It’s Monday, April 28. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. And starting today: It’s new and improved, meant to save you time by getting right to the most important stories.
Today: Who’s up and who’s down after 100 days of Trump? Is AOC running—and can she win? A prosecutor’s “unusual” investigation into Wikipedia. Join Bari and Douglas Murray live, today at 3:30 p.m. ET. And much more.
But first: The explosion of foreign funding at U.S. universities.
Why have toxic, anti-American ideas prevailed at our most storied American universities? It’s a question I have thought about a tremendous amount since I graduated from Columbia 20 years ago—and especially since October 7, 2023.
I tend to think the most accurate answer is the most straightforward one.
The answer, in a word, is tenure. Tenure allowed postmodernist, postcolonial, post-nationalist, post-structuralist professors lifetime job security, and empowered them to hire their intellectual facsimiles. Repeat that process beginning in the 1960s and you’ll look around and notice that a morally relativist, anti-American, anti-Western worldview is not the fringe but the norm on the most prestigious college campuses.
But another answer—and one the Trump administration is currently focused on—is foreign investment. After all, if you’re an investor of the likes of China or Qatar, it’s hard to imagine a better bang for your buck than investing in institutions that are already educating the American elite against their own country.
And that’s what today’s lead investigation is about: the explosion in foreign donations to elite American universities.
Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin have the scoop—and the numbers and details here are wild. —Bari Weiss
The Columbia University janitors who were held hostage during the violent takeover of a campus building last spring are suing their alleged captors for battery, assault, and conspiracy to violate their civil rights, according to a copy of the suit reviewed exclusively by The Free Press. Mario Torres and Lester Wilson were “terrorized” into the early hours by anti-Israel protesters who “assaulted and battered them, held them against their will, and derided them as ‘Jew-lovers’ and ‘Zionists,’ ” according to the suit—which provides the fullest picture yet of how that infamous night at Columbia unfolded.
Ed Martin, the firebrand Republican activist who President Donald Trump picked to be the top prosecutor in D.C., has a new target: Wikipedia. Martin sent a letter last week to Wikipedia’s parent group, the Wikimedia Foundation, threatening its tax-exempt status. But one nonprofit law attorney calls the investigation “highly unusual,” and free speech advocates say Martin is using “political grandstanding” to chill dissent. Gabe Kaminsky has the scoop.
As great apes, we obsess over the social hierarchy. Who is being praised and who is being excoriated? Who is hot and who is not? That may sound like gossip, but Free Press columnist Tyler Cowen argues it is also a big part of our politics. “If politics is fundamentally about the way we human beings organize ourselves,” he writes, “then status is the ultimate coin of the realm.” So, with nearly 100 days of Trump’s second term in the books, who’s up and who’s down?
Tune In Today: A Live Conversation with Douglas Murray
Join Bari and Free Press contributor Douglas Murray today at 3:30 p.m. ET for a live conversation about Trump’s first 100 days in office, the state of the right, his best-selling new book On Democracies and Death Cults, the war in Gaza, and his recent news-making appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Tune in at TheFP.com, and bring your questions.
This livestream is available to paying subscribers only. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, you can do something about that here:
It’s election day in Canada, where the polls point to a victory for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal party. If the incumbent comes out on top, it’ll be an extraordinary turnaround: The Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, were more than 20 points ahead when Justin Trudeau resigned in January. What happened? Donald Trump happened.
A two-year-old U.S. citizen was deported to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” a Trump-appointed federal judge said Friday. The child—identified only as “V.M.L.”—has reportedly been released in Honduras with her Honduran-born mother and sister. “Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday. “If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if there’s their father or someone here who wants to assume them.”
The son of a senior CIA official was killed in Ukraine last year fighting for Russia, the CIA has confirmed. Michael Gloss, a former Eagle Scout who dropped out of college and went to Turkey in 2023, died in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
Donald Trump has urged Russia to “stop shooting” in Ukraine and make a deal. Marco Rubio said this week would be crucial for peace talks and that the White House would make a determination about “whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in.” Trump met Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the Pope’s funeral at the Vatican Saturday—their first meeting since the Oval Office shouting match.
As Trump nears the end of the first 100 days of his second term, his approval rating is going in the wrong direction. According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, 39 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, compared to 45 percent in February.
India’s military test-fired missiles for “long-range precision offensive” strikes on Sunday, amid rising tensions with its neighbor Pakistan after the Kashmir attack that left 26 dead. India says its troops have responded to small-arms fire from Pakistani positions on their disputed border for three successive nights.
Bradford G. Smith has become the third person to receive a Neuralink brain implant. He is the first nonverbal recipient of the implant, and the first with ALS.
Wikipedia is a great place to get quick facts on a subject (such as, for example, how many games a sports team won in 1989) or even as a place to start more in-depth research into something bigger. But it has never been a place to get verified and trusted information, especially on controversial or disputed subjects, and anyone using it as such is, quite frankly and harshly, either naive, a sucker or an idiot.
Because it is sourced from unverified contributors and anonymous editors, Wikipedia has never qualified as a legitimate source or reference for real research or documentation. In fact, my first task when I once started a new job was to go back and scrub half a dozen reports for unviable references. More than 80% of those citations that needed to be removed or edited were from Wikipedia.
That said, up until I read Larry Sanger's comments on Wikipedia being shot through with partisan bias, I had been an annual (though small) contributor. I figured it was worth a few bucks per year has often as I had used it.
The irony is that privileged and "educated" students at an elite university, who thought they were defending the cause of downtrodden Palestinians, abused those who clean up after them. What hypocrites. God bless these janitors who will soon never have to push a broom or clean a toilet again. Poetic justice.