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How ‘Misinformation’ Becomes Common Knowledge Timur Kuran
How did something considered misinformation on Thursday afternoon become common knowledge by Thursday night?
The social mechanism that converts supposed misinformation into consensus is a topic that I have studied for many years. It involves something ubiquitous: the twin acts of misrepresenting what we know and what we want under perceived social pressures. As I explained in my book, Private Truths, Public Lies, such expressions of insincerity can do serious harm. The Biden-Trump debate and its aftermath provide a powerful case in point. Allow me to explain.
Until Thursday night’s CNN debate, a majority of Democrats were afraid to tell a basic truth in public—to say openly what they know about Joe Biden’s physical and mental health—for fear of emboldening Donald Trump or taking a position that may seem adverse to their party. So they kept their knowledge of his declining cognitive abilities private and, in public, conveyed impressions and issued reports at odds with their own senses.
If they felt that a different candidate had a higher chance of beating Trump, with rare exception they kept that preference hidden and pretended to agree with the idea, repeated ad infinitum, that Biden remained the party’s best hope.
Preference and Knowledge Falsification
Why did they do this? Fear. Fear, in this case, of being punished by their fellow Democrats.
Fear of being punished by a crowd is not unique to Democrats, or liberals, or Americans. It is an innate human response to the dangers of being ostracized, to being cut off from friendships and privileges that are critical to survival. We are born with a need for social acceptance. That need is what drives knowledge falsification and preference falsification.
Each of these—misrepresenting what you know and what you prefer—is a special form of lying. Most “in the know” Democrats engaged in both over the past few years: knowledge falsification about Biden’s decline and preference falsification about whether he should be the party’s nominee.
So even as hardly a day passed without new video clips showing a disoriented and frail Biden, Democrats, aided by swaths of left-leaning media, rushed to dismiss the clips as taken out of context, or as misleading because of the cameraman’s perspective, or as malicious misinformation. They would also vilify the producers and spreaders of the videos as MAGA villains out to destroy democracy. In no uncertain terms, qualms about Biden’s age or cognitive capacity were treated as unwelcome, even as a betrayal of democracy itself.
Those Democrats who refused to lie about what they knew once they knew it—people like Dean Phillips and, much later, Ezra Klein—surely sensed that Biden’s condition could not remain a secret forever. And they worried that, should the news spread before Election Day, he could lose votes essential to winning. Better to preempt that eventuality, they argued, by picking a younger candidate while time remains for him or her to gain national name recognition. If the stakes are democracy, could there be any other choice?
But the Biden campaign would have none of it. Talk of replacing Biden was regarded as irresponsible, meant to push away voters Democrats need— and, they argued, it would facilitate Trump’s return. Insiders also brought up—more commonly in private conversations than in public settings—an obstacle to getting the party to unite around an alternative nominee. Were Biden to bow out, Vice President Kamala Harris might create an even bigger problem. Despite her low approval ratings, she would likely insist on moving to the top of the ticket. Other candidates could emerge, triggering accusations of racism and sexism, fracturing the party. Whatever the resolution, the infighting would cause epic Democratic losses up and down the ballot.
And so, for the first half of 2024, the majority of Democrats who favored Biden’s retirement kept their preferences private.
A Trap of Their Own Making
As signs of Biden’s diminished mental acuity mounted, knowledge and preference falsification trapped Democratic elites. Though few implored Biden to step aside in the months and weeks before the CNN debate, Democratic officeholders and an overwhelming majority of Democratic journalists maintained a facade of unity. To individual doubters, this unity posed an insurmountable obstacle to speaking truthfully. It meant that they were likely to face accusations of betrayal alone, possibly even without backing from friends. Although the private doubters of nominating Biden may have had the edge numerically against his genuine supporters, the doubters had no way to mobilize. Because they kept their private truths hidden, they could not even find each other, much less coordinate their actions and form an effective anti-Biden coalition.
Knowledge and preference falsification can do far more damage than mere self-censorship. In this case, Democrats close to Biden, and thereby “in the know,” deliberately misled their fellow Democrats into thinking that chatter about Biden’s deterioration was merely propaganda orchestrated by Republicans and their allies. They circulated cherry-picked videos of choreographed events as ostensible proof that Biden was as sharp as ever. In March, they proclaimed that Biden’s State of the Union address, in which he read a prepared speech from a teleprompter, should put to rest questions about his fitness.
