Should Parents Pay for the Crimes of Their Children?

The conviction of Jennifer Crumbley. Plus: Shane Gillis gets uncanceled, more DEI overreach in academia, and new Free Press merch. Jennifer Crumbley, who was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter on Tuesday, did not kill anyone, not even “involuntarily.” Rather, it was her son Ethan who, in November 2021, sneaked a gun into his Michigan high school and killed four of his classmates. In December, he received a life sentence with no chance of parole. Does his mother share some of the blame for his killing spree? Of course she does, writes Joe Nocera in today’s Free Press. On the morning of the shooting, school officials wanted Jennifer to take Ethan out of class after they saw a drawing he’d done of a gun and a bleeding human body. “The thoughts won’t stop,” he’d written. “Help me.” Jennifer promised she would take him to a therapist, but in the meantime, she left him at school. Neither she nor the school officials realized he had a gun in his backpack. Hours later, he went on his rampage. Never before has an involuntary manslaughter charge been used to put away a parent whose negligence led to a mass shooting. “But so what?” Joe writes. “It is possible—in fact, I think it’s likely—that Jennifer Crumbley’s conviction could serve, at long last, as a deterrent to the scourge of school shootings.” Read his full argument below: He Murdered His Classmates. Should His Mother Go to Jail? JOE NOCERA · 2:20 AM He Murdered His Classmates. Should His Mother Go to Jail? Read full story And for a different view, read Billy Binion’s piece in Reason, “Mom’s Manslaughter Conviction for Her Son’s School Shooting Sets a Dangerous Precedent.” The DEI rollback hasn’t made it to Nebraska Readers may remember John Sailer’s recent Free Press story “The DEI Rollback,” where he detailed how the tide is turning against the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, especially in higher education. But that’s not true for one major state school where DEI dogma is alive and well, John reports for us today: The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s College of Engineering might sound like one of the last places in higher education where you’d expect to find evidence of DEI orthodoxy influencing big decisions. Nebraska is a red state and UNL is a public school. Plus, you’d expect hiring at an engineering school to be based on, well, scientific criteria. But through a public records request, I reviewed every diversity recruitment report created by the school over the last four years. And I’ve discovered that even here, DEI has been central to hiring decisions. For example, in 2020, when the school set out to hire a professor of National Defense/Computer Network Security, the search committee made its priority clear: each candidate’s “diversity” score—assessing how well applicants understand things like “many intersectional aspects of diversity”—was given equal weight to factors like research and teaching experience. Another search in 2021, for a professor of Big Data/Cybersecurity, stated: “the weight of the ‘diversity’ scores were equal to the other scored areas that contributed to the candidate’s overall score.” And applicants have been ruled out for failing to clear DEI hurdles. According to one report, from 2021, “a small number of candidates” in a search for a professor of thermal sciences “were eliminated based on absence or weak diversity statement.” In another case that year, three applicants for a role in environmental engineering “did not include diversity statements and were disqualified from the search.” Per the college’s diversity and inclusion plan, which is still in place, the reports carry high stakes: a search that fails to show “a serious consideration” of DEI-related issues risks being canceled, resulting in no hire at all. Diversity statement evaluations have long been criticized for their potential to enforce an orthodoxy on issues of race and gender, weeding out faculty with heterodox views. They raise serious questions of academic freedom—as well as First Amendment compliance. The college’s DEI statement evaluation rubric—also acquired through a records request—confirms these fears. The rubric dictates a high score for engineers who identify and discuss “intersectional aspects of diversity”—while punishing those who fail to “distinguish inclusion from diversity.” In other words, even in Nebraska, chemical engineers and materials scientists must be fluent in the idiom of race consciousness. The absurdity is transparent, which is why state university systems from North Carolina to Missouri to Wisconsin have abolished diversity statements. Even faculty at progressive universities have begun to push back. In Nebraska, the policy is alive and well—but that’s something the state’s lawmakers could easily fix. From DEI in engineering to anti-racism in medical schools. . . Jeffrey Flier was dean of Harvard Medical School. Writing in The Free Press today, he sounds the alarm on the rush to embrace ideas about combating racism in medical education that will do more harm than good. And he worries that doctors are told race matters more than excellent care. Read his alarming account in full: Medical Schools Should ‘Combat Racism.’ But Not Like This. JEFFREY FLIER · 1:11 AM Medical Schools Should ‘Combat Racism.’ But Not Like This. Read full story The joke’s on SNL: It’s good to be Shane Gillis. This weekend, five years after the comedian was axed by Saturday Night Live before making his debut as a featured cast member, he will return as a host. Back in 2019, Gillis was accused of using an anti-Asian slur on a podcast that an SNL spokesman called “offensive, hurtful, and unacceptable.” In the years since his big break went badly wrong, Gillis hasn’t kvetched once about his cancellation. Instead, he’s made lots and lots of people laugh with his YouTube sketches, stand-up shows and, most recently, his Netflix special. A big part of Gillis’s appeal is his commitment to making fun of everyone, from Fox News–watching moms to MSNBC–watching dads. And as a white, working-class guy from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, he can tell a joke about Donald Trump that actually lands. Boring people (remember when Vanity Fair was readable?) will tell you that Gillis’s return is a sign that SNL is “cater[ing] to the right” and “giving problematic people a platform.” Others wonder if Gillis’s return is a sign that cancel culture is over. So which is it? For an honest take, we asked fellow funnyman Andrew Schulz, who self-released a comedy special when an unnamed streamer asked him to water down his set: Some people will use this to claim “Cancel culture doesn’t exist.” That’s not fair to Shane. It was used to strip him of his original role on SNL. He then was so undeniable and determined that he overcame his cancellation. What a story. Banished from the city only to return as king! I love Shane. He’s brilliant and absolutely deserving of his success and the opportunity. More merch! Again, you asked, and again, we delivered! Free Press merchandise is officially back in stock and up for sale on our website. We’ve added new items and subtracted the delivery issues (our apologies. . . it won’t happen again!). We have new t-shirts (the people wanted t-shirts!), even better totes, and our classic hats and mugs available for purchase. Go to TheFP.com/shop to support our mission, show off your love for The Free Press, and buy your swag to wear with pride. And be sure to tag photos of you and our merch on Instagram @thefreepress or on X @TheFP. Happy shopping! Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. The Free Press. © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

The Real Team America

Palmer Luckey, Katherine Boyle, and Joe Lonsdale on the defense tech they’re building to keep our country safe—and the threats that keep them up at night. As scary as this period feels—between Russia’s war in Ukraine and Hamas’s war with Israel—there’s increasing concern that this is just the calm before the storm. Should China decide to move against Taiwan in some way, then we’ll have war with U.S. involvement in three separate regions. Or perhaps by then it will not seem like three separate wars, but a single global one. Most Americans in the last fifty years, and certainly since the end of the Cold War, have lived in the luxury of safety. We live in a place where peace and security are generally taken for granted. But a lot of Americans had a serious wake-up call after October 7, when a country with a high-tech security fortress was overwhelmed by terrorists on motorcycles and trucks and paragliders. It’s only natural to wonder: Could this happen here? Who is actually coming over our border? If we had to fight for our country, who would actually show up? Today’s guests on Honestly had that wake-up call long before the wars in Ukraine or Gaza. They’ve long invested their time, money, and resources into building a better American defense. And in the past few months especially, their work has come to be seen as prescient. Palmer Luckey is a 31-year-old software engineer and entrepreneur. At the age of 19, Palmer founded the virtual reality company Oculus, which was originally supposed to be sold on Kickstarter as a virtual reality prototype for VR nerds and enthusiasts. Instead, it was acquired by Facebook for more than $2 billion. Then, when he was 25, he founded Anduril Industries, an $8.5 billion company that develops drones, autonomous vehicles, submarines, rockets, and software for military use. Katherine Boyle is a Washington Post reporter turned venture capitalist; she is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the co-founder of the firm’s American Dynamism arm, which invests in