Free Republic

We conservatives possess a terrible habit that must be shed if we wish to save this country: We constantly obsess over leftist behavior. We ask questions like: Why do liberals teach students to hate America? Why do they force children to wear masks? Why does Facebook and Twitter censor free speech? Who cares? Do liberals obsess over our psyche? No, they don’t. They go about their business taking over every facet of American culture and crushing dissent while we ask: Why are they doing that? Practically speaking, it’s utterly irrelevant why the left does what it does. The only thing...

Politicians and bureaucrats have decided that they can wave a magic “COVID” wand and make constitutional rights disappear. College students have been among those hit hardest by the edicts. Many students have been forced to choose between medical choice and privacy and their continued education. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) required students to take a COVID test every two weeks and have their medical results loaded to a third-party app on their smart phones. Many parents and students took exception with the requirements, penalties, and enforcement mechanisms. Students who refused the mandatory testing and app were denied access to classes,...

Nothing is stranger than the contemporary American university. Not long ago, Americans used to idolize their universities. Indeed, in science, math, engineering, medicine and business, many of these meritocratic departments and schools remain among the top-ranked in the world. Top-notch higher education explains much of the current scientific, technological and commercial excellence of the United States. After World War II -- won in part due to superior American scientific research, production and logistics -- a college degree became a prerequisite for a successful career. The GI Bill enabled some 8 million returning vets to go to college. Most graduated to...

I’ve never set foot on my elite women’s college campus, but that didn’t save me from my enraged peers when I announced, “If you support Trump, you are my friend. If you support Biden, you are my friend. If you feel the need to degrade those who feel differently from you...maybe we aren’t friends.” That’s all I said on my Instagram story, yet execrable messages began trickling into my direct messages from my peers. I was told that I was a part of the problem, and that nobody wanted to be friends with me. I was accused of believing that...

You present to a physician with severe abdominal pain. He examines you and concludes that your ingrown toenails are the cause of your abdominal distress. He prescribes that you soak your feet in warm water but that does not bring relief to your abdominal pain. Then he suggests that you apply antibiotics to your feet. Still no relief. Then the physician suggests that you wear sandals instead of shoes. Still no relief. The point of this story is that your toenails can be treated until the cows come home, but if there is improper diagnosis, then you are still going...

Yale University has fancy dining halls. They pay no property tax. Local restaurants struggle to compete, but their tax burden makes that hard. "We basically pay one-third of our rent in taxes!" complains Matt West, manager of Koon Thai Restaurant. "Yale is a money-making machine." It is. Many colleges are. Yale has a $31 billion endowment. Harvard's is $40 billion. My alma mater, Princeton, has $26 billion. Yet, these schools also get government handouts and tax breaks. How government rips-off taxpayers and students by subsidizing colleges is the subject of my video this week. Yale owns about a quarter of...

Editor's Note: The following piece contains graphic language.The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it. In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson's tweeting that he supports "citizen soldiers" in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science declared that "they...

The violence, looting and mayhem that this nation has seen over the last several months has much of its roots in academia, where leftist faculty teach immature young people all manner of nonsense that contradicts commonsense and the principles of liberty. Chief among their lessons is a need to attack free speech in the form of prohibitions against so-called hate speech and microaggressions. Here are examples of microaggressions: "You are a credit to your race." "Wow! How did you become so good in math?" "There is only one race, the human race." "I'm not racist. I have several black friends."...

For decades, America and its institutions of higher education have ignored the critical threat we face from Communist China. The radical left has made its way into our universities and focused on combatting perceived injustices – renaming buildings, liberalizing curriculum, and promoting safe spaces over open, honest debate – while staying silent on their connections to Communist China, a country committing genocide against its Muslim population and actively oppressing the people of Hong Kong. Now that a new semester is beginning and international students are returning to American universities, woke administrators and the universities they run will face a serious problem...

Institutional racism and systemic racism are terms bandied about these days without much clarity. Being 84 years of age, I have seen and lived through what might be called institutional racism or systemic racism. Both operate under the assumption that one race is superior to another. It involves the practice of treating a person or group of people differently based on their race. Negroes, as we proudly called ourselves back then, were denied entry to hotels, restaurants and other establishments all over the nation, including the north. Certain jobs were entirely off-limits to Negroes. What school a child attended was...

