Inside the Radical Protests on October 7

Behind Enemy Lines is a radical “anti-imperialist” group. While it’s relatively small, it co-organized one of the demonstrations at last year’s Democratic National Convention. This year, the group called for nationwide protests on the anniversary of October 7. Manhattan Institute investigative reporter Ryan Thorpe went undercover and attended one of these protests, where he met with a BEL organizer and other demonstrators.

Thorpe followed the protesters from the South Bronx to the Israeli Consulate. He witnessed American flags burned, saw expletives scrawled in spray paint, and heard calls to “globalize the Intifada.” One organizer suggested that he wanted people to “defect from their loyalty” to the United States.

Read the rest of Thorpe’s vivid report here.

Corbin Barthold explores how OpenAI’s impractically idealist nonprofit structure has left it at the mercy of activists and politicians. He recounts internal resistance and the board’s failed 2023 attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman, the complex restructuring with Microsoft, and pressure from California attorney general Rob Bonta. The results of these struggles might be to blunt OpenAI’s ingenuity—or to turn it into yet another politicized nonprofit.

The lesson? “When a free and pluralistic society lets private actors compete to build better things, the result is imperfect but ever-increasing prosperity. When central planners claim the power to save the world, the result is corruption, coercion, and misery—every time,” writes Barthold.

In The Fall of Affirmative Action, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver writes about the Supreme Court’s ruling last year against race-conscious admissions practices, maintaining that “the decision constitutes a veritable catastrophe not just in higher education but in our larger national life.”

Driver intends the book as a post mortem for affirmative action, but as Daniel Kodsi observes, the author ends up making clear how weak the case is for racial preferences. “That young people of some races have come to expect preferential treatment, while young people of others have grown inured to seeing their college applications discounted,” Kodsi writes, “does not make systematic racial discrimination in university admissions any less wrong or unfair.”

Read his review.

At a recent Manhattan Institute event, City Journal contributing editor Rob Henderson spoke with author Ed Latimore about his new book, what it was like growing up in poverty, and the lessons he learned in the Army and as a professional boxer.

The neighborhood Latimore grew up in “was basically a war zone,” he said. “When I met friends later who said they’d never heard gunfire, I was shocked. That was like hearing someone say they’d never seen rain.”

Read an edited transcript of their conversation here.

“Buzz! Screech! The alarm blared again the second night: stay near a shelter. Again, everyone gathered in the alleyway. Minutes later, sirens called out—in the sky, on our phones—and into the coffin we returned. We waited for stragglers. A heavy metal clank: the door latched shut. It was crowded and hot. Old men left their shirts unbuttoned. Some of the women had brought a mat to cover their piece of the floor. We heard booms: flat and dull, like thunder filtered through concrete and metal. People looked up, and then to one another. So the Iranian response had come. A religious man, perhaps a rabbi, read from the Torah and prayed. No fear—just concern and anticipation.”

That’s an excerpt from Adam Zivo’s report from Israel, which you can read here. In the story, which appears in our new Autumn issue, he recounts his experience in Tel Aviv during the war with Iran.

“Chiles is an opportunity to shed light on the state of a mental health profession that is in crisis, using fad psychology, and avoiding the hard work of providing appropriate care to treat dysphoria.”

Photo credit: Ryan Thorpe