companies that build to support the national interest. Joe Lonsdale is a co-founder of Palantir (along with Peter Thiel and others), and founder and general partner of the firm 8VC, which backed Anduril in its early days. They are each attempting to disrupt the defense marketplace, bring Silicon Valley’s speed, creativity, and innovation to defense, advance our national security, and, you know. . . save America. To listen to our full conversation, click below—or read on for an edited excerpt. The Real Team America The Free Press Episode On why people with no military experience became passionate about American defense: Bari Weiss: You guys are, in a certain sense, like skunks at a garden party. All of you are involved in American defense in some way, but none of you have a military background. So I’m curious how you came to this view of the problem given that none of you had ever served? Joe Lonsdale: A lot of the best innovation by entrepreneurs is done by outsiders. And, you know, I grew up in Silicon Valley. I was, if anything, a bit of an insider on the computer science scene and tech scene. You’d hear stories, when I was going to Stanford, about how the NSA and the DoD were like 20 years ahead, 15 years ahead of these big breakthroughs versus even the very top places at MIT and Stanford, Harvard. But they were that far ahead in the ’70s. And then 9/11 happened. And then we saw the U.S. government spend tens of billions of dollars on stuff that, frankly, was just stupid compared to how Silicon Valley worked, compared to everything we figured out at PayPal, compared to how Google works, compared to how other companies work. And this was a really painful shock for me because I am a patriot. I’m proud of how strong the U.S. is. I always kind of assumed the U.S. was way ahead in these areas, and it wasn’t. And we realized we have to actually get involved, take some of the things we’ve learned about investigative technology, about new possibilities in technology, and go after this. It was a combination of seeing that the best and brightest in China were being forced to work with the Chinese military at the same time that our best and brightest were saying, no, we’re not going to. That was a big wake-up call. That’s when Palmer and three of my former colleagues from Palantir built Anduril with Palmer and helped start it. We said, wow, we have to do this. It’s key for America. On the erosion of faith in the U.S. military and the importance of American power: Katherine Boyle: The one thing that underpins the entire conversation we’re having is the talent crisis. That is not my term. It was called a quiet crisis, actually, in the 1980s, by Paul Volcker, who was former chair of the Federal Reserve. Then he was tapped to serve as the head of a commission on the crisis inside the civil service, inside the bureaucracy of government. There was a view that in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, the best and brightest American minds—they served their country. They all served in some capacity in government. Oftentimes that was through the draft. But there was still status in going into the bureaucracy, into the civil service of the country, and working inside of the government. That’s very important to have talented people working as part of the bureaucracy, not as political appointees, but working and serving their careers inside government. The view in the 1980s was that it was already eroding. There was a degradation inside civil service and that it needed to be turned around. The same talent crisis that hit the government in the ’80s has also hit the prime contractors. The best and brightest minds in this country used to go into Lockheed Martin, they used to go into Raytheon, they used to build the F-35. The best engineers who wanted to work on the hardest problems used to go to the defense primes. For the last 30 years, they’ve been coming to Silicon Valley. For a while they were working on apps, but because of people like Joe, because of people like Palmer, because of SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril, a lot of the best talent is now coming to defense start-ups, and the government has to figure out how to work with start-ups. Otherwise, we have trapped talent pools that are not providing the government with what it needs to survive. Palmer Luckey: It used to be that everybody knew somebody who had served, and it was probably a close family member just because of the statistical distribution of people who fought in World War II, who fought in the Korean War, who even fought in Vietnam. That’s now changing. You have kids who don’t know anybody who’s ever served in the military, would never consider joining themselves, and none of their role models have ever served in the military. That leads to a bit of a disconnect. In my case, I worked at an Army affiliate research center before starting Oculus—the ICT Mixed Reality Lab—on a few things, including an Army project called Brave Mind, which treated veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. That was the first exposure I had to how the military developed technology, how they use technology to solve problems. But I was one of those people where me and all my friends, we didn’t really have any direct experience with the military in our regular lives. It wasn’t something that we even had had a strong negative thought about. It’s that we didn’t think about it at all. On the importance of innovative software in American defense: BW: When most civilians like me think about military defense, I think about F-35s, I think about giant, hulking ships. I think about big, heavy things, strong guys with guns. And you guys are suggesting that that’s sort of an outdated view of what military defense should actually look like. Palmer, one of your core beliefs is that software can be just as powerful as physical things. I would love for you to explain that to listeners. PL: I’m not one of those guys who thinks software alone is going to stop war. But I do think that software, really good software, like AI control software that is very good at fusing sensor data, figuring out how to attack things and how to kill them effectively, is what allows you to build totally new types of weapons. Think about the difference between building aircraft that have to keep a person alive inside the aircraft and can only maneuver at the limits of what a human can handle versus a system that can think and move as fast as a computer can survive. That’s a totally new type of thing. Remote-controlled airplanes like the Predator are great, but at the end of the day you need multiple people who are controlling and managing each of those. You will never be able to manage thousands or tens of thousands of them in a given area because of that ratio of machines to people. If I can automate those, I can potentially be deploying millions of robotic systems in a given area and have them performing at a level that a human-piloted or remote-piloted system never could achieve. This is true across the air. This is true underwater. This is true in space. This is true on land. This is even true underground. And so that’s the power of software: enabling you to build weapon systems, which are hardware that couldn’t exist otherwise, that are much cheaper at much larger scale than the things that are designed to keep people alive. BW: Palmer, I go on the Anduril website and I read about things like AI, drones, autonomous vehicles for the air and sea. Tell us what these things actually are. PL: We build vertical takeoff and landing, AI-powered, small micro fighter jets. We build robotic submarines that can dive deeper than manned submarines that are much quieter, much longer range, and much cheaper to manufacture than a submarine that needs to keep a whole crew of people alive. We’re also building aircraft that can collaborate with manned aircrafts. Imagine a squadron of one or two human planes flying, aided by dozens of autonomous aircraft that are able to soak up missiles, to keep that person safer and also make them much more lethal in that manned platform. We tried to find these areas where autonomy and artificial intelligence can make warfighters much more effective. You have Amnesty International, you have a lot of United Nations organizations trying to ban lethal autonomous weapon systems. Look at the countries that are supporting those efforts. They are countries that want to cripple our ability to build these things because they don’t want America to have the best tools. It’s amazing to me how people fall for this. The people pushing for bans on lethal autonomous weapon systems are wrong-minded people. They understand exactly what will happen if Western countries do not build these systems, and that’s why they’re pushing to basically allow us to destroy ourselves. They would love to see us like Europe has done: destroy ourselves with regulations and take ourselves out of the fight. We have to be resistant to that. On the biggest threats to America: BW: It’s clear to me that there are two key threats right now to the Pax Americana. One is that it’s under threat from China and Russia and Iran and the so-called axis of resistance. That’s obvious. But also that it’s under threat internally by a lot of people, including a lot of elite, influential people who believe that American power is necessarily bad. They don’t think that the world is better off with America as the world’s hegemon. Which is the bigger threat? Is it our leadership here at home, that many people in positions of power don’t seem to get it? Or is it China that is really keeping you up in the middle of the night? JL They’re obviously both threats. I would definitely say it’s the leadership at home and it’s the culture here at home that scares me. It’s millions