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| By The Free Press |
It’s Tuesday, October 6. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: James Kirchick on the problem with the ascendant European right. Martin Gurri on Europe’s Russia fearmongering. Tyler Cowen on what the critics get wrong about effective altruism. Plus: Michael Oren on School of War, and more.
But first: Olivia Reingold reports from Cornell.
The town of Ithaca, New York, is the epicenter of a national scandal: the case of the so-called “Cornell 7.” It is the most explosive story about campus sexual assault in years, and has been in the headlines ever since an anonymous Jane Doe filed a lawsuit last month alleging that seven male students gang-raped her at their fraternity house in 2024.
With everyone from New York’s governor to the president weighing in on the case, we sent Olivia Reingold to Cornell. She found a campus rocked by the story: The night before she arrived, a student building had been vandalized. Yesterday, she was among a vast crowd of protesters gathered to declare “Justice for Survivors,” and carrying signs that read “I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL WITH RAPISTS.” This is her dispatch from the school at the center of the national conversation.
—The Editors
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Russia War Fears and the Rise of the European Right
Today we have two stories on the rise of the right in Europe, and how the continent’s incumbents have reacted. The first comes from James Kirchick. He takes stock of the continent’s surging right-wing populists, who are rocking the political order in France, Germany, and beyond. “It would be a grave mistake to condemn these movements as betokening the return of fascism,” writes Kirchick. “It would also be a mistake to cheer them on.” In his latest piece, he explains why the cure to the excesses of the European establishment could be worse than the disease.
Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, detects the threat of the surging new right in the recent warnings from European elites about a widening war with Russia. He argues that fear of Russian aggression beyond Ukraine—while understandable—has become overblown. Do centrist and establishment politicians from London to Berlin see Russia as a convenient tool in delegitimizing their opponents rather than a truly existential threat? “Russia is the new Covid—a crisis so dire that the state must be allowed to trample at will on individual rights to prevent the overthrow of civilized society,” Gurri writes. Read Gurri’s essay on what, besides national security, is at stake.
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In Defense of Effective Altruism | |||||
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