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Karim Khan, International Criminal Court prosecutor
A story has been running for days that the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is poised to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defence Forces chief of staff Herzi Halevi over alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.

If this is correct, the prosecutor would be taking action against Israel for defending itself against genocide while doing more than any other military in the world to minimise civilian death and suffering. It would mean the ICC would be acting on the basis of lies put out by Hamas, such as the number of civilians killed in the Gaza war — figures which have been rubbished by statisticians — and Israel’s alleged blocking of humanitarian aid — a claim that’s contradicted by evidence of aid being provided from the start of the war but which was mostly stolen by Hamas.

Such arrest warrants would be a wickedly perverse move and a breathtaking onslaught against truth, justice and the Jewish people. The move would represent the ultimate in defamation, demonisation and delegitimisation mounted by the apparatus of international law against the Jewish state, a unique and malicious double standard applied to no other country on earth.

But are these reports true?

There’s no doubt that the ICC has been historically hostile to Israel. There’s also no doubt that the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, is being put under enormous pressure by member states and activist groups to act against Israel. This pressure has been confirmed by US sources — who say, however, that they are uncertain if arrest warrants are imminent.

But a number of things in these reports don’t add up.

The story seems to have emanated from unknown Israeli sources. In the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, Ben Caspit reports that Israel has picked up “sensitive” information indicating that Khan is seriously considering issuing arrest warrants against the prime minister and other top Israeli officials.

This is said to have “terrified” Netanyahu who asked US President Joe Biden for help in blocking the ICC’s warrants. In an atmosphere of “managed panic” in the Israeli government, high-intensity international efforts have reportedly been underway to put pressure on those who might be pressurising Khan to act against Israel in this way. Israeli president Yitzhak Herzog said today:

I unequivocally object to any attempt to abuse international legal institutions — including the ICC — to deny the state of Israel its basic rights. We have an independent and robust judicial system that knows how to investigate as needed.

The US National Security Council has said it opposes the ICC’s investigation into Israel’s alleged war crimes, on the grounds that the court has no jurisdiction to discuss the Gaza war.

This intervention contradicts a key element of the most alarmist reporting, the claim that the Biden administration is in cahoots with the ICC in this deeply hostile move against Israel. The Biden administration has certainly behaved as much like an enemy as a friend of Israel over the past seven terrible months, undermining its war of self-defence at every turn and parroting the defamatory lies designed to demonise and delegitimise it (even while the US has continued to supply it with essential armaments).

However, the claim that it was giving the nod to the ICC warrants always seemed improbable since the US isn’t a signatory to the ICC and has no standing there at all. The suggestion in early reports that the US was even involved in Khan’s selection as ICC Prosecutor because he was regarded as a suitable patsy therefore seemed fanciful in the extreme.

In addition, none of this fits with the known attitude of Khan himself. A British lawyer and an extremely cautious individual, he is also an Ahmadi Muslim. Ahmadis are themselves victims of persecution and oppression within the Islamic world where other Muslims consider them to be heretics. He is hardly likely to be a Hamas groupie.

Moreover, as Caspit writes:

Prosecutor Khan is not considered to be hostile towards Israel. Quite to the contrary. He came to Israel after the massacre at the invitation of the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, toured the devastated Gaza periphery communities, met with survivors and with hostages who had been freed, and was deeply moved. Teams on his behalf have met at length with all of the hostages who were freed from Hamas captivity, and have been working to collect evidence.

Khan, who became the ICC Prosecutor in 2021, is undoubtedly keenly aware of the ICC’s deeply damaged reputation as a court owing more to international power politics than to the rule of law, and which was all but wrecked by his two incompetent and deeply partisan predecessors in the post.

While the current investigation into possible abuses in Gaza and the disputed “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria dates back to 2014 and has been marked by a number of malign moves against Israel, Khan will be acutely concerned to repair the ICC’s reputation as an impartial and fair court of law.

Among other considerations, that means abiding by court’s own fundamental rule of complementarity. As an informal expert paper published by the ICC put it:

The statute recognises that states have the first responsibility and right to prosecute international crimes. The ICC may only exercise jurisdiction where national legal systems fail to do so, including where they purport to act but in reality are unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out proceedings. under which it has to give a state time to investigate itself any claims that have been made against it.

In practice, this means that before the ICC can make any move against Israel, the Jewish state must be given the chance to investigate any charges laid against it. Since the war in Gaza is still under way, that is clearly not yet possible.

In addition, Khan has pledged to deliver impartial justice. In a statement he made at the end of October, when he spoke emotionally about his horror and repugnance at the crimes committed against innocent Israelis on October 7 and also about the suffering of the “innocent Palestinians” in Gaza, he said he would investigate possible crimes committed “on the territory of Palestine by any party”.

So if these reports of imminent arrest warrants against the Israelis are fundamentally untrue, what is the explanation for them? It’s possible that other agendas are in play, aiming to whip up a storm to service self-serving or partisan interests of one kind or another.

In relation to that, Caspit’s story contains one further intriguing nugget. Having reported that Khan’s teams have been working to collect evidence about the kidnap into Gaza of the Israeli hostages, Caspit writes:

However, in the meantime, a second ICC team has been operating as well, a separate team that decided that a balance had to be maintained and that the “other side”— in other words, Israel — also had to be dealt with.

Israel reportedly pressed the panic button having obtained “sensitive information” about the ICC’s deliberations. Might this have been obtained by listening in to the ICC “second team” investigators’ conversations? Might these “second team” investigators themselves have been malignly disposed towards Israel?

But whatever the investigators might be be saying, the person who decides whether or not to act against Israel is no-one but Khan himself. Is it likely that such a man would act in such a way?

On the other hand, is it likely that the Israelis can be so ignorant of the way the ICC actually works?

Maybe these alarmist reports are indeed well-founded. Maybe Karim Khan is about to finally destroy what’s left of the ICC’s reputation. Maybe this really is the apotheosis of the current infernal global drive to destroy Israel through a lethal pincer movement of military entrapment and a legal sucker punch.

If so, it would mark a new and even more terrifying low in this crisis point for the Jewish people and for civilisation.

Recent posts

My most recent exclusive post for my premium subscribers argues that the anti-Israel student mobs threaten not just the Jews but America and civilisation itself. This is how the piece begins:

The campus crucible of Islamic holy war
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The campus crucible of Islamic holy war
Events at Columbia university and on other American campuses have left many people open-mouthed in shock and horror. Overnight last night, a mob stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Masked men dressed in black used hammers and other tools to break in through the windows, barricading entry to the building with tables, chairs and a human chain. They hung a banner reading “Intifada” and screamed “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is ours alone”. There were reports that one campus worker was taken hostage.

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Columbia university "Gaza Solidarity Encampment"
Events at Columbia university and on other American campuses have left many people open-mouthed in shock and horror.

Overnight last night, a mob stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Masked men dressed in black used hammers and other tools to break in through the windows, barricading entry to the building with tables, chairs and a human chain. They hung a banner reading “Intifada” and screamed “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is ours alone”. There were reports that one campus worker was taken hostage.

This was an escalation of the “Gaza Solidarity” encampment on campus that has been defying the authorities for nearly a week. Columbia president Minouche Shafik began suspending students in the encampment who ignored her Monday deadline to “voluntarily disperse”. After days of previous negotiations between university officials and student protesters, the students voted unanimously to remain and declared: “Columbia will burn”.

The Columbia insurrection is but the most extreme version of what’s been playing out on the campuses and streets of America and Britain for the past seven months, ever since the October 7 Hamas pogrom. An alliance between the far left and Hamas operatives has turned dozens of universities into hotbeds of Hamas support and made London’s streets unsafe for Jews in the vicinity of these demonstrations of anti-Jewish power.

People shocked by this reveal that they have never had a clue about how Islamic fanaticism actually works. While the west’s useful idiots have promoted a mythical “two-state solution” that’s actually been rejected by the Palestinian Arabs for almost a century and would constitute instead a Final Solution for the Jews of Israel, their support for the genocidal Palestinian cause has unwittingly sanitised and legitimised a narrative of Islamic holy war.

The ignorant west similarly told itself that Islamic terrorism — including human bomb attacks — was motivated by despair. On the contrary, it is fuelled by exultation and an ecstatic sense of destiny unfolding. The October 7 pogrom, in which 1200 Israeli innocents were barbarically slaughtered and some 240 kidnapped into Gaza, acted as the starting gun for an Islamic world to which this bloody victory over the Israelis signalled the beginning of the end not only for Israel but also for the west.

The significance of these campus insurrections is far greater than support for Hamas or even murderous hatred of the Jewish world. The universities have become ground zero for the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of Islamising the west...


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Introducing a New Saturday Series: The Prophets
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Sat, Mar 2 at 11:12 AM
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Introducing a New Saturday Series: The Prophets
Meet the messengers from the past who saw the future and explain our world today. First up: Marshall McLuhan.
BENJAMIN CARLSON
MAR 2
McLuhan (Illustration by Pablo Declan for The Free Press; photo by Michel Laurent via Getty Images)
Emily Yoffe, senior editor at The Free Press, here. Last year while scrolling on X, I came across a post that caught my attention. It was a short clip of an interview with Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher and English professor. I had vague memories of McLuhan—who died in 1980—as a semi-famous intellectual of his day. The young writer who posted the clip, Benjamin Carlson, promised it was “one of the most mind-bending riffs on identity in the digital age I’ve ever heard.”

As I listened, I got a rush from the prescience of McLuhan’s words. It was as if this man, now more than 40 years dead, was a messenger from the future who had been sent to our past, and now was explaining to us the world we live in today.

I wanted to know more about what McLuhan foresaw, and the fascinating essay below from Benjamin Carlson is the result.

Meanwhile, we at The Free Press started talking about whether there are other McLuhans from the past, people who predicted our current moment. That is, people whose words, work, and life illuminated something essential about the increasingly strange times we find ourselves in today.

That’s how our new limited series, The Prophets, was born. Every Saturday for the next several weeks, we will bring to you an activist, scientist, writer, or thinker who somehow knew what would happen years or decades after their deaths. None of them were right about everything. Indeed, some were significantly wrong about significant things. But they all saw something important coming.

And because every prophet deserves their own brilliant scribe, we asked some of our favorite writers to bring you the stories of our prophets. Many of these writers have been experiencing—and covering—the very issues the prophets predicted.

We hope our new series delights, inspires, and occasionally even infuriates you. Ultimately, though, we think these essays make our times easier to understand—and will help you feel less alone in our crazy, fractured world.

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Alexei Navalny Lived and Died in Truth
We live in a world of moral confusion. The Russian dissident was as clear as he was courageous: there is freedom and there is unfreedom. Bari Weiss writes.
BARI WEISS
FEB 17
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Alexei Navalny on the January 2021 flight that took him from Berlin to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested. (Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
Alexei Navalny had a choice.

After he was poisoned by Moscow in August of 2020, after he emerged from a monthlong coma in a Berlin hospital, after he overcame the terrible effects of the nerve agent Novichok, which was developed by the Soviet Union, he could have stayed in exile in Germany.

He had already become the most important dissident in Russia. The choice—certainly the rational choice—would have been to remain outside of Putin’s reach.

But Navalny made the opposite one.

“There was never a question for me whether to return or not,” he said upon his recovery in Berlin. “They are doing everything to scare me. But what they are doing there is not of much interest to me. Russia is my country. Moscow is my city. I miss them.”

So he flew back to Moscow. He was arrested at the airport on January 17, 2021. Then he was sentenced on bogus charges of embezzlement, extremism, and fraud and sent to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They called it “Polar Wolf.” The punishment was 19 years.

It was in that gulag that Navalny—a man who will be remembered forever as one of the heroes of our darkening century—was killed earlier today.

In this, Navalny joins a long line of ordinary and noble people who were and are the victims of Stalinist tyranny and now Russian authoritarianism.

People like:

Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist and author of Putin’s Russia, who was shot dead on October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday—in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. She was 48 years old.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent turned British defector, who was hospitalized for polonium-210 poisoning and died 22 days later, on November 23, 2006. His chief crime was saying out loud what everyone suspected: that Russian intelligence had killed the oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Sergei Magnitsky, responsible for exposing corruption and misconduct by Russian government officials, who served 358 days in a Moscow prison before he died at 37 years old, on November 16, 2009.

Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated on February 27, 2015, beside his Ukrainian wife on a bridge near the Kremlin, in Moscow, where he was organizing a rally against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

“There has always been a surplus of servitude and a deficit of freedom in Russia,” he once said. “We value those who grovel, which is why Russia remains a ‘nation of slaves and princes’ to this day.”


When I woke up early Friday morning to the news that Russia’s most courageous hero had been murdered, I called up another one. Natan Sharansky spent nine years of his life in the gulag where Navalny was murdered. Sharansky’s crime was his desire to immigrate to Israel, where he now lives, in Jerusalem.

“I can’t collect myself,” Sharansky told me. “He was the most fearless person I knew—and the most stubborn in unmasking the true nature of this regime.

“Even after an assassination attempt by the regime left him on the brink of death, he turned his own horrific experience into a tool to expose Putin’s method, by getting one of his would-be assassins to reveal his mission and the men who sent him. And in going back he sent a clear message to the people of Russia and to the world that he was not afraid of Putin’s regime—and neither should they be too afraid to act,” Sharansky said.

“People prefer to run away from the truth because the truth is very tough,” he went on. “It demands that you change your behavior—not to just enjoy life and the privileges of being close to the regime. He did more than anyone in the history of Russia to show to millions of citizens the regime’s real nature. He was the great producer, the great actor. But the stage was the world. And the price was his own life.

“I dedicated my book The Case for Democracy to the memory of Andrei Sakharov, a man who proved that with moral clarity and courage we can change the world. That’s Navalny,” said Sharansky. “At some point people are scared. It is against nature not to be scared. But he said: you can be very strong. He said there is black and there is white. It’s so clear. It’s so simple. Moral clarity without any compromises.”

In our world of cynicism and cowardice, it often doesn’t seem so simple. But Navalny’s life—a life lived in truth—and his death—a death for the sake of truth—gives the lie to the moral confusion all around us.