of bureaucrats that are unaccountable. It’s a culture of incompetence. It’s cultures that prioritize virtue signaling over merit and competence, which is terrifying. There’s so much of the defense-industrial complex where the money goes toward things based on who they are friends with, or if they have proven that they have the right minority or gender status. Have they virtue-signaled the right way and donated to the right people? Are they playing the game properly to come across as the thing that D.C. wants to support? And this is not to say that there aren’t great bipartisan defense leaders in Congress, in the DoD, who want to do the right thing and who are trying to do the right thing. But I think our country in general has this crisis of incompetence. And that’s what we need to fix if we’re going to get this right, because we have the ability to do this right. What I care most about is that the best ideas can win. That’s the biggest question right now. If we can be competent, America will be safe. On the future of America and American dynamism: BW: Katherine, you often talk about investing for the sake of the West, a strategy you call “American dynamism.” In a speech you gave last year, you said, “we don’t win a war against bad ideologies unless we know who we are and what we stand for and where we’re headed. And if we lose this silent war, the ultimate war for American ideals, it’s not because we don’t have the know-how to build missiles and hypersonics and attributable systems and drone swarms. It will be because we doubt our inheritance, because we doubt the beauty and nobility of what we’re building, because we doubt that American dynamism is true and the key to a safer, more prosperous civilization.” I’d love for you to build on that idea. KB: I talk about what Alexis de Tocqueville said about what makes America so special. It is this enthusiasm, this optimism, this belief that you can do anything. There is an American sentiment that has existed in this country since its founding, that we build new things and we always take risks, and we’re not afraid of risk. Yes, some people lose. Actually, the quote I wish I had in front of me is basically that some people will lose in the American experiment. Some people will build businesses that fail. But America always benefits from that innovative spirit, from that hustle spirit, from that wanting to create new things. I say tech is sort of a petri dish of this American experience. It’s how we build new technologies. But it’s not just tech. Building a family is in the spirit of American dynamism. It’s building a small business that’s not venture-backed, where you’re building something for your community that your customers love. This is what underpins the American experiment and which keeps us at the forefront, that keeps us as the hegemonic power. The spirit to continuously build. Again, the biggest thing that has happened that is dangerous is to convince young people, to convince our regulators that building is not a good thing, to convince people that growth is bad. Growth is life. Dynamism is life. It underpins the American experience. That is the thing I worry about, that we’re believing these lies that we can’t innovate, that innovation is bad, that tech is bad, that owning a business is bad, that building a family is bad. All of those are lies. What is the core of the American experience? It is building new things for your community. It is building in the spirit of serving your country. It is building for others. It’s that outward focus that has made America the most exceptional country in the history of the world. To support vital conversation, become a Free Press subscriber today: The Free Press © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Ladies’ Night at the Grammys Plus: In praise of Joni Mitchell, why authenticity is in, justice for Lana Del Rey, and more. OLIVER WISEMAN FEB 3

It’s ladies’ night at the Grammys this year, with female solo acts like Billie Eilish, SZA, and Olivia Rodrigo duking it out in the heavyweight categories. And, of course, Taylor Swift. Will the Swift juggernaut keep on rolling? Surely! Then there’s Barbie. The feminist doll–industrial complex is hoping it can squeeze a little more juice out of the movie that captured the zeitgeist last summer and refuses to let go. Songs from the soundtrack have eleven nominations in total, including two nominations in the Song of the Year category, “Dance the Night” by Dua Lipa and “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish. What else is happening at the Grammys tomorrow? An eighty-year-old Joni Mitchell will perform at the show for the first time. (More on her in a second.) Also performing, for the first time in years: Tracy Chapman. You may remember last year’s very silly kerfuffle over her hit “Fast Car,” when the (straight, white—Southern!—male) star Luke Combs topped the country chart with a cover version of the song. This made Chapman the first black woman to have a solo songwriting credit on a number one country hit. Good news! Progress! No, no. According to a Washington Post piece, the response to the song was “complicated” and “clouded by the fact that, as a Black queer woman, Chapman, 59, would have almost zero chance of that achievement herself in country music.” Evan Gardner explained why attempts to pit Combs and Chapman against each other were doomed from the start in a great piece on country music for us last year: Even as his accent tells you that his is a different story than Chapman’s, the words remind you that it’s the same. The car he and Chapman sing of is equal parts sweet chariot and Ford F-150. They are both racing to the same place, and that place is freedom and self-realization, both beautiful and uncontainable. That shared journey will be clear tomorrow night when, according to Variety, Combs and Chapman will sing “Fast Car” onstage together. We’re looking forward to that—and more. Today, Free Pressers look ahead to music’s biggest night of the year. We have Evan on the best new artists, Julia Steinberg on Lana Del Rey, and Peter Savodnik with some recommendations for those who prefer their music centuries old. But first, here’s Eli Lake on why Joni Mitchell’s too good for the Grammys. . . The Grammys Don’t Deserve Joni Mitchell ELI LAKE · FEB 2 The Grammys Don’t Deserve Joni Mitchell Read full story Authenticity is in Evan Gardner on the realness of the nominees for Best New Artist. Merriam-Webster picked authentic as their word of the year for 2023. And our hunger for authentic musical artists has never been greater. Just look at the surprise success of complete outsider Oliver Anthony, whose country song “Rich Men North of Richmond” shot to the top of the charts out from of nowhere. Or look at the nominees for Best New Artist at the Grammys tomorrow night. Where this category once rewarded whichever up-and-coming star had nailed the formula for a pop hit with the broadest possible appeal, this year, whoever wins, the title will go to someone with their own authentic music. The new artist nominees make music that is a collage of their own unique lives and sounds. Meet the front-runners: Jelly Roll For Jelly Roll (born Jason DeFord), a 39-year-old former drug dealer from Antioch, Tennessee (just outside of Nashville), who was in and out of detention centers for ten years and did his first stint at 14, music is primarily an emotional exercise: he channels a life of pain, drugs, and crime into his work. Hip-hop was the obvious way for Jelly Roll to tell his story. And that’s the kind of music he made until 2020, when he released “Save Me,” a stripped-down demo where he sings rather than raps. More recently, he tells his story with a different sound: country music. Jelly Roll isn’t just making money off his past; he’s trying to make change happen, too. Earlier this month, he testified before Congress about the fentanyl crisis, saying “I brought my community down. I hurt people. . . . I am here now standing as a man that wants to be a part of the solution.” Tomorrow he’ll complete his journey from prison cell to red carpet with his first-ever nomination—for a sound that is all his own. Noah Kahan Twenty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter Noah Kahan’s breakout single recounts “Stick Season” in his home state of Vermont. The song’s title is a reference to the time of year from October to early December that is post-foliage but pre-snowfall, and he tells his story over a warm, earthy track with hints of woodland banjo and a rustic rasp. It’s a deeply paranoid song about being stuck that doubles as a reluctant ode to his roots. Ice Spice Ice Spice (born Isis Gaston) is a 24-year-old former college volleyball player from Fordham, in the Bronx. She takes the sound of the streets (drill) and combines it with the pop songs of her adolescence. The result is an innovative genre critics have come to call “sexy drill.” Her songs burst with Bronx bombast that makes you move; they’re light, fun, and sticky—a piece of bubblegum you can’t help but munch. Proof that all you need for a good time is a bass and a boombox. Fred Again Fred Again (also known as Fred Gibson) is a 30-year-old London native whose dance music is an act of digital scrapbooking: his first three albums form a trilogy called Actual Life, an appropriately named collection of sounds drawn straight from his surroundings that sample everything from Instagram livestreams to videos in his camera roll to a conversation with a stadium worker following a show. Also in the running are Gracie Abrams, Coco Jones, Victoria Monét, and The War and Treaty. You might not have heard of any of these names, and that’s precisely the point: this year’s show is an excellent opportunity to shine a light on musical innovation, whether it’s