Free Republic

Dozens of white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia campus on Friday night carrying torches while chanting “You will not replace us.” The demonstrators, who also yelled "blood and soil", a phrase tied to Nazi ideology, made their way through the Charlottesville campus before encircling a group of counterprotesters gathered around a statue of Thomas Jefferson. A fight broke out, and some of the white nationalists swung their tiki torches at people, according to the Daily Progress. Protesters wielding torches march through campus chanted "You will not replace us". Members of both sides were reportedly hit with pepper spray,...

Otto Warmbier, the American student who was imprisoned in North Korea for more than 17 months and was returned home to Ohio last week, has died, his family said Monday. "It is our sad duty to report that our son, Otto Warmbier, has completed his journey home," his family said in part in a statement. "Surrounded by his loving family, Otto died today at 2:20 p.m."

It's settled, but far from over. The University of Virginia fraternity that was slimed and defamed by sicko fabulist Sabrina Erdely will receive a $1.65 million payment, the fraternity announced this week. Erdely's manufactured tale of gang rape by Phi Kappa Psi members, spun through a manipulated UVA student dubbed "Jackie" and published by left-wing Rolling Stone magazine, combusted spectacularly after scrutiny by independent journalists in late 2014. The latest payout over the fictional hit piece comes in the wake of another defamation lawsuit by UVA dean of students Nicole Eramo. She won a $3 million jury verdict last year...

– University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier has been medically evacuated from North Korea in a coma after being detained for 17 months, his parents told The Washington Post on Tuesday. Warmbier, 22, is due to arrive home in Cincinnati on Tuesday evening, having been evacuated through a U.S. military base in Sapporo, Japan. Warmbier has been in a coma for more than a year, since shortly after his last public appearance during his trial in Pyongyang in March 2016. His release was announced Tuesday morning in Washington by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Tillerson did not discuss Warmbier’s medical...

North Korea has released Otto Warmbier, a U.S. university student who has been held captive there since January 2016, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.

Rolling Stone magazine settled a University of Virginia administrator's lawsuit over its discredited story about a rape on campus, but its legal fights over the botched article aren't over. Attorneys for Rolling Stone and Nicole Eramo announced this week that they reached a confidential settlement over the 2014 story "A Rape on Campus," putting an end to the lengthy case stemming from the now-debunked claims of a woman identified only as "Jackie." "We are delighted that this dispute is now behind us, as it allows Nicole to move on and focus on doing what she does best, which is supporting...

Campus feminists whipped up a Category-5 frenzy over sexual assault allegations at a Northwestern University fraternity in February. But last week, the school's Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin was forced to muster up her best impression of "Saturday Night Live's" classic foot-in-mouther, Emily Litella. Neeeeever miiiiind. Picture Telles-Irvin squinting and grimacing sheepishly as she wrote an update on her breathless bulletin "that four female students attending an event at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house were possibly given a date-rape drug, and two of these students believed they were sexually assaulted." Before I reveal the substance of her...

The New York Times’ coverage of alleged sexual assault on college campuses “seems of a piece with the leftist bias I noticed within the Times newsroom regarding climate change, gay marriage, abortion, affirmative action, labor, and other hot-button issues.” Tom Jolly, New York Times sports editor, confessed in February 2008 that he regretted aspects of his paper’s much-criticized coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. He vowed to do better. “Knowledge gained by hindsight has informed our approach to other stories since then,” said Jolly, who later became an associate managing editor. But The Times did not do better. Its handling...

A university think tank just published a list of recommendations for paying for college. Perhaps not too surprisingly, they mostly involve increasing taxpayer-funded government subsidies of higher education. To its credit, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia acknowledges that the economy is worse than the U. S. government claims it is. "Total unemployed, people who want to work but are discouraged from looking, and people who are working part time because they cannot find a full-time job peaked in 2010 but remains at 9.8 percent," the executive summary of "Investing in the Future: Sharing Responsibility for Higher Education...

In this season’s most anticipated holiday spin-off, Campus Reform visits the University of Virginia dressed as “The Hipsters Who Stole Christmas.” With schools across the country outright banning even such innocuous Christmas decorations as evergreen trees and images of Santa because they could be interpreted as being “non-inclusive,” Campus Reform wanted to find out what students think of the idea.

“I haven’t slept in my room since the election.” That is the exact headline of an op-ed recently published in The Washington Post by Ian Ware, a sophomore at the University of Virginia studying foreign affairs and American studies. Ware writes he’s avoided his dorm and instead slept on couches, futons, floors and unoccupied beds in his friends’ homes.

A University of Virginia police officer has resigned for “abuse of a PA system” after he shouted “Make America Great Again” at students on election night. According to The Cavalier Daily, student protesters who intruded on a Board of Visitors meeting back on the 11th included a demand for the firing of three officers allegedly associated with the public address “abuse,” and wanted a “re-evaluation of […] tuition dollars going to the University Police Department.”

Since the election, I haven’t slept in my dorm room once. I’ve slept on couches, futons, floors and unoccupied beds in my friends’ homes. At first, it came from a need to be with people who supported me and understood how scary this political moment is for young people who grew up under the liberal auspices of an Obama presidency and came of age politically in a time marked by progressive movements such as that of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But after I went home for clean clothes to find an anti-gay hate message written on my door, right next...

Three universities in Virginia associated with our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, James Madison University, and George Mason University, are embroiled in free speech battles over what faculty, students, and employees can or cannot say. University of VirginiaLast week, UVa faculty released a letter to President Sullivan wherein they requested that she stop quoting Thomas Jefferson in mass emails to faculty, students, and employees. For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotations in these e-mails undermines the message of unity, equality and civility that you are attempting to convey (here.) Ostensibly, the rationale had something to do...

Snowflake university culture in America may have just hit peak safe-space stupidity. Here’s what happened according to the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily: :: Several professors on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9. In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves. “Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are...

Hundreds of students and faculty at the University of Virginia have asked the school’s president to stop quoting President Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, because of his slave-owning past. The letter garnered 469 signatures before being sent to University President Teresa Sullivan on Friday, The Cavalier Daily reported. It was prompted by an email sent last week by Ms. Sullivan promoting unity in light of Donald Trump’s presidential victory.  “Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and...

Several groups on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9. In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves.

Days after Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking 9,000-word story about a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia in November 2014, the magazine’s editors received an email just before 2 a.m. with “Our worst nightmare” in the subject line. They needed to run a retraction, the reporter said. Instead, Rolling Stone kept the article on its website for four months before finally pulling it down that April and officially retracting the story. That decision was enough to convince a federal jury in Charlottesville on Friday that the magazine defamed a university administrator, who claimed she was cast as...

CHARLOTTESVILLE — A federal court jury decided Friday that a Rolling Stone journalist defamed a former University of Virginia associate dean in a 2014 magazine article about sexual assault on campus that included a debunked account of a fraternity gang rape. The 10 member jury concluded that the Rolling Stone reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was responsible for defamation, with actual malice, in the case brought by Nicole Eramo, a U-Va. administrator who oversaw sexual violence cases at the time of the article’s publication. The jury also found the magazine and its publisher responsible for defaming Eramo. The $7.5 million lawsuit...

When Rolling Stone published a brutal account of a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia, the magazine relied on the recollections of the young woman who said she was assaulted. Quoted by the nickname “Jackie,” the tale of her assault was used to exemplify the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses and was the crux of an argument that university administrators who handle such claims can be indifferent to them. Jackie told Rolling Stone in explicit detail aspects of the night she described as the worst in her life: Sept. 28, 2012, when she said she was assaulted...