The life and death of Navalny insists on the following: there is a free world and an unfree world. There is right and there is wrong. There is better and worse, good and evil. There is truth and there are lies. And heroes, however imperfect, walk among us still.

“My message if I am killed is very simple,” he told the filmmaker Daniel Roher in 2022. “Do not give up.”

People across Russia heard that message. In St. Petersburg, people waved their phone flashlights at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression. In Moscow, people lined up in the snow to lay flowers in Navalny’s memory at a memorial to gulag victims. His wife, Yulia, got onstage in Munich hours after the news and said this: “I thought about it. Should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children? And then I thought, what would Alexei do in my place? And I am sure that he would have been standing here on this stage.”


Just beneath that clip of Navalny’s heroic wife I come across another. This is one of Tucker Carlson praising a Moscow grocery store, where he is mesmerized by the cart system that disincentivizes shoppers from “taking the carts back to their homeless encampments” and by the low prices. Then there is another of him inside the Moscow subway system, praising its order and cleanliness and set to soaring music.

I am reminded of a passage from one of Sharansky’s fellow dissidents and Navalny’s political ancestors: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In his 1976 book Warning to the West, he wrote this: “Human nature is full of riddles. One of those riddles is: How is it that the people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?”

Navalny was in the darkest pit. And yet he remained free. May his example live for all time. God knows we need it in ours.

Just two and a half weeks ago, The Free Press published the story of Tamara Pietzke, who said she had been pressured in her job as a therapist to approve all teen gender transitions. Tamara is the third whistleblower—alongside Jamie Reed and Riittakerttu Kaltiala—to speak out in our pages about their fears that the medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria is harming a generation of youths.

When her story came out, Tamara had left her job at one of Washington State’s biggest hospital systems and was just three weeks into her new one. Days later, her boss called and asked for her resignation. Tamara was given no reason for the termination.

We spoke with both Tamara and Jamie Reed, who left her job at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital before her own account was published one year ago. Here, they talk to The Free Press about the potential costs of blowing the whistle—and why, despite it all, they don’t regret speaking out.


Tamara, what happened after your story published in The Free Press?

Tamara: The day my story published, I texted my new employer about it to give her a heads up. She eventually acknowledged that she got my message, but she didn’t really respond to it.

When I was hired, I agreed to do neurofeedback in addition to counseling, even though counseling is what I love. But last Thursday, she called me at 7 at night and told me she wanted a full-time neurofeedback practitioner. When I offered to do neurofeedback full-time, she said I wasn’t right for the position.

The next day, she sent me an email acknowledging my resignation. I drafted a response saying that I wanted to clarify that I did not resign. She hasn’t responded since.

She didn’t mention anything about the story you published?

Tamara: No, she didn’t say that’s why she was firing me. It just seemed like she completely went back on what she told me my job would be when she hired me, so my conclusion is that publicly sharing my opinions about youth gender medicine had something to do with it.

Jamie: I think Tamara’s employer is smart enough not to directly acknowledge the reason for letting her go. But I think it’s probably related to the story.

Regardless of whether your article had anything to do with your firing, do you regret speaking out?

Tamara: No. I’m sad and exhausted and angry, but I think it’s important for people to speak out who have the kind of concerns I have about youth gender medicine. Because if there’s a chance that we’re hurting kids, then how can I not?
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WATCH: Douglas Murray Meets the Son of Hamas
Mosab Hassan Yousef was raised by the man behind the terror group. He then became an Israeli spy. In a Free Press interview, he exposes the ideology that fueled October 7.
THE FREE PRESS
FEB 13
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Mosab Hassan Yousef has lived an extraordinary life. Born in Ramallah, Yousef spent his youth involved in Hamas activities. That was expected of him, given that his father, Hassan Yousef, is one of the founders of the Islamist movement. Growing up, Mosab Yousef embraced his father’s ideology and was arrested by Israeli authorities multiple times, starting at age 10, for crimes such as throwing stones at Israeli settlers and purchasing guns. But during a stint in Israeli prison in the late ’90s, at age 18, something changed. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that he flipped: he became an Israeli informant.

Eventually, he became Israel’s most valuable intelligence asset, foiling suicide bombings and other terror attacks. Yousef has since been outspoken not just about Hamas, but about radical Islamic terrorism more generally. In 2008 he converted to Christianity, shortly before he was granted asylum in the United States.

For a while Yousef stopped doing press and seemed to be trying to live a quiet life—away from the media and the death threats. But after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 more on October 7, Yousef is speaking out once again against the terrorist group he knows all too well.

That’s why he sat down with Free Press columnist Douglas Murray in Tel Aviv recently.

Yousef is unsparing in his assessment of the movement he grew up in and the damage it has done to Palestinian society. Hamas, he says, has created a generation of “people willing to destroy themselves. . . to cause the most destruction possible.”

But even Yousef, who understands the hate that fuels Hamas better than most, was shocked by the attack on October 7. “I was surprised not by Hamas’s brutality, but by the scale of the event,” he says. “There is no human language that can describe the evil that took place on October 7. And that’s not just a war crime. It’s not just killing. It’s a genocide.”

What makes such evil possible? The answer lies in the hate-filled beliefs that Yousef’s father helped spread. “Jihadists think that they are the sword of God on Earth,” Mosab tells Douglas. “That they are actually manifesting the punishment against the Jewish people for being disobedient.”

Yousef’s unique perspective—and his moral clarity—makes him an essential voice right now. It’s also what makes his interview with Douglas required viewing. Their conversation is available now for paid subscribers to The Free Press. So if you’re not already subscribed, do so today.

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The Assassin’s Veto
A British minister is forced out of parliament by Islamist threats. Plus: King Charles, woke kindergarten, and a pitch-perfect Grammys.
OLIVER WISEMAN AND SUZY WEISS
FEB 6

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Mike Freer MP: “They have silenced me.” (Mary Turner for The Free Press)
→ The assassin’s veto: When public figures are threatened by Islamists, it changes their life. Just ask the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was forced into hiding after Iranian theocrats put a bounty on his head for publishing The Satanic Verses in 1988. Thirty-four years later, when many thought the threat to Rushdie had passed, he was nearly killed in an onstage attack at a literary festival in upstate New York.

Or ask Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician and writer, whose criticism of Islam—the religion she was born into—led to death threats. Meanwhile, her colleague, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered for collaborating on a movie about Islam with her.

Just this past Sunday, The Free Press’s very own Douglas Murray faced the specter of Islamism in London, when a theater refused to host a pro-Israel event he was participating in, because of violent threats against their staff.

One of the depressing things about these crimes is that they usually have the desired effect. The assassin’s veto has silenced free speech, not just for its targets but for society at large. For evidence of its effectiveness, consider our main story today.

Mike Freer has been a member of Britain’s parliament for 14 years, representing a part of London where a large number of Jewish people live. But last week he announced he will step down at the next election because violent threats—including many from Islamist extremists—have made him fear for his life and the lives of his husband and loved ones.

Olly spoke to Freer shortly after he announced his resignation. The outgoing lawmaker described the security measures he has been forced to take, including wearing a stab vest when he meets his constituents. At home, he said, “I have a doorbell that allows me to see who is at the door. My letterbox is sealed up. . . . All of my windows have been replaced with security windows. I have to have shutters on the windows so that people can’t see in and there’s now a panic button in every room.”

But even that wasn’t enough to put him or his family at ease.

Of those who have threatened him, he says: “They have silenced me.”

Read the full story here: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-assassins-veto-freer-charles-grammys?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=141417848&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1zm6gm&utm_medium=email


https://www.thefp.com/p/mike-freer-islamist-threats-mp-parliament?
Britain Can’t Protect Its Own Government Ministers from Islamists
OLIVER WISEMAN
3:01 AM
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→ Busy Biden: Donald Trump, eager to demonstrate that he has the GOP primary in the rearview mirror and is raring to go ahead of the general, challenged Joe Biden to an “immediate” debate yesterday on The Dan Bongino Show. When reporters put this offer to the president, he said, “If I were him I would want to debate me too. He’s got nothing else to do.”

Make no mistake, President Biden is a busy guy. He has Beverly Hills lunch dates to attend, old episodes of Morning Joe to catch up on, and tweets about airline booking fees to craft. That schedule is far too packed to find time to debate Trump—or to sit for the customary Super Bowl interview that his predecessors have generally managed to make room for.

The president’s determination to avoid interviews and debates hardly bodes well for his reelection chances, and the way in which he more or less refuses to sit down with newspaper reporters is, frankly, a disgrace. That said, we hope he holds firm on the debate thing—at least until the fall. Just give us the summer, fellas.

→ Reading, writing, and racism: Evidently a great way not to get kids to learn to read is by giving $250,000 to an organization called “Woke Kindergarten,” which naturally is exactly what a San Francisco school district did. Nearly 96 percent of students at Glassbrook Elementary can’t do math at grade level, but they can, according to the website of the organization the school district contracted for three years, “examine the historical nature of reading aloud as an act of resistance.”

Maybe let’s just stick with the reading part?

The Woke Kindergarten agenda, which was implemented to help raise the bar for underachieving students, is built on the foundation of abolitionist principles, and pushes students to dream of a world without cops, capitalism, or the state of Israel. As far as we know, it does not challenge them to dream of a world where they can multiply or conjugate. For a smart assessment of this sad use of resources, check out Jesse Singal’s newsletter, where he argues that Woke Kindergarten is actually capitalism at its worst.

→ Pitch perfect: The Grammys were a smash. Well, at least after the trainwreck that was the Golden Globes. The music awards saw Miley Cyrus win her first gramophone, for “Flowers,” and a first-ever Grammy performance by Joni Mitchell. Taylor Swift, naturally, won Album of the Year—for the fourth time—and she announced that she’ll be releasing a new album come April while accepting the trophy from Celine Dion. (Sorry, Julia, still no justice for Lana.)

And then there was Jay-Z, who, while accepting his award for Global Impact, admonished the recording academy for snubbing black artists. “We love y’all. We want y’all to get it right,” he said, before nodding to his wife Beyoncé in the front row. “I don’t want to embarrass this young lady, but she has more Grammys than anyone and never won Album of the Year. So even by your own metrics, that doesn’t work.” The whole scene called to mind the epic moment when Kanye, in an attempt to praise Beyoncé, took all the air out of the room. Let’s just allow Queen B to speak for herself.

But the best moment of the night—by far—was an epic duet by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. All the bullshit culture-war noise around his cover of her masterpiece “Fast Car” was drowned out for a perfect five minutes. (And, as maybe the only two people in the room not pumped full of fillers, Chapman and Combs looked reassuringly normal.) Take a few minutes and watch it.

→ Get well soon, Charles: King Charles III is sick with a “form of cancer,” according to Buckingham Palace. The palace said Charles will forgo his public-facing royal duties while he receives treatment.

We usually have next to no patience for Boomer dudes clinging to the top job. This is your final warning, Bibi Netanyahu. Joe Biden. Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin. And even you, Jon Stewart, now that you’re about to take over The Daily Show as a regular host through the election, and as producer until 2025. But we’ll give Charles a pass on a determination to keep his nose to the grindstone. After all, he’s been waiting his whole life for the gig. We wish the king well and hope he’s fighting fit and back to the tedium of ribbon-cutting soon.

Oliver Wiseman is a senior editor for The Free Press. Suzy Weiss is a reporter and producer for The Free Press.

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Everywhere, all the time. ....
The war and the hostages take up all the oxygen here. Here's how I think people outside Israel can (and should) at least try to replicate that.
FEB 2

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Beyond the news—how the fighting is going, what is going to happen in the north, the tragically steadily growing list of names of fallen soldiers, Israel’s case at the ICJ at the Hague, the beginning of the return of politics and much more—what takes up the oxygen here is the ongoing horror of the hostages.

Outside of Israel, it’s hard to get a sense of the extent to which the hostages are front and center, everywhere and all the time, precisely as they should be. After all, they are hostages between their country failed them. Providing basic security is the first and foremost obligation that any state has to its citizens, and Israel completely failed these people.

It’s our absolute obligation to get them back.

It seems that almost everyone is doing something to keep them front and center. People are wearing the now ubiquitous dog tags that read “our hearts are held hostage in Gaza.” There are signs hanging from porches, along the sidewalks, on the front of most stores. Everywhere.

At the end of this post, I have a suggestion about what people can do everywhere in the world, no matter what language they speak or how public they do or do not wish to be.


I went to the National Library earlier this week, and the first thing that you see upon entering through the lower level is the reading room, filled with people, but also, note the chairs lined up by the window, dedicated to our not forgetting:


And if you look closer, you notice that there’s a book on the chair of every hostage, as if to say, I assume, “we want you back, and when you get home, we have a lifetime’s worth of thought and imagination waiting for you.”


You may recall that we posted a video of Rachel Goldberg Polin asking everyone to wear a piece of masking tape on their shirt, or sweater, or vest, or whatever, with the number of the day that it is (today is 119).


We do it at our home, I find the act of writing yet another number, one number higher than the previous day, on tape every morning much more harrowing than one might expect.

That’s the point.

Israelis are facing an unfolding crisis, but also an important opportunity to rebuild. If you would like to share our conversation about what they are feeling and what is happening that the English press can’t cover, please subscribe today.