Knowledge and preference falsification pollute the bodies of information that individuals use in developing their understandings of the world and their rankings among options. They misinform the polity about what is known and preferred. They conceal feasible options. They obscure the extent of support for changing direction. In fostering a culture of mendacity, they hinder the identification of discontent and compound the difficulties of forming coalitions among people eager to switch course.
The Trap Shatters
The self-imposed Democratic trap shattered in the first few minutes of the CNN debate. Posts on X and calls from horrified Democrats set off an open national conversation. Long-apprehensive Democratic-aligned journalists, officeholders, and other influential party members finally found in themselves the courage to voice what they have known and wanted, but suppressed.
As Biden spoke incoherently, his debility became common knowledge. Suddenly everyone knew—and everyone knew that everyone knew. Because tens of millions of Americans were watching, every viewer understood that all other viewers, whatever their political biases, were witnessing the same thing. No amount of spin could overcome what we were seeing with our own eyes.
The trap’s collapse made fear among many Democratic elites flip sides. Their predominant pre-debate fear of signaling reservations about Biden’s candidacy gave way to an ascendant and now-dominant fear of continuing to endorse the approved narrative.
But by no means were the Democratic opinion leaders who exploded in horror after the debate alone in initiating a national conversation on Biden’s candidacy. The Democratic rank-and-file played a critical role in pressuring elites to start saying what they had known long before the debate.
Most Americans are detached from the twists and turns of daily news cycles. They tune in only during major crises and elections. So to many of these Democratic voters, Biden’s performance came as a genuine shock.
We will never know whether Democratic elites would have dismantled their self-destructive trap without a flood of honest reactions from the Democratic rank-and-file. The president’s performance was so disastrous that it might have been sufficient to drive enough elites to their boiling points to start a cascade of truthfulness among themselves.
It may have made all the difference that a huge national audience watched the debate live. If the debate had not been televised, with only the press witnessing it, reporters might have been able to spin the exchange as a win for Biden by focusing on Trump’s wild exaggerations and his non-answers, along with some Biden mini-quotes that seem coherent on paper. In other words, the out-in-the-open, live nature of the debate may have been critical to generating the common knowledge of Biden’s current state.
One thing is certain: the discovery by Democratic elites of Biden’s deterioration on Thursday night was mostly feigned. Individually and collectively, they chose not to convey truthfully what they knew or what decisions they considered necessary for electoral success. They knew. But like many human beings faced with the consequences of telling the truth, they opted to misinform.
Timur Kuran is a professor of economics and political science at Duke University. He is also the author of many books, including the seminal Private Truths, Public Lies. Follow him on X @timurkuran.
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Monday, July 1, was a busy day. That morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gives the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts. On the same day, Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon began a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Before he began serving his sentence, he swore he would “be more powerful in prison than I am now.”
“On July 2, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, went onto Bannon’s webcast War Room to hearten Bannon’s right-wing followers after Bannon’s incarceration. Former representative Dave Brat (R-VA) was sitting in for Bannon and conducted the interview.
“[W]e are going to win,” Roberts told them. “We’re in the process of taking this country back…. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.”
“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts took over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021, and he shifted it from a conservative think tank to an organization devoted to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Central to that project for Roberts has been working to bring the policies of Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, to the United States.
In 2023, Roberts brought the Heritage Foundation into a formal partnership with Hungary’s Danube Institute, a think tank overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government; as journalist Casey Michel reported, it is, “for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.” The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the U.S., and, Michel noted in March, “we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.” Roberts has called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.” He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his far-right political party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists, who attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.
Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure. In January 2024, Roberts told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times that Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the government. “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Roberts said. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”
Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”
In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.
The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”
Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.
The plan asserts “the existential need” for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.”
It attacks “America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture,” for their embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all of those partnerships and alliances.
Also on July 1, Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. He will be operating for six months in that position under a slogan taken from Trump and adapted to Europe: “Make Europe Great Again.” The day before taking that office, Orbán announced that his political party was forming a new alliance with far-right parties in Austria and the Czech Republic in order to launch a “new era of European politics.”
Tomorrow, Orbán will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin. On July 2, Orbán met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where he urged Zelensky to accept a “ceasefire.” In the U.S., Trump’s team has suggested that, if reelected, Trump will call for an immediate ceasefire and will negotiate with Putin over how much of Ukraine Putin can keep while also rejecting Ukraine for NATO membership and scaling back U.S. commitment to NATO.
“I would expect a very quick end to the conflict,” Kevin Roberts said. Putin says he supports Trump’s plan.
Roberts’s “second American revolution,” which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution.
