Free Republic

The drive to make Washington, D.C., a state has been a favorite of some Democrats for years. Why wouldn't it be? If enacted, a new state, formed from deepest-blue D.C., would create two new Democratic senators and one new Democratic member of the House. For a Democrat, what's not to like? But while there have been lots of D.C. statehood bills over the years, the issue has been voted on only once before. In 1993, it failed badly in the House, losing 277 to 153. Back then, moderate Democrats put their judgment before partisan interest, splitting on whether statehood was...

Protesters say America’s criminal justice system is unfair. It is. Courts are so jammed that innocent people plead guilty to avoid waiting years for a trial. Lawyers help rich people get special treatment. A jail stay is just as likely to teach you crime as it is to help you get a new start. Overcrowded prisons cost a fortune and increase suffering for both prisoners and guards. There’s one simple solution to most of these problems: End the war on drugs. Our government has spent trillions of dollars trying to stop drug use. It hasn’t worked. More people now use...

Today, the nostrum goes, it is not enough for Americans to be not racist. They must be "anti-racist." This woke terminology has infused our lexicon. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), recently declared from the well of the Senate: "Being race-conscious is not enough. It never was. We must be anti-racists." What, pray tell, is the difference between being against racism and being anti-racist? Ibram X. Kendi, author of "How to Be An Antiracist," provides an answer: Racism is no longer to be defined as the belief that someone is inferior based on race. Instead, racism is to be defined as the...

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Monday that a state can’t even require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital. And the logic of the concurring opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts, who provided the fifth vote, suggests not even de minimis regulation of abortion will survive his Court’s scrutiny. Here’s the stunner: Four years ago a different Court majority overturned a similar Texas statute, with then Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the four liberals. Chief Justice Roberts dissented in that case. Yet on Monday the Chief joined the liberals, citing his duty to follow precedent. As the dissenters point...

According to recent polls, 65% of all Americans now support Black Lives Matter (BLM). Why do so many Americans support an “organization” that is avowedly dedicated to the proposition that America is evil and must be fundamentally transformed? Because the Republican establishment has made remarkably little effort to expose BLM as the revolutionary and totalitarian movement that it is. Leading Republicans do not seem to understand that George Floyd’s death was the excuse for the current crisis, not the cause of it. The chaos in our streets—led by BLM, supported by Democrats, and propelled by higher education—is for all intents...

The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in Monday with another example of its divided wisdom on abortion, refusing by a single vote to uphold a Louisiana law seen as making access to abortion unconstitutionally difficult. Unconstitutionally difficult? What about less likely to result in another medical blockade of a developing life on the outskirts of developed life? The court split 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the progressives in their preference for leveling barriers to "reproductive choice." Louisiana had enacted a requirement in 2014 that abortion doctors obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The court's 1-vote majority said this wouldn't...

<p>Now that statues of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant and Roosevelt have been desecrated, vandalized, toppled and smashed, it appears Woodrow Wilson's time has come.</p> <p>The cultural revolution has come to the Ivy League.</p> <p>Though Wilson attended Princeton as an undergraduate, taught there and served from 1902 to 1910 as president, his name is to be removed from Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.</p>

Dr. Thomas Sowell has been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century. On June 30, he will have completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight some important features of that life. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As part of the great black migration northward during the 1930s and '40s, he and his family moved to Harlem, New York. Sowell attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, but dropped out. In 1951, he was drafted into the military and assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps, where he became a...

To 'pay' for their own sins, the zealots of the Woke Left's new religion are on a mission to sacrifice the reputations and livelihoods of others.> Much has been made of the similarities the “woke” left’s political program resembles a new religion. Columbia University linguist John McWhorter made the point in his discussion with evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, James Lindsay describes how “wokeness” resembles a cult, and Hans Fiene wrote a satirical article in The Federalist describing the religious program in the “Cathedral of Blessed Wokery.”The woke Left’s program does seem to resemble a religion. This should not, however, be...

Despite their roots in reality, there is no doubt that these crises -- and the White House and Senate's attempts to tackle them -- would be reported differently if Hillary Clinton were president. It took more than five years, but the corporate media finally have the tools and strategy to successfully defeat President Donald Trump.The corporate media have these, mind you, despite the Democratic Party, whose foibles, stumbles, and misfires over those same five years have only complicated efforts, kicking off with a disastrous 2016 defeat and eventually culminating in a near-invisible and increasingly senile presidential candidate stumbling through a...

