The storm that Donald Trump unleashed when he outlawed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs by recipients of federal funding has thrashed Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard is in danger of losing its international students, its tax-exempt status, and about $3 billion in funding. Worry is deepening that the president will go after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or other research institutions next. That might explain why MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced last week that MIT will shut down its DEI program. “Our success depends on attracting exceptionally talented people of every background,” she said, adding that “community is best built locally rather than top down.”

It wasn’t so long ago that DEI offices had enormous power on campus, where they could sway hiring decisions or help bring down even world-renowned faculty members.

Just ask David Sabatini. He was a molecular biologist working in Cambridge to figure out a protein called mTOR, which plays a critical role in tumor development, and he was at the top of his field. His research laid some of the groundwork for drug discoveries around organ transplantation and cancer treatment, and he was predicted to win the Nobel Prize. But Sabatini was fired in August 2021 from the job that paid his salary and resigned from two others, his name and reputation destroyed.

He had been working in science for about 25 years without so much as a complaint, he told me. But then Kristin Knouse, a fellow researcher with whom Sabatini had a consensual relationship, accused him of sexual harassment. “I lost everything,” he told me back in 2022. “My whole life imploded.”

Every week in his columns for The Free Press, Matthew Continetti tries to make sense of the characters, factions, and dynamics on the American right. We launched Matt’s column shortly after Trump’s return to the White House, and let’s just say he hasn’t exactly been light on material.

With a MAGA revolution underway in Washington, D.C., Matt has become a…

In May 2024, I wrote a column praising universities—specifically Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri—for prohibiting students and faculty from intimidating Jewish students and chanting antisemitic epithets on campus.

It was not a controversial column. Except at the pro-United Nations organization I volunteered for.

For the last 10 years, I’ve been on the board of an organization called USA for UNHCR, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, otherwise known as UNHCR, created in the aftermath of the Second World War to help resettle the tens of millions of refugees uprooted by war.

Shortly after my column was published, I was sent an email by leaders of the organization questioning my “suitability” as a board member. They told me my views were at odds with their standings “as a humanitarian and peace-keeping organization.”

I was stunned. USA for UNHCR has been the major cause of my adult life. My father, Mark Vittert, helped create the organization after his own stint as a UN volunteer. I believed in its mission. My opinion piece was strictly limited to the bravery it took for schools to stand up to the antisemitic intimidation of their students. Yet it turned out to be at odds with their values as a “humanitarian and peace-keeping organization.”

It was heartbreaking for me. But the truth is the culture of USA for UNHCR had changed so completely during my tenure that they were trying to silence me.

The candlelit church in Greenwich Village was packed. After months of study and preparation, 19 adults sat at the front, dressed in white, nervously awaiting their turn at the baptismal font. One by one, they stepped forward. After anointing them with chrism (holy oil), the priest poured water over their heads, baptizing them into the Catholic Church in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

“It was almost as if the veil between heaven and earth had been lifted,” said Jane, one of the adults baptized into the Church that day. She left feeling “more receptive to the supernatural.”

That was Easter Sunday 2025, just over a month ago. And what happened in Greenwich Village happened across America. There was a boom in adult baptisms.

Earlier this year, The Pillar reported a surge in the numbers of aspiring Catholics registering to join the church at Easter. The Diocese of Lansing in Michigan reported a 30 percent spike from the previous year, 633 converts, which is the highest they’ve seen in over a decade. Father Ryan Kaup, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Catholic center, baptized 20 students alone—“the highest we’ve ever had”—and gave rites of initiation to an additional 50 who were coming into the church from other Christian denominations.

And now, of course, we have an American pope, Leo XIV, who church leaders hope will turbocharge the country’s Catholic boom.

America is not alone. The Catholic boom is also happening in France—which saw a 45 percent increase in the number of adult baptisms this year—and in England—where, due to a surge in Mass attendance, Catholics are on track to outnumber Anglicans for the first time since the Church of England was born.

Why are so many adults in the once-secularized West seeking to be baptized into the Catholic Church? I’ve been reporting on the rise in religiosity for a while now, and have heard many theories: Modern Americans are starved of beauty, meaning, purpose, and community. The Church of Rome offers all these things, but so do other religions. So: Why Catholicism?

Tyler Cowen is usually the smartest person in the room. I consider him a friend, so I’ve often been in the room with him, and when he speaks, on any number of subjects, there tends to be a pause in the conversation as people reach for their notepads.

