Free Republic

With the mainstream media focusing on the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville riots of last year, many news organizations are basically blaming President Trump for stoking the hatred and racial tension that led to the violence in that small college town, because of his coarse rhetoric on immigration and the NFL player protests. I will concede that Trump is not without blame in contributing to some of the coarseness of our society, but it’s hard to deny the fact that Trump has been consistent his whole, adult life. Trump has always been brash, arrogant, self-centered, abrasive in his language, and...

In Michigan's state Senate race, Democrat Rep. Bettie Cook Scott had the perfect vote-getting pitch in her primary race against fellow Democrat, Rep. Stephanie Chang: "Don't vote for the ching-chong." According to Detroit's Metro Times: Scott is alleged to have referred to Chang as "ching-chang" and "the ching-chong" to multiple voters outside polling precincts during last Tuesday's election.  She's also said to have called one of Chang's campaign volunteers an "immigrant," saying "you don't belong here" and "I want you out of my country." Chang and Scott were running in the Democratic primary for state Sen. District 1.  Chang won the election...

Omarosa has renewed rumors that there is a tape of Trump using the N-word while he was on ‘The Apprentice.’ There have long been rumors of a tape showing Donald Trump saying the N-word, but one New York Times columnist thinks this could actually be a boost for Trump among his supporters if it did exist and were to be released. This week, ousted White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman has been sharing all manner of dirt from her time in the Trump administration, including repeating claims that Trump is on tape using racist language while he was on The...

The New York Times recently hired as a writer and board member Sarah Jeong. The Times knew that in recent years Jeong had posted a series of unapologetically racist anti-white tweets. She had offered wisdom such as #CancelWhitePeople" and expressed hatred for males. Yet when the Times discovered less graphic versions of such tweets from newly hired technology writer Quinn Norton earlier this year, the newspaper immediately fired Norton. The message of disparate treatment was that what bothers the New York Times is not racism per se, but who is the racist and who are her targets. Over at The...

“Queer Eye” star Jonathan Van Ness had to defend himself on Wednesday after he was ripped for urging his fans to be tolerant of other ideas and saying that not all Republicans were evil and racist. Van Ness decided to get political on Twitter following the results of Tuesday’s primary results. “Luckily a lot [of] extreme right people won yesterday, meaning that if we can come up w center left candidates we can take back the house & senate, not to mention many state legislatures. It is so important for the left to not go too left or we are...

"Oh, I remember this tape I saw, and I described it exactly," Arnold tells Kimmel. "He says the n-word. He calls Eric [Trump] the r-word." Tom Arnold was all over the place during a frantic and "crazy" interview with Jimmy Kimmel Wednesday night, but all of his manic energy was aimed directly at Donald Trump. The stand-up comedian has long been one of Trump's most vocal opponents, and he's been one of the loudest voices demanding the release of the so-called "n-word" tape that allegedly exists and contains the president using the derogatory term during his "Apprentice" years. Arnold insists...

People are making this so complicated. A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times editorial board hired a technology writer, Sarah Jeong. When it was revealed that she had tweeted barbs against white people, conservatives formed a Twitter mob to demand her dismissal. While a few on the right said -- or claimed -- that they were offended by the substance of her tweets, the overriding passion derived from an understandable outrage about liberal double standards. The argument took a familiar form: "If a white or conservative person said something like this about any other group, her career would...

Omarosa Manigault-Newman should never have been allowed to breathe Situation Room air, and that she did, while jeopardizing national security, is a sad and frightening testament to the Trump administration’s utter lack of seriousness from its conception. And now, the President is paying the price for hiring some of the worst people to work for him: An unqualified, backbiting and dishonest former employee is waging a public relations war. I have no idea if what Manigault-Newman is alleging Trump did or said is true. It’s all plausible — would anyone be shocked to learn a man who has openly, publicly...

Is Boston racist? Plenty of signs point to yes. The city has been called out many times for being home to a number of racist acts, from a Fenway crowd member calling Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones the N-word last summer to comedian Michael Che saying Boston is “the most racist city” he has ever been to. Now, another spotlight is shining on racism in Boston after a Twitter user shared her experience and received a flood of responses telling similar stories.

The DC “Unite the Right” rally resurfaced the silly “Who’s the real racist?” game. When liberals call conservatives or conservative opinions racist, conservatives respond: “No, you are the real racist!” But conservatives don’t seem to understand that liberals use that term in a different way. Worse, conservatives damage conservatism by arguing. If they are going to play the game, conservatives should do so with open eyes.Let me start by acknowledging the obvious: racism is bad. The game isn’t silly because the response is wrong; people on the left really are racist. Of course I am generalizing, but it isn’t...