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Olivia at the Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting last month.
For the last ninety years, New Yorkers have come together for the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center. But this past December, a thousand anti-Israel protesters showed up, determined to disrupt the celebratory spirit.
“There is only one solution,” organizers shouted into megaphones, “Intifada, revolution.”
Within the hour, punches flew. I saw a cop and a protester tussle on the pavement. One man, his face shrouded in a keffiyeh, lit an NYPD hat on fire. Seven protesters, including one minor, were arrested that night. As for the families who had gathered to celebrate Christmas? Many of them were herded away by the cops to avoid the melee.
That was one of 14 pro-Palestinian rallies I’ve attended since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Like the Rockefeller Christmas tree, the activists behind these events consider innocuous institutions to be their enemies: Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Cancer Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
They insist that their aim is to liberate Palestinians, and that they are not antisemitic. But attend enough of these demonstrations and you’ll start to see the swastikas. Some people have looked me in the eyes and said that Israelis are the new Nazis, the prime minister of Israel is the new Hitler, and Palestinians are the new Jews. Out of the scores of people I’ve spoken to, only two demonstrators told me that Israel has a right to exist.
The word Jew is rarely uttered by these protesters. Instead, people hurl terms like Zionist, settler-colonialist, and occupier. They speak of academic theories like decolonization and intersectionality—concepts many told me they learned at elite institutions like Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
I decided to go to the source of these ideas: The American campus, where I spoke to scores of anti-Israel activists and dozens of Jewish college students across the country.
I asked: How did an ideology once restricted to the ivory tower come to inspire masses of Americans chanting on behalf of Hamas and Yemeni Houthis? How did Gen Z, the most educated generation in U.S. history, become sympathetic to terrorism? And, most fundamentally, how did our colleges come to abandon the pursuit of truth in pursuit of something far darker?
The result is The Free Press’s first-ever documentary, American Miseducation.
Click below to watch, and please join the conversation in the comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5XGGDD0K9g

The UN’s Terrorism Teachers
Plus: What if the real war in Israel hasn’t yet begun?
OLIVER WISEMAN
JAN 29
A UNRWA school in Rafah, Gaza. (Photo by Abed Zagout via Getty Images)
For the past few days, Bari and a few other Free Press colleagues have been in Israel, traveling the country, meeting with the families of hostages, and interviewing some of the most insightful people there about the Israel-Hamas war and the future of the Jewish state.

We’re excited to bring you their reporting in the near future. But today we want to share just two pieces, from two prescient people, on two subjects from the Middle East making international news.


On Friday, after the Israeli government provided evidence that twelve workers at UNRWA—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—were involved in the October 7 massacre, the State Department announced it was freezing funding for the agency. As of this writing, twelve other nations have followed suit.

Hillel C. Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch, an organization that monitors the UN and holds it to the standard of its own charter. Hillel and his colleagues have previously documented at least 150 cases of UNRWA teachers and employees inciting terrorism, including spreading genocidal antisemitism in classrooms, all the while receiving taxpayer funds from the West.

The news that the workers took part in October 7 came as no surprise to Hillel, who has seen dozens of messages in which UNRWA staff members celebrated Hamas’s attack on Israel. Messages like the one sent by Israa Abdul Kareem Mezher, an elementary school teacher in Gaza, who cheered “God is the greatest” as news of the terrorist group’s atrocities spread.

Click below to read Hillel’s piece about the UN’s terrorism teachers—and why suspension of their funding doesn’t go far enough:

The UN’s Terrorism Teachers
HILLEL C. NEUER
·
4:09 AM
The UN’s Terrorism Teachers
Read full story

In our second story today, Matti Friedman reports from northern Israel, where the escalation of a full-scale war with Hezbollah now looms large. Not that things are quiet right now: some 170 Hezbollah fighters and 15 Israelis have died in skirmishes along the Israel-Lebanon border since October 7, while 60,000 Israeli civilians who lived in the North have been displaced.

When Matti asked one veteran military observer what a war with Hezbollah would look like, he was told to “take the current war with Hamas and multiply it by ten.”

As Matti reports, the fear in Israel is that the worst is yet to come:

Matti Friedman: What If the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?
MATTI FRIEDMAN
·
2:04 AM
Matti Friedman: What If the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?
Read full story

On Sunday, three American troops were killed, and dozens injured, in a drone attack fired by Iran-backed militants near the Jordan-Syria border. President Biden declared: “We shall respond.”

But, as Eli Lake wrote last week in The Free Press, “it’s almost like there are two policies for the Biden administration. In Washington, the State Department and Treasury Department are still pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. In Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the U.S. military is at war.”

And in fact, we have been for years, according to families of U.S. servicemen killed by Iran’s proxies in Iraq. Tricia English, who lost her husband Shawn, an Army captain, to an Iranian EFP in 2006, told Eli: “We are funding our enemy and sending our service members to be their victims.”

If you haven’t already, read Eli’s piece “American Troops Know: Iran Is Already at War with Us.”
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Is There Any Way in Hell Nikki Haley Can Stop Trump?
The former governor could beat Biden. But Trump is ahead in New Hampshire by double digits. Can Haley pull off a miracle tomorrow? We asked her on the campaign trail.
JOE NOCERA
JAN 22


Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley makes a campaign stop to greet people at MaryAnn’s Diner on January 21, 2024, in Derry, New Hampshire. (Joe Raedle via Getty Images)
MANCHESTER, NH — “Why in the world is Nikki Haley holding a rally in the middle of nowhere?” a talking head asked Katy Tur during her midday MSNBC show. It was last Tuesday, and Tur was in Manchester, New Hampshire. So was I, preparing to drive halfway up the state to a sprawling old resort in the White Mountains. In a snowstorm.

The day before, Haley had been absolutely crushed by Donald Trump in the Iowa caucus. In her last Iowa speech, the former South Carolina governor claimed that her 19.1 percent finish meant that it was now a “two-person race,” between her and Trump—which was some bold framing given that she’d come in third, behind even Ron DeSantis. (By Sunday, though, it had become true with DeSantis dropping out.)

The conventional wisdom said that if Haley didn’t win New Hampshire—or at least come close—she was cooked. With Trump at 50 percent in the polls, and Haley at 34 percent, she had to make up a 16-point deficit. And she had only six days to do it.

With its history of making or breaking presidential candidates, New Hampshire has always loomed large in presidential politics. And yet Haley’s first big post–Iowa rally was in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a snowstorm. I could only shake my head as I slogged my way north.

The Haley campaign had promised me an interview once I got to the Mount Washington Hotel and Resort in Bretton Woods—the same resort where the postwar economic order was settled in 1944. Slowed by the snow, I arrived shortly before we were supposed to talk. Haley strode smartly into a large, mostly empty ballroom where I’d been deposited by her team. If she was discouraged by the Iowa result, she didn’t show it.

At her town halls in Iowa, I’d mostly seen voters kicking the tires. “I liked her okay,” a retired farmer told me after one event, “but I’m strong for Trump.” So where was she going to find enough Republican voters to overcome the brick wall of Donald Trump? Everyone knows that the typical MAGA voter is white, rural, and working class. But what constitutes her base?

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One Hundred Days of War
Reflections from Bari Weiss, Michael Oren, Shadi Hamid, Einat Wilf, Bruno Maçães, Haviv Rettig Gur, Andrew Sullivan, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, and more.
BARI WEISS AND OLIVER WISEMAN
JAN 15
Israeli Merkava battle tank units regroup near the border of Gaza, in the southern part of Israel, Saturday, October 14, 2023. (Marcuz Yam via Getty Images)
One hundred days ago, the world changed. October 7 has proven to be many things: the opening salvo in a brutal war between Israel and Hamas; an attack that could precipitate a broader, regional war; the beginning of a global, ongoing orgy of antisemitism; a moral test that many in the West have failed; a wake-up call regarding the rot inside the West’s once-great sensemaking institutions; a possible realignment of our politics.

Here at The Free Press, we’ve worked hard to capture the many threads of the story of October 7 and its aftermath, from life in wartime Israel and the reality on the ground in Gaza to the spillover effects in our newsrooms, classrooms, and lecture halls here in America. We’ve investigated the roots of the attackers’ hatred and their apologists’ moral relativism. We’ve looked at an unstable world through a wide-angle lens.

We’ve also tried not to lose sight of the acts of unspeakable barbarity that set all of this in motion. The Hamas terrorists who crossed into Israel killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 240 more. It was a day of mass murder, mass abduction, and mass rape, and we’ve spoken to families whose lives turned into horror stories 100 days ago today.


A woman weeps and another shouts as family and friends of hostages taken from Kfar Aza demonstrate in the plaza in front of Tel Aviv Museum of Art on November 2, 2023, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Amir Levy via Getty Images)
For many families, that nightmare still isn’t over. There are still 136 hostages in Gaza. Hamas has used the hundred-day milestone as an opportunity for macabre PR: yesterday they released proof-of-life videos of three hostages and announced that their fate will be revealed today.

Across the rest of the West, if not in Israel, the hostages have faded from view. And when it comes to the fate of the many young women abducted by Hamas and taken to Gaza, the silence from some corners has been deafening.

As Bari argues in a new monologue, the groups you would expect to care about these women and hostages—the prominent women’s organizations who protested loudly when it came to #MeToo, or Donald Trump, or Brett Kavanaugh—have said and done next to nothing about the murder, kidnap, and rape of Israeli girls.

What explains their silence—or worse, their downplaying and denial?

WATCH: THE SILENCE OF THE FEMINISTS


(If you prefer to listen instead of watch, click here.)


What We’ve Learned in 100 Days
Some of the most thought-provoking essays we’ve published over the last 100 days have been from people whose opinions we value explaining how the events of October 7—and the reaction to those events—have changed the way they understand the world.

Contributors like Konstantin Kisin, who wrote in The Free Press that October 7 was “The Day the Delusions Died.” Or Axel Springer CEO Mattias Döpfner, who listed for us “The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7.” Or Ilan Benjamin, who explained: “Once, I Was a Peace Advocate. Now, I Have No Idealism Left.” Or Matti Friedman, who explained the sobering “Wisdom of Hamas.”

And so we asked six other people—voices from across the political spectrum —to answer a single question: What have you learned since October 7?

Here are their replies:

‘I can pretend to be a person when all I want to do is disappear’
Rachel Goldberg-Polin

I have learned about the depths of despair and the heights of compassion. I have learned there are no appropriate words in any language to describe the excruciating, throat-constricting dread I feel at all times from having my only son stolen from me. I have learned that I can pretend to be a person when all I want to do is disappear.

I now know that people can live without sleep, real sleep. I have discovered that I am part of a community so full of grace, generosity, and love, that they pick up and carry my soul when it’s crumpled on the floor. I now understand that strangers from all over the world can help give me a whisper of relief by sharing a kind word from afar. I have found out my husband is a champion, my daughters are resilient, and that I may be small but I can, and will, do whatever it takes to get my son back. And I have learned that my love for my beautiful Hersh continues to grow each day.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin is the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli hostage.


‘Jew-hatred has been revealed as a permanent and pervasive reality’
Michael Oren

War is the great clarifier. Issues and trends that might be clouded in peacetime become acutely clear in war. If, before Israel’s war in Gaza, Jews believed that antisemitism was an escalating yet still eradicable problem, the war has illuminated its vast, indelible dimensions.

Since October 7, the atrocities carried out by Hamas have been tolerated, contextualized, and hailed. Since October 7, Israel itself has been accused of perpetrating them and worse. All of this has brought a great and terrible clarity: Jew-hatred has been revealed as a permanent and pervasive reality in the West. Jews in America, especially, now have three choices: stay and fight, stay and hide, or move to Israel.

For Israelis, the war has dispelled the illusion that our state was secure behind its borders, functional in crises, and capable of defending itself by itself against any Middle Eastern threat. We learned that the Palestinians—the neighbors that some of us once regarded as future partners for peace—overwhelmingly supported the slaughter of the most peace-minded Israelis, while others either participated in or abetted that massacre.

More positively, we discovered that Israeli society was arguably the world’s strongest, able to resist near-intolerable strains and mobilize nationally for philanthropy and defense. Israelis, by contrast to American Jews, have only one choice: to fight and rebuild a state worthy of our society. For that clarity, we have the war to thank.

Michael Oren is a historian, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., and the author, among other books, of “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.”


‘This feels existential’
Shadi Hamid

The war in Gaza isn’t just (or even primarily) about Gaza. I’ve come to see it as a proxy for a deeper set of civilizational fault lines, which makes all of this feel existential in a way few foreign policy debates have been.

In this reading, the war is about “civilization” versus “barbarism,” with Israel standing as an outpost of Western liberalism against an Arab and Muslim world with very different commitments. In this reading, Israel also serves as a stand-in against “woke” ideas that prioritize the rights and grievances of the powerless against the powerful.

The trouble with this reading is that it ignores the fact that there are actual victims—those who have found themselves stuck at the receiving end of history. As Edward Said memorably put it, the Palestinians are the “victims of the victims.”

For the past years I have broadly found myself aligned with the “anti-woke” camp, insofar as there is such a camp. But since October 7, anti-wokeness has become less appealing to me. If anti-wokeness results in an inability to acknowledge profound power imbalances and the suffering of the truly marginalized, then I’m not sure it’s a movement that makes sense for those of us who cannot reconcile ourselves to the violations Palestinians must endure daily.

In this sense, I’ve learned that my own ideological orientation is still in flux. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. While others found themselves veering to the right after October 7, I found myself moving in the other direction. It’s perhaps an odd place to be, but events—especially war—have a way of compelling us to question our own commitments.

Shadi Hamid is a columnist and editorial board member at The Washington Post. He is also the author of “The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea.”


‘Our enemies meant what they said’
Einat Wilf

October 7 should put an end to any notion of “the poor Palestinians.” The massacre of that morning required years of massive investment in a formidable and fortified tunnel infrastructure, financial and economic planning, discipline, strategy, and vision—albeit a perverse kind.

For more than a century, Palestinians have tragically devoted themselves with singular dedication to one goal: that the Jewish people will not have their state anywhere in the historic land of Israel. Once that state was established, the goal remained the same, but the goalposts shifted: that the Jewish people will know not one day of peace until their country ceases to exist.

Hamas is but the most brutal and successful executor of the fundamental Palestinian goal. They planned their attack in full knowledge that it would be hugely popular among their people and that they would enjoy broad support by whatever anti-Jewish ideology prevails at the moment.

This should not have come as a surprise. The Palestinians have always been aided and abetted by every anti-Jewish ideology of the past century, whether it was Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, Pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet Communism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Sunni Jihadi Islamism in the 1990s and early 2000s, and now Shi’ite Jihadi Islamism and extreme Western progressivism, all of which have only ever been “pro-Palestinian” insofar as Palestinians fought the Jewish state.