The silence of the Jews of America in the face of rising anti-Semitism is stunning. Over the Shavuot festival on May 30, members of Black Lives Matter (BLM) carried out a pogrom in Fairfax, the oldest Jewish community in Los Angeles, largely populated today by ultra-Orthodox Jews. They vandalized five synagogues and three Jewish schools. Most of the Jewish businesses on Fairfax Avenue were looted. As Daniel Greenfield reported at Frontpage, Allyson Rowen Taylor, a co-founder of StandWithUs, shared an account of the riots in which they chanted, “F**k the police and kill the Jews.” Aryeh Rosenfeld, whose store was...

Anyone who is troubled by the direction in which our country is moving is not likely to have their spirits lifted by Big Conservative media. And you know why. From talk radio to Fox News to your average conservative publication, almost without exception Big Conservative media is replete exclusively with accounts of leftist outrages and double standards. Conservative media celebrities with enormous resources in money, influence, and connections—i.e. with the ability to organize a genuine, meaningful resistance to Anti-America—expend most of their energy increasing the anxiety levels of their audiences while dramatically decreasing their morale. And when they do...

What is the solution for Democrat-led inner cities?

The outrage over statues and the 'white' depictions of Christ is meant to detract us from the real endgame: the 'canceling of Christianity itself. Towards the end of his reign, Tuthmosis III of Egypt ordered the destruction of all the public monuments to his aunt, Hatshepsut, the former leader of Egypt. It wasn’t the first instance of iconoclasm that the world had seen, but it has become one of the most memorable.Iconoclasm — the deliberate destruction of images — has existed almost as long as man has walked the earth. When it took place, there were usually deep and profound...

Radical activist mobs toppling statues across the country aren't just wrong about the contributions of Thomas Jefferson, they're wrong about the Founding. It is believed playwright George Bernard Shaw once said “Every man deserves to be judged in the context of his times.” While that sentiment often goes unheeded, in our current moment it seems to be under full-blown assault. Hardly an hour goes by without demands — even preemptive actions — to topple a monument or statue memorializing someone from the past.A Thomas Jefferson statue is the latest target for my alma mater, the University of Missouri. Since 1885,...

On Sunday a major positive milestone was reached for the first time, coronavirus deaths declined by 90% in this country from the high set on April 21st. That’s an incredibly positive story about our national battle with the virus. Yet, shockingly, it has received almost no media attention. (UPDATE: On Monday deaths were also down 90% from the April 21st peak, meaning there were two straight days this occurred, again, with almost zero media coverage). That’s indefensible because this is not complicated data to track down. You can see it yourself on this chart here, on April 21st 2,693 people...

On Jan. 28, 2020, the long-awaited Trump Administration’s “Deal of the Century,” officially titled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” was made public. The proposal aspires to reach the goal within its title after unfreezing and advancing negotiations between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The aim is to end a conflict as old as the State of Israel, and in some ways older. The plan entails Israel replacing the present military law with its system of civil law in the still non-sovereign territory that Israel captured from the...

Harken back four years ago and recall how the media confidently predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide electoral victory over Donald Trump. They held firm to this prediction even when the election was all but over. At 10:20 PM ET on November 8, 2016, election night, the New York Times confidently proclaimed, in the manner of Baghdad Bob, that Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent chance of winning the election. Long faces and tears graced cable news election night coverage shows by then and Hillary probably was on her second bottle of chardonnay, drowning her sorrows over a coronation that was...

I was reading a long think piece on the Brit UnHerd.com about Scott Alexander shuttering his “Slate Star Codex” blog because he was afraid of being outed by the New York Times. Then I had an idea. Here’s how to stop the Cancel Culture dead in its tracks. If any social media user accuses someone of being a “racist” or a “sexist” -- or any category in the left’s Codex of Preferred Progressive Pejoratives -- then that user’s social media account is canceled forthwith. Hey @Jack! Whaddya think of that, pal? And as a gesture of good faith I propose...

On Black Lives Matter's website, the organization's radical founders trace the creation of their movement "to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman." Had those founders paid any attention to the trial, they would have known that Zimmerman should never have been charged with murder, let alone tried. The fact that he was arrested can be attributed to a stunningly blatant fraud orchestrated by the attorney who has been prominently milking the racial divide he helped create, Benjamin Crump. As it happens, the one person capable of exposing this fraud is George Zimmerman. All Zimmerman needs is his own...