In today’s Front Page from The Free Press: Joe Nocera on Anthony Fauci’s congressional hearing; the super-breeders branded “far-right”; Harvard drops diversity statements; Eli Lake on Gaza’s jihadist George Washingtons; and much more.
But first, for our lead story, Olivia Reingold talks to Joe Gow, a 63-year-old professor at University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, who was fired last December after 16 years as the school’s chancellor. His offense? Making porn with his wife Carmen, 56, and posting it on the internet. Later this month, a panel of his colleagues will decide whether he should also be stripped of his tenured professorship teaching communications. Gow’s case raises an important question: Is he guilty of “unethical and potentially illegal behavior,” as the school claims—or is he a brave champion of the First Amendment?
As Gow tells Olivia, “This is 2024. There seem to be a lot of people who say they’re for free speech, but it’s only when it’s speech they agree with.”
Should a professor be allowed to moonlight as a porn star? To find out, read “Professor by Day. Porn Star by Night. Can He Be Both?”
Next up, we turn to another husband and wife touting sex, but this time for procreation. Malcolm and Simone Collins want to have a lot of children—up to twelve, in fact—and they want us to follow suit. Writing for The Free Press, Malcolm recounts how the media has branded him a far-right extremist, when really, he’s just a dad.
My wife Simone and I are pronatalists. At the ages of 36 and 37, respectively, we have four children—and one day hope to have at least seven, but ideally as many as twelve. We know it’ll make life hectic. But our lives already are.
A typical day for us already starts between two and five in the morning, when Simone and I try to get in some work before the kids wake up. After making breakfast with them and dropping them off with the neighbors, we often take a walk as a couple, to talk about our business or our nonprofit. Then we get online and try to explain to the world that we are not, in fact, far-right ideologues who want to usher in dystopia.
It’s the last bit that’s the only real challenge we face.
A lot of people quietly share our beliefs, but Simone and I preach what we practice. We don’t just have a bunch of kids—we talk about it, too, on X, on Instagram, on our podcast, and at the occasional conference. We do this because we are deeply disturbed by the modern world’s trend toward childlessness and want to do our bit to push back against it. But we could never have anticipated the hate we’d receive for doing this. Continue reading.
Another day, another poll about support for Donald Trump now that he is a convicted felon. But YouGov’s survey does suggest plenty of churn: 26 percent of voters say they are more likely to vote for him after the verdict, while 27 percent say they are less likely to vote for him; 39 percent say it won’t change their vote. (YouGov)
“We’re back bitches,” declared Columbia protesters, who reestablished an anti-Israel encampment on the school’s main lawn to coincide with alumni reunions over the weekend. After Columbia faculty entered the encampment to talk to the protesters, college president Minouche Shafik said in a statement that she “welcome[d] this effort to establish dialogue.” (Meanwhile, the protesters had plastered her face on a cardboard missile in the encampment.) The students packed up their tents at the end of alumni weekend but left a banner promising: “We’ll be back bitches.” (Washington Free Beacon)
In this economy, even AI titan Sam Altman needs a side hustle. The OpenAI CEO makes just a $65,000 salary from his day job, but nearly $3 billion in other investments on the side. And I thought my dropshipping business was a coup. (Quartz)
Brexit troublemaker Nigel Farage has announced his return to frontline British politics yesterday. A month ahead of the election, which everyone expects to be a bloodbath for the Conservatives, Farage said he would stand as a candidate for the right-populist Reform Party and promised to offer “real opposition” to a Labour government after the election. The latest analysis suggests Labour are on course to win the biggest majority in the party’s history. The Tories, meanwhile, are fighting for their life. (AP)
The AI revolution means we’ll need more power than ever. And yet Big Tech has helped usher in the net-zero (emissions) politics that now threaten resource abundance. Will Silicon Valley finally get serious about energy? (Wall Street Journal)
A police officer has succumbed to his injuries after he intervened in a knife attack on Friday in the German city of Mannheim. A 25-year-old Afghan immigrant was filmed stabbing the officer along with five members of an anti-Islam political group called PAX Europa. (DW)
GameStop shares jumped by more than 30 percent Monday after Keith Gill, the meme stock standard-bearer who goes by the handle “Roaring Kitty,” posted a screenshot on Reddit showing he had a $5 million position in the company. It’s the second time in two months Roaring Kitty’s online antics have sent the company’s share price sky-high. Who said meme stocks were over? (Fox Business)
Claudia Sheinbaum won big in Mexico’s presidential election Sunday. Sheinbaum was the protégé of the incumbent AMLO and formerly served as mayor of Mexico City. She is now Mexico’s first female and first Jewish president. ¡Mazel tov, presidenta! (ABC)
Plenty of famous Americans have given in to the call of the wild—but for all the wrong reasons, says Ken Smith. A Scot who has lived in a cabin in the woods for 40 years and has never used the internet, Smith has written an autobiography (by quill? It’s unclear) and argues that Henry David Thoreau tried to be a hermit because he was “angry” and hated people—whereas Smith is “much healthier emotionally.” (Slate)
Whatever’s happening in Hollywood, it’s not funny anymore. The results are in, and this weekend’s international box office winner, netting $41 million, was. . . The Garfield Movie. A movie about a fat cat that got one-star reviews and is apparently “littered” with product placement is representing America on the global stage. Apparently, it was very popular in China. This is embarrassing. (Screen Daily)
→ “Thank you for your science”: It’s a shame that Congress—both Democrats and Republicans—have been less interested in learning from America’s response to Covid-19 than in turning it into a political football. Yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before a House subcommittee, but the lack of curiosity and understanding about the virus allowed the good doctor to walk away unscathed.