And on October 7, Jews in Israel and Jews around the world woke up to their complacency, surprised once more that their enemies meant what they said.

Einat Wilf is a former Knesset member for the Labor Party and author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.


‘The appeal of universal principles has collapsed’
Bruno Maçães

What I did not know before October 7 is that most people—almost everyone—think in terms of “us and them” or “friend and enemy.” They first look to see who their friends and enemies are, then decide their views. This has been a rude awakening and a sore disappointment for me. The same actions committed by Russia and Israel—the same propaganda, the same gory videos—are judged differently simply because Israel is one of us and Russia is one of them. What I find so troubling is not just that the appeal of universal principles or the role of truth in politics has collapsed, but that so many people are cheering it on. It seems to me like people were tired of reason and truth. Such principles are too boring compared to the thrills of enmity and hatred.

Bruno Maçães is a columnist for the New Statesman, a former Portuguese Europe minister, and the author of “Geopolitics for the End Time.”


‘A test of fundamental theories and visions’
Haviv Rettig Gur

One hundred days is too long for the old model of Israeli-Palestinian clashes. Something new is afoot—a test of fundamental theories and visions.

When it set out on the morning of October 7 to kill and kidnap Israelis, Hamas knew what its actions would bring upon Gaza. And it welcomed it, not because Hamas are “extremist” or “radical”—easy but meaningless designations—but because it believes it is fighting a much larger fight than the Israeli-Palestinian one.

Hamas has a basic theory of Israel that is, at its heart, a theory of Islam. Muslim theologians have long wrestled with the problem of the Muslim world’s military, economic, and scientific weaknesses. Islam was born a conquering empire; the astonishing speed of its early conquests served for centuries as a favorite point of evidence for its divinity and truth. Modern-day Islamic weakness, then, implies to many ideologues an intolerable distancing between Muslims and their God.

The Jews, the Salafist theologian Rashid Rida wrote in 1898 in response to the First Zionist Congress, are “the penniless of the weakest of peoples, whom all governments are expelling.” If such weaklings can push back Islam, the problem of Islamic weakness reaches an intolerable breaking point.

This is why the Muslim world largely sat out the cataclysmic Houthi war in Yemen, which saw 85,000 children starved to death, or Assad’s butchery in Syria—but now marches in large numbers for Gaza. It is why an Iranian regime uninterested in rights for its own people engages in a long, expensive multifront war for “Palestinian rights.”

Iran did not build Hezbollah to not use it, nor the Houthis or its militias in Iraq and Syria. A war one side thinks is being fought to reclaim Islam’s rightful place in history will not end in Gaza. It has, alas, only just begun.

Haviv Rettig Gur is a senior analyst at The Times of Israel.


Finally, an essay that challenged several of our colleagues—and perhaps, you, too:
Andrew Sullivan is one of this country’s great independent thinkers. He’s allergic to tribalism and groupthink, perhaps because, as a gay Catholic and a conservative who makes the case for liberalism better than most liberals, he doesn’t really belong in any one tribe. This is part of what makes Andrew such an interesting and important writer.

Andrew is also far more critical of Israel than we tend to be. And one thing we’ve heard from you over the past three months is that you’d like to hear more debate on this subject in our pages.

All of which is why we thought to publish Andrew’s most recent essay from his must-read Substack The Weekly Dish. It is an example of Andrew’s writing at its best, and an important argument worth contending with as Israel’s war against Hamas wages on.

Andrew Sullivan: How Many Children Is Israel Willing to Kill?
ANDREW SULLIVAN
·
2:24 AM
Andrew Sullivan: How Many Children Is Israel Willing to Kill?
The atrocities of October 7, committed by a fundamentalist, totalitarian terror sect, were designed to replicate the antisemitic madness of the Holocaust—in the one place where this was never supposed to happen again. Like the architects of 9/11, the terrorists’ psychologically astute goal was to trigger the deepest fears of its victims, to terrorize into trauma and overreach.

And in this respect, Hamas surely succeeded, just as al-Qaeda did. And how could they not? It is simply not human to experience a rape that violent and remain altogether sane in the aftermath. And yes, just as we did over two decades ago, the Israelis have, understandably, lost their minds a little. The question, going forward, is whether they will lose their souls as well.

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Things Worth Remembering: Making Fun of Marxism
A limerick about Stalin and Lenin, written by a former communist, wittily punctures their politics.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
JAN 7

Soviet communist poster from Russia, 1924. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read two great limericks by Robert Conquest, click below:

LISTEN NOW · 1:56
I’m well aware that most of the poems I have summoned by heart are not amusing—far from it. In this series, we’ve explored the horrors of World War I and the Gulag, man’s confrontation with mortality, and many of the great philosophical questions—like Why am I here? and Will it matter that I lived?

I have never been drawn to light verse. In fact, I was given a book of light verse years ago, and even though it was edited by the wonderful writer Kingsley Amis, I still look at it with a slight contempt.

Of course, there are funny poems. Take, for example, P.G. Wodehouse’s poem that curses sloppy publishers, “Printers Error,” in which the subject of the poem, a writer, contemplates murder after spotting a now that has been transformed into a not.

Or the Australian critic Clive James’s “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered,” which I wrote about earlier. (For some reason, quite a lot of the funniest poems, or at least quite a lot of the funniest poems that stick in my head, are literary inside jokes, like James’s.)

The modern master of the comic poem was Robert Conquest—who was born in the monumentally consequential year of 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, and died nearly a century later in 2015. ...

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My Father Is an Imam in Gaza. Hamas Kidnapped Him for Refusing to Be Their Puppet.
Last weekend, twenty masked men dragged my father away. His crime? He refused to brainwash his people with their politics.
ALA MOHAMMED MUSHTAHA
JAN 4
GUEST POST
Mohammed Mushtaha, imam at Dhu ‘l-Nurayn mosque in Shuja’iyah in Gaza, was kidnapped by Hamas last week. (Photo courtesy of the author)
RAFAH—On Saturday, December 30, our front door was busted down, and twenty masked men barged in and took my father, a widely respected and deeply learned imam here in Gaza.

One dragged him by his head, and another grabbed him by his beard. My younger brother tried to intervene and reason with the kidnappers, but they beat him. I have a medical condition that makes it hard for me to breathe, so all I could do was watch as the horror unfolded.

I know that if Hamas kills my father, they’ll say that the Israeli army did it. But my father was very keen that even if he died, we should make known the despicable demands they made of him. It was his last request to us, literally as he was being carried out of the door, that should he die, we should publicize the real reason for his death, and it is this:

He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell.

This story starts before October 7, and even before 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza.

Our family has lived in Gaza for generations. Before 2007, my father worked for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. After Hamas took over, they forced him out of his position. This was a hard time for my family; my father was the sole breadwinner. Finally, after three long years, he came back to work first as a mosque servant, then a mosque guard, then an employee of the ministry and finally, he was appointed as a mosque imam. (My father is known throughout the Gaza Strip. He has a doctorate in sharia from Cairo’s storied Al-Azhar University, and is well-respected by his peers.)

For Hamas, being Muslim means supporting Hamas, and people who do not support Hamas aren’t Muslims. If you don’t abide by what Hamas tells you, you’ll lose your job or worse. To keep my father in line, ensuring that he would deliver only Hamas-approved Friday sermons and allow Hamas to use his mosque as a clandestine weapons depot, they arrested my brother and me at least ten times between 2016 and 2019. Sometimes they would speak politely, sometimes they would ask us to comply “for the sake of your sisters,” but always the threat of violence loomed in the background. And several times we were beaten and humiliated in front of our father. They beat him, too, once nearly blinding him.

He was forced to do things for Hamas; move money around, store things, keep their secrets.

As an imam, my father keeps the keys to the mosque and is responsible for safeguarding large sums of money that Muslims give as zakat, the mandatory almsgiving of our faith. Hamas members would take advantage of his duties and use the mosque to stash money, weapons, and equipment.

Sometimes they’d bring a large, wrapped-up prayer rug, which they said had been donated—except my father wasn’t allowed to open the rugs; only special volunteers were allowed to open them or transport the rugs in and out. My father had to open and close the doors and allow the sacred space to be used as a warehouse for Hamas. What choice did he have? It’s a bitter truth that Hamas thinks of mosques as the property of their regime and that they store weapons there.

Once there were big boxes that were marked as food aid. There wasn’t food inside, but something made of iron.


Inside Dhu ‘l-Nurayn mosque in Gaza, where Mohammed Mushtaha led prayers and delivered sermons. (Photo via Facebook)
The most egregious thing Hamas imposed on my father was the content of his Friday sermons. They instructed him to brainwash people with their politics, to stick with Hamas and with the “resistance,” and that it’s the only choice. That those who died fighting would be rewarded with 72 black-eyed virgins. Patience, jihad, all of that stuff. Hamas exploits our religion, pretending to be modern-day prophets, likening themselves to the companions of the prophet Muhammad.

Nobody told my father there was a plan to attack Israel on October 7. There’s just this constant overarching message within the mosques, Islamic classes, sermons, and lectures, that the “resistance”—meaning Hamas and only Hamas—is the only way to liberate Al-Aqsa and the only way to alleviate our suffering.

They do all this brainwashing to make you think the cause of our suffering is Israel. But I see very clearly who causes our suffering.

Whereas most aid in Gaza is only accessible to Hamas’s loyalists or those who toe the movement’s line, my father would collect and distribute zakat alms to those who actually needed it. Some congregants would donate food, furniture, and household goods; and many among Gaza’s neediest would come to my father, who would see that they were distributed fairly. My father also strove to give pious Muslims unbiased spiritual guidance, not the propaganda Hamas clerics deliver.

We fled our homes in Gaza City on October 20, moving from place to place until settling at my sister’s home in Rafah several weeks ago. Her home was bombed as well, and now roughly forty people, including women and seniors, are sharing space in a building that is partly reduced to rubble.

Since the war, Hamas has put enormous pressure on imams to persuade the population that their only choice is “the resistance.” Schools and universities aren’t functioning; the one thing that draws people in is prayer.

But now we have reached a time when nearly everyone in Gaza is saying Hamas caused the death of 20,000 people in Gaza and the injury of 50,000 more. So when the group demanded that my father go to a school where thousands of displaced persons are sheltering and urge them to stand with the “resistance”—to trust Hamas—he flat-out refused. My father knows the difference between right and wrong. He knew that refusing to act as a megaphone for Hamas could lead to his death, and yet he refused. He has a clear conscience. So does everyone who knows what really happened to him, and why.

This time, it’s not like the prior wars. This time, people are telling the truth.

Before October 7, people were afraid—and of course some people are still afraid—but ironically, when there is fighting, Hamas goes underground, and people can be more vocal about how Hamas has ruined our lives. People are starting to publicly violate the laws, rules, dictates, and orders of Hamas. They are openly cursing Hamas and its leaders in the streets and markets, and ignoring the directives of the few Hamas officials and police still above ground. They have caused so much damage, it’s undeniable. They’ve imposed themselves on our society, on my father, for too long. We’re all paying the price. People want freedom. We hope deeply that this war will end, and that Hamas will end with it.

I don’t know where my father is. I don’t know if I will ever see him alive again. My hope in telling this story to the public, and putting my name to it, is to somehow offer my father a measure of protection. Hamas may wish to release him and show the world that they would never harm an admired mosque preacher. God alone knows the future, but what I know is that, under no circumstances, would my father want to become a propaganda tool.

Mr. Mushtaha shared his story with The Free Press as part of the ongoing series Voices from Gaza, our partnership with the Center for Peace Communications.

https://substack.com/app?utm_source=email
Texas National Guard hold migrants crossing the Rio Grande River before crossing the United States border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on January 02, 2024. (David Peinado via Getty Images)
Welcome back. This is the all spin zone.

→ Claudine Gay is out: There might be other more important news in the world, but in my little corner of heterodox liberalism, this is the biggest news of the decade. Claudine Gay is now the shortest-serving Harvard University president in history. To recap: after hesitating to condemn Hamas freedom fighters after October 7, she then stumbled during a congressional hearing when Rep. Elise Stefanik asked her if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s student conduct rules. As The New York Times put it: “she fell into something of a prosecutorial trap”! Ah, it was so clever, the question so complicated. Then someone thought to read her old work, and it turns out she plagiarized dozens of times, quite egregiously (my favorite was plagiarizing someone else’s acknowledgements section). Still, Harvard’s board stood behind her. They had already sicced high-powered lawyers on journalists, threatening to sue The New York Post for reporting on the plagiarism. (Harvard’s lawyers advanced a strange theory to the Post that it was all made up by ChatGPT.) But the drumbeat was too loud. And in what is and will forever be the biggest news of 2024, no matter how many world wars start: Claudine Gay resigned.

Gay, for her part, refused to apologize. Her resignation letter blamed it all on “racial animus.” Her inevitable Times op-ed repeated the idea that she had fallen into “a well-laid trap” and doubled down on her own “broadly respected research.” No notes, Mrs. President. Never explain, never apologize!

→ Who came up with this plagiarism idea? The Associated Press set the tone for how this would be covered. Plagiarism being bad is a monstrous and deceitful new concept, developed in a lab by right-wing activists and unleashed on unsuspecting academics.

https://www.thefp.com/p/bill-ackman-how-to-fix-harvard?
Bill Ackman: How to Fix Harvard
Claudine Gay’s ouster won’t change things. The college needs a complete overhaul, starting with a resignation of the board and the removal of DEI from every corner of the institution…

By Bill Ackman

January 3, 2024

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In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8—before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza—came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw then-president Claudine Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large. I came to understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form. Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.


Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy (and even climate change, due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc., that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist—in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization that has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local, and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already-burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question that challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label that could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation, and more. Being called a racist got people canceled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, canceled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly acquired worldviews. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and canceled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country, since its founding, has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business, or otherwise, that if you switched the word white to black, the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous words are instructive:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to affect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless), and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.


I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system that can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.

America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism—another word for an equality of outcome system—will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history—a fact that is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors—it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people, generations after the abolishment of slavery, should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the disadvantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity (i.e, fairness) in how DEI operates that contributes to this resentment.