tucked away on a city block or in a country cabin. Justice for Lana! It’s an outrage Lana Del Rey hasn’t won a Grammy. Let’s fix that tomorrow night, writes Julia Steinberg. On May 21, 2020, Lana Del Rey posted a message on Instagram titled “Question for the Culture.” In it, she asked: Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc—can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money—or whatever I want—without being crucified or saying I’m glamorizing abuse?????? May 21, 2020, was my eighteenth birthday. It was also the day I read Lana’s treatise. I remember watching as the woman who wrote the soundtrack to my teenage life was crucified for speaking out against pop culture orthodoxy. Critics accused her of putting women of color down and turning against feminism, which Lana says has no room “for women who look and act like me—the kind of woman who says no but men hear yes.” I was outraged that the critics were reaffirming her point entirely: that a woman must conform to cookie-cutter feminism in order to be accepted. There’s also a personal reason I was upset. A year earlier, during the start of my senior year of high school that was cut short due to Covid, Lana dropped her masterpiece: Norman Fucking Rockwell. I would tell you to listen to NFR for yourself. And if you haven’t, you should. But nothing beats being a teenager in L.A., driving around Topanga with your boyfriend, yearning for the adult complexity Lana told me about. I had never been in love, let alone had my first kiss. I never knew what it meant to desire true freedom or to truly hate someone. But Lana told me what all of it would feel like. A line from “Cinnamon Girl”—Like if you hold me without hurting me / You’ll be the first who ever did—rings in my ears every time I get close to feeling romantic affection. For years, Lana has given voice to a generation of young women caught between feminism and femininity. The greatest female artists of my generation agree. Many of my closest female friendships have come from bonding over Lana. And yet, Lana Del Rey has never won a Grammy. Lana should have won Album of the Year for Norman Fucking Rockwell in 2020. After the backlash to “Question for the Culture,” Lana channeled her rage into two more albums, Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Banisters, both released in 2021. They’re good, but not masterpieces. And then, in 2023, came Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Lana’s ninth studio album. This Sunday, it’s up for Album of the Year. She’s also nominated for Best Alternative Music Performance, Best Alternative Music Album, Song of the Year (for “A&W,” an abbreviation of American Whore), and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance (for “Candy Necklace” with Jon Batiste). “A&W” opens with the line I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine, a perfect example of the cryptic originality we lap up from Lana, whose private life is now as strange and fantastic as a teenage girl’s. She says her last relationship—allegedly, an engagement—ended because her house was too small. She’s addicted to vaping (when I saw her live in 2019, she paused her set to grab her vape), and she is friends with legendary folk singer-songwriter Joan Baez. She erected only one billboard promoting her latest album, in Tulsa, the hometown of her ex-boyfriend, celebrity cop Sean Larkin. “It’s personal,” she explained in a comment on Instagram. Call Lana crazy. Many have. But I can confidently say that Lana, 38, is the voice of women her age and younger: generations who feel stuck, chastised for their sadness but even more for their rebellion. A Grammy would give legitimacy to her prophecy. And finally, if Joni Mitchell or Jelly Roll or Lana or Fred Again aren’t your cup of tea, here’s Peter Savodnik with some selections for weekend listening that have really stood the test of time. In general, I try to avoid listening to music composed by anyone still alive—just like I prefer books written by people long dead. When I’m in a superlative mood, I listen to the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz at Oberlin. Or, even better, Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concertos. (Avi Avital playing the concerto in C major is tops.) But usually I’m not in a superlative mood, so I turn to Bach—often the organ sonatas. (Víkingur Ólafsson’s recording of the fourth sonata, on piano, is especially evocative.) Or Mozart. My father spent countless nights practicing the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor on our Steinway grand. When I hear it, I always feel at home—wherever I’m supposed to be. But yes, I’m aware, there’s some awards ceremony happening this weekend, and I suppose, if pressed, I’d vote for the football lady’s “Anti-Hero” for, you know, whatever. The music is fine, but really, it’s the Dostoyevskyan lyrics. She’s laughing up at us from hell? Lovely! It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. Exactly! (If only Ivan Karamazov were a pop star!) Anyway, note to would-be pop stars: find your favorite Russian novelist, and prepare for greatness. Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. The Free Press. © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

TGIF: Taylor vs. Trump Three Squad scandals. A Disney trigger warning. The GOP turns on Tay-Tay. Heterosexuals should probably give up on sex. Plus, Biden’s hard hat, Pelosi’s faux pas, and more. NELLIE BOWLES FEB 2 ∙ PREVIEW

Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates with girlfriend Taylor Swift after his team won the AFC Championship. (Photo by Patrick Smith via Getty Images) Hello and welcome back to TGIF. → America’s military might will respond at 2 p.m. at these coordinates: This week, an Iran-backed militia launched a drone strike against America’s soldiers and killed three—William Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, GA; Kennedy Sanders, 24, of Waycross, GA; and Breonna Moffett, 23, of Savannah, GA. First, the American response was to make it clear that it was kind of our fault: there were two drones coming in, and one was our friendly drone and one was Iran’s murder drone, and in the confusion we let the murder drone kill instead of taking down the murder drone. See, Iran didn’t mean it, it’s our bad, really. Biden took a few days to mull what to do and then the administration released their response: “U.S. officials have confirmed to CBS News that plans have been approved for a series of strikes over a number of days against targets—including Iranian personnel and facilities—inside Iraq and Syria.” The key to military strategy is to announce it loudly and clearly a week or two ahead of time, that’s what it said in The Art of War, I’m pretty sure. Soon, several empty buildings are about to be shown what America is all about. Within days, a random drone left on the desert floor is going to see into the blinking red light of a state-of-the-art weapon and know why we don’t have free healthcare. Several strong, terrorist-affiliated long-eared hedgehogs are going to be obliterated. Iran will never strike again! Mission—I can’t believe we’re back here—Accomplished. → Biden pivots on the border: In what CNN calls a “stunning political shift,” Biden this week said that if he could, he would “shut down” the U.S.-Mexico border right now. But can’t he? I have no idea. This comes after Border Patrol, at the end of last week, finally released December’s immigration numbers (they held the numbers late, finally releasing them on a Friday afternoon, a classic strategy to try to get as little coverage as possible). And why would it be good to hide them? Because the numbers are shocking. Border Patrol reported 302,034 migrant encounters in December, which breaks the previous record set in September. Among those were 19 people on the FBI terror watch list. Nineteen! Enough to play a basketball tournament... Subscribe to The Free Press to read the rest. Become a paying subscriber of The Free Press to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Failing Upward at the State Department

Plus: Biden our time with Iran, the new proletariat, the great Kelce-Swift stupidification, and more. → Today in “The Grown-Ups Are in Charge”: Remember the pullout from Afghanistan? That high point of U.S. diplomacy that left tens of thousands of U.S. allies stuck in a country now ruled by the Taliban? Remember the people chasing planes, clinging to the wheels, and dropping from the sky? Yeah, not our finest hour. Well, rather than being offered a premature retirement from government business, the person in charge of rescuing our Afghani friends (who remain abandoned) has been nominated as the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Today, Free Press reporter Eli Lake brings you the alarming story of Tracey Jacobson failing upward at the State Department. Tracey Jacobson Abandoned Our Afghan Allies. Now She’s Getting a Promotion. Tracey Jacobson Abandoned Our Afghan Allies. Now She’s Getting a Promotion. ELI LAKE · 4:02 AM Read full story → Biden our time: Five days have passed since an attack on Tower 22, a U.S. base in Jordan, killed three American troops and injured at least 40 others. On Sunday, the morning after the attack, Joe Biden said, “We shall respond” in a speech at a church in South Carolina. On Tuesday, the president said he had decided how to respond without offering any details. On Wednesday, the administration confirmed that an Iranian proxy was responsible for the attack. As of Wednesday night, though, there has been no response. And this week, Biden officials have reiterated their determination not to get drawn into a regional conflict. Meanwhile, what Biden officials see as a refusal to take the bait, others see as a surefire way to ensure that attacks on