Free Republic

America fascinated me as America fascinates every newcomer. Nineteen years old and fleeing the study of medicine at my Nigerian university, I longed to be a writer, to live a life of the mind. From my first days, I watched and read and learned. I was struck by the excess and the newness of America, by its flagrant contradictions, but mostly by how identity as an idea shaped so much of American life....... Shortly after the Black American George Floyd was murdered by a White police officer, a woman told me she had just read Americanah. “You are a prophet;...

A New York University professor claimed last week homeschooled students can easily become victims of indoctrination.During an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) book club meeting, Ruth Ben-Ghiat argued the recent opposition against public schooling stems originates with authoritarians who want to indoctrinate their children via homeschooling.One of the reasons that they all go after education and one of the reasons that schools are being targeted ... A big thing is to destroy liberal, democratic models of secular education – get everybody out of the system, put them in homeschools so they can be indoctrinated,” Ben-Ghiat told AFT President Randi Weingarten,...

World-renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff is no longer a professor at Harvard Medical School after refusing the COVID vaccine because he had infection-acquired immunity. Refusing the vaccine is a decision that lost him his appointment at a Harvard-affiliated hospital at the time several years ago — and this month led to his termination from the Ivy League school. “Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls. Hospital-based faculty, such as Dr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to...

Davidson College alumni are calling for change after student athletes recently were required to watch the video “I’m Not Racist … Am I?” which labels all white people as racists. The Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, an alumni-run free speech organization, exposed and denounced the video after learning the North Carolina institution forced student athletes to watch it this semester. Notably, “in one clip of the film that we uncovered, is the unequivocal repetition that all white people are racist, and people of color cannot be racist,” the organization told The College Fix in a statement via email...

Last year when I attempted to pick my daughter up from school, the volunteers in the carpool line tried to put a fourth grader in my car, not the four-year-old I was attempting to retrieve. Both of us were vehemently shaking our heads, both of us looked totally confused, but the man with the radio would not be deterred. There are only a handful of white kids at my daughter's school and only two of them are car riders. One of them gets picked up by her mom, and the other, by her dad. This white girl went with the...

Each generation confronts the question of education anew. The problems that faced one generation are distinct from those that face the next. Today’s families feel unprecedented anxiety about the state of education. The public school, the primary mechanism for education and values transmission, has lost their confidence, as many educators have abandoned traditional pedagogy in favor of indoctrination. Many families have scrambled for alternatives, switching districts, enrolling in private schools, or starting home schooling programs. These families have absorbed a critical lesson: education cannot be neutral; it must be oriented to a set of principles. The only question is which...

"America was founded on racism" and "parents need to stay out of their kids' education and shouldn't have a say in what they learn," are the kinds of things you'd expect to read on the pages of Pravda, back during the bad old days of the Cold War when the Communists were running Russia. I have some news for you. Pravda is now part of the U.S. military's training manuals and the Communists are running Washington. This exposé is courtesy of the invaluable Chaya Raichik, aka Libs of TikTok. SCOOP: Mandatory training for military members teaches that America was founded...

In an effort to empower parents to hold woke educators accountable, the Indiana attorney general has launched new portal for reporting socialist indoctrination in classrooms. The Eyes on Education portal will “empower parents” to report and view inappropriate content being fed to their children in school. Indiana AG Todd Rokita announced the portal in a Feb. 6 press release. He included examples of woke, age-inappropriate nonsense already entered in the portal, including a classroom Pride flag with a Black Lives Matter symbol and a Martinsville High School presentation urging children to “become emotionally independent of parents.” Rokita promised to follow...

"Generation Indoctrination," a groundbreaking new podcast, recently delved into the harrowing experiences of individuals who have undergone body-deforming trans procedures, only to regret their decisions and pursue detransitioning. The fifth episode of season 3, hosted by The Christian Post's Brandon Showalter and titled "In Their Own Words: Detransitioners, Advocates Decry Deceptions Of 'Gender-Affirming Care," shed light on the profoundly personal and societal challenges faced by detransitioners.Forrest Smith, a young man from Oregon, shared how, at the age of 20, he was prescribed cross-sex hormones and, over the next five years, underwent a series of irreversible body-mutilating surgeries, including breast implants...

I imagine life can often feel pretty difficult for today’s high school students. On top of dealing with classic teenage drama like homework, hormones, pimples, parents, driving, dating, university selection, and more, students these days have to contend with a host of new challenges. They suffered long periods of brutal Covid lockdowns. Active shooter drills are a normal part of student life. And, of course, there’s the nonstop anxiety and peer pressure of social media. Plus, on top of everything else, students today have also been force-fed some pretty bizarre ideas. Classical literature, advanced mathematics, and hard sciences have taken...

