Brian Karem, the longtime White House correspondent and author of “Free the Press: The Death of American Journalism and How to Revive It,” just published a fiery Salon piece declaring he’s boycotting this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD). His reason? President Donald Trump is attending. “I will not be attending,” Karem writes. “I have no desire to participate in this hypocrisy.” He accuses Trump of “discredit[ing], insult[ing] and abus[ing] reporters,” closing off access, suing news organizations, and stacking the briefing room with “right-wing propagandists posing as independent reporters.” He laments a “spineless and worthless” corporate media that won’t fight back hard enough. If the press is truly under siege, if American journalism is dying, as Karem’s book title insists, then why does one President showing up to a black-tie dinner feel like an existential threat? The truth is simpler, and far more American: The press has never been more free. It’s just no longer the exclusive property of the old gatekeepers. For decades, the press wasn’t a marketplace of ideas — it was a cozy cartel. Three television networks, a handful of powerful newspapers, and the annual WHCD (affectionately, or not, known as “nerd prom”), where reporters mingled with the very officials they were supposed to hold accountable. Access was everything. Favors were traded over cocktails. Stories that challenged the narrative often died quietly in the editing room. Karem himself is a product of that system. He successfully sued to regain his press pass during Trump’s first term. He’s covered administrations for years from inside the bubble. Yet now he’s shocked that the man millions of Americans elected twice refuses to play by the old rules. Trump didn’t invent presidential control over White House access — it’s not a public utility, and never has been. Every president has shaped the briefing room to suit his style. What’s different is that Trump says the quiet part out loud, and millions of Americans cheer him for it. Meanwhile, legacy outlets spent years pushing stories that later crumbled: the Russian collusion narrative (later walked back by intelligence officials), the Hunter Biden laptop promoted as “Russian disinformation,” and COVID-era claims that shifted with the political winds. Trust didn’t evaporate because of Trump’s tweets. It collapsed because Americans could see the spin in real time. Gallup’s latest poll shows just 28% of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media — the lowest on record. The internet shattered the cartel. X, Substack, podcasts, YouTube, and independent sites let anyone with a smartphone and the courage to speak publish instantly. Citizen journalists reach millions without begging corporate approval. Substack alone has exploded past 35 million monthly active subscribers by 2026, with paid subscriptions growing rapidly as readers vote with their wallets for independent voices. Podcasts and newsletters from moms, veterans, and everyday Americans now influence the national conversation more than evening newscasts ever did. Legacy newsrooms are hemorrhaging staff and subscribers, not because of “right-wing propagandists,” but because competition works. When the old guard calls this the “death of journalism,” what they really mean is the death of their monopoly. Viewpoint diversity has never been higher. Before 2016, newsrooms in Washington, D.C. and New York City leaned overwhelmingly one way — studies routinely showed that over 90% of political donations from journalists went to Democrats. Conservative perspectives were dismissed as fringe. Today, parallel ecosystems flourish. Trump didn’t kill journalism; he accelerated its breakup into a true marketplace of ideas. Americans can now choose sources that reflect their values instead of being force-fed a single narrative. Real-time corrections happen daily. The Hunter Biden story suppression, the lab-leak theory dismissal, and “transitory” inflation spin were all exposed not by internal ombudsmen but by independent outlets and the American public. Legally, the press has never been safer. The First Amendment remains untouched. Presidents have always limited access, issued criticism, and occasionally sued when reporting crossed into falsehood. Trump’s “enemy of the people” line is protected speech, just as the media’s daily insults toward him are. No journalists are jailed. No newspapers are shuttered. Contrast that with actual authoritarian regimes where reporters face prison or worse. Reporters Without Borders may wring its hands, but America still ranks among the freest nations on earth for press freedom. The WHCA dinner itself proves the point. It’s a celebrity schmooze-fest that raises scholarship money while reporters pose for selfies with power brokers. Karem and more than 250 colleagues (including Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson) signed a letter decrying “unprecedented attacks.” Yet the event was never about “vigorous press” — it was about access and glamour. Boycotting Trump because he shows up exposes the hypocrisy: The