I was accused of being a racist by the president of the NAACP among others when I posted on X (formerly Twitter) that I had learned that the Harvard president search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former president Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.

When former president Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I, too, celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.

I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities, including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.

I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1 percent or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.

In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history, with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20 percent share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.

Compare this approach to the traditional one, where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees—they aren’t given that opportunity—yet they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It creates only resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.

While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon, so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.

I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to be the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.

All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.

This appears to have been the case with former president Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7, but there were many signs before then when she was dean of the faculty.
The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.
The Harvard board should not have run a search process that had a predetermined objective of hiring only a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president, so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of DEI ideology into the corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

As a side note, unrelated to the DEI issue, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable businesspeople for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a dean of the faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.

The president’s job—managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management—are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.

Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the university is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5 percent annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.

The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades (I believe it has grown about 7–8 percent per annum), and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.

The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20 percent. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20 percent in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?

In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems that I have identified above.

The corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the university since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.

The board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus, exposing the university to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.

And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the New York Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.

It was only after getting the story canceled that the board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms (i.e., “duplicative language”) to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.

The board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” (that to this day remain unnamed) who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the university and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower, and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.

According to the New York Post, the board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the university’s whistleblower protection policies.

Despite all of the above, the board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the board.

In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.


So what should happen?

The corporation board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure that enabled them to obtain their seats.

The board chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.

The board should not be principally composed of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be composed of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.

Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution that does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment that welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.

Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.

These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.

A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution, which can be found here, and that has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.

A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.

Today was an important step forward for the university. It is time we restore veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.

We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.


Bill Ackman is the CEO of Pershing Square, and holds bachelor’s and MBA degrees from Harvard. This piece originally appeared as a post on Ackman’s X account. Follow him @BillAckman.

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A couple of weeks ago, I had occasion to deliver two remote presentations to a group of professionals in the United States who sought to understand better the deeper meaning of what happened on October 7 and what has unfolded since, in the light of what Zionism was, was meant to be, and what it has promised to the Jewish people.

Today’s post includes the first of those two presentations (edited for length and to mask the identities of participants), which we’re making available to all our readers, including a transcript below (which we usually do only for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside).

It runs just shy of 50 minutes, and is a brief history of the Zionist movement, its fundamental commitments and promises, and serves as a way of setting up that second segment on “How October 7 broke the promise that Zionism had made to the Jewish people,” which we will run tomorrow. We will post a very brief excerpt for all of our listeners, while the full episode will be available, also tomorrow, to exclusively to paid subscribers.

Israelis are facing an unfolding crisis, but also an important opportunity to rebuild. If you would like to share our conversation about what they are feeling and what is happening that the English press can’t cover, please subscribe today.

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We Were Taught to Hate Jews
‘It’s like asking me how often I drink water. Antisemitism was everywhere.’ Apostates, former Islamists, and an almost-terrorist on how they changed their minds.
MADELEINE ROWLEY
DEC 16
∙
GUEST POST


Iranian protesters burn an Israeli flag during an anti-Israel rally at Enqelab-e Eslami (Islamic Revolution) Square. (Sobhan Farajvan via Getty Images)
The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel. They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).

These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

Some of the people you will hear from below have received death threats for speaking out on issues like antisemitism and sexism in the Muslim world. One uses a pen name to protect herself and her daughter from her terrorist ex-husband, who is currently jailed in Egypt. All of them came to reject their loathing for Jewish people and the West, and have rebuilt their lives in the wake of their realizations. Here are their stories, which you can read or click to listen to each author recite in the audio recordings below.


“To enter our classroom, we had to step on a painting of the Israeli flag on the ground.”
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-were-taught-to-hate-jews?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

LISTEN NOW · 3:19
When I was born, Iran was still free. You could drink and dance, and women could wear whatever they wanted. I’ll never forget my first day of school after the Islamic Revolution. I was six, and my mother entered my room with a long, dark, and formless mantle and a piece of fabric for my hair and neck.

“My darling,” she said, “this is your uniform.”

I didn’t understand. I pointed to my closet and said, “But I have so many other beautiful dresses.”

She explained that I had to wear it if I wanted to become educated. I remember seeing the boy next door walk out his front door. He wore the same clothes he always did. I knew, but couldn’t accept, that my life would change, and his wouldn’t.

At my school in Tehran, in my new shapeless uniform, we read the Quran every morning and repeated sayings like, “Down with the USA, down with Israel.” To enter our classroom, we had to step on a painting of the Israeli flag on the ground. There are still universities in Iran that have painted American and Israeli flags on the ground, but most students walk around them.

The Iranian people and the Israelis are victims of the same monster—Islamists. In 1999, I was imprisoned under Ayatollah Khamenei for speaking out against the marginalization of women. I was 24. I was afraid that they wanted to execute me in jail, but instead they released me in the hopes that I would lead them to my husband, who was one of the leaders organizing protests against the Iranian regime. Luckily, a friend smuggled me in the back of his car to reunite with my husband in secret. We lived in Turkey for six months before moving to Belgium and have been married for 26 years.

When I saw the problems that we face in Belgium regarding radical Islam today, I began to write opinion pieces on the subject and eventually entered politics. I was elected to the Belgian Federal Parliament in 2019.

Islamists have ruined Iran, and they have destroyed the Middle East. Do we want to wait until this atrocity ruins everything in our Western countries too? As an elected official here in Belgium, I try to be the eyes and ears of some of the people who are sleeping.

Darya Safai, 48, is a member of the Chamber of Representatives of Belgium. She was born in Tehran, Iran and lives in Belgium.


“It’s like asking me how often I drink water. Antisemitism was everywhere.”

LISTEN NOW · 3:15
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-were-taught-to-hate-jews?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I was 17 and living in Vancouver, Canada, when a teenage boy came up to me at school and pointed to my black hijab.

“You’re Muslim?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, a little surprised he knew, since Muslims and women in hijabs weren’t a common sight in Vancouver at the time.

He smiled at me and said, “I’m Jewish! We’re cousins.”

I remember recoiling and scrunching my face in disgust. He was understandably shocked. I’m ashamed of this reaction, but it was involuntary. It’s how my Islamist mother and her extremist Sunni husband raised me. After my mother and biological father divorced, she met a man in Canada who was living in a mosque at the time. He took her as his second wife, which is permissible in Islam.

Antisemitism was part of my Islamic education, and it was part of the colloquial discourse when I lived in Egypt for two years in my teens. It was infused into my family’s culture. How often did I encounter antisemitism? It’s like asking me how often I drink water.

One time at the market, when I was about eight, my aunt picked up a cucumber and said, “Gosh, the cucumbers are so small this year. The Jews are putting cancer in the vegetables.” I told her that was impossible, but she insisted that “Jews can do anything.”

At 19, I was forced to marry an al-Qaeda terrorist named Essam Marzouk. My mother and her husband were sympathizers of a group called the mujahideen, which, after 9/11, would be folded into al-Qaeda, and they knew that Essam was a terrorist. My mother said I needed a man who was strong enough to control me, so that’s who she chose.

He was 36 and acting as Osama bin Laden’s counterpart in Canada. I didn’t want to get pregnant, but in Islam, wives can’t refuse their husbands. I gave birth to my daughter at 20.

A year later, I took my mother to the hospital, and an agent from CSIS, Canada’s version of the CIA, approached me and told me that I was married to a terrorist. I knew he terrorized me—he beat me mercilessly, and once he punched me so hard that he broke his wrist—but I didn’t know that he was an actual terrorist.

It took a little bit of time, but eventually, I got out. I did it for my daughter’s sake; my mother and Essam planned to have her circumcised, an abhorrent practice known as female genital mutilation, or FGM.

When I was 25, I filed a restraining order against Essam while recovering from a miscarriage at my mother’s house. About eight months later, a woman from CSIS knocked on my door and handed me a black-and-white photo of Essam behind bars in Egypt. I was finally, truly free. I wrote a book called Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, and I now run a nonprofit called Free Hearts Free Minds, which supports ex-Muslims living in Muslim-majority countries and all over the world. As far as I know, my ex-husband is still in jail in Egypt, but I do what I can to protect my daughter from him.

Yasmine Mohammed is an author and podcast host. She was born in Vancouver, Canada. She uses a pen name to protect her safety and has withheld her location and age.


“Anti-Israel propaganda is a constant.”

LISTEN NOW · 3:15
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-were-taught-to-hate-jews?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Even though my parents were liberal—they never fasted or prayed, and they drank alcohol—I went to a conservative Shia school like all kids in Iran. Shia Islam is the second most widely practiced form of Islam worldwide, and most Iranians are Shia. At school, I became religious and truly believed what I was taught—that you could go to hell for committing the most minor of sins. I was terrified of going to hell. Once, I burned the skin on my arm just to feel what hell was like. I still have the scar.

At 13 years old, I jumped out the window of my school building in Shiraz, Iran, breaking both of my legs and arms and fracturing my back. I was confined to a wheelchair for seven months. According to Shi’ism, males can’t sin up until 15 years of age, so even though suicide is a sin, I reasoned that if I killed myself before I turned 15, it didn’t count as one, and I’d go to heaven.

The only reason I didn’t try again was because I saw how it devastated my parents.

No amount of politics and military strategy will solve the issues in the Middle East because radical Islamists like Hamas welcome death. Just like I believed I found a loophole to avoid hell, Hamas believes dying for the cause of Islam will prevent them from going to hell. They want to become martyrs and go straight to heaven. Who wouldn’t?

It doesn’t help that anti-Israel propaganda is a constant. When I was growing up, it was on TV and it was part of our school curriculum. For example, if a person was being stingy, someone might say, “You’re such a Jew.” We were told to chant “Death to Israel” many times in school, and once, I remember being excited because my teacher said we were going to burn the Israeli flag. We weren’t excited to be anti-Israel, per se; we were just little boys who were excited to watch something be set on fire. But it did the trick—we were eager to show hate toward Jews even if we didn’t know it.

My school also took us to a yearly pro-Palestinian event, but it really ended up being a big “Death to Israel” event.

I started doubting Islam at around 16 and was a full-on atheist by 18. While living in Iran, I founded an online group called Atheist Republic, which now has over two million followers. I moved to Canada on a student visa because I wanted a better education and I wanted to be free to express my opinions. It was also dangerous for me to remain in Iran as an atheist activist. My mother passed away from cancer, but she was very proud of my work as an atheist activist, and she died as an atheist herself.

I believe the solution for the bloodshed in the Middle East today lies with the Iranian people, the majority of whom are more liberal and secular like my parents. We have an entire nation of 80 million people who are shouting for Zan Zendagi Azadi or Woman, Life, Freedom—that they want life in this world over the next one.

Armin Navabi, 39, is an author and the founder of Atheist Republic. He was born in Tehran, Iran and lives in Canada.


“The word Jew was an insult.”

LISTEN NOW · 2:51
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-were-taught-to-hate-jews?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“The last hour will not come about until the Muslims fight the Jews, killing the Jews, such that the Jew will hide behind a stone or tree and a stone or a tree would say O Muslim, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. . .”

I first heard this hadith—an instructional Islamic text passed down from the Prophet Muhammad—echoing throughout my neighborhood in Mosul, Iraq, from the minaret’s speakers during a Friday sermon. I lived in a neighborhood where most people practiced a strict, fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam called Salafism.

Growing up, I heard only negative things when it came to Jewish people and Judaism. The word Jew was an insult—a person might call someone a Jew if they did something wrong or were being cruel and uncaring. But by the time I heard this hadith, at 14, I was already starting to reject many aspects of my religion and decided to reject this hadith.

As a teenager, I sparked debates about Islam on Facebook. I was drawn to debating—there was no formal debate club at my school in Mosul like there are in the U.S. or the UK, so I used social media to discuss controversial topics. I created a post and asked about the historical accuracy of the Prophet Muhammad slaughtering one of the Jewish tribes at Medina. The majority of responses told me that it did happen and that the Jews were traitors who deserved collective punishment.

I started getting into trouble at school and was sometimes kicked out of class for refusing to wear a hijab, which I saw as something that took agency away from me. I was dabbling in a minority sect of Islam called Quranism, which rejected hadith and the hijab, and I was reading internet blogs and Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in secret. It wasn’t long before I became known as an apostate at my school.

When ISIS took over Mosul in 2014, my parents feared for my life. My mother knew that if ISIS captured me, I would be stoned to death for how outspoken I’d been. I escaped to the Kurdistan region of Iraq three months after ISIS took control, and then I boarded a plane to London alone. I was 17.

I took off my hijab on the flight to the UK and never put it on again—that was almost ten years ago. I worked basic jobs until I graduated from the London School of Economics, and now I work as a management consultant for a large consulting firm. Though my parents still live in Iraq, and we have since reestablished a close relationship, I do not miss Mosul. My life started the minute I landed in London.

Rana Mallah, 26, is a consultant in London. She was born in Mosul, Iraq.


“At 17, I started to plan a terrorist attack in London.”

LISTEN NOW · 3:37
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-were-taught-to-hate-jews?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I was radicalized at age six. My parents practiced Wahhabism, which is a subset of the broader extremist Salafi movement. They taught me that Britain was the enemy, even though I was born in London.

One day when I was 14, my father and I went to a Jewish home because my father was doing some business with them. The couple had a toddler who smiled at me and wanted to play. The parents told me it was okay to play with him, and as I was playing with the baby, I thought, “I hate them, but they don’t hate me. They trust me with their child.” That’s when I began to question the antisemitism that had been drilled into me for nearly a decade. Another time, I was sitting on the couch, and my father sat next to me and said that Allah punished Jews because they were an evil race of people. I remember thinking, “How is an entire race of people evil?”

Unfortunately, these doubts didn’t stop me from becoming a Muslim extremist, and at 17, I started to plan a terrorist attack. I plotted to set off a remotely detonated IED in East London at Canary Wharf, a bustling business center near Central London. But I got only as far as the method of the attack and the location before I abandoned the idea because I thought, “What about all the innocent people who might get caught up in the attack and die? How is that right?”

