Free Republic

Going further than the Treasury Department's tacit support for debanking alleged "hate groups" after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a State Department component that "strengthen[s] resilient democratic societies" developed a more sweeping plan for financially choking off disfavored narratives a month later. The U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a "Disinformation Primer" that appears to have been started in "late 2020," judging by a reference to the most up-to-date "social media initiatives" by Facebook and Twitter "to address disinformation and misinformation."It was still being written at least 10 days into the Biden administration, referring twice to the Jan. 31,...

A group of University of Chicago students are continuing their campaign for their university to pay over $1 billion in reparations to Chicago's South Side. University of Chicago Against Displacement (UCAD), an anti-gentrification student club, hosted an open house event on Thursday. "Come to our open house for some food, music, and good conversation!" the group's Instagram post read. "This week we’ll be making and coloring our own zines :)" According to University of Chicago's library, a zine "is a self-published [fanzine] … produced in small print runs." In February, the club had asked for $1 billion in reparations in...

Built by the University of Chicago in 1897 in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, Yerkes Observatory is home to the world’s largest refracting telescope and famous astronomers like George Ellery Hale, Edwin Hubble and Carl Sagan worked and studied there. ...as newer technology emerged the Great Refractor became less relevant, and the university closed the observatory in 2018. A non-profit formed by residents in the nearby Lake Geneva area took control, and in 2020 that group, Yerkes Future Foundation, embarked on a $20 million renovation effort.... Weighing about 82 tons, the Great Refractor is the world’s largest refracting telescope. The University of...

A federal appellate judge confirmed that he will no longer consider graduates of Yale Law School for clerkships, citing the school's alleged penchant for "cancellation of views." Judge James C. Ho of the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeal spoke to the Kentucky Chapters Conference of the Federalist Society last week and openly criticized the so-called intolerant practices trumpeted by Yale Law and its graduates. "Yale not only tolerates the cancellation of views — it actively practices it," said Ho, a University of Chicago School of Law graduate who was nominated to his federal judiciary post by then-President Donald...

The Atlantic last week hosted a conference titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” at the University of Chicago, where I’m a student. Barack Obama, Amy Klobuchar, Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ben Smith, Brian Stelter, and other boldface names studded the program, alongside many lesser-known members of the prestige press. They would gather, as a news release put it, to explore “the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.” The Atlantic gabfest was billed as a space for rigorous dialogue, where the light of truth would scatter the darkness of disinformation. But the dialogue and criticism, it...

This week, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP) and The Atlantic magazine hosted a “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference, and we have to hand it to IOP Director David Axlerod for bringing in true experts on the subject. The conference featured some of America’s greatest purveyors of disinformation, such as Barack Obama, Brian Stelter, Anne Applebaum, and a few token conservatives, including Jonah Goldberg and Adam Kinzinger. The media, government, and academia elites speaking at the conference weren’t expecting to be challenged as they self-righteously spewed more lies—but our team at the Chicago Thinker was prepared...

A college student has ripped into CNN’s Brian Stelter for being “right up there” on delivering false narratives after members of the liberal media accused Fox News of being a “purveyor of disinformation”. The CNN anchor was a guest at the University of Chicago’s panel discussion on ‘Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy’ when a college student didn’t hold back arguing the network had made several mistakes including failing to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story. “You’ve all spoken extensively about Fox News being a purveyor of disinformation but CNN is right up there with them,” college freshman Christopher...

Fired FBI executive Andrew McCabe says America's conservatives are as bad as Islamic terrorists and the federal government needs vastly increased powers to spy on them. The stunning words from McCabe came during his recent speech at the University of Chicago, and were captured by a report in The Federalist about his comments on conservatives. "I can tell you from my perspective of spending a lot of time focused on the radicalization of international terrorists and Islamic extremist and extremists of all stripes … is that this group shares many of the same characteristics of those groups that we've seen...

A prominent climate physicist has resigned from one of his roles at the University of California, Berkeley, after he said faculty members would not agree to invite a guest lecturer to the school who had come under fire for his political views. The lecturer, Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist, has been criticized for opposing affirmative action programs and other initiatives to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at colleges and universities.... ...The Massachusetts Institute of Technology this month rescinded a lecture invitation to Abbot, a geophysicist and associate professor at the University of Chicago, amid public backlash over an op-ed he co-wrote...

Dorian Abbot is an associate professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He spends his days studying climate change and extrasolar planets. In a piece written for Bari Weiss’ Substack, Abbot says he’s never been particularly political. He uses an online tool to decide who to vote for. But a few years ago he began to have concerns about academic freedom. He says he mostly kept his thoughts to himself for several years but that changed last summer. In the fall of 2020 I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I...