With Avital Balwit, Cowen recently co-wrote a fascinating article, published by The Free Press, on the many ways the arrival of artificial intelligence will reconfigure our basic humanity. I don’t know Balwit personally, but she tells us that at 26 she holds an important position at Anthropic, the company responsible for an AI large language model called Claude. So I suspect that she, too, is extraordinarily smart.

So here we have two extremely intelligent humans confronting the reality of transcendentally intelligent machines—and while the vision of the future they describe in their article very much leans on the side of optimism, their gut reaction is to feel diminished. AI, they tell us, will trigger “the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced.” The reason? AI spells the end of “human intellectual supremacy—a position we’ve held unchallenged for our entire existence.” That is, people who once thought of themselves as the pinnacle of brainpower will now struggle “to live meaningful lives in a world where they are no longer the smartest and most capable entities in it.”

My initial reflection on reading this was, Whew, could be a lot worse . . . I’m a baby boomer. The big, scary invention in my youth was the nuclear bomb, which threatened to cause the end of human existence, rather than just existential anguish. Those who survived being pulverized would be eaten by 40-foot mutated insects, Hollywood reliably informed us.

Then, when considering the matter further, I found the claim that humanity has always seen itself as the smartest thing on the planet to be curiously ahistorical. Most people to this day believe in greater powers and a higher intelligence. “The heavens proclaim the glory of God,” said the psalmist. Cosmic arrogance—what the ancient Greeks called hubris—has long been understood to lead to self-destruction. AI models like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT will eventually absorb all human knowledge, wisdom, and madness and then interface with us as a person or at least a personality. Thus, we are likely to approach them as the ancient Greeks once approached the oracle of Apollo at Delphi—whose prophecies were often too clever by half.

It’s Wednesday, June 4. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The future of war is here; why “report first, verify later” is a gift to Hamas; Bari Weiss and Rod Dreher in conversation on the radical right; and more.

But first: River Page and Peter Savodnik on how Democrats lost young men—and a new generation of candidates trying to depose their party’s old guard.

A recent New York Times article revealed that the Democratic Party is spending $20 million to anthropologically study the young men who have abandoned them in droves. Like Margaret Mead observing the grass-skirted natives in Samoa, notebook in hand, Dems plan to study the “syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in online male spaces, according to the plans.

They should pay me instead. I am a young man (in good lighting, anyway), and one the Democrats once had and lost.

In my latest essay for The Free Press, I argue that the party should learn from the one Democrat capable of capturing a male audience: Bernie Sanders. With his party in the midst of an identity crisis, Bernie has been packing arenas on his “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour and charming the hosts of bro-ish podcasts like Flagrant with Andrew Schulz. If Democrats want to win back young men, they have to adopt the Bernie method: Acknowledge that something is deeply wrong with the country, provide a plan to fix it and, most importantly, name an enemy.

Thankfully, some Democrats seem to get it. Or at least that’s what I’ve gathered from my colleague Peter Savodnik’s latest reporting. In his Free Press story today, he profiles the young Democrats taking on the party’s gerontocracy in the coming primaries.

“These new Democrats say they are done with just railing against Donald Trump,” Peter writes. They “are more focused on addressing the problems that propelled Trump to power in the first place—the problems that the people they’re challenging have had years to do something about but, to their mind, have not.”

—River Page

And tune in at 3 p.m. ET today for our next livestream: A conversation between Free Press columnist Matthew Continetti and senior editor Olly Wiseman on the past, present, and future of American conservatism, from William F. Buckley to Donald Trump. Join us here.

• Elon Musk, newly departed from his D.C. efforts to reduce governmental waste, called the Republicans’ tax-and-spending-cut bill a “disgusting abomination.” The Tesla CEO referred to the “big, beautiful bill” as the “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill,” adding: “Shame on those who voted for it: You know you did wrong.”

• The wife and five children of the Colorado terrorist attack suspect were arrested yesterday and taken into custody by ICE and Homeland Security. The suspect—an Egyptian national who shouted “Free Palestine” as he hurled Molotov cocktails at demonstrators—and his family now face deportation. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said her agency is “investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack.”

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has warned that the global economy is set to grow at its slowest rate since the pandemic amid President Trump’s trade war. The organization has lashed its forecasts for 2025 and 2026 to 2.9 percent. The U.S. is projected to be hit particularly hard, with a predicted growth rate this year of 1.6 percent, down from 2.8 percent last year.