Even though I believed in this ideology of hate, I was still friendly, approachable, and fairly popular in my public school. I had plenty of Christian and Jewish friends.

Obviously, this was a very strange, cognitively dissonant part of my life, not only because I was friends with people I was planning to kill but also because I’ve known I was gay since I was eight.

According to several hadith, the specific punishment for someone like me is execution by being thrown headfirst off a building or being stoned to death. I grew up hating myself and thought if I successfully executed a terror attack, I would be caught, I’d go to prison, and the rest of my life would be decided for me.

After I brought myself back from the brink, I started speaking out against terrorism. That’s when my doubts about Islam started to creep in, and I began to research all the questions I had about it. When my parents found out I was gay, my dad said the only way he would allow me to live at home was if I agreed to be exorcised—the Muslim version of conversion therapy.

I had nowhere else to go, so I agreed to it, but the effect it had on me psychologically was traumatic. Three months after that happened, I left my home, and I never went back. I no longer have a relationship with my family. I do have concerns about becoming a target for speaking out about this, but I wouldn’t say I’m afraid. I’ve made peace with the idea that I’m willing to die for my values. That’s one thing that hasn’t really changed about me from my extremist days until now.

Today, I’m an agnostic deist and totally reject organized religion, but I still understand how extremist Muslims think. They believe in something so much that they are willing to die as a martyr for it. There’s just no frame of reference for that in the West.

Sohail Ahmed, 31, is a student at Cambridge University. He lives in London.

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Things Worth Remembering: September 1, 1939
The poem W. H. Auden wrote in response to the outbreak of World War II achieved a newfound fame in the wake of 9/11.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
DEC10
Newsboy holds paper with war declaration New York, NY, on September 9, 1939. (via Getty Images)
Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” click below:
https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-auden-things-worth-remembering?
LISTEN NOW · 2:02
I want to turn today to the question of W. H. Auden and what happened to him just as the world was going mad.

Auden was hardly the only one left disoriented—shattered—by the outbreak of World War II, but I think his response to the war—his poem “September 1, 1939”—offers a uniquely powerful illustration of what happens to us when everything we think we know becomes uncertain.

The poem receded for decades—in no small part because Auden didn’t care for it—but after the attacks of 9/11, it achieved a newfound fame. It was especially popular in New York City, where the Twin Towers once stood, and because that’s where Auden wrote it. As he says in the poem’s opening lines:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street

That is a good opening.

What comes next is even more grabbing:

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:...

Subscribe to The Free Press to read the rest.

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Why Two Parents Are the Ultimate Privilege
Half of American babies are born to unmarried mothers. And those with two parents, Melissa Kearney argues, have an immense advantage.
BARI WEISS
DEC
(Photo by Lambert via Getty Images)
One of the words that’s become utterly void of meaning in the last few years because of its overuse and misuse is privilege. White privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege, gender privilege, heterosexual privilege, even hot privilege. In these contexts, privilege is a stain, an original sin meant to guilt the offending party into repentance.

“Check your privilege” became a common refrain of the past decade. What all of this has done is confuse and undermine the idea of real privilege, which, of course, really exists in this country.

The ultimate privilege in America is not being born white or straight or male. The ultimate privilege, as Melissa Kearney argues, is being born into a household with two parents.

Melissa Kearney is an economist at the University of Maryland and her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, argues that declining marriage rates in America—and the corresponding rise in children being raised in single parent households—are driving many of the country’s biggest economic problems. In the 1950s, fewer than 5 percent of babies in this country were born to unmarried mothers. Today, nearly half of all babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. Most surprising—and worrisome—is how this trend is divided along class lines, with children whose mothers don’t have a college degree being more than twice as likely—compared to the children of college-educated mothers—to live in a single parent home.

Many of the arguments Kearney makes in her book are what you might call common sense. And yet the book has received criticism. But as celebrated economist and our friend Tyler Cowen said of Melissa’s book, “it’s remarkable that such a book is so needed, but it is.”

The word privilege, as Melissa Kearney uses it, is not a dirty word. Quite the opposite. It’s aspirational. It’s meant to inspire policies, programs, and changes in our social norms to even the playing field so that we can do better for all of our children. So that every child in America has the best possible chance for flourishing. That is what every child in this country deserves.

Why Half of American Babies are Born to Unmarried Mothers

The Free Press

Episode

Why people aren’t getting married anymore:

BW: Over the past 40 years, there has been a dramatic decline in the share of children living with married parents. In the 1950s, less than 5 percent of babies in America were born out of wedlock. Today, half of all babies in this country are born to unmarried mothers. How did we get from there to here?

MK: It’s a misconception that couples are becoming less wed to the institution of marriage, so they’re just cohabiting. That’s not the case. Roughly 30 percent of kids in the U.S. live outside a two-parent home. More kids in the U.S. than in any other country in the world are now living with just one parent. And it’s not about an increase in divorce. Divorce in the U.S. is down from the mid-eighties. This decline in marriage, this rise in the share of kids living with just one parent, and this rise in nonmarital childbearing, has happened predominantly outside the college-educated class. That’s why this topic is so instrumental to conversations and concerns about inequality and threats to social mobility. It’s really among more economically vulnerable parents that there’s been this rise in kids living outside of a two-parent or married parent setting.

BW: This wasn’t always the case. From the 1960s through the 1990s, women with college degrees were actually less likely to be married than women without college degrees. What happened in those intervening decades?

MK: In the ’60s and ’70s, there was a sociocultural revolution in the U.S., which included changing expectations about marriage, a greater acceptance of having a child outside of a marriage, and changing expectations about gender norms. We saw decreases in marriage across the education distribution in roughly equal proportion. In the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, marriage rates among college-educated adults stabilized. Economics is a big part of the story. College-educated adults did really well in those decades, and they continued to see increases in their earnings. But outside the college-educated class, men saw their employment rates decline and their earnings decline.

We saw a loss in a number of jobs that in previous generations provided family-sustaining, well-paying jobs for men without college degrees: manufacturing jobs, industrial production jobs, etc. Those jobs were eliminated, and we saw a corresponding decrease in marriage and an increase in the share of kids living in single-mother homes among affected communities such that economists have drawn a causal connection. That’s the sort of unromantic model that strips out love and compatibility and just looks at the economic incentives to marry or not. It turns out to be pretty predictive.

BW: The one big exception to the rule here is Asian American families, who across all education groups and all classes have really high rates of marriage and two-parent households. Why do you think that is, and what can we learn from their success?

MK: That was the finding that surprised me the most when writing this book. Among whites, among blacks, among Hispanics, there’s this huge college gradient. But among Asian Americans, regardless of maternal education, there are really high rates of two-parent homes. So the least-educated moms who identify in the census as Asian American are more likely to live in married parent situations than the most educated Hispanic and black moms. It’s not explained by different economic situations. Non-college-educated Asian men saw the same economic trends over the past 40 years as white men, black men, and Hispanic men, but without the subsequent reduction in marriage. That makes me think that there is a strong role here for social convention.

Why the decline in marriage is bad for children and bad for the economy:

BW: You say that the decline in the two-parent household has economic consequences that we cannot afford to ignore. Why is a two-parent household, from the perspective of an economist—not a social conservative or a pastor—better than one parent in the household?

MK: Two parents combined have more resources than one. Two parents in a home bring in the earnings—or at least the earnings capacity—of two adults. And so, in a very straightforward way, we see that kids growing up in single-mother homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up in married parent homes. (Kids in single-father homes are three times as likely to live in poverty.) Some of that reflects the fact that people with lower levels of education or income are more likely to become single parents. But even if you compare across moms of the same education group, you see that kids who grow up in a household with two parents have household incomes that are about twice as high. That means that those parents are paying for things like a nicer house in a safe neighborhood with good school districts. But they also spend more time with their kids. We see that kids who grow up with married parents have more parental time invested in them: reading to your kid, talking to your kid, driving your kids to activities. If there are two parents in the household, there’s just more time capacity.

None of this is to denigrate single moms or single dads. It’s just a reflection of the reality that two adults in the household have more combined time than one alone. Another set of resources that we have a lot of evidence on is there’s more “emotional bandwidth” (and less stress) in households that have two parents as compared to one. We see in the data that married parents are less likely to resort to spanking and harsher parenting. They’re more likely to report having strong, nurturing bonds with their kids. We also see that kids from two-parent households are less likely to have behavioral issues. They’re more likely to reach educational milestones. They’re less likely to get in trouble with the law. All things that set them up to be in a better position to thrive in life.

It’s certainly not the case that all of these single-parent households would be better off if the second parent were in the house. We have evidence that when the second parent might be a negative influence, the child is better off with just one parent. If the second parent would bring instability and chaos, that’s not good for the kid.

BW: Some people might hear all of these dire statistics and think, “We were better off in the world before the 1960s, where men had a very clear socially prescribed role as the breadwinners and women had a very clearly socially prescribed role, which is they took care of the home, and maybe we should return back to that.” How would you respond?

MK: I do not in any sense bemoan women’s economic independence. Unequivocally, I think it’s a good thing that women are more able to provide financially for themselves and their children and not have to be married. Having said that, to the extent that these trends are being driven by men’s economic opportunity and position being eroded, that’s a bad thing. And we should be able to hold both of those thoughts in our mind at the same time, that women having economic opportunities is a good thing and men losing earnings potential and employment is a bad thing.

Another important thing to note is in survey evidence, you don’t see widespread rejection of marriage as an institution. You don’t see in the U.S. that there’s been a widespread move away from the desire to get married. Rather, it feels like achieving a stable, married home is a bit of a luxury good. It’s something that’s harder for people without higher levels of education and income to achieve. So for that reason, we should not be okay with that advantageous institution being something that’s increasingly out of reach for those who aren’t in the highest education income classes in our society.

On solutions to the single-parent problem:

BW: What are some of the policies and programs that you think the local and federal government should adopt to help strengthen families?

MK: If you look at the Administration for Children and Families budget, only 1 percent of their budget goes to community programs that have an explicit goal of strengthening families. I would put a lot more money and research emphasis on building up an evidence base in the kinds of community programs that work and then scale them. We also need to double down on all of the things that we talk about to improve the economic position of adults in this country without college degrees. If the adult can’t bring in money and doesn’t have stable employment, that brings so many struggles. Bolstering the economic position of vulnerable adults and parents is really critical and we just haven’t done enough there.

I also think we need to promote a social convention of two-parent homes for kids. We do have social science evidence suggesting that role models matter, that celebrity messaging matters, that local leader messaging matters. This is why I think it’s important we’re honest about the benefits of two-parent households and fatherhood engagement for kids. I think many people are rightly hesitant to promote two-parent households because in the past, single mothers and their children were so stigmatized that they were essentially outcasts from communities. We should never go back to that, but there’s got to be a way for us to promote two-parent involvement in their kids’ lives.

BW: One of the things that is surprising about our current moment is that some of the programs, including subsidies and tax credits, that used to be thought of as the precinct of the political left, have now been embraced by surprising people on the right. Talk to us about the changing politics of this issue that makes you think bipartisanship might be possible on this.

MK: People on the left have traditionally been more willing or eager to spend money to help low-income families. Now, people on the right are very explicit about the need for pro-family policy agenda. We all want to build a healthier society for families, and we should be supporting vulnerable families regardless of parental marriage structure. In the past, cash welfare was only available to single moms, and if you had a man living in the house, you would lose your check. Obviously, that’s a bad idea.

Even though we don’t explicitly disincentivize marriage now, our tax and transfer system does implicitly disincentivize marriage. For example, if you’re married and you’re both working, you’re much less likely to qualify for the earned income tax credit because our tax code works where you pool the income across two people. So a woman who might be on the margin of making $30,000 gets the earned income tax credit. If she marries that guy making $50,000, her and her child lose the earned income tax credit and lose Medicaid. This gives her the incentive to cohabit instead of getting married. And so our tax and transfer system unintentionally does discourage marriage—at least between two people who work. We should be getting rid of all of those legacy effects.

Why this is “forbidden” research:

BW: This book and your findings have been received like it’s been a nuclear bomb, at least in certain contexts. Why is that? How did this topic become so out of bounds?

MK: This issue was first raised very prominently by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the ’60s when he was an analyst at the Department of Labor, and he wrote a memo calling attention to the large share of unmarried moms in that black American community at the time. A big part of his memo was saying there’s high unemployment rates among black men that’s contributing to this. But in the ’60s, it got shut down with accusations of him being a racist. And there was some really unfortunate language that would strike us now as unproductive, as cultural shaming. So it got shut down as a racist topic for years.

In the ’80s and ’90s, the welfare reform debate had explicit language in the final federal law calling attention to the rise in nonmarital childbearing as a social problem. So it very much took this position that marriage was beneficial for kids. But during that debate, there were some really ugly, racialized stereotypes of the welfare queen. So I do think the racial element has made it particularly challenging to talk about.

BW: You write that you would speak to your fellow scholars about your plans for writing this book, and they would say things along the lines of, “I tend to agree about all of this, but are you sure you want to be out there saying this publicly?” How many areas of research, inquiry, and basic curiosity about the most important things in our lives and culture are third rail now? If it’s taboo to write a book saying two parents in a house are better materially than one, what else is off-limits, and what can we do to combat that?

MK: The University of Chicago Press published my book. It wasn’t an easy process. I got four reviews, and one of the reviewers basically told the Press, “You should not be publishing a book in 2023 that calls for a return to marriage.” So even at the Chicago Press, which you might think is the most committed to just telling the hard truths, it wasn’t a walk in the park to get this book past the reviewers. This worries me deeply as a scholar, as a teacher, as a researcher. It worries me deeply that there are right answers and there are wrong answers among academics.

There are clear pressures of what topics are valued, what topics people should pursue, what topics are going to get published in the best journals. I think that is really antithetical to what we should be doing as scholars. When my friends outside the academy ask, “Is it really as bad as people say?” I’m like, “Oh, it’s something that worries me deeply.”


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reaction: “Please God, no!”