U.S. forces in the region continue. In other words, they see inadequate responses to Iranian aggression as one way we wind up in exactly the situation Biden says he is trying to avoid. As Reuel Gerecht, a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, put it to me when we spoke yesterday, “Only escalation can intimidate Iran.” But Gerecht doubts the administration will opt for the kind of action he believes is necessary to deter the Islamic republic. “I would be shocked if this administration, for example, attacked Revolutionary Guard Corps inside Iran. I think that’s just far too much for them. The administration’s gut is for the Americans to do less in the Middle East, not more. The Iranians and their allies have been forcing their hand, but I don’t think three dead Americans and however many wounded are going to fundamentally change their approach, which is to avoid direct conflict with Iran.” Lurking behind all these tactical considerations is what now looks like a catastrophic miscalculation by the administration. Coming into office, Biden and his team thought they could placate Iran and move on from the Middle East. How wrong they were. And how reluctant they are to admit that mistake. In The Wall Street Journal this week, Walter Russell Mead declared that “From Gaza to the Red Sea and from Jordan to Iraq, a stream of unprovoked attacks by Iran and its proxies are driving President Biden into the greatest crisis of his presidency.” With every attack on American troops, it becomes harder to disagree. Meanwhile, the U.S. is reportedly weighing recognition of a Palestinian state as a step toward a two-state solution. And in related news, three families of American October 7 victims are suing the governments of Iran and Syria as well as the crypto exchange Binance. In the lawsuit, filed in New York, the claimants accuse them of providing funds and support for Hamas’s attack. → Road Warriors: French farmers in tractors are laying “siege” to Paris. Deep France—la France profonde—is angry and wants the powers that be to know about it. By the time you read this, it’s possible the farmers have stormed the Élysée Palace. They might be tying President Emmanuel Macron to a forklift and throwing rotten apples at his dashing new prime minister at this point. Who knows? (Quick fashion detour. Out: protesting in keffiyehs. In: protesting in tricolor sashes. Something for the pro-Hamas crowd to consider.) I know, I know. The French are in revolt. What else is new? But it isn’t just the French. Farmers across Europe are firing up their tractors and clogging up the highways. In Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Italy, country folk are hitting the road over rising costs, cheap imports, and burdensome green regulations. The French farmers bring to mind the Canadian truckers who shut down Ottawa over Covid regulations in 2022, and the Dutch farmers who protested last summer. When it comes to class war, the picket line is out and the convoy is in, Michael Lind argues in an essay first published in the New Statesman that we’re reprinting in The Free Press today. As Michael explains, these working-class protesters on wheels were once well represented by their country’s center-left parties. Now, those parties are more closely aligned with educated professionals and “a supporting cast of disproportionately foreign-born service workers.” But while agricultural workers feel politically marginalized, they can still flex their economic and strategic muscle. They deliver goods, they grow food. . . and they block highways with tractors and trucks. Read Michael’s essay here: Road Warriors: The New Proletariat Road Warriors: The New Proletariat MICHAEL LIND · 3:37 AM Read full story → Big Tech apology tour: Mark Zuckerberg would presumably have chosen a pummeling in the dojo over the grilling he endured on Capitol Hill yesterday. The Meta chief, along with executives from X, Snap, Discord, and TikTok (wait, didn’t we ban those guys?), was called to testify in a Senate judiciary hearing on social media’s impact on children. In a tussle with Senator Josh Hawley, Zuckerberg was cornered into turning to the families of children who were victims of online abuse and exploitation and apologizing for what their kids had been through. I mean, I guess the dressing-down of a new master of the universe scratches an itch. But did the hearing do anything to help those who want safer social media for kids? Free Press contributor Abigail Shrier knows these issues better than most. She has a new book on the mental health of young Americans—Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up—out later this month. I asked Abigail for her thoughts on the hearing. Here’s what she told me: Gender dysphoria, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Tourette syndrome: the number of social contagions spread by social media could fill a diagnostic manual all its own. And yet, in the eight years since academic psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt first warned the world about the dangers of social media, the mental health expert complex has done nothing to curtail its use by teens and tweens. Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg feel no pressure to take responsibility for the damage their products cause. And why would they? The American Psychological Association, quick to warn the public about the dangers of systemic racism, police tactics, and climate change, has utterly failed to take the dangers of social media to teens seriously. (See the APA’s belated, laughably weak, and equivocating health advisory.) The simplest solution, Abigail says, is for parents to throw out their kids’ phones. But experts won’t suggest that because it will put them out of a job: One of the best things mental health experts could have done to improve the mental health of teens would not grant them an ongoing role in kids’ lives. Any parent can take away a cell phone. But only mental health experts can dispense “wellness tips,” diagnoses, psych meds, and therapy. They march into schools and lecture teens about the responsible uses of social media, which is a little like school nurses advising kids about the prudent uses of Ecstasy. In other words, parents: you’re on your own. → Canada discovers euthanasia is not morally straightforward: The Canadian government had planned to expand its “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) program to allow people suffering from mental illness—rather than just physical illness—to choose to die. But those plans are now on pause. Why? It seems our northern neighbors are growing increasingly uncomfortable with the idea. Our very own Rupa Subramanya had a role in this. She reported on MAID back in 2022, and, as she explained to me yesterday, her story “shone a light on how permissive MAID is in Canada and gave it international attention. Nothing in Canada changes until it figures negatively in the international press, and I think that’s what made the difference.” The Conservatives, Canada’s main opposition party, are now calling for MAID’s extension to be scrapped altogether. Look out for much more debate on this issue—in Canada and across the West—in the near future. → Just be normal!: We live in stupid times. By now, that much should be uncontroversial. A lot of people are to blame for this. Among them: Trump and his crew. The MAGA crowd is known for trivializing the serious: calling a deadly plague the “Wuhan flu,” joking about the injuries John McCain suffered while a prisoner of war in Vietnam, etc. It’s sick, sick stuff. But a more annoying, if less reprehensible, tendency seems to be gaining steam on the right: treating the trivial as if it were deadly serious. Look no further than the strange fuss around Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs. A brief recap for the blissfully unaware: pop star Taylor Swift and tight end Travis Kelce recently started dating. Then his team, the Chiefs, turned things around after a slow start to the season and are heading to the Super Bowl on February 11. This is great news for everyone: the football player, his proud girlfriend, and the NFL, which gets to cash in on a Super Bowl of cultural significance (surely many more young teens will tune in to cheer on “Taylor’s boyfriend”). But over on Fox News, pundits are starting to claim that Swift is a deep state psyop, and the NFL is rigging games to ensure a fairytale ending that would help the league get rich(er) and the president get reelected. (Because Swift backed Biden four years ago, the Biden campaign reportedly—and unsurprisingly—wants her to help his reelection bid.) Here’s GOP presidential also-ran Vivek Ramaswamy laying out the whole sinister plot on X: “I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.” Or maybe a very good tight end on a very good team is dating a very popular pop star. He will win the trophy. He will kiss the girl. This is America, baby! This is just what we ordered! L’affaire Kelce might be incredibly dumb, but it has at least inspired some smart writing. Here’s Ross Douthat, the only social conservative allowed in The New York Times’s offices these days, taking the meme-lords to task for their “self-defeating weirdness.” And here’s Mary Harrington, over at UnHerd, explaining Swift-mania as an “internet-enabled swarm” that “the Right neither understands well, nor has much prospect of turning to their advantage.” Readers, you’re not buying into the Swift-Kelce conspiratorial nonsense, are you? . . . Are you? Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor at The Free Press. Become a Free Press subscriber today: The Free Press. © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Weekend Listening: The Right Way to Fight Illiberalism Christopher Rufo and Yascha Mounk debate.