U. of C. student dies days after being struck by stray bullet on Green Line: ‘He was a ball of light’ July 5, 2021 Denver native Max Lewis died days after he was shot on an L train. Friends remembered him as an outgoing and welcoming presence. Max Lewis didn’t have to make the trek downtown. The affable 20-year-old University of Chicago junior had the option to work from home for the competitive internship he’d landed at a Loop investment firm, but he “loved getting to know as many people as he could,” according to his best friend. “He loved...

Student leaders at the University of Chicago peddled anti-Semitic tropes in a letter condemning Israel after a ceasefire ended a weeks-long conflict set off by the terrorist group Hamas. In a joint letter with the Students for Justice in Palestine, the incoming Undergraduate Student Government called on May 22 for university officials to divest from Israel and "make accommodations" for Palestinian members of the school community. The unsigned letter states, "From the river to the sea, USG supports a Palestine that is free." Anti-Israel activists use this slogan to call for the wholesale destruction of the Jewish state. The University...

Until Evita Duffy, one of its founders, wrote at The Federalist about the controversy at the University of Chicago over continuing that school’s commitment to free speech, I had never heard of The Chicago Thinker. It is a conservative student newspaper that Duffy and a few others created last year. I have no idea if it took inspiration from this online journal but would be highly pleased if that were the case. Free speech and free thought are two sides of the same coin.An article titled “Instructing Insurrections: How UChicago Can Avoid Creating the Next Ted Cruz” was published on...

Researchers with the University of Chicago's SAND Lab have detailed the development of a new tool called Fawkes that subtly alters images in a way that makes them unusable for facial recognition. The tool comes amid growing concerns about privacy and an editorial detailing the secret scraping of billions of online images to create facial recognition models. Put simply, Fawkes is a cloaking tool that modifies images in ways imperceptible to the human eye. The idea is that anyone can download the tool, which has been made publicly available, to first cloak their images before posting them online. The name...

The University of Chicago has determined an economics professor who came under scrutiny over tweets critical of the “defund the police” movement did not engage in “discriminatory conduct on the basis of race in a University classroom.” The statement Harald Uhlig, who has taught at UChicago since 2007, was temporarily removed as editor of the Journal of Political Economy, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago cut ties with him, and he came under investigation over alleged classroom “discriminatory behavior” a series of tweets earlier this month where he took aim at the growing movement to defund police departments following Geroge...

China is determined to block investigations of where COVID-19 came from. But worse, influential American scientists are going along with censoring any inquiry. They're declaring their "solidarity with the scientists and health professionals of China." That's a deadly problem. Conquering this virus and devising a vaccine will require unbiased research, no matter where it leads. The best weapon to fight this virus is the truth. The biggest mistake is to limit scientific inquiry and pander to China. We need scientists to be scientists, not political censors. When Australia called for a formal inquiry into the pandemic's origins, China explicitly threatened...

CHICAGO, IL.- On Friday evening, around a dozen University of Chicago students occupied the campus police building for 20 hours, demanding that the university defund the police department and instead divert funds to grassroots projects on the South Side of the city. WBBM Newsradio reported that the #CareNotCops campaign, which is part of UChicago’s Student Action set up inside the building on Friday afternoon for a rally and demonstration that lasted overnight Friday and ended Saturday morning.

Former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod said he attended a focus group with Democratic voters in Chicago on Friday, describing the gathering as "chilling" because impeachment "didn't come up" until more than an hour into the session despite it taking place amid the Senate trial of President Trump. Axelrod, who serves as a political analyst on CNN, shared about his experience during an interview with network anchor Erin Burnett on "OutFront" on Friday night, as Democratic House impeachment managers made their final arguments in the trial before White House lawyers begin their defense of the president on Saturday. "I was...

The confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump’s latest judicial nomination was refreshingly bipartisan for Trump's first ever out lesbian pick. Trump nominated Illinois judge Mary M. Rowland, through a June announcement, for a seat as a district judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Why is this significant for Instinct Readers? Because Rowland is an out lesbian and the first openly LGBTQ judge to be nominated by Trump since entering the White Rowland has had a long standing history in the world of law. She got her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and...

When Charlotte Adelman was a student at the University of Chicago, the nearby parks became a refuge for her, a sprawling expanse of green where she could escape the concrete urban landscape. It was then, many decades ago, that Adelman began her journey to becoming a fighter for environmental justice. Along the way, she has fought to preserve open spaces, ban pesticides in Wilmette and co-authored a book, “Prairie Directory of North America.” Now, Adelman, 81, has set her sights on her biggest target yet — to block the Obama Presidential Center from being built in Jackson Park. Adelman, along...