• A set of bills that would have made developing renewable energy infrastructure harder and more expensive failed in the Texas state legislature on Monday. An alliance of clean energy groups, corporations, and fossil fuel companies had lobbied against the legislation—a demonstration of the strength of an “all of the above” energy policy in Texas. Approximately a third of the state’s energy comes from renewable sources.

• Citigroup committed itself to political neutrality in a statement published Tuesday. As the issue of “debanking” becomes more prominent, the company is explicitly prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “political affiliation.” The financial firm also lifted its restriction on the sale of firearms by its business clients. Read Rupa Subramanya’s groundbreaking Free Press report on “debanking.”

• Lee Jae-myung was inaugurated as South Korea’s new president today after winning a snap election. The liberal opposition leader took office after the previous president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was impeached and removed after a political saga involving his improper declaration of martial law.

• Climate activist Greta Thunberg set sail for Gaza as part of a mission aimed at “breaking Israel’s siege,” according to organizers of the trip. “No matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the livestreamed genocide,” Thunberg said.

• The Kennedy Center saw a drop of 36 percent in subscription revenue for the upcoming season. The dip comes after Trump appointed allies to the board of trustees, made himself chairman, and replaced its president with Ric Grenell, who served as ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term. A staffer who shared the data said: “We feel that it is necessary to show that mismanagement by the new leadership is becoming a real problem for the health of the organization.”

• Two Chinese citizens were charged with conspiracy and smuggling a “dangerous biological pathogen” into the U.S. A DOJ attorney said that two Chinese men smuggled a “ ‘potential agroterrorism weapon’ into the heartland of America, where they apparently intended to use a University of Michigan laboratory to further their scheme.”

Ever since they were walloped in November, Democrats have been asking not just what they’re supposed to do next—but who they’re supposed to be.

With the first primaries of the 2026 midterm now coming into focus, the navel-gazing will soon come to an end, and the debate about the future of the party will stop being theoretical and start becoming reality as voters go to the ballot box.

At the heart of that debate is a crop of never-heard-of-before candidates, most of them under 40, taking on the old elite of a party that has never been more unpopular.

The newcomers come from a growing pool of younger, angrier, populist (or populist-adjacent) Democrats. They are revolting against a gerontocracy that, they say, has failed over and over—and, worse yet, seems content to fail. Almost all the candidates I spoke to have read or are reading the new book Original Sin, about the White House cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

“So fucking cringe,” one candidate said, when I asked what he made of Kamala Harris’s 2024 “freedom and joy” campaign.

As of right now, there are 15 Democratic House members being primaried, and we’re still nine months out from the first votes. “I absolutely expect the House Dem primary challenge number to rise,” Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, a group that recruits young progressive candidates, told me in an email. “It’s still very early.”

The challengers, along with Senate candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, 40, in Michigan and New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani, 33, are disproportionately male—in sharp contrast with the last time Democrats were heading into a midterm under Donald Trump. That was 2018, when women—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Elissa Slotkin, and Abigail Spanberger, among many others—led the charge.

In early 2020, I changed my Florida voter registration from Independent to Democrat in order to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary. A few months after he lost, I changed my registration back to Independent.

This was not an exercise in sore-loserdom, but rather, something more pressing: avoiding embarrassment. Voter information is public in Florida and, around that time, an angry commenter on Twitter called me a Democrat and produced my voter file as proof.

Of all the slurs ascribed to me in my years as a journalist—libtard, commie, faggot, just to name a few—Democrat is by far the most humiliating, because it implies that I am not only a libtard, a commie, and a faggot, but also an unprincipled one, who, like the Democratic Party, believes in nothing at all.

The truth is, I can’t think of a single male friend who self-identifies as a Democrat. Perhaps this is because I’ve spent most of my adult life in the deep-red Florida Panhandle. Or maybe it’s because my friends didn’t go to elite colleges, if they went to college at all. Whatever the case may be, even the ones who still vote Democrat admit to doing so only with a bit of embarrassment in their voices, and all of them happen to be gay. None of my straight male friends, to my knowledge, have voted for a Democrat since Bernie. If they have, they are closeted about it.

So I was not surprised to learn recently that the Democratic Party plans to spend $20 million on a project called “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.” Like Margaret Mead observing the grass-skirted natives in Samoa, notebook in hand, Dems plan to study the “syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in online male spaces, according to a plan obtained by The New York Times.

