Free Republic

It's a cliche to say that democratic states can't function properly without an informed electorate. But it’s absolutely true. And this is why, heading into the 2016 election year, I'm nervous about the future. With Donald Trump leading the Republican presidential contenders, even many Republican die-hards are shaking in their boots.But Trump isn't the cause, just the symptom. The deeper cause is a strain of anti-intellectualism that runs through the roots of American culture. And while this strain is found on both sides of the political spectrum (see some liberals on vaccines and chemtrails), it's mostly concentrated among religious conservatives...

Michelle Obama would want a gun to protect her family if we lived in rural area, President reveals in firearms debate President reveals Michelle's comments that were made on a visit to rural Iowa Barack says the First Lady's words are 'absolutely right' as people occupy 'different realities' Obama also said he was not trying to take away other Americans' constitutional right to purchase firearms Speaking at the debate, Taya Kyle told the President that tightening gun laws 'would not work' Michelle Obama would want a 'shotgun or rifle' to make sure her family were protected if living in a...

Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that people in Washington don’t think it’s a good thing to be labeled as middle class. Speaking at the American Association of Port Authorities convention in Houston, Biden reminded attendees of his nickname, “Middle-Class Joe.” “In Washington, that’s not meant as a compliment–it means you’re not sophisticated,” Biden said.

Appearing as a panelist on the November 6 Hardball, liberal talk show host Joe Madison offered his assessment for why Democrats lost the 2014 midterms: Liberals, being the intellectuals they are, talk above the heads of the average voter, rather than communicating their ideas in an accessible manner for the layman to understand. They need to “put it where the goats can get it,” as Madison’s grandfather would say. …

A plan for a luxury skyscraper with a so-called “poor door” is changing to extend more of a welcome to residents of its cluster of affordable apartments, officials and the developers said Friday. The retooled plan for 1 West End Ave. still involves separate entrances, but all residents will now have access to such building amenities as a courtyard and river-view roof deck, and the affordable segment’s lobby will be stylishly appointed and set facing a park. […] … (S)ome residents and officials see the divisions as discriminatory, and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has said it aims to bar...

At the USDA’s annual Agricultural Outlook Forum on Thursday during a panel discussion about attracting young people to the farming industry, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked a panelist how she would convince an inner city “minority” child who “doesn’t even know what a tomato is.” “Emily, I want you to envision an inner city child,” Vilsack said to Emily Oakley, interim director of the National Young Farmer Coalition. “Could be African American, could be Hispanic, could be Native American, Asian, whatever, a minority. You’re talking to that child. That child doesn’t even know what a tomato is much less what...

In the 2010 electoral campaigns, some tea-party candidates referred to the objects of their middle-class enmity as "the ruling class." The ruling class, as its critics understand it, consists of the overlapping circles of Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Big Labor who have the sense that their resources—financial and intellectual—entitle them to an outsize say in how America is governed. ....Mr. Callahan traces the rise of the liberal rich to the 1960s and the vital role played by Stewart Mott, a General Motors heir, in financing the 1968 anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy. But Michael Knox Beran, in...

Shakespeare himself could not have chosen a better foil for Barack Obama than Sarah Palin. The professor and the hockey mom make the perfect pair to dramatize the ongoing contest between liberal condescension and conservative populism. A lot of ink and pixels have been expended lately to castigate what Jacob Weisberg, writing in Newsweek, terms the "childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large." Time's Joe Klein likewise casts his gaze across the land and sees only "a nation of dodos," who are "flagrantly ill-informed" because they think federal stimulus funds have been misspent. Writing in The Boston...

Conservatives win many votes saying that liberals are elitist. I am here to tell you that the liberal movement is indeed very elitist. Its organization's staffs are composed mainly of Ivy leaguers whose life experiences are dramatically different than the 70 percent of Americans that never graduate from college. Very few of them have any actual experience living with or knowing working-class people. As a graduate of Bucknell, I still feel out of a place and most glaringly underdressed when I get in a room with the Ivy Leaguers running our movement. As garbageman turned United Electrical Workers (UE) in...

Obama's War by Peter Wehner Throughout his dramatic campaign to win his party’s nomination for the presidency, Senator Barack Obama has tended to ignore the specifics of policy in favor of the generalities of emotion, centering his appeal to voters on vague promises of “change” and “unity.” But on one issue, above all others, Obama has remained fixated from the campaign’s first moment, and that is the war in Iraq. By Obama’s own account, the consistency of his stand on this war demonstrates more than anything else that he, a one-term United States Senator who arrived in Washington in 2005...

Writing about that recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll on the number of books Americans read in the previous year, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Sauders pounced on how AP reported the findings – specifically, that "liberals read more books than conservatives": The poll found that among people polled who read at least one book in the last year, liberals read nine books and conservatives read eight.When I called Michael Gross, associate vice president of Ipsos public affairs, to find out more about the Ipsos poll, he told me the one-book difference "is within the margin of error, it's not a...

EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS Associated Press JACKSON, Miss. - A Democratic congressman from New York says he wasn't trying to insult Mississippi in published remarks Thursday, but a Republican colleague from Mississippi says Rep. Charles Rangel should apologize to the state. Rangel, D-N.Y., was quoted in a Thursday article in The New York Times, saying: "Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?" Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., issued a news release criticizing Rangel's words. "I hope his remarks are not the kind of insults, slander, and defamation that Mississippians...

I’m slipping into bathos at record speed here tonight; a function of happiness, I suppose. So let me explain just why right-wingers hate interracial friendships, and what this has to do with feeling good about what you think, not what you do. This isn’t a screed, but it belongs to the same genus, so if you’re disposed to roll your eyes at this sort of thing, ta-ta; see you tomorrow. Let’s say you’re a movie reviewer. You’re writing about a war movie, and you say this: “Indeed, the love that the soldiers feel for one another has no erotic component...