In the past few months, many people were shocked to see the moral rot that has taken hold inside American universities. For example, they were surprised to learn that: A tenured Columbia professor praised Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel as “awesome.” At UC–Irvine, a professor said “the Zionists have been exposed for the criminals and bloodthirsty animals that they are. This is a gift from Allah to the world.” At Virginia Tech, a professor said Hezbollah terrorism is just “a form of anti-imperialism that unfortunately the Western left shies away from too much.” And as Francesca Block of The Free Press reported this week, an NYU adjunct professor told students at The New School “we know it’s not true” that Hamas committed rape and beheaded babies on October 7. He even jokes about being antisemitic. I could go on and on. We’ve covered many of these stories at The Free Press. As antisemitism has spread at our universities, many started asking how this could happen when campuses are famously sensitive to microaggressions. How could schools that provide students emotional support animals and cry closets allow this kind of thing? Perhaps DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—wasn’t actually about those words, but about something else. It’s about replacing the principles of good-faith debate and truth-seeking scholarship with an illiberal orthodoxy that puts a premium on identity over ideas. Well now, it seems, people have finally had enough. States are second-guessing DEI’s place on college campuses and beyond. On January 1, a Texas law shutting down DEI offices at all state colleges went into effect. In Utah, Governor Spencer Cox—just three years after championing DEI—now rails against colleges that mandate faculty and staff sign diversity statements as a condition of employment. The University of Utah has since eliminated all diversity statements and questions in its hiring process. In fact, lawmakers in more than a dozen red states have either passed or proposed higher education reform packages that curtail DEI initiatives. Among them, of course, is Florida, which passed the Stop Woke Act nearly two years ago. Although a court placed part of that law on hold, the State Board of Education this month approved rules that limit public funding of DEI on college campuses. Our guests on this episode of Honestly, Christopher Rufo and Yascha Mounk, say the DEI ideological overhaul has consumed our schools for quite some time. The question now is: What should we do about it? Those are not questions with simple answers, and certainly not ones on which Christopher and Yascha agree. Christopher is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a board member at New College of Florida, and maybe the country’s most influential conservative activist and biggest cheerleader of Florida’s Stop Woke Act. He thinks that using the power of the law to stop DEI is essential. Yascha, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an international affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, is on the other side of the political spectrum. While he thinks that DEI—and woke ideology more broadly—is concerning, he doesn’t think the answer to its illiberalism should come in the form of bans and legislation. Christopher and Yascha both recently published books that investigate the changing cultural trends of the American left. Christopher’s book is America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. And Yascha is the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. What I appreciate about this debate on Honestly is that while each has a different perspective, they don’t dismiss each other’s arguments (well, mostly anyway). I talked to them about how we arrived at this new doctrine on power, identity, and justice, and what the right way forward should be. Below are some highlights from our debate, but you can listen to the full version of the conversation here: The Right Way to Fight Illiberalism: Christopher Rufo and Yascha Mounk Debate The Free Press Episode On how to describe DEI’s capture of higher education: Bari Weiss: Some people call it wokeness, which sort of automatically brands you as being on the right. Other people call it critical theory or identity politics or postmodern neo-Marxism. There’s a lot of disagreement about how we actually describe this thing that all of us are witnessing. So I want to start there. What is it that we’re actually talking about? Christopher Rufo: I think it’s an ideological syndrome. So it’s a cluster of traits, ideas, concepts, narratives, and bureaucratic arrangements that have really revolutionized American society over the past 50 years. I trace the immediate origins back to the year 1968, and the argument that I make in my book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is that all of the ideas from the radical left of that era—the late 1960s, early 1970s—have infiltrated universities and then started to move laterally through bureaucracies in the state sector, in K–12 education, in HR departments, and even the Fortune 100 companies. And what you see over the course of this process is some very kind of multisyllabic, complex ideological concepts from the originators of these ideas in that period. And now they’ve filtered out through bureaucratic language, through euphemisms, to become what we now know as DEI. That’s the ultimate bureaucratic expression of these ideologies. You can call it—any of those labels that you just suggested, I think, are correct in general, at least facets of this ideology. But at this point, it’s not just an idea. It’s actually an administrative, cultural, and bureaucratic power that has manifested itself and entrenched itself as a new, let’s say, hegemonic cultural force in American life. Yascha Mounk: I think the best way to boil down the ideas of this ideology is in three propositions. Number one, that identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the key prism for understanding society. But to understand how we talk to each other today, or to understand who won the last election, or to understand how political revolutions happen, you have to look at things like race, gender, and sexual orientation. Number two, that universalist values and neutral rules, like those enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are just meant to pull the wool over people’s eyes, that they actually were always designed to perpetuate forms of racist and sexist discrimination, that as Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory, claimed, America in the year 2000 remained as racist as it had been in 1950 and 1850. And third, which follows rather needlessly if you grant the first two premises, that therefore, in order to make any kind of progress in our society, we have to rip up those universal rules and aspirations and make how we all treat each other, and how the state treats all of us, explicitly depend on the kind of identity group into which we are born. I think if you understand that that is the core of the ideology, what you call it is less important. On whether it’s accurate to say cultural Marxism is taking place: YM: I think where we probably have genuine disagreements is in the extent to which it’s helpful to think of this ideology as being Marxist. So, Chris, correct me if I’m wrong: I think you would refer to it sometimes as a form of cultural Marxism. So the idea, broadly speaking, is that you take, sort of, the Marxist political ideology—you take out the class and you sort of put in identity categories like race and gender and sexual orientation. And broadly speaking, you get the ideas we’re talking about. I think that’s wrong for a number of reasons. First, because I just don’t think that there’s very much left of Marxism when you take out the economic categories. It’s a little bit like saying “when you take the bat out of baseball.” You’ve just gotten rid of too much for it to be meaningful. Secondly, because of the history of the thinkers who really do, I think, make up this tradition. Michel Foucault joins the French Communist Party, which very much is listening to Moscow in 1950, but he leaves it in 1953 in disgust. Derrick Bell says he barely read any Marx in college, and after that he never had time. The people he really read were people like [W.E.B] Du Bois and others. And when you go back to the core thinkers of the Marxist tradition, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the Frankfurt School and others, they simply don’t help you understand contemporary progressive politics. Then, of course, the thing we haven’t really mentioned, the idea of intersectionality, which comes to be interpreted as the claim that if you stand at [a] different intersection of identities than me, then I really can’t understand you, and I just have to defer my political judgment to you. That comes out of Kimberlé Crenshaw. And that, I think, is an area where we have a genuine intellectual disagreement. CR: I personally don’t use the term cultural Marxist that Yascha has done. I don’t do so in the book, although I think that the basic concept, if we leave the moniker aside, is that Marxism—the basic categorical distinctions—moved away from a purely orthodox materialist science or material determinism toward entities of culture, family, law, in a kind of Gramscian direction. [Herbert] Marcuse was a Marxist, and he was the most influential philosophical figure of the New Left, which is the prototype of the radical left we see today. His doctoral student, Angela Davis, was a member of the Communist Party, is a devoted Marxist, and really took the Marxist tradition and applied it to racial categories. Then within academia, most notably her long career at UC–Santa Barbara, and then her mentees, the third generation, were the founders of Black Lives Matter. They said themselves, “we are trained Marxists.” If you read a law review article written by one of the BLM founders, if you listen to their interviews and speeches, and then if you listen to their interviews with Angela Davis, they make very clear: “we are mobilizing along racial lines. We think that that’s the best rhetorical approach to score political victories. But the ultimate goal is the abolition of capitalism.” And you see this absolutely everywhere: in training programs and academic work, and even critical race theory. On what’s at stake in the Marxism argument. And if DEI is Marxist, why do Fortune 500 companies employ it? BW: But tell me what’s at stake, actually, in this argument, because I could go with both sides of the argument. But for the average person who’s looking at this ideology and just saying “This is bad. I look at the way that it segregates Americans. I look at the anti-Americanism all over it. I look at the anti-capitalism that’s definitely explicit in large parts of it, and I just think it’s bad.” And then they hear the two of you having a disagreement about whether it’s Marxist or not. They might wonder, why does it really matter in the end, if we can all agree that it’s a bad thing and that it’s bad for America? CR: What I think is really at stake—I think in Yascha’s interpretation, it appears to be this cerebral, abstract intellectual problem within academia. And if we can only have the right ideas and engage in debate, then the great ideas will win, and then the bad ideas will decay, and then everything will be fine. But if you take seriously the written words over the course of a half-century of these political objectives, of these thinkers and their activists, who have certainly seized territory in many, many institutions, you’re going to say it’s not just an intellectual