Fauci, who retired as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in late 2022, was the personification of the establishment’s response to the pandemic. It was he who insisted that schools needed to be closed, that lockdowns needed to be enforced, that vaccines should be mandated. Most blue states believed they were “following the science” in following Fauci’s recommendations. (Didn’t Fauci once say “I represent science”?) And though many Democrats now admit that this approach was a mistake, Fauci never has.
Yet not a single Democrat called him out on these recommendations that did so much harm to so many people. Instead, Jill Tokuda, the Democrat from Hawaii, asked Fauci a series of questions designed to portray him as the indispensable man, without whom many more would have died. “I want to thank you, not blame you,” Tokuda said. “Thank you for your science.” Indeed, Fauci went so far as to claim that his primary role during the pandemic was to help roll out the vaccines in record time. In fact, he had nothing to do with the vaccine effort—but of course, no one called him on that either.
As for the Republicans, they have had one obsession for years: to show that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak. Republicans have long accused Fauci of using government funds to help pay for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that could have led to the creation of the virus. And he has long denied it, including at yesterday’s hearing.
Remarkably, though, Fauci maintained that he had always kept an “open mind” about the origins of the virus causing Covid-19 and that he never attempted to censor or discredit opposing voices on the policies he spearheaded during the pandemic. This is laughable. Until the hearing, Fauci had consistently dismissed the lab leak hypothesis. And as for those opposing voices, after three dissident scientists published the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for a strategy of protecting the vulnerable and letting life resume otherwise, Fauci compared them to the doctors in the 1980s who claimed HIV didn’t cause AIDS.
One of those three dissident scientists, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and professor of health policy at Stanford University, told The Free Press that Fauci is “incapable of intellectual honesty” and of “honest engagement with his critics.”
“I see no capacity for him to admit error at all throughout the entire pandemic. I just see arrogance,” Bhattacharya said, adding that no person “should ever have the kind of power that Fauci had” while he was director of the NIAID.
Republicans also tried to hammer Fauci over the fact that his senior adviser, David Morens, had actively evaded the Freedom of Information Act, writing in emails that he learned “how to make emails disappear” and suggesting to others they contact Dr. Fauci through a “secret back channel” or through his personal email address to avoid their communications becoming available to the public. In one email, Morens wrote to one recipient that there was “no worry about” the media finding out because Fauci “is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
That last part appears to be true. Fauci spent much of the hearing distancing himself from Morens—condemning his behavior but stating repeatedly he “knew nothing” of his “actions.” There was nary an email to suggest otherwise. Tony Fauci came through intact, as usual. —Joe Nocera, co-author of The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind
→ A blow against DEI at Harvard: Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)—the largest school within the university, comprising half of all Harvard students—will no longer require “diversity, inclusion, and belonging” statements for faculty hiring. The news, first reported by The Boston Globe, is the latest indicator that elite universities are moving away from the ideological litmus tests that have come to dominate campus.
This follows the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s decision to end the controversial policy entirely, which I first reported on last month. It also comes after Harvard reinstated standardized testing in admissions in April.
“In external searches for faculty appointments, we have changed our process to request a broad statement of service instead of requiring a Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) statement,” Nina Zipser, FAS Dean for Faculty Affairs and Planning, said in an email to faculty on Monday seen by The Free Press.
These revisions mark an incremental but real move away from a policy that represents the worst excesses of the DEI bureaucracy. In a statement, a Harvard spokesperson told me that the update means that the school will request “broader and more robust service statements as part of the hiring process.” These statements can include, but are not limited to, “efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”
At the time of MIT’s decision, several prominent Harvard faculty members praised the move. Harvard’s former president Larry Summers described diversity statements as “morally bankrupt” and “an affront to almost every academic freedom value,” and called on the college to follow MIT’s lead.
Now, prominent faculty members are calling on the entire university to follow FAS’s lead. “It’s a cause for celebration that FAS has replaced the requirement for DEI statements with a requirement for ‘service statements,’ i.e., how candidates will contribute to their department, their university, and their professional community,” Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, told me in an email. “The next step should be for this to be extended across all schools of the university.”