For my part, I will stand with the words written 248 years ago today, saying that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/01/politics/steve-bannon-report-to-prison/index.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/179776/heritage-foundation-viktor-orban-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-orban-visit-kyiv-ukraine-peace-putin-zelenskiy/33022024.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/02/europe/viktor-orban-visits-kyiv-intl/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/02/nato-second-trump-term-00164517
Khrystyna Bondarieva, “Putin on Trump’s proposal to quickly end war in Ukraine: Russia supports it,” Ukrainska Pravda, July 4, 2024.
On our nation’s 248th birthday, Joe Biden faces the wrath of a thousand pundits. The whole world watched the elected leader of the world’s oldest republic befogged, slack-jawed, and mentally vacant in a debate he had to win. A recent poll from CBS showed that after Biden’s performance last week, 72 percent of registered voters believed the man lacked the cognitive ability to be president.
Even his closest friends and sycophants are pleading for the old man to hang it up. The New York Times editorial board. Former advisers to Barack Obama. Columnist and Biden’s personal friend, Tom Friedman, said he wept in a hotel room in Portugal while watching the debate. They’ve seen enough. Joe Biden, for the good of your country, step down.
And yet, Biden’s White House is shrugging it off. It was just a debate, they tell us. Don’t let 90 minutes define years of accomplishments.
But it was not just a debate. It was indelible and undeniable proof that the leader of the free world lacks the stamina and acuity to do the job for four more months, let alone four more years.
As Biden weighs his decision, he may well think back to when he was a young man and then-president Lyndon Baines Johnson found himself in a similar position. Johnson was losing the country, and in the middle of the primary he decided to bow out.
Today, Free Press writer Eli Lake hosts a special episode about what happened in 1968 when President Johnson decided he was not fit for reapplying for his job. He listened to his critics and backed away from the White House, allowing the Democrats an opportunity to stage an open convention to choose their next candidate for the presidency. But why did the party want him gone so badly? And how did this seismic decision work out? It’s a tale of murder, war, and riots that culminated in the most explosive convention in the history of America.
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Happy Fourth of July, Free Pressers. There’s a lot going on for what is supposed to be a national holiday. Is the president about to resign? Is his VP up to the job? What can Joe Biden learn from 1968? Is the UK a serious country? All that and more in today’s Front Page from The Free Press.
But first, something for those of you who’d prefer to mark America’s 248th birthday with something completely unrelated to the fast-moving circus in Washington. For his new book, The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs set about sticking to the most literal interpretation of the Constitution for 12 months. He exercised his right to bear an eighteenth-century musket on the streets of New York. He quartered soldiers in his apartment, much to his wife’s consternation.
And—as he describes in his piece for us today—he petitioned Congress to become a state-sanctioned pirate, or “privateer,” with permission to detain enemy ships. According to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress has the power to grant citizens “letters of marque and reprisal.” Meaning that, with Congress’s permission, private citizens can load weapons onto their fishing boats, head out to the high seas, capture enemy vessels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patriotic pirates were known as “privateers.” And, as A.J. notes, privateers were the unsung heroes of the revolution—so we probably wouldn’t celebrate today without them. Read on, me hearties, for A.J.’s delightful piece “Your Constitutional Right to Be a Pirate.”
Wednesday was Kamala Harris’s day. As speculation about the president’s future grew—fueled by a meeting with Democratic governors and fresh reporting, furiously denied by the White House, that Biden had discussed dropping out with a close ally—all eyes were on Harris. The world wondered: Is the plot of Veep about to come true? Polling showed her within “striking distance” of Trump. The Trump campaign referred to her as “Cackling Copilot Kamala.” “IT’S HER PARTY NOW,” read the banner headline on Drudge.
Meanwhile, the Biden camp is desperately trying to tamp down the speculation about the president’s future. “I am running,” Biden reportedly said on a staff call Wednesday. “No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving.” Pooh-poohing the “draft Kamala” idea, Democratic adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn reportedly told donors that “Kamala Harris is more threatening to those swing voters than a dead Joe Biden or a comatose Joe Biden.”
Biden and Harris will be together at the White House for Fourth of July celebrations later today. And while outwardly Harris is staying loyal, the Washington rumor mill is in overdrive. Fueling all that gossip are these questions: Is Joe Biden really the Democrats’ problem? And would his departure from the race really help their chances of beating Donald Trump?
That’s the subject of today’s Fight Club between Joe Nocera and Eli Lake. Joe says yes, Biden is the problem and needs to go. Eli says the damage is already done.
Click here to read the debate on the only story we can think about right now.
Conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty is, last time I checked, not a member of the KHive, but he argues that now is the time for Kamala Harris to be president. She was duly elected as vice president and the president has shown he is not fit for the office. So, what should happen next is simple—or should be. (National Review)
On the center-left, Mark Leibovich isn’t pulling his punches in a piece on the Democrats sticking with Biden: “Since President Joe Biden’s debate debacle on Thursday, I’ve learned two things for sure: first, that Republicans are not the only party being led by a geriatric egotist who puts himself before the country. And second, that Republicans are not the only party whose putative leaders have a toxic lemming mindset and are willing to lead American democracy off a cliff.” (The Atlantic)
Joe’s got to go, says Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. He is one of the biggest Democratic donors in the growing group that wants the president to announce he isn’t running. (Variety)
Does our choice in this election suggest an empire in decline? Not in the slightest, argues venture capitalist Packy McCormick. “Accelerated progress despite government and institutional stagnation is exactly what makes America exceptional,” he writes, heralding the start of the American Millennium. (Not Boring)
A throwback worthy of Independence Day: the late, great A.A. Gill’s spectacular essay, “America the Marvelous,” in which the author—a Brit of refined taste—argues with characteristic aplomb that “America is Europe’s finest invention.” (Vanity Fair)
Most of us understand the Supreme Court to be divided 6–3, with conservatives in the majority. But according to Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, the just-wrapped session makes clear that there are really three groups on the court: the liberals (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson); the “centrist conservatives” (Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett); and the “arch conservatives” (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch). (Bloomberg)
Whichever camp you sympathize with most, let’s get behind Dilan Esper’s suggestion: justices should spend less time grandstanding in dissenting or concurring opinions and more time deciding cases. Idea: speed things up by giving them all anonymous Twitter accounts to vent on. (Dilan’s Newsletter)
Is France safe for the Jews? Not according to Grande Synagogue of Paris Chief Rabbi Moshe Sebbag, who told The Jerusalem Post: “I tell everyone who is young to go to Israel or a more secure country.” The U.S. hasn’t seemed to fit that description lately, but David Wolpe, emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, hasn’t given up on America. In a new essay, he writes of the people of “good heart and good will, of soulfulness and love, all over this great nation.” (WSJ)
Today is the first Fourth of July in 23 years when neither of the world’s two greatest competitive eaters, Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut, will feature in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Instead, they will face off live in a Netflix special on Labor Day. Is nothing sacred? (ESPN)
Related: McDonald’s USA president Joe Erlinger admitted the company was “not successful” with the McPlant burger. Consumers weren’t loving it, and it seems the company has no plans to bring the patties back. The red-blooded American loves meat. Who knew! (Food & Wine)
When a President Drops Out: What Biden Can Learn from 1968
On our nation’s 248th birthday, Joe Biden faces the wrath of a thousand pundits. The whole world watched the elected leader of the world’s oldest republic befogged, slack-jawed, and mentally vacant in a debate he had to win. A recent poll from CBS showed that after Biden’s performance last week, 72 percent of registered voters believed the man lacked the cognitive ability to be president.
Even his closest friends and sycophants—the New York Times editorial board, former advisers to Barack Obama—are pleading for the old man to hang it up. Columnist and Biden’s personal friend, Tom Friedman, said he wept in a hotel room in Portugal while watching the debate. They had seen enough.
And yet, Biden’s White House is shrugging it off. It was just a debate, they tell us. Don’t let 90 minutes define years of accomplishments.
As Biden privately weighs his decision, he may well think back to when he was 25 years old and then-president Lyndon Baines Johnson found himself in a similar position. LBJ was losing the country amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War, and in the middle of the primary, he decided to bow out.
Today, Free Press writer Eli Lake hosts a special episode of Honestly about what happened in 1968 when President Johnson decided he was not fit to reapply for his job. He listened to his critics and backed away from the White House, allowing the Democrats an opportunity to stage an open convention and choose their next candidate for the presidency. But why did the party want him gone so badly? And how did this seismic decision work out? It’s a tale of murder, war, and riots that culminated in the most explosive convention in the history of America.
Click below to listen, or catch the Honestly episode wherever you get your podcasts:
→ Three cheers for Britain’s boring, silly election: For you Americans who worry that your country is on a political precipice this Independence Day, I urge you to take heart. Britain, from where I hail, is going through its own meltdown. After 14 years with the Conservatives in charge, the economy has stagnated, the country has torn itself apart over Brexit, and just about everyone is fed up with the status quo. As Britons head to the polls today, my nation is expecting a landslide for Labour.