debate. In fact, they want to, as critical race theorists have written, eliminate First Amendment protections for any speech they deem harmful, for any speech they deem racist. They want to eliminate the right to individual equality, as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and have a system of racial categorization and a racial spoils system in which power, privilege, wealth, and property are redistributed along the lines of racial identity. And they want to abolish the system of free enterprise, free markets, entrepreneurial capitalism that has created a massive blessing, not just for the United States but all over the world, and have it all run by a quote, unquote, “anti-racist bureaucracy.” And I think what is really at stake is: if you value the right to free speech, if you value the right to private property, if you value the right to be treated equally as an individual, if you value the United States Constitution—that’s what’s at stake. YM: One of the things that you cannot understand if you think of these ideas as Marxist, is why it is that Fortune 500 companies have proven so willing to adopt them? Why is it that corporate DEI trainings have so easily been able to incorporate these ideas? They certainly never incorporated the ideas of Karl Marx. Diversity training certainly never said, “the true nature of American society is capitalists exploiting workers, and you should form a union and go on strike.” That certainly would not be conformable with what a Fortune 500 company would allow its diversity trainers to say. So why is it that they are willing to have people come in and talk this kind of language? CR: Why would Fortune 100 companies do this? The answer to that is actually very important. It’s because they felt pressure from the cultural left on these kind of so-called racial equity issues. And they had already satisfied everything that they needed from the economic right: tax cuts, deregulation, free trade abroad. And so what they did is made a gamble and really a co-optation strategy. And more accurately, they were paying the tax—or really kind of like labor unions and factories in the mid-century period would pay the Mafia protection money. They adopt DEI policies for a number of reasons. One, to limit legal liability because of frivolous racial discrimination claims. Two, to buy off activist groups to leave them alone and not harass them and jeopardize their reputation. And then three, because there is internal pressure to, let’s say, “do something.” And these are the offerings that are on the table. It doesn’t mean they are Marxists. Obviously not. At The Free Press, we believe in having hard conversations out loud. If you want to hear more of them, and want to support our work, become a subscriber today: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article. The Free Press © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

TGIF: Soldiers of the Resistance

Democratic Socialists of America has a budget crisis. Hamas thanks U.S. college kids. Trump keeps soaring. Oakland’s In-N-Out shuts down. Plus, the white supremacists of Taizz. Donald Trump visits a polling site on the day of the New Hampshire primary, which he won by 11 points. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images) Welcome back to wintry Friday morning (just kidding, it’s sunny and gorgeous in L.A.). Thanks to Olly and Suzy for carrying the baton last week. They were too good. I see it as a threat. → Texas vs. Biden: The Biden administration and Texas are in an old-fashioned standoff, with Biden wanting to tear down the barbed wire fencing along the Texas–Mexico border and Texas wanting to keep it. Well, the Supreme Court says Biden wins, of course, because immigration is kind of a federal thing. But Governor Greg Abbott is not done; he’s declared that the border crisis counts as an invasion. Yes, Governor Abbott writes: “I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.” Major escalation! And some 25 other Republican governors are standing with Governor Abbott: “The lawless southern border threatens the lives of all Americans, including Idahoans,” says Idaho governor Brad Little. “Virginia stands with Texas,” says Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin. Others are joining the rebels. I didn’t have civil war in my tea leaves this morning, but here we are. My main question: Truly, why is Biden trying to dismantle the Texas–Mexico border anyway? Why are we in this fight? Remember when like ten migrants went to Martha’s Vineyard and it was a national crisis? → Who said the border was secure? Not us! My favorite senator and always has been, John Fetterman, the Bernie-supporting Democrat from Pennsylvania who has emerged as the new face of common sense, had this to say in a conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper: “I honestly don’t understand why it’s controversial to say we need a secure border. . . . I think about immigration is we wanna provide the American dream for any migrant, but it seems very difficult when you have 300,000 people showing up, encountered at our border to do that.” I’ve gone from a Fetterman skeptic to a person who might write in Fetterman for president. ... The Free Press © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

It’s Over, and It’s Trump The question is why? Plus: More from the campaign trail, justice for Canada’s truckers—and Barbie! OLIVER WISEMAN JAN 24

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BR2eDMdUKSo A car with stickers supporting Donald Trump in Laconia, New Hampshire. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) “New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation,” said Nikki Haley in her concession speech last night, after losing to Donald Trump. “This race is far from over,” she added. The polls suggest otherwise. New Hampshire, with its open primary and independent streak, was Haley’s best shot at beating Donald Trump, and she fell short. Everywhere else, she is miles behind the former president. In other words, it’s over. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Trump’s political obituary was written on January 6, 2021. Now, three years later, his future as a candidate isn’t just alive—he’s polling ahead of President Joe Biden in head-to-head matchups, and has shrugged off his Republican rivals in Iowa, and now New Hampshire, without breaking a sweat. In the press, his glide path toward the GOP’s third presidential nomination has been met with fulminating and increasingly naked bias. Witness, for example, the decision by CNN and MSNBC not to air his victory speeches in Iowa. And rather than trying to understand Trump’s voting base, many in the media have villainized them as fascists. If you think I’m exaggerating, just look at Rachel Maddow’s comments after Trump’s win in Iowa. The greatest threat of “our democracy falling to an authoritarian and potentially fascist form of government,” Maddow concluded, is “. . . people wanting that.” Yet again, the coverage of Trump is missing a serious effort to understand why a man impeached, indicted, and so reviled is the favorite candidate of the GOP base. In his essay today for The Free Press, Martin Gurri writes that the media’s lack of curiosity about Trump’s appeal reflects a larger problem in America. “Trump appears to act as a sort of funhouse mirror on which the progressive elites who run most institutions, including the federal government, see themselves reflected in the most monstrous and frightening light,” Gurri writes. “The malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative democracy. To smash the nightmare image of themselves that Trump evokes, they are willing to twist and force our system until it breaks.” Read Martin’s essay to understand how America’s elite gave up on the masses, and what it means for 2024 and beyond: Trump. Again. The Question Is Why? MARTIN GURRI · 3:21 AM Trump. Again. The Question Is Why? Read full story Stumbling toward the White House The Republican primary is a done deal. Say what you want about the Republicans’ showing—the hot mics, the catfights, the gaffes—at least they gave it the old college try. Though it feels like we’ve been talking about this election for years, a long and winding road still lies between us and November 7. Here’s what’s on our 2024 radar, post-New Hampshire. → Is Haley really hanging about? The biggest question facing Nikki Haley after last night’s result was whether she would drop out before South Carolina’s primary on February 24. Yes, she said she wasn’t going anywhere last night. But she has a full month until South Carolina. A month in which donors will wonder whether their money is being well spent—and in which Haley must stew over the choice between the humiliation of exiting the race before primaries in her home state, or the humiliation of fighting on and being beaten in her home state. (No one promised this would be fun, Madam Ambassador.) On primary day in New Hampshire, Haley’s message to donors was this: “We aren’t going anywhere.” But her second-place finish in New Hampshire offers next to nothing in the way of a path to victory. → As for the Democrats: Joe Biden won as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire’s renegade Democratic primary, with his main challenger Dean Phillips winning around 20 percent of the vote. Phillips was hoping a strong second, if not a surprise win, could deliver a shock to his own side and raise the alarm about an incumbent he thinks is set for defeat come November. Phillips was aiming for a repeat of what happened in 1968, when LBJ’s surprisingly weak first-place finish in New Hampshire—he won only by single digits against Eugene McCarthy—contributed to his decision not to seek reelection. Yesterday, Phillips (like McCarthy, a Minnesotan) came a much more distant second behind Biden, who was a write-in candidate, not even on the ballot. Phillips’s quixotic presidential bid, which is all but over, has been met with derision by his party’s establishment. But they have plenty to learn from the little-known lawmaker, and they can start by listening to his interview with CNN yesterday about attending a Trump rally. It was almost jarring to hear a politician talk about the other side’s supporters with that much empathy. “Basket of deplorables” it ain’t. ICYMI: Here’s Dean Phillips on Honestly. → It’s the border, stupid: Inflation is no longer voters’ top concern, according to a new Harvard CAPS–Harris poll this week. The new major issue, it turns out, is whether Claudine Gay deserves a tenured and highly paid position at Harvard. Just kidding. It’s the border. The percentage of voters who see immigration as the biggest issue facing the nation has jumped seven points in one month to 35 percent. Bad news for the president, and arguably a bigger electoral liability than inflation. Voters give Biden a 32 percent favorability rating on immigration—an all-time low. Since the start of the Biden administration, the U.S. has released more than 2.3 million migrants at the border, while 6 million migrants have been taken into Customs and Border Protection custody since the start of 2021. Amid all the theorizing about Trump’s enduring appeal, perhaps the simplest explanation is the border: the issue that animated Trump’s rise nearly a decade ago is becoming an ever-bigger crisis—and, as Olivia Reingold reported for The Free Press yesterday, it continues to scramble our politics in all sorts of surprising ways. → Elise Stefanik’s audience of one: Say what you will about Elise Stefanik, but the New York congresswoman knows her customers. And when it comes to campaigning hard for Donald Trump, perhaps in