It’s money well wasted. The Democrats have been losing the support of young men like me for years. Why? Let me tell you from my perspective as someone the Democratic Party once won and lost.

The first is the Democratic Party’s demonization of white men, ostensibly in the service of “social justice.” As Rod Dreher put it in The Free Press earlier this week, “Think what it must be like to be a white boy growing up in a culture that tells you that you are what’s wrong with the world. You are not only demonized by cultural elites and institutions—not because of anything you believe or have done—but because of who you are.”

The second, and related reason, has to do with the Democratic Party’s embrace of an extreme version of identity politics. General respect for minorities is one thing; deification is quite another. People will tolerate many things, but secondhand embarrassment is not one of them, which is what most men (and many women, I suspect) feel when they hear a land acknowledgment, a “fat activist” screaming about privilege, or any of the other corny displays we’ve been subject to over past years. More concretely, the Democratic Party’s embrace of the most extreme goals of the trans movement, such as allowing children to transition or for transwomen to participate in women’s sports, strikes many men—even a lot of gay ones, including me—as insane.

The Democratic Party seems to have caught on to the problem—at least rhetorically. Take the Democratic strategist who admitted to the Times that the party had “lost credibility by being seen as alien on cultural issues.” Wannabe Democratic front-runners are already pivoting and memory-holing, whether it’s Pete Buttigieg taking the pronouns out of his Instagram bio, or Gavin Newsom becoming a podcaster and falsely claiming that nobody ever said Latinx (a word he used himself).

But the Democratic Party’s great de-wokening won’t be enough to regain the trust of the young men it’s lost. The failed Kamala Harris campaign, for all its flaws, did not run on “wokeness”—it largely avoided social issues, apart from legal access to abortion, which most men support. The Harris campaign’s greatest failure is that it ran on nothing at all. Ask yourself: What does the Democratic Party actually stand for—and, crucially, stand against? An inability to name an enemy, apart from Trump and the Republicans, or articulate a vision of the future, has turned the Democratic Party into vanguards for a political and economic establishment that people already perceive as a failure.

If Democrats want to win back young men, they cannot promise reform. They have to admit what Americans already feel is true: that there is something that’s going very wrong with this country—and it’s time to radically change it.

Trump knows this. He leaves you in no doubt as to who his enemies are, and they happen to be some of the most unpopular people in the country: a governing elite in both parties who have gotten all the big calls wrong.

The success of Bernie Sanders with young men is a testament to this winning strategy.

I was drawn to Sanders in 2016 because of his message, which was that Americans had been screwed—not just by Republicans, but by the Democrats as well—the party that refused to punish the Wall Street executives who nearly brought down the financial system in 2008, and who preferred to dine with the country’s oligarchs instead of attacking them. Democratic administrations were just like Republican ones: Heads didn’t roll. The rich got richer. The poor were forgotten. And nothing ever fundamentally changed.

I was 20 years old in 2016, when the Democratic Party was rigging the primary season to ensure that Sanders was not the nominee. I was working two jobs with no health insurance, and preparing to take out thousands of dollars in student loan debt to make the mistake of going to college. I will never forgive the Democratic Party for telling me that I was a sexist pig for not sacrificing the long-shot possibility that Sanders could give me—and lots of men just like me—a better life on the altar of Hillary Clinton’s political ambitions.

In 2020, four years after Hillary lost to Trump, Joe Rogan, the country’s most popular podcaster, said he would “probably vote for Bernie” because Sanders “has been insanely consistent his entire life.” In response, establishment Democrats like Joe Biden and their allies in the liberal media deployed the same playbook as in 2016, demonizing Rogan and condemning him as a David Duke–level bigot for saying that transgender women shouldn’t play female sports. Bernie was supposed to join in the condemnation. He didn’t.

Bernie is especially popular in the young male media ecosystem that the Democrats are so eager to break into. “During this election the podcast space, which the Democrats largely avoided, they started to label us the podcast bros and said we were sexist and we were racist and bigoted,” the comedian Andrew Schulz said to—who else?—Bernie Sanders on his massively popular podcast Flagrant last week. “It’s almost like it’s the exact same strategy to get you out of there.”