China insists everything is okay. At the request of the World Health Organization, Beijing has given assurances that the surge is not caused by a new virus but is rather a combo of the flu and other bugs in the country’s first winter without a lockdown.

And yet, China’s claims won’t completely alleviate global concerns because, as Alina Chan argues in her piece for The Free Press today, the country still has a chronic trust problem when it comes to public health.

“Everything is a state secret,” one frustrated Beijing parent recently told Taiwanese media. Meanwhile, global public health officials still lack the access they need to make their own conclusions about the outbreak.

And so, even if this latest illness really is nothing—or at least not Covid-level something—the situation still demonstrates how little we’ve learned from the Covid-19 pandemic. Alina argues for radical transparency measures that must happen soon—or else we may be doomed to repeat the mistakes of four years ago.

China Says This New Outbreak Is Nothing to Worry About. How Can We Be Sure?
ALINA CHAN
·
2:46 AM
China Says This New Outbreak Is Nothing to Worry About. How Can We Be Sure?
Two weeks ago, Taiwanese media were the first to report an outbreak of pneumonia in several northern regions of China. Footage showed crowds of masked parents and children at a hospital in Beijing. Sick children attached to intravenous drips filled the lobby of another hospital in Liaoning as they waited hours to see a doctor.

These reports were immediately flagged by the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), a Boston-based international organization that scours the web for signs of unusual health events around the world. ProMED analyst Dan Silver said in his initial report that “it is too early to project whether this could be another pandemic but as a wise virologist once said to me, ‘The pandemic clock is ticking, we just do not know what time it is.’ ”

Read full story
Israel’s ‘Rambo’

“We stayed the rest of the day, killing terrorists. And I felt nothing.”

That’s Rami, a 70-year-old Israeli who fought in the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, telling The Free Press’s Tim Samuels what he did when his kibbutz was attacked by Hamas on October 7. Rami’s story is just one example of the heroism shown by many Israelis that day—and the psychological toll the violence has taken on their lives.

The full interview with the man now being called “Rambo” by some of his neighbors is a must-watch:

The Boys Aren’t Alright

In recent years, leading social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been investigating the explosion in mental health problems among teenage girls coinciding with their use of social media.

Jonathan has long argued that, while mental health problems are on the rise for boys too, the problems girls suffer are so much greater we should focus our efforts on helping them. But, as he explains in an essay for The Free Press today, he’s changed his mind: “I’ve found that boys are doing very badly too, but it was harder to see.”

Click through to read his full argument below:

Jonathan Haidt: I’m Worried About the Boys, Too
JONATHAN HAIDT
·
DEC 5
Jonathan Haidt: I’m Worried About the Boys, Too
Since 2015, I have been trying to solve a mystery: all of a sudden, around 2013, rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm began rising rapidly for American adolescents. Those born in and after 1996—Gen Z—have the worst mental health of any generation for which we have data (going back to the “Greatest Generation,” born 1900 to 1925).

You can see the sudden change in Figure 1, which plots the percentage of adolescents (ages 12–17) who self-report at least one major depressive episode in the past year, as measured by a major national U.S. survey.

What stands out is the trend for girls. It’s like a hockey stick, with a bend that begins going up in 2013. Why that year? That is the year after Facebook bought Instagram, and, with so much publicity, girls of all ages flocked onto the platform. In graph after graph, Jean Twenge, Zach Rausch, and I found sharp increases in poor mental health for girls right around 2013. One major correlational study found that girls who are heavy users of social media are three times more likely to be depressed than non-users, while for boys, there’s no sign of harm for light use, and heavy users are “only” twice as likely to be depressed as non-users.

The conclusion was clear: social media harms girls via multiple well-known mechanisms including social comparison, early sexualization, perfectionism, cyberbullying and relational aggression, and emotional contagion. Mystery solved, right?

Not quite. What about the boys? Their depression rates also go up in Figure 1, but not as much, and without a clear “elbow.” So, maybe the story is that boys use social media less than girls do, and/or it is less harmful to them, so we should focus most of our efforts on helping girls.

Read full story
A quick note: Jonathan’s piece was first published on the site of a new organization called the American Institute for Boys and Men. It was founded by Richard Reeves, who you may remember from the Father’s Day episode of Honestly and who is the author of an excellent book on the masculinity crisis, Of Boys and Men. We wish the AIBM well and will be following their work with great interest.

A Jaw-Dropping Congressional Hearing on Antisemitism

Tuesday’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism saw the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT opt for exactly the kind of equivocation and double standards that have defined elite schools’ responses to hateful speech directed at Jews on their campuses since October 7.

In one particularly astonishing turn, Rep. Elise Stefanik asked the university chiefs whether calling for the genocide of Jews breached their schools’ codes of conduct. Not a single one of them responded with a yes.

Bill Ackman, an investor and Harvard donor who has been critical of the school’s weak response to campus antisemitism since October 7, said the answers reflected the three presidents’ “profound moral bankruptcy” and called on them to resign. “If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour,” he concluded.

It’d be one thing if these college leaders were free speech hard-liners who consistently applied this principle toward all. But that, of course, is not the case. Take Harvard president Claudine Gay, who said yesterday that when it comes to calls for the genocide of the Jews, context is everything. The same Claudine Gay helped oust Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan from an administrative post after his decision to serve on Harvey Weinstein’s defense team led to calls for his resignation. (For a fuller look at the hypocrisy, we recommend this piece by the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium.)

When Gay could summon the courage to denounce antisemitism, she said it was “a symptom of ignorance” and that “the cure is knowledge.”

It’s a nice thought, but the truth is more complicated—and more unsettling. After all, some of the most credentialed kids in the country have been taking part in hateful protests, calling for the freedom of Palestine “from the river to the sea.”

This paradox is nothing new. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia said in a 1997 speech on the Holocaust, “the most frightening aspect of it all. . . [is that the Holocaust] happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world. . . a world leader in most fields of art, science, and intellect.”

Scalia quoted from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University: “Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility. . . . it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life. These. . . are the objects of a University.”

Virtue, conscience, humility. These were all in short supply at yesterday’s hearing.


Also on our radar. . .

→ The candidate’s dilemma: Nothing gets Joe Biden in the mood to overshare like a small group of very rich Democrats. Last year he mused to a room of multimillionaires about the very real risk of “Armageddon.” Yesterday at a fundraiser in Boston, Biden said: “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.”

Joe, Donald, can you please come to some kind of agreement? How about you settle this privately and let someone else, you know, run the country?

→ Antisemitism with dance moves! A new survey of Americans under 30 suggests that TikTok isn’t just promoting antisemitism; it’s driving it. Researchers from Generation Lab found that a user of the Chinese-owned platform is nearly three times more likely than an Instagram user and nearly nine times more likely than an X user to hold antisemitic or anti-Zionist views, such as the idea that Jews are disloyal to America or that Jews control the media, or that Israel does not have the right to defend itself.

The same study also found that, for every view of a TikTok video with a pro-Israel hashtag in the U.S., there are 54 views of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags.

If only there were something we could do about this noxious app turning our kids into antisemites. Oh, wait. There is!

→ Democracy with Chinese characters: From homelessness and overdose deaths to housing and the cost of living, San Francisco’s municipal leaders have a lot on their plate. But Supervisor Connie Chan is worried about a bigger problem: the dangerous threat to democracy that is non-Chinese candidates adopting “authentic” Chinese names in local elections.

Ballots in San Francisco are printed in both English and Chinese. Under Chan’s proposals, Chinese names may be used by candidates only if they were born with them or they have been using them for more than two years. Otherwise, they must stick to a clunky transliteration of their actual name.

“Cultural appropriation does not make someone Asian,” Chan told The San Francisco Standard. “There is no alternative definition to whether someone is Asian or not. It should be based solely on a person’s ethnicity and heritage. That’s what this law is about.”

But this won’t stop San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who adopted the Chinese name—謝安宜 or “safety, pleasant”—when she was appointed by the mayor last year. As long as she waits to file for reelection until next summer, she’ll be well within the two-year threshold.


Oliver Wiseman is an editor and writer for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

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The Free Press Goes to Washington to Defend Free Speech
Amid a wave of legislation around the world curbing free speech, our reporter Rupa Subramanya went to Washington to defend American liberties.
BARI WEISS
DEC 5
Free Press reporter Rupa Subramanya testifying at the House of Representatives.
I met Rupa Subramanya on Twitter (now X) in early 2022. It was during the Canadian truckers’ protest, and she seemed to be one of the only people actually trying to understand what was going on: Why were these people so angry? Were they really revolting over a Covid vaccine mandate? And why, despite the fact that the protesters were from every walk of life, was the legacy press insisting that they were driven by bigotry?

Rupa had the sensibility and mindset of a great reporter: curious, astute, open-minded, incisive—and disinclined to believe groupthink.

So, I messaged her. What do you think about writing something for us?

That led to Rupa’s first piece for The Free Press: What the Truckers Want.

In her story, she wrote: “​​I live in downtown Ottawa, within view of Parliament Hill, and have spent the past 10 days or so bundled up and walking around the protests. I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks, and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist, or misogynist.” She also found that the truckers, the vast majority of whom were actually vaccinated, were really protesting about something else: “A sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.”

Since then, Rupa has reported for The Free Press on state-sanctioned euthanasia and race-based criminal sentencing in Canada. She exposed the “giant grift” that is ESG and how PayPal has become a cornerstone of our emerging social credit system. She flew to West Virginia and got the first big interview with country phenom Oliver Anthony. She’s written about the end of affirmative action, and, of course, Justin Trudeau’s war on internet freedom.

If there’s one theme that runs through Rupa’s work it is this: the urgent threat to our liberties by the combined power of government and Big Tech.

It’s hard to think of a more urgent subject than that one at the moment. Which is why we felt it was so important to fly Rupa down to Washington late last week to testify at a House of Representatives hearing on free expression.

Watch her impassioned testimony here. It’s seven minutes long and worth watching with your children. (She also appeared on Fox and Newsmax.)


This is the second time a Free Press reporter has headed to the capital in recent weeks. Our intern, Julia Steinberg, offered powerful testimony before Congress on the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.

This is all to say: we are a small team, but our impact is enormous.

So if you believe in our work and want to make sure The Free Press is here to stay, please become a paid subscriber today.

—BW

‘As the helicopters carrying the released hostages landed, traffic stopped. People got out of their cars and broke into song.’
DOUGLAS MURRAY
NOV 30
Members of Kibbutz Kfar Aza watch a news broadcast announcing the release of members of their community from Hamas captivity. (Photo by Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“What is life?” a child asks Oriana Fallaci at the beginning of her great 1969 book Nothing and Amen. As Fallaci wrote, the next morning she flew to the Vietnam War to find out.

I have thought about that question a lot in recent weeks, since arriving in Israel earlier this month to cover the war. I have seen plenty of wars before and they always throw up that question: “What is life?” To understand life you have to understand death, and to understand death you have to try to understand the worst thing that humans can do to each other: war.

Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 has left 1,200 dead. Nearly 240 hostages—children, women, grandmothers—were taken to Gaza. Over the past few days, about 81 hostages have been returned to their loved ones during the cease-fire.

I was at the children’s hospital in Tel Aviv when the first children and their parents were released. When the helicopters landed and the hostages got out, IDF soldiers blocked their faces with screens to protect them from the glare of the cameras. But I’d already been sent a single photo taken by the Arab press that showed some of the mothers with their children inside a bus when they were still in Gaza.

The terror on their faces. They looked as though they’d aged by decades.

But at this moment, there was joy. As the helicopters landed, traffic stopped, and people got out of their cars and broke into song. They clapped and their voices rang out as they welcomed back the hostages with songs like “Hevenu Shalom Alechem.” (“We brought you peace.”)

As it happened, 12 of the 13 returnees that night were from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the first place I visited on my trip to Israel. But for every returnee, you remember those still in Gaza. I thought especially of the grandsons of the man who showed me around the kibbutz during my visit. On the morning of October 7, the teenage boys were alone in the house. Their grandfather was on the phone with them trying to tell them how to hold the safe room door shut while avoiding being shot from the other side. The two boys struggled with a wound-up sheet, and held out a while, but they couldn’t fight back against two grown men, members of Hamas. They were taken into Gaza.

So was Kfir Bibas, a baby of ten months. So was his brother. So was their mother. Yesterday, Hamas said that they would not be released because they died in captivity.

Who knows if Hamas killed them, as they killed so many others, or if they are lying in order to torture those waiting for their return.

So the hostage releases are happening, but each day brings disappointment and hope. The process that has begun is a hell of its own. For almost two months, every billboard across the country has shown us the faces of the stolen. We have gotten to know them. Nobody pulls these posters down here. They are family, friends.

Every returned hostage is a blessing. But what makes reporting on their release hard is that Hamas has strategically made sure that nearly all those freed still have a family member held captive inside Gaza. So almost every released hostage is compromised.

Everybody knows that Hamas is eking out the deal—and reneging on it—in order to slow down the Israeli war plan. Possibly indefinitely.

Rumors spill out everywhere. Some people believe that only half the hostages are still alive. But this fear is put to the back of people’s minds as they dream of everyone returning home.
MORE https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-diary-israel-hamas-hostages-war?

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Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
John Judis and Ruy Teixeira explain how liberals lost their way.
THE FREE PRESSNOV 30
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Then-presidential nominee Bill Clinton waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. (Photo by Steve Liss/Getty Images)
In the past few decades, the Democratic Party has undergone a seismic shift. Kitchen-table issues like the economy and public safety have been overshadowed by more elitist topics like identity politics, gender ideology, defunding the police, climate change, and the vaguely defined yet rigidly enforced ideology of anti-racism, which sees white supremacy as the force behind every institution in America.

But while activists, lobbyists, and pundits were busy reshaping the Democratic Party, ordinary voters—including the working class, middle-class families, and ethnic minorities—were simply leaving. All of which has stranded a large group of Americans on an island, voters in the center of nowhere.

Two people who have spent years thinking about how the Democratic Party lost its vision are political analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, offers up a map to help us understand how liberals lost their way.