the hope that he picks her as his running mate, unflinching loyalty is the name of the game. Witness, for example, her impressive spin after Donald Trump appeared to mix up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi in a recent speech by repeatedly blaming Haley, not then–Speaker Pelosi, for the lack of security in Congress on January 6. Asked about the confusion, Stefanik said, “That isn’t a mix-up. . . Nikki Haley is relying on Democrats, just like Nancy Pelosi, to try to have a desperate showing in New Hampshire.” When the reporter pointed out that Trump was talking about January 6, Stefanik said: “President Trump has not lost his step. He is a stronger candidate, stronger. . . than he was in 2016 and he was in 2020. Compare that to Joe Biden’s weakness.” Never apologize, never explain. We get the elections we deserve. Apparently, in 2024, we deserve nothing better than “My candidate is less mentally impaired than the other candidate.” → The Mindy project: Speaking of vice-presidential hopefuls, Tim Scott got engaged to his girlfriend Mindy Noce on Saturday night in Kiawah Island, South Carolina. Congratulations, Senator! Noce, a Charleston-area interior designer and pickleball enthusiast, wore a sparkly white jacket for the beach walk when Scott popped the question. Perhaps she is politically astute enough to have seen a proposal coming after Scott endorsed Trump a day earlier. “[Tim Scott] is engaged to be married,” Trump said at a rally in New Hampshire Monday. “We never thought this was going to happen. What’s going on?” In Trump-speak, that’s the equivalent of a massive congratulations. I think. The Canadian truckers’ day in court Back in 2022, the battle between Justin Trudeau and Canada’s truckers over vaccine mandates came to symbolize a lot more: a clash over power and freedom in the pandemic era. It’s a fascinating story that Free Press reporter Rupa Subramanya has been following from the start. Now, she brings us an update: The Federal Court of Canada delivered a major blow to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday, ruling that his government exceeded its authority when it claimed special powers in response to the truckers’ protest in Ottawa in 2022. The revolt over Covid rules did not pose a threat to national security as required by the Emergencies Act, the court decided, meaning Trudeau’s government violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—Canada’s equivalent to the Bill of Rights. By invoking the Emergencies Act, Trudeau gave himself extraordinary powers, imposing draconian measures such as empowering the federal finance minister to freeze the personal bank accounts of protesters without requiring a court order. The RCMP, Canada’s equivalent of the FBI, ordered banks to freeze 257 individual accounts. For the truckers on the receiving end of the government’s emergency powers, the decision is a long overdue win. Immediately after the court’s decision, I called Peter, a trucker I first spoke to while reporting on the protest for The Free Press in 2022. He was not comfortable sharing his full name. Since we last spoke, he had lost his trucking business because of the harsh vaccine mandates and only recently feels he is getting back on his feet. His brother, also a trucker who had supported the protest, had his truck impounded by the feds under the emergency powers. (It was eventually returned to him.) Peter is heartened by the federal court’s decision. “We have a voice,” he told me. “It’s a good start toward accountability.” Chris Clarke, another trucker I first met back in 2022, told me he welcomed the ruling but doubts that things are really going to change. He believes there need to be civil lawsuits following this decision to compensate the truckers, and some accountability for Trudeau himself. “Going against a corrupt government is exhausting. They know they have the power and endurance to outlast their citizens and exhaust them while staying in power,” said Clarke. Ed Cornell, a retired gunner from New Brunswick, was one of the protesters who had his account frozen in 2022. When that happened, Cornell had no way to appeal the decision and was given no explanation by the authorities. “It was the biggest blow that you could imagine,” Cornell told The Free Press yesterday. “It made me look over my shoulder, a feeling that has never gone away. You stand up for your country for so long, and then your country betrays you.” Bruce Pardy, a prominent Canadian constitutional scholar, told The Free Press: “The court correctly said that the government’s invocation of the Act relied on the statutory requirement for ‘threats or use of acts of serious violence.’ And there weren’t any.” Pardy called the decision “well-reasoned,” adding: “We still have some kind of rule of law in this country.” Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, has already indicated that the government will appeal the federal court’s decision. It will next go to the Federal Court of Appeal and will almost certainly wind up in the Supreme Court. Whatever that court’s ruling, yesterday’s defeat comes at a bad time for Trudeau’s government, which is being hammered in the polls and must face an election before October next year. The Conservative Party’s charismatic leader, Pierre Poilievre, is sure to make hay of the decision by reminding Canadians that his was the only major party that opposed invoking the Emergencies Act in Parliament. No matter how things turn out in the end, it’s clear that a line has been drawn in the sand when it comes to federal government overreach into the lives of private citizens. Meanwhile, Cornell says the court’s decision is a “poke in the face of our government. And it says to them that you’re not going to get away with this. The people know what you did.” Justice for Barbie! The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer led the field with nods from Academy Awards voters in 13 categories. (Here’s the full list.) Barbie, last summer’s bubblegum yin to Oppenheimer’s Promethean yang, collected eight nominations. (Both films were nominated for Best Picture, setting up the ultimate Barbenheimer showdown.) But Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were notably absent from the list of nominees for the Best Director and Best Actress categories, much to the frustration of Suzy Weiss, who gave Barbie a glowing review in The Free Press. Here’s Suzy, calling for justice for the women who painted the world pink last summer: A little part of me is happy when my favorite movies or performances aren’t nominated for an Academy Award. Getting an Oscar whets the appetite for more Oscars. And too often, would-be artists become trophy chasers, jumping through the increasingly narrow and bizarre hoops set by the powers that be to produce a set of winners that comport with the identity-obsessed politics of the moment. But Greta deserved a nomination. So did Margot Robbie. The two women who helmed Barbie as its director and star gave cinema a much-needed dose of fun and pink joy this summer (not to mention banger box office numbers). It seems Hollywood can’t take a win even when it’s right under their perfectly enhanced noses. And there’s no Oscar justice either for the superb cast of May December—none of whom got a single nod. Nor Emerald Fennell, who—despite writing one of the darkest, funniest, and most original screenplays in the history of film (Saltburn)—failed to get a nomination in any category. As Barbie would say: “The real world is forever and irrevocably messed up.” ICYMI: The Free Press goes to the movies. Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor at The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. The Free Press © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants.

They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants. The city is greeting new arrivals with resources like health screenings and rent support. ‘They’re giving migrants all the things we’ve been asking for since we came here in chains.’ OLIVIA REINGOLD JAN 23 ∙ Neighbors Donald Glover (from left), Mona Collins, Gerald K. Harris, and Fred Caldwell in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Harris is one of five plaintiffs suing Chicago over its plans to house migrants at nearby Amundsen Park. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press) “How dare you?” That was the first reaction Cata Truss, a 57-year-old mother on the West Side of Chicago, had when she found out who was behind the push to turn her neighborhood park into a shelter for migrants: Democrats she helped elect. “All these people, I have supported every one of them,” she says about Mayor Brandon Johnson and his progressive allies. “I was like, ‘Are you freaking kidding me?’ ” There was no way she was going to let Amundsen Park—what she calls “the crown jewel of the community”—go to the newly arrived migrants from the Mexican border. Especially not when there were black Chicagoans who needed the space, which she says kept her five sons “out of trouble” and busy playing football when they were young. “There’s a humanitarian crisis in the black community,” said Truss. “But every time we have a need in our community, we’re told that there are no funds. There’s no money for us.” Cata Truss, at her home in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, filed her suit against the city on notepaper, handwritten in pen. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press) Truss and other black residents told me that Chicago, which calls itself a “welcoming city,” has been very welcoming—just not to them. Since August 2022, Chicago has greeted nearly 35,000 new arrivals with resources like laundry services, mental health screenings, and $15,000 in rental support per person—all funds that Truss says could’ve gone a long way in Amundsen Park in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, where nearly 28 percent of residents live below the poverty line. So last October, a day before the field house was set to become a migrant shelter, Truss raced to the local courthouse, along with three of her neighbors—plus the head of the local NAACP chapter for moral support. For the next two and a half hours, she drafted a lawsuit in a notebook, then ripped out the pages and handed them to a clerk. Her argument, handwritten in pen, was that the field house was “designated for recreational use within the community,” not housing noncitizens. One of her co-plaintiffs, Gerald K. Harris, runs the football program at the field house that trained her five sons. “I was like, ‘bring it on,’ ” she says. “Let’s fight.” ... Subscribe to The Free Press to read the rest. Become a paying subscriber of The Free Press to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Things Worth Remembering: The Doomed Romance of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

Hughes said nothing of his wife’s suicide for decades, until his own final years when he penned the words: ‘Everything in me loved her.’ DOUGLAS MURRAY 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. It’s hard to explain the aura that surrounded the poet Ted Hughes. He was the genius behind collections like Crow and The Hawk in the Rain, and he was poet laureate of England and a frequent fly-fishing companion of the Queen Mother. But there was also a terrible penumbra about him because of something that had happened that Hughes never talked about: his former wife and fellow poet Sylvia Plath had gassed herself in London in 1963 while the couple’s two children slept next door. Once was horrific enough. But then it happened again. ... © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104