It’s an interesting electoral strategy – call every white person a racist and demand they vote for you as a way to absolve themselves of their guilt. That’s what Democrats are doing in 2020. I guess it’s better than running on their record and policy ideas. There used to be a word for dividing everyone by race and demanding different treatment based on that division, but I can’t quite recall it at the moment. Oh, yes, it’s racist. But words no longer mean what they used to, they mean whatever leftists demand they mean, which is turning the whole country...

Dulles, Virginia – Scott Zangas is in his junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, studying cyber security, but like most college students in America, he is doing so from home this semester. Scott’s father used to tell him to “hang on to your dreams.” It’s one of the few memories Scott has of his dad, Robert, a Marine who lost his life in Iraq 16 years ago. And the dream Robert had for his children, before he gave his life for our country, was that they would earn a college education that would help them realize their aspirations. This...

John Jacob Astor, the richest man on board the Titanic, famously gave up a seat in the final lifeboat when he saw two young children still on the ship's deck. "Women and children first" was the order from the ship's captain, and the final numbers show just how much the men on board -- even the rich and powerful -- adhered to that call. Women on the Titanic had a 75% survival rate, compared with just 17% for men. Besides some crazed radical feminists, most of us view the chivalry displayed on that sinking ship with a sense of awe...

America's colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from COVID-19 offers opportunities for a bit of remediation. Let's first examine what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a recent study, "Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship." The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital magazine. By the way, Areo is short for Areopagitica, a speech delivered by John Milton in defense of free speech. Authors Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian say that something has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields within...

Last week, I received a phone call from a professor who teaches in another department here at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington (UNCW), where I have taught for the past 27 years. He was reporting a case of possible discrimination, which resulted in a professor being denied tenure thus losing his livelihood very soon. When I received the call, I immediately began asking questions to assess the validity of his concern. After just a few questions, I came across some information that will shock the conscience of any clear thinking, rational individual. By way of background information, professors...

Colleges have been around for centuries. College students have also been around for centuries. Yet, college administrators assume that today's students have needs that were unknown to their predecessors. Those needs include diversity and equity personnel, with massive budgets to accommodate. According to Minding the Campus, Penn State University's Office of Vice Provost for Educational Equity employs 66 staff members. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of 93 full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts and coordinators. Amherst College, with a student body of 1,800 students employs...

The Department of Justice sided with college students reprimanded for promoting free speech by slamming Jones County Junior College’s “Orwellian,” “draconian,” and “unconstitutional” treatment of them in a Statement of Interest filed on Monday. The DOJ made explicitly clear that public colleges cannot “trample” on their students’ First Amendment rights. In a news release from the DOJ announcing the Statement of Interest filing, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division clearly stated, “Repressive speech codes are the indecent hallmark of despotic, totalitarian regimes. They have absolutely no place in our country, and the First Amendment outlaws all...

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve witnessed a cultural transformation wherein people describe themselves in terms of how they “identify.” It’s common to hear men say they “identify as a woman” or in some extreme cases to hear a Caucasian person identify as black. However, no amount of identifying as a woman will make a man have a period. No amount of identifying as a woman will allow a man to grow or birth a child. Identifying as a woman makes a man a woman as much as my identifying as a 2-year-old makes me a toddler. Our identity and...

No matter what side you take on Trump Impeachment Theater, or just about any other topic for that matter -- from the politics of chicken sandwiches to climate change -- if you dare challenge the views of the reigning political priests, chances are you'll be called stupid and hateful. And someone will want to shut you up. The traditional American response to such silencing has always been: "This is a free country, isn't it?" But is it now? Or are we building a new "Animal Farm," where we are told what to think and how to think it? These are...

This year's education scandal saw parents shelling out megabucks to gain college admittance for their children. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 50 people with participating in a scheme to get their children into colleges by cheating on entrance exams or bribing athletic coaches. They paid William Singer, a college-prep professional, more than $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators and to change test scores on college admittance exams such as the SAT and ACT. As disgusting as this grossly dishonest behavior is, it is only the tiny tip of fraud in higher education. According to the Bureau of...