On today’s episode of Honestly, guest-hosted by Michael Moynihan, Judis and Teixeira trace the influence of big money forces behind what they call the Democrats’ “shadow party,” and offer a path forward away from the radical cultural issues embraced by party elites and back to core economic issues that matter to the working class, a group that Democrats need to win back if they want to win in 2024.

Read an edited excerpt from their conversation below or click here to listen to the whole thing.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ayC4x4oqOvGUv8kSlqjhI?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
The Free Press
Episode

On the trajectory of the Democratic party over the last 20 years:

Michael Moynihan: Before you wrote your new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, you wrote another book together called The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002 about a new wave of Democratic voters that was emerging in America. How does it look 20 years later?

John Judis: In the late 1990s, Ruy discovered that the white working class was disappearing from the Democratic ranks and I discovered that this new group—the professionals—was coming in. And we constructed what we thought was a plausible scenario for the Democrats having an advantage over the next decade or two, and it would consist of professionals, nurses, teachers, people with college degrees, particularly single women, minorities, and young people. And when Obama won in 2008, it was hallelujah—we were prophets and we figured it all out! But then two years later, in 2010, the Democrats lost big. They lost the House, and we started figuring out that something was the matter. After the 2016 election, it became clear that the Democrats had lost out on its central issue: the economy. And it also had all this extra baggage, which Trump summed up in the idea of “political correctness.”

Ruy Teixeira: We never downplayed the importance of the white working class. In fact, it was very clear that in a lot of key states, there would be no way for the Democrats to sustain what we called at the time “the progressive centrist coalition,” unless they were able to retain the loyalty of these voters. In 2016, with Trump’s victory built on the backs of white working-class voters in the Midwest especially, it was very clear that the Democrats were not able to maintain the kind of share of the white working-class vote they needed to make the political arithmetic of a changing America work out in their favor. But as we saw after 2016, Democrats summarized their loss as being about the reactionary parts of America—the racist, the xenophobes, the left-behinds—and it didn’t seem to have much to do, in their view, with questions of economics. It was all about how they’re not “down” with the multicultural, multiracial America that’s coming into being, and that’s all there is to it. So, they thought, why even bother with these people? They’re “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton famously put it.

JJ: I used to always hear Democrats saying, “The election was all just Trump’s racist appeals,” but I actually went to the rallies in 2015. He would talk about bad trade deals. He promised to bring back Glass-Steagall, which is the bill regulating finance. He talked about health insurance. He was going to do a plan that actually would cover all Americans and wasn’t going to be like a rat’s maze. And if you compare the ads, his ads were overwhelmingly more policy-oriented than Clinton’s. She was really just attacking him as a bad guy and it didn’t work.

MM: So, you didn’t anticipate that the party that said, “We are the party of Paul Ryan, we’re the party of tax cuts, we’re the party of Milton Friedman,” would actually start to sound more liberal on economic policy?

RT: Yeah, and that’s another way in which Trump was misunderstood. He got the nomination because the Republican Party itself was changing and was becoming more of a working-class party driven by these kinds of voters. They didn’t want to hear the Paul Ryan message over and over again. They didn’t want to hear just about tax cuts. They didn’t want to just hear, “We unleash the free market, everything will be great. Trust us on this.” They were mad, and they thought the elites of the Republican Party as well as the Democratic Party were selling them out. So Trump’s message fell on receptive ears, and that shock to the Republican Party system is still with us today, because I don’t think there’s any turning back to the former economic approach of the Republicans. Trump is the guy who changed the landscape. This gets away from looking at him as just an avatar of white supremacy or whatever it is he is frequently portrayed as by some Democrats.

On the non-white working class:

MM: In 2021, I went down to Starr County, Texas, which I believe is the most Hispanic county in America. They went about 40 points for Hillary Clinton, but they went for Joe Biden by about 3 or 4 points. These voters are Mexican Americans who have been in America for a very long time. They supported Trump on immigration. They were very concerned about culture war issues that they thought the Democrats had gone too far on. Is that ultimately the failing of this type of identity politics that lumps a very disparate group of people together and says, “Well, they’re Latino,” and not acknowledging that there’s variations in that?

JJ: All that stuff is goofy. I mean, Puerto Ricans vote differently than Cubans, who vote differently than Latinos in Texas. So, yes, but it is also a fact that except for the Cubans, minority voters are pretty much Democratic on economic issues. The Democrats have started to lose them more recently and it’s partly over economics, but it’s also over culture issues and over immigration and abortion.

RT: It should have really shocked Democrats more than it did in 2020 when Hispanic working-class voters bailed out en masse from the Democratic Party. Democrats can’t any longer count on working-class voters of any color to be stable in their levels of support.

The Democrats also made a serious error in melding Hispanics into this construct of “people of color” in the United States who are all oppressed by the fact they are non-whites in a white supremacist society; who are all the victims of racism and discrimination; who all believe in a very liberal immigration policy. None of those things were correct. Hispanics think of themselves as Americans. They think of themselves as people who want to pursue economic uplift for themselves, their families, their communities. They want healthcare. They want safe streets. They want a normal, good, prosperous American life. And they’re not so sure the Democrats really have their backs on economics.

If you look at the data from what people think about how they fared under Trump as opposed to how they fared under Biden so far, Hispanics give very solid margins to Trump, and that has something to do with the lack of inflation when he was in office. Wages were going up. Things were stable. Then there is the whole issue of the lockdown, which really did not sit well with a lot of Hispanic voters who felt we were locked down for too long. Immigration is another example. I listened to a focus group of swing Hispanic voters recently, and it was extraordinary how negative and outraged they were on the immigration situation. This just gets back to the white, educated, liberal part of the Democratic voter base that thinks what they believe about the world must be what other elements of their base constituencies think.

Has the party changed, or have the constituents changed?

MM: You say there’s no one single factor that has driven working-class voters from the Democratic Party. You compile this long list of possible reasons: Democrats’ enthusiasm for immigration of unskilled workers, the support for abortion rights, support for strict gun control, support for and identification with the quest for new identities and lifestyles, particularly among the young, Democrats’ insistence on eliminating fossil fuels, and many others. Aren’t these people you’re describing just lost to the Republican Party at this point because they’re too conservative for the Democratic Party?

JJ: I think the electorate is much mushier than the political scientists make out. If you look at Gallup’s polling on party identification, the number of independents has just been rising to the stratosphere in the last ten years. There’s a huge number of discontented voters and a lot of those are working-class voters. So, those voters are up for grabs. The Democrats’ main problem may be geographic. I don’t think the Democrats are ever going to win West Virginia back, as long as climate change is an issue. But bringing industry to Ohio, for example, if the UAW starts to organize some of these non-union foreign firms like Honda that have plants there, then I think you could see a lot of movement in certain parts of the Midwest. The other factor is suburbanites, women. So I think that the Democrats, in that sense, have a chance to win a lot of these people back.

RT: I don’t think the cultural barriers are as big as people think for the Democrats being able to win back over some of these voters. Most people are culturally moderate. They’re not super conservative.

MM: So how do you marginalize the cultural extremists in the party?

RT: Well, how did the Sister Souljah thing work for Bill Clinton? He drew a line. He named names. I think this is something Democrats are very reluctant to do. When Biden, in his State of the Union address, said, “Fund the police, fund the police, fund the police,” that was fine, except he didn’t point out any of the places in the Democratic Party where people aren’t doing that. He didn’t say, “I disapprove of that. That’s not what Democrats are about.” Democrats need not just to make gestures toward the center. They have to really mean it and they have to emphasize it and actually make it part of their brand, their persona, their offer to voters. That’s what Biden and Democrats, by and large, have not been willing to do. So if you want to disidentify the Democrats with cultural radicalism, you have to do it aggressively. The progressive left is a paper tiger. They’re threatening that if you move to the center on any of these issues, that gazillions of young people who are controlled by liberal organizations, or listen to them, won’t turn out or won’t vote. I think that’s baloney.

On the Democrats’ shadow party:

MM: Is this a media issue? If so few voters believe this kind of cultural radicalism, if they don’t want to defund the police, if they don’t know who Ibram X. Kendi is, why is this worldview so dominant?

RT: The Democrats and their associated shadow party, this penumbra of media pundits and activists and nonprofits and advocacy groups and foundations, really control the commanding heights of cultural production. So the dominant narratives that get out there in a lot of the most prominent cultural and media areas of the country are really those that are consistent with this cultural radicalism that the Democrats are now so associated with. The institutions that dominate our cultural discourse are not channeling the view of the voter. They’re channeling the view of the educated liberal folks who staff these institutions, who write things, who pontificate, who give out foundation grants, who advocate in Washington. And those people are, generally speaking, white, college-educated liberals, if not radicals, who have a particular point of view on the world. So even if, for example, “defund the police” was never anything that had a purchase among ordinary voters, including ordinary black voters, it suddenly blew up into something that people actually seem to be taking seriously and debating, despite the fact it was a terrible idea, and it’s not actually what black people wanted.

JJ: The other factor you have is that if you are organizing a group, or if you become the head of the ACLU, and you want to raise money, you need to have an active base that you’re able to appeal to, and the way you appeal to them is not by having political views that will gain a majority in the country, but having views that will stir them up.

MM: So it’s an incentive problem in some way, too.

RT: Yes. Follow the money, follow the prestige, follow the status. If you can get subscribers, support, likes, and money by taking these positions, you’re going to continue to do it. What it doesn’t do is allow you to form a broad coalition in American politics. But that’s not the priority for a lot of these people.

MM: Talk a little bit about money, because I’ve never seen a book in which every institution that is mentioned is followed by a note about who funds that institution.

JJ: There’s two aspects to it. First is the politicians. That’s what people ordinarily talk about, and that remains important. The other aspect is the role of foundations in funding a lot of these groups that we’re talking about. Black Lives Matter started a group in 2015 called The Movement for Black Lives. And they had a very controversial platform—for instance, guaranteed healthcare and guaranteed income for blacks only. They wanted an end to public jails. Well, the Ford Foundation joined forces with the Borealis Philanthropy to launch a six-year fundraising project aimed at giving $100 million to The Movement for Black Lives. So, you get these very controversial positions being reinforced by the foundations, who are giving them enormous amounts of money.

On the Democrats’ strategy in 2024:

JJ: I think the main problems are going to be to what extent are the Democrats going to define themselves simply in terms of Republican craziness, and to what extent are they going to find a path to winning back a lot of these other voters. And what I would expect in 2024 is not that they’re going to call for “defund the police.” But it’s going to be focused on how crazy the Republicans are.

MM: What do you think of that tactic? If you did a LexisNexis search of MSNBC transcripts, which I have done, of the word fascism in the past four years, you could be clicking through 20 pages with 50 results a page. It’s endless. The argument was that if you stuck with Donald Trump, this is incipient fascism and the American republic will crumble. Do you think that that’s something that most Democrats are going to still push on with as the most effective way of fighting back against Trump?

RT: I don’t think there’s any question that they’re going to stick with that. I mean, look at the 2023 results right now, and in 2022 as well. I think they feel that’s a great motivator for the high turnout parts of their base. And I don’t think they feel comfortable defending Bidenomics or dealing with public safety and immigration issues in any serious way. They just want to highlight Republican extremism because that’s what allows them to be victorious. So that’s why John and I tend to think that because they’ll take this tack, we are looking at another highly contested teeter-totter kind of election where the Democrats might come out on top with a strategy. They might not. But I think that’s what they’re committed to. And I don’t think at this point they see any compelling reason to change their approach. As far as they’re concerned, they think there’s an anti-MAGA majority in this country and we just have to mobilize it, get our people out to the polls, and then we’ll win. We don’t really have to change anything substantively.

JJ: The other thing I’d say is that the Republicans in the House are doing the Democrats an enormous favor, because there’s a big middle of the electorate that’s very skeptical about Washington and getting things done, and for the last 20, 30 years have blamed both parties. And I think if the Democrats had a really powerful candidate for president in 2024, they would win the House big and win the White House.


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Why Western Women Are Converting to Islam
Since October 7, young Americans have been professing their devotion to the Quran in ‘the ultimate rebellion against the West.’
FRANCESCA BLOCK AND SUZY WEISS
NOV 18
∙
PREVIEW

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(Rolf Vennenbernd via Getty Images)
It took Megan Rice just three weeks to go from first opening the Quran to professing her belief that Muhammad is the one true messenger of God.

It all started on October 20, when Rice, a black American millennial-aged activist, announced on TikTok that she was reading the holy book for the first time.


@megan_b_rice
I’m enjoying the read so far. #islam #thequran
Perched on her couch in a gray sweatshirt, she said to her then-400,000 followers in a video that has since been viewed more than 5.3 million times: “It just seems that Palestinians have this ironclad faith even in the face of losing quite literally everything.”

Three days later she founded the World Religion Book Club, a virtual community now boasting more than 13,000 members, where she conducts live readings of the Quran. Israel’s response to the Hamas attack on October 7 is where her journey toward the religion “all started,” she told her followers on November 2.


@megan_b_rice
Drop your tips in the comments. Also before y’all jump at my throat, the coffee is from Biggby.
By November 10, she first appeared on TikTok in a hijab, and the number of her followers had doubled. (It currently stands at 865,000.) The next day, Rice took her shahada, the Islamic ceremonial profession of faith, officially converting to Islam.

Rice is among a new swath of TikTok users—typically non-Arab, left-leaning Western women—who consider themselves “reverts” to Islam, based on the belief that all people are born on a natural path to Islam and therefore revert, rather than convert, to the religion.

There are currently scores of TikTok hashtags that include the word revert, including #WhiteRevert (1.6 million views), #BlackRevert (174K views), #JewishRevert (131K views), and #JapaneseRevert (278K). Biggest of all is the simple hashtag #revert, with 2.9 billion views, followed by #RevertMuslim (1.4 billion), and #MuslimRevert (525 million). At the same time, Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America, in which the terrorist justifies Al Qaeda’s hatred of the West and its attack on the Twin Towers, went viral this week on TikTok as young Americans declared admiration for his ideas...

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