It’s Friday, June 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Jonathan Rosen on how antisemitic obsessions came to dominate our politics. Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what the Montreal shooter really believed. Jed Rubenfeld unpacks the Supreme Court’s landmark asylum ruling. And much more.
But first: Why was the man who co-founded Wikipedia just banned from the site for life?
Twenty-five years ago, Larry Sanger co-founded what is arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia, which now has millions of entries on every topic imaginable, was designed to be a hub of free and unfettered knowledge, built by and open to the public.
So why was Sanger, earlier this week, permanently banned from the site he helped found?
He tells that story for us today. It’s one that starts back in 2001, with the admirable, game-changing goal of democratizing information. But after Sanger left the project in 2002, he “watched in dismay as the site I’d created began to drift from its founding mission.” Ideological bias took hold; pages were whitewashed; left-leaning outlets came to dominate sourcing; and a small group of administrators grew “beholden more to each other than to any constitutional framework.”
Last week, Sanger launched an effort to reform Wikipedia from within—only to be met with a coordinated effort to ridicule, discredit, and undermine it, culminating in a lifetime ban on Monday. “I knew Wikipedia’s disciplinary processes were bad—but I had never experienced them myself,” he writes.
Read Sanger’s account of how one of the miracles of the internet age has abandoned truth and evolved into an emblem of our censorious age, and what his ban reveals about the culture that allowed it.
—Jillian Lederman
On Monsters and Monstrous Ideas
What happens when the fringe becomes mainstream? For years, many of the ideas now coursing through our politics—socialism, antisemitism, the division of society into oppressors and oppressed—were largely confined to campus radicals and the darkest corners of the internet.
That’s now changed. According to Jonathan Rosen, few things illustrate this shift more clearly than Tuesday’s New York City primary, in which three far-left candidates toppled establishment Democratic incumbents. The victors, Jonathan writes, “had indistinguishably progressive platforms from those they defeated, with one key difference”: a virulent hatred for Israel and its supporters. And they’re not alone. From Mayor Zohran Mamdani calling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee “monsters” to coffee shop workers harassing a Jewish congressman online, radical antisemitism is becoming an organizing principle of American political life. At threat? “America’s understanding of history and the country’s founding principles.” Read his piece to understand why these developments spell danger not only for American Jews, but for the entire country.
“Rhetoric has a way of becoming policy, or something worse,” notes Jonathan in his piece. On Monday, a gunman proved that very point when he opened fire in a Montreal neighborhood with a large Jewish community, killing an Israeli man and a police officer. Initial coverage of the shooting focused on the suspect identifying as an incel. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali read the 104-page manifesto he left behind and argues that such a label badly misses the point. Read Ayaan on what the shooter really believed—and the disturbing lesson from his lethal attack.
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On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that immigration officers can turn away asylum seekers before they cross the border—a practice that began during the Obama administration and has dominated America’s fraught immigration debate ever since. Today, Jed Rubenfeld breaks down what the case actually decided, what the majority got right, and where the dissent goes astray.
In more immigration news, the Health and Human Services department is proposing an overhaul of how the federal government vets sponsors for unaccompanied migrant children—what some advocates are calling the most consequential protections for these children in decades. Audrey Fahlberg has the exclusive.
Of all the traits humans share with chimpanzees, one of the most peculiar is perhaps the most human: the tendency to go to war. On the latest episode of “School of War,” Aaron MacLean sits down with Dr. John Mitani to discuss the violent civil war among the Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda, which Mitani has spent the past decade documenting. What caused one of the world’s largest chimpanzee communities to turn on itself? And what does warfare among our closest living relatives reveal about the origins of human conflict?
Great Americans
In honor of America’s 250th birthday, we’re spending every weekday until July 4 celebrating the people who made this country what it is. Today, veteran sportswriter Peter Richmond remembers Muhammad Ali, the greatest heavyweight to ever live—but whose most courageous fights, Peter writes, had nothing to do with boxing.
