Free Republic

The New Yorker interview with San Francisco's school board president reveals how political ideology has replaced knowledge among especially younger American leftists.Last week, The New Yorker ran an interview with San Francisco school board President Gabriela López, a 30-year-old former teacher leading the district’s charge to bury American history. It’s eye-opening, to say the least.López was elected on a campaign to cancel history. Under her leadership, the nation’s seventh-largest school district has spent its time not teaching its 57,000 students — who have been “learning” online for nearly a full year — but plotting to take the names of historic...

I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy. Having weathered more than one social-­media s- -t storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger ­McCarthyite blacklisting. But that isn’t the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review...

In an interview with Slate staff writer Isaac Chotiner, New York Times campaign reporter and Chasing Hillary author Amy Chozick discussed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat — and complained how the media did not do enough to promote her agenda. Chotiner needled Chozick about a passage in her book that highlighted the public thirst for knowledge of Clinton’s email scandal, saying, “There was an insatiable appetite for email-related stories. I can’t explain it exactly except to compare it to a fever that spread through every newsroom and made us all salivate over the tiniest morsels.” Chotiner asked, “What role do you...

Slate magazine’s obituary for longtime Fox News political commentator Alan Colmes is catching considerable backlash on social media. “Alan Colmes, Buffoon and Patsy, Was Fox News’ Original Liberal Weakling,” wrote Slate’s Isaac Chotiner, a senior staff writer and former editor of The New Republic. Colmes died this week at the age of 66 due to lymphoma. “Colmes was the most absurd, useless, and mocked television personality in America for many years, precisely because he was nice. In the context of Fox News, being a nice guy — and a ‘liberal’ nice guy at that — meant being a buffoon, and...

The results of India's election, which are rapidly appearing today, seem to show a huge win for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A victory had been expected, but this looks like a massive landslide. The next prime minister is almost certain to be Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, a state in western India. He is known for his economic agenda, which is seen to be relatively business-friendly (expect stocks to react very positively to the news), and his controversial brand of Hinduism. Modi's ideology is certainly going to be important over the next several years, but his...

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....