A few days back, Kimberley Johnson, a feminist contributor to Huffington Post, came under fire after a social media post questioning why a black man would sport pro-NRA and tea party bumper stickers on his car. “Out on the road the other day I saw an affluent black man driving a BMW with two bumper stickers. One was pro-NRA and the other one was a Tea Party sticker that read, ‘Don’t tread on me.’ This left me very confused.” – Kimberley Johnson on Twitter, July 5, 2018 Now, I believe there are two reasons why Johnson was confused. She’s a...

A Florida Denny’s has apologized after a group of black customers were turned away at the restaurant. Elijah Henderson Jr. told News4Jax that he visited the Lake City Denny’s with a group of about 25 members from his church, and was immediately told by an employee that they would not be able to accommodate them. Henderson said that there were plenty of other groups in the restaurant, and that he thought his group was being discriminated against. "Is it the color of my skin? That's where I left it at. Is that a problem? Because everybody else was eating and...

Beginning with Friday’s evening newscasts and going through Monday’s morning shows, the broadcast networks of NBC, ABC, and CBS provided an astonishing 93 minutes of air time to promoting former Trump White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s new tell-all book blasting the administration and accusing the President of being a “racist.” While hosts and correspondents repeatedly acknowledged the Apprentice star’s major credibility problems, that didn’t stop them from providing the avalanche of coverage. The total was compiled by looking at the evening and morning newscasts Friday night through Monday morning, as well as the Sunday political roundtable shows, NBC’s Meet the...

On the one-year anniversary of the violence in Charlottesville and the killing of Heather Heyer, an anti-Nazi protester allegedly mowed down by a white nationalist, President Trump reminded us he is incapable of treating white nationalism as a singular evil — or of offending his white-grievance-obsessed base. Trump unleashed a furious backlash a year ago when he engaged in jaw-dropping moral equivalence, saying there were “very fine people, on both sides” (meaning both Nazi sympathizers and anti-Nazi protesters) and later claiming there was “blame on both sides.” Saturday, he gave the same wink to white grievance mongers, insisting on Twitter,...

I’ve spent most of my adult life producing theater in New York City. In that time, on more occasions than I care to remember, only 20 people showed up in the audience when I’d hoped for hundreds. I thought of that with a smile yesterday watching the maybe two dozen sad white nationalists hold their “rally” in Washington. I know how bad that feels, the Public Address system and stage you paid for mocking you. Jason Kessler and his gang more than deserved it, but you can see why they assumed they were going to sell out. The going narrative...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday that President Trump engages in racism “constantly." Pelosi said on MSNBC’s “AM Joy” that she believes the president is afraid of her and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), whom he has repeatedly attacked as being a “low IQ” person. “He’s afraid of the women who are going to be coming into Congress,” Pelosi said. “He talks about there’s no place for racism and then he speaks that way, it’s really disgraceful.” “It’s disrespectful to Maxine, to women, of course to minorities,” she added. Pelosi also referenced Trump’s tweet ahead of the first anniversary...

ecently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”[snip] Again, demonizing the Trump voter as beyond cultural redemption is nothing new. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables” who were “irredeemable” and were “not America.” After her defeat, Clinton proved her early smears were no accident. Speaking in India, she again slurred Trump supporters as being racist, sexist, and xenophobic for their...

So the white nationalists are coming back to Charlottesville, and once again we’re going to hear the standard media narrative that these bigots are “on the right.” Leave aside that Jason Kessler, the organizer of the original Charlottesville rally, was an Obama activist and an Occupy Wall Street guy. Never mind that Richard Spencer, the poster boy of white supremacy, reveals in a detailed interview in my new movie that he’s a progressive who supports nationalized health care and expanded centralized state, and whose favorite presidents are all Democrats. We need to probe deeper to understand who these white nationalists...

President Trump on Saturday tweeted that he condemns "all types of racism and acts of violence" ahead of the one-year anniversary of the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va. Trump has been under intense pressure to condemn last year's violence and speak out against white supremacists organizing an anniversary rally set to take place on Sunday. "The riots in Charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division," he tweeted. "We must come together as a nation. I condemn all types of racism and acts of violence. Peace to ALL Americans!" The president faced significant criticism over...

A “descriptivist” is someone who studies how language is used. A “prescriptivist” is someone who tells other people how to use language correctly. And while these are often framed as opposing camps, they need not be: A thoughtful descriptivist realizes that strongly established usage patterns should generally be treated as rules by someone who wants to communicate effectively; a thoughtful prescriptivist realizes that the rules emerge from constantly evolving usage patterns. There’s a certain strain of prescriptivism, though, that merely seeks to impose rules on other people’s language, often on nothing more than one’s own say-so. Overwhelmingly, these folks are...