Bernie agreed, and noted that he, like many of his colleagues, believed all forms of bigotry needed to be eliminated and that liberal Democrats talk about this issue “all the time.” Bernie said, “And then you get into what we call ‘identity politics.’ ”

Bernie continued, imitating liberal Democrats, “Oh, you’re black, you’re wonderful, you’re gay, you’re the greatest human being on earth.”

Schulz and his crew cackled—you’re gay, you’re wonderful sounds hilarious in Bernie’s old Brooklyn accent.

Bernie continued. “You’re gay, that’s fine, who cares? But what do you stand for?” And then he returned to making the case for universal healthcare. In a subsequent podcast appearance with radio DJ Charlemagne tha God, Schulz and his co-hosts all agreed that, as Schulz put it, “The Democrats’ pivot should be to go more socialist.”

Not all Democrats will agree with Bernie’s economic populism, but moderates watching him pack arenas on his “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour must realize that they need to find something beyond running ever so slightly more to the center if they are going to stand a chance. (And no, it isn’t “abundance,” because I’ve read the book and still have no idea what it means.)

What young men want is someone who’s willing to let them fight for themselves—together. Economic populism allows for that without turning into a sinister form of identity politics.

This cannot be accomplished without naming an enemy—and it can’t just be the billionaires that Democrats happen to dislike because they supported Trump, like Elon Musk. It has to be the system that allows people to accumulate more wealth than they can ever spend in a country where people die from lack of healthcare. And Democrats have to promise more than tepid reforms around the edges.

Forget everything else. If Democrats want to win back people like me, they need to go to war with the rich. They should have started yesterday.

If what the Ukrainian security service has told the public is even half true, their long-range strikes against the Russian air force on June 1 were an operational success on a grand scale. The Ukrainians say that they damaged or destroyed roughly a third of Russia’s strategic cruise-missile carriers, striking targets at bases from the Arctic Circle in Murmansk all the way to the far end of the Eurasian steppe along the Mongolian border in Irkutsk. Russia’s vast depths failed to contribute to their customary strategic advantage.

The raids also demonstrated that the future of war is now. To overcome Russia’s advantage in distance and evade its air defenses, the Ukrainians infiltrated cheap drones in trucks, launched them remotely in close proximity to their targets, and apparently leveraged local telecom networks for control, though reportedly using some degree of autonomy as well—the details are not clear. Some of the targeted aircraft are no longer in production and are thus likely irreplicable. The Ukrainians say the tab in damaged or destroyed equipment for the Russians is in the vicinity of $7 billion. The cost of the attack was certainly orders of magnitude less than that—just as the effective demolition of Russia’s Black Sea fleet cost much less than the destroyed assets themselves. We knew that an “anti-navy” was a feature of the modern battlefield; logically an “anti-air force” was just as plausible.

I may be biased, but I think our columnist Matthew Continetti is the sharpest chronicler of American conservatism working today. So, we asked him to write about the long-anticipated new biography of William F. Buckley Jr.—the person who arguably did more than anyone else to build and steer the conservative movement.

Read his essential review below—and join me and Matt for a livestream discussion of the past, present, and future of the American right, from Buckley to Trump and beyond, tomorrow at 3 p.m. ET. Click here to mark it in your calendars.

—Oliver Wiseman

William F. Buckley Jr., born 100 years ago this November, was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century.

From the publication of Buckley’s first book in 1951 when he was 25, to his death in 2008, the author, debater, speaker, editor, columnist, and television personality inspired, chronicled, built, and guided the conservative movement that revolutionized American politics.

From his energy and devotion to human freedom came lasting institutions. In 1953 Buckley helped found the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which educates college students in conservative thought. In 1955 he launched National Review, the house magazine of the conservative movement. In 1960 he presided over the founding of Young Americans for Freedom, an activist group devoted to bringing conservatives to college campuses. Two years later, Buckley launched a syndicated column and helped create the Conservative Party of New York State. In 1964 he helped organize the conservative capture of the GOP, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. In 1965 he ran as the Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York City. In 1966 he debuted as host of Firing Line on PBS. He signed off 33 years later.

His output was gargantuan. Thousands of columns and articles. Some 60 books. More than 1,500 episodes of Firing Line. An average of 70 speeches a year across 40 years. When he died aged 82, Buckley was at his desk. Another deadline loomed.

Buckley’s life is a case study in natural talent as well as the value of hard work, dedication, style, and charm. A paradox makes him endlessly fascinating: Buckley’s principles and personality never seemed to change, but his movement shape-shifted often. It still does.