. Cordileone’s statement...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A man who drove the car that helped pull down the statue of a Civil War hero and abolitionist outside of the Wisconsin state Capitol during a night of protests in 2020 has been sentenced to six months in jail. The statue of Hans Christian Heg was toppled and beheaded during a protest in downtown Madison in June 2020 against police brutality. Protests began a month earlier over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and flared up again that June after Madison police arrested a Black activist. Kelsey D. Nelson, 33, was sentenced for...

Why is a Senate office building named for a racist? While the secular Taliban of the Left has been busily destroying statues like they’re ISIS in Palmyra, scrubbing American history and reducing Founders, such as Declaration of Independence authors, to racist caricatures, they’ve missed one big, glaring target: the Russell Senate Office building. But there’s big reason why groups such as antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other professional protesters probably don’t want to touch the issue. The building, previously known as the Old Senate Office Building, was renamed for Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell, a Democrat, in 1972. Senator Russell, a...

The Moscow-installed authorities of the port city of Mariupol, which fell to Russian forces after a devastating siege earlier in the year, took down a monument to Ukrainian victims of Stalin's famine on Wednesday. Kyiv has been calling the 1930s man-made hunger under Josef Stalin a "genocide," while Moscow has been downplaying it as an episode of famine all over the Soviet Union. The state-run RIA Novosti news agency published a video of a truck uprooting the monument in Mariupol. "We are not taking out a memorial, we are getting rid of a symbol of the political disinformation of the...

The female protestor who sparked fury today when she glued herself to priceless artwork in the National Gallery has been accused of being a jet-setting sailor who has racked up tens of thousands of air miles. Student Hannah Hunt, 23, is the co-founder of Just Stop Oil whose social media pages are adorned with exotic holiday pictures from locations including Bali, Australia and the Canary Islands. The aspiring psychologist has contributed to chaos across the country, after she was pictured glueing herself to roads, camping in the rafters of a major oil depot in Essex and today stuck pictures over...

An angry tourist smashed two ancient sculptures at the Vatican after being denied a chance to meet with the pope. It's just the latest in a series of instances of visitors behaving badly in Rome. Read on to find out what happened, what authorities said about the man, and how long it will take for the ancient works to be repaired. The incident happened around lunchtime in the Museo Chiaramonti, which is part of the Vatican Museums. It holds about 1,000 works of ancient statuary and Roman portraits. The man demanded to see the pope, the newspaper Il Messaggero reported....

After years of Russiagate conspiracy theories about how the Russians had somehow rigged the 2016 presidential election using Facebook ads, the Senate Intelligence report awkwardly revealed that the Russian operation had focused most of its attention on black nationalists. The Senate report revealed that "most of the videos" put out by the Russian IRA troll factory on YouTube "pertained to police brutality and the activist efforts of the Black Lives Matter organization" and found that "no single group of Americans was targeted... more than African-Americans" around "race and related issues". But that was an understatement. The Russians had created their...

...Somehow, despite the accusations and criticisms from some of the most credible people in the race grievance industry, King has continued to raise money. It appears he’s used that money to make some very important purchases in the fight against racial injustice. Among those purchases is a $40,000 dog, a Mastiff for his family they named Marz. King’s PAC, Grassroots Law, has handed over the sum in a pair of payments to Potrero Performance Dogs in California since December, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The PAC paid Protero $10,000 in December, followed by a $30,650 payment in February. Days after...

Cancel culture has now reached President Abraham Lincoln, the man who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation declaring enslaved people “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Democrat Rep. Jamie Becker-Finn (DFL-Roseville) complained about Lincoln’s presence on the House floor this week during a debate on an education bill. “We are asked to serve, we serve in this body, we have to look at President Lincoln every day we are in this space.”

Gizmodo reported on the leaks. A hostile offshoot of the defunct neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, Patriot Front formed in late August 2017 less than three weeks after the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. (James Alex Fields Jr., who was convicted in December 2018 of killing 32-year-old anti-racist protester Heather Heyer at the rally, was seen there holding a shield emblazoned with the VA logo. VA later denied he was a member.) The split from VA followed months of infighting between Thomas Rousseau, the Front’s founder, and VA leader Dillon Irizarry, who was seen accusing Rousseau in...

When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.

Police said that the young, Forest Hills resident is the woman who was caught on camera smashing a pair of church statues to pieces in July.FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — A 23-year-old Forest Hills resident was hit with hate crime charges on Friday, after police identified her as the person who smashed a pair of church statues in July, according to the NYPD. Jacqueline Nikiena was arrested on Friday, Sept. 10 on charges of criminal mischief as a hate crime and aggravated harassment, police said. Her arrest comes nearly two months after she was caught on camera smashing a pair of...

The Taliban have started replacing murals on Kabul’s streets with paintings of their flags and Islamic slogans as the new rulers continued to reimpose their austere vision on Afghanistan.The murals addressed everything from the killing of George Floyd in the US and the drowning of Afghan refugees in Iran, to the signing of the US-Taliban agreement towards peace and murder of a Japanese aid worker.