Members of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard—led in part by Flier, and Steven Pinker—have now proposed a resolution urging the university as a whole to stop using diversity statements. These overdue changes have arrived because professors simply do not like the idea of being tested for their commitment to a cause unrelated to their academic work. The FAS’s decision gives them all the more permission to say that out loud. Expect others to follow Harvard’s lead. —John Sailer
→ Jihadist George Washingtons: One might think that anyone who doubted the murderously antisemitic intentions of Hamas would have changed their mind after the group’s many atrocities on October 7, 2023. Hamas, after all, uploaded GoPro footage of the carnage to their social media accounts.
But for former Bernie Sanders spokesperson and co-host of The Hill TV’s Rising, Briahna Joy Gray, the Zionists are just ignorant to Hamas’s evolution. “When Hamas is talking about eliminating Israel, it’s talking about not killing all of the Jews, it’s about eliminating the idea of a Jewish state, an ethno-national state, and having a state more like what we have in America,” she said at a debate last month with Michael Moynihan, Jake Klein, and me at the Dissident Dialogues in Brooklyn.
As she was making this point about Gaza’s jihadist George Washingtons, I broke decorum and laughed in her face. There are moments in public discourse when ridicule is required, and this was one of them.
This did not sit well with Gray, who stormed off the stage after the debate and threw her headset at one of the organizers. According to a write-up in The New Republic, Gray told the moderator, Triggernometry’s Konstantin Kisin: “This is the most Islamophobic, racist audience I’ve ever seen. It’s disgusting. I hope someone drops a bomb on this entire building.”
Over the weekend, a clip of Gray’s apologetics for Hamas from the debate surfaced on X. After coming under criticism, Gray doubled down. On June 1, she posted a block quote from Wikipedia that claimed a 2017 document issued by the group said: “Hamas’ fight was not with Jews as such because of their religion but with the Zionist project.”
That is partially true. But the document in question was never ratified to replace its original charter from 1988 that explicitly calls for the murder of Jews (as opposed to Zionists). Even still, the 2017 document was likely crafted for the organization’s many useful idiots in the West when confronted with the fact that this death cult revels in Jewish bloodshed.
Nonetheless, Gray believed all of this was a teachable moment. “The Hamas charter was revised in 2017,” she posted on X. “But Eli Lake’s ignorance, along with the ignorance of the average Zionist, knows no bounds. Nor does their racism and cruelty.”
I’m sure those democratic pluralists running Gaza, who absolutely do not want to murder all the Jews in Israel, appreciate Briahna’s intervention. —Eli Lake
Listen to the debate in full on Honestly:
→ Posties pissed: Sally Buzbee is out as Washington Post editor. CEO Will Lewis, a Brit who took over the ailing paper at the start of the year, has announced a restructured masthead, with former Wall Street Journal editor Matt Murray taking over as top editor immediately. After the election, Murray is set to hand the reins to Robert Winnett, another Brit, who is currently the deputy editor of The Telegraph in London.
Posties (as the paper’s staff insist on calling themselves) are reportedly “deeply skeptical” of the hires, who are both former colleagues of Lewis’s. Talking to the Post’s own media reporter, one anonymous staffer said, “The cynical interpretation is that it sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies,” adding: “And now we have four white men running three newsrooms.”
I’m duty bound to root for any fellow Brits in American media, so congratulations to the victorious subjects of His Majesty. But allow me also to mount a more serious rebuttal to the pissed Posties. (By the way, Robert, pissed means angry here, not drunk.) The Washington Post is a failing newspaper. It lost $77 million last year. Its audience has more than halved since 2020. These are bad numbers. Very bad numbers. Crazy thought, but maybe something is wrong with the product?
The Washington Post Guild doesn’t think so. It says it is “troubled” by Buzbee’s “sudden departure” as well as Lewis’s “suggestion. . . that the financial issues plaguing our company span from the work of us as journalists instead of mismanagement from our leadership.” The Guild also said it was “concerned about the lack of diversity at the top levels of the organization.”
Buzbee lasted barely three years as editor. But let’s not forget the finest moment of her tenure:
Tom recommends Ball Four: The book was written by Seattle Pilots’ pitcher Jim Bouton in 1970 and is a diary of Bouton’s and the Pilots’ 1969 season. I reread it almost every year as baseball season approaches. At the time, it was controversial in that it exposed a side of baseball that was previously unreported. In today’s world, it is quite tame. It remains funny, touching, and insightful then and now.
Jason recommends Crick Coffee: The best place to grab a cup of joe in Canadian wine country (yes, this is a thing, and within an hour of the U.S. border) is Crick Coffee in Summerland, BC. Located in the middle of an apple orchard and right off Highway 97, it is a must-stop for anyone north of the border. There is also a cidery on the property. Okanagan Lake and Giant’s Head Mountain are within a few minutes’ drive.
Send your recommendations to thefrontpage@thefp.com.
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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