The Attorney General of Indiana has launched an interesting initiative to prevent the progressive indoctrination of children in public schools.In an interview with The Daily Signal, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced the launch of an online portal in which parents can monitor content of potential concern. “This is a tool to empower parents in their dealings with their own school system so they can better raise their kids, which is their job and not the schools,” Rokita told the Signal. Rokita said that he felt the need to take action after parents sent him lesson plans showing how their...

Press Release 01.24.24 Media Contact 202-226-8467 Washington, D.C. – The Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability and Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations will convene a joint hearing entitled, “UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures” on Tuesday, January 30 at 2:00pm ET. What: Hearing – “UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures” Date: Tuesday, January 30, 2024 Time: 2:00pm ET Location: HVC-210 Witnesses: Richard Goldberg Senior Advisor Foundation for Defense of Democracies Marcus Sheff Chief Executive Officer IMPACT-se Hillel Neuer Executive Director UN Watch Mara Rudman Schlesinger Professor University of Virginia Miller Center PDF

A mandatory “re-orientation” for first-year University of Wisconsin Law School students last week included a survey prompting participants to share racial slurs and instruction that colorblindness is bad and that racial minorities cannot be racist, according to a source who attended Friday’s session. Like other euphemistically-titled “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programming, the presentation on Friday preached the usual dogmas of Marxist-steeped critical race theory and “anti-racism” that have infiltrated U.S. college campuses, the source said. These doctrines teach that the United States — particularly its legal system — is systemically racist, that “whiteness” must be “dismantled,” and that the...

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education. The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards. Four years later, the money is almost gone and students haven’t made up that lost academic ground, equaling more that a year of learning for disadvantaged kids. Driven by fears of a spike in...

It’s not enough to go along with the crazy. It’s not enough to tolerate it. You must believe it. If I believe myself to be a fork, must society be made to agree? Should I be encouraged to hang out near salad bars with the expectation that diners will trust me with their food? If I continue to get passed over for other silverware, should I be allowed to sue for discrimination? Or worse, if someone has the nerve to call me a spoon, will the government step in to punish that “bigot” for mis-utensiling me? Of course not. Then...

California’s higher-education system, beset by alarming acts of hate, intimidation, and bigotry on its campuses (e.g., anti-Israel and anti-Jewish protests), has launched a series of initiatives. Among them is an educational program that will present a “viewpoint-neutral history of the Middle East.” Many UC faculty oppose the plan and accuse UC president Michael Drake of an assault on their academic freedom. This raises important questions of principle: Is “viewpoint-neutral” history possible? Is it desirable? Opponents of the hegemonic, imperial American Left’s control of the education space have an almost instinctive recourse to slogans. As the Left increasingly uses the education...

17 states call on the Supreme Court to overturn ruling in favor of parental rights A coalition of 17 state attorneys general are asking the Supreme Court to recognize parental rights in a case involving a Maryland school district’s transgender policies. West Virginia is leading the coalition challenging a case involving parents fighting an appeals court ruling that found they did not have the right to sue Montgomery County Public Schools over a policy that allows teachers and administrators to transition children without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Plaintiffs in the case dubbed the guideline in question the "Parental Preclusion...

Hamas groomed an army of angry, insecure, wife-beating psychopaths and gave them permission to rape, mutilate and kill Israeli men, women, and children. The terror organization drugged these psychopaths, told them to videotape their atrocities, and offered them a $10,000 reward for taking hostages. Hamas savages were high on captagon, Israeli blood, and visions of martyrdom. They believed that they were heroes righting wrongs and injustices by killing and violating the “oppressors” who stole and occupy their land. The October 7th attack on Israel can be partly attributed to the red-green alliance of radical leftists and Islamists who foster a...

The younger generations seem increasingly crazed. A worrying proportion of the young sympathises with those who launch terror attacks against Israel, supports the immediate elimination of fossil fuels or demands the wiping out of gender distinctions. All these positions are troubling in themselves, but they also reflect a deeper malady – a mostly apolitical breakdown of social norms, personal interaction, literacy and logical thinking. No single issue has catalysed Gen Z, as the Vietnam War did for the Baby Boomer generation. Boomers were angry but did not generally despair about their futures, which turned out reasonably well, buoyed by the...

A father is suing Colarado’s largest school district after he alleges that a school refused to let his children display “straight flags”. Nathan Feldman alleges that his two children have been denied their First Amendment rights at the K-8 Slavens School in Denver. He says that a “straight flag” would represent his children’s beliefs and should be allowed to be hung and displayed on campus the same way LGBTQ+ flags are. Feldman’s lawyer, Michael Yoder, has blamed equality, diversion and inclusion policies in Denver for the “overt sexualisation of content in elementary schools nationwide”. He said that books focused on...