EDITORS’ PICKS
The big story of this week was the political earthquake in New York. And if you look at the platforms of the three Mamdani-backed candidates who stormed to victory in New York City, one thing stands out: More than any other issue, they are united by their opposition to Israel and U.S. support for the Jewish state. Above, Jonathan Rosen lays out the stakes of this reality—but where did it come from? How did a tiny country across the globe become such a toxic litmus test for the Democratic Party? To answer that question, we turned to veteran political journalist Mark Halperin, whose piece this week examined the structural forces, foreign money, and social media algorithms that together fuel a defining framework of modern politics: “People crave villains almost as much as they crave heroes. Once a person, institution, or country is assigned the role of villain, facts often become secondary.”
For a primer on who these candidates actually are, Olivia Reingold has you covered. This week, she laid out the beliefs of Claire Valdez, who instructs supporters to “Abolish ICE. Free Palestine”; Brad Lander, who has accused Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and “forced starvation”; and Darializa Avila Chevalier, a prison abolitionist who refused to condemn Hamas and in 2020 referred to the U.S. as a “fucking disgrace.” With all three almost certain to be elected to the House this November, this is your one-stop guide to politicians you will be hearing a lot more about.
Political turmoil didn’t discriminate this week, as our neighbors across the pond were roiled on Monday by the resignation of British prime minister Keir Starmer. His successor will become the seventh British PM in just 10 years. In the wake of the resignation, Douglas Murray examined the failures that brought the UK to this point: a succession of leaders who fumbled Brexit, mishandled immigration, and proved consistently deaf to the people they were meant to represent.
Starmer’s resignation came at a fitting time: one day before the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum that made political instability a mainstay of British politics. But why has Brexit failed to deliver? And how does that question help us understand Starmer’s exit? Niall Ferguson’s piece this week took the long view, arguing that all the drama is thanks to a Victorian political system buckling under the weight of crises it was never designed to survive.
From one fight to another. Of all the heated debates consuming the momosphere, sleep training surely ranks near the top. The practice—by which parents selectively ignore their babies’ cries at night to allow them to “self-soothe”—has pitted pediatricians who say sleep training is safe and necessary against neuroscientists who call it a form of emotional neglect. Then there are the mothers stuck in the middle, not knowing who to trust. Madeleine Kearns, a new mom herself, spent months interviewing experts on both sides of the debate, as well as exhausted moms in desperate search of an answer to one of parenting’s most loaded questions: Is sleep training bad for your baby?
As deputy director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, Josh Smith oversees one of the largest prison systems in the world. But before that, he spent five years as an inmate in federal prison on drug charges. This week, P.G. Sittenfeld profiled the man President Donald Trump pardoned and then tapped to reform the agency from the inside, who says he’s guided by a single animating question: “How do we make prison a place of transformation?”
Finally, in case you missed it, this month’s inaugural Free Press Supper Club drew more than 2,000 subscribers across 28 cities together to do something increasingly rare: sit down with strangers and have an open, unfiltered conversation. Olga Moriarty, our head of community and events, was at one of those very tables, and this week she wrote all about it. If you missed out on the fun, don’t worry! Our next Free Press Supper Club is July 15, and the theme is America at 250. Reserve your seat now to join us for a birthday dinner for the country, Free Press style.
Qatari money
https://behindthenarrative7.substack.com/p/wikipedias-lies-a-case-study-in-knowledge?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=bpnge
This feud between founders has been going on for years. Mr. Sanger should set his bitterness aside and move on, already.
I just saw an ad on Youtube (of all places) for a new service set up by some Stanford grad students that they call an exact copy of TikTok’s user experience, except that it provides 20-second summaries of the great works of literature, philosophy, and history. They boast that it’s equally addictive and endorphin-releasing, only educational instead of hyper-sexualized/AI slop that TikTok dishes out.
Brilliant idea, I say. Most such ideas don’t succeed but who knows, maybe this one will catch on, if only with a small subset of netizens. Or it might become a tool for schools and universities.
This is the type of thing that I’d like to see people like Sanger working on. Wish I’d thought of it, myself.