And yet, almost no one in my country can bring themselves to get excited about Election Day.
“Why does it feel so boring?” asked a recent headline of the vote. The electorate—or at least those in England—are much more interested in the Euros. England is playing Switzerland in the quarterfinals, though thankfully not on polling day but two days later.
And for anyone who is sick of both Biden and Trump, take heart from soon-to-be former British prime minister Rishi Sunak and his woeful attempts at damage control. Sunak isn’t what we’d call a natural politician. In fact, he makes Kamala Harris look like Bill Clinton. Here he is telling some schoolkids that he’s “a total coke addict.” And when poor Rishi announced an election in the middle of a massive downpour, the country’s headline writers had a field day (Drowning Street, Drown and Out, you get the gist). The next day, the prime minister visited Belfast’s Titanic Quarter, once again making the headline writers’ jobs very easy. The list of Sunak’s screwups goes on. . . there’s the attempt by the PM, who is estimated to be worth $800 million, to earn sympathy by telling voters that he didn’t have premium cable TV growing up. There’s the failed photo opportunity where he and foreign minister David Cameron tried to herd some sheep, only for the creatures to flee. And there’s this rather unfortunate daytime TV situation the prime minister found himself in on the eve of the election:
Other leaders have leaned into the absurdity of it all. The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has pursued a strategy of humiliating himself over and over again in a bid for attention (or “unearned media,” as the pros say). In recent weeks, he’s fallen off a paddleboard, ripped down a slip and slide, jumped in a lake, tripped over a tire, hula-hooped, Zumba’d, fallen off another paddleboard, and bungee jumped. That last stunt was, he said, a way to encourage voters to take a “leap of faith” with him and his party.
The lesson in all this? No amount of hijinks will move Britain’s stiff upper lip. They’d rather elect Keir Starmer, a former lawyer whose voice will put you to sleep. Maybe that’s what we need right now, but I’ll miss “total coke addict” Rishi Sunak and his rendezvous with “Britain’s most tattooed mum.”
→ Antisemitism in the group chat: Ever since October 8, when thousands of university students and professors sided with Hamas instead of innocent Israeli civilians, we at The Free Press have pointed out the double standard applied on elite campuses across America. Institutions supposedly committed to “safety first,” that call misgendering a form of “abuse” that “perpetuates violence,” have allowed its students to openly call for the death of Jews in their quads.
The people running the campuses don’t think much differently than their students do—especially at my alma mater, Columbia University. We already knew about some of this. During a panel on Jewish life on May 31, Susan Chang-Kim, vice dean and chief administrative officer, texted colleagues that the concerns about antisemitism were “difficult to listen to” and sent vomit emojis in reaction to an op-ed on campus antisemitism by the school’s rabbi.
The more we learn, the worse it gets.
Yesterday, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released new messages from Chang-Kim and other high-level Columbia administrators. First reported by The Washington Free Beacon, they are even more damning than the first batch.
As Orly Mishan—daughter of a Holocaust survivor—described her own daughter, a Columbia sophomore, “hiding in plain sight” on campus, Chang-Kim wrote “I’m going to throw up.” “Amazing what can do,” Cristen Kromm, the dean of undergraduate student life, wrote in response.
As Brian Cohen, the head of Columbia Hillel, said that Jewish students felt safer at Hillel than in their dorms, Matthew Patashnick, associate dean for student and family support, wrote to his fellow admins, “They will have their own dorm soon.” Minutes later, Chang-Kim wrote, “Comes from such a place of privilege.” Mind you, this is the same Hillel that Jewish students could not leave because of the violent protests outside its doors.
Cohen spoke in hopes of providing more support services to Jewish students, to which Kromm texted, “If only every identity community had these resources and support.” And of course, Patashnick accused Cohen of taking “full advantage of this moment” for its “huge fundraising potential.”
So I repeat what I said in a Free Press video in December: Safety first, except for Jews.
Many people are shocked by these texts. I am not. Many are thrilled to hear that the administrators have been placed on leave. I am not. I saw this rot as a student there until I graduated early last year to work at The Free Press. I was told that I was crazy for sounding the alarm on smaller instances of antisemitism (nothing too crazy, just some swastikas on dorm room doors).
We sometimes fail to remember that people comprise institutions. Columbia is not a bastion of truth-seeking and free thought overseen by benign, mysterious forces. Nope, power gets exerted by a grubby group chat whose members think that concerns about antisemitism come from a place of privilege.
And these are the just the ones who were dumb enough to get caught. Their texts are a small window into a much deeper, much uglier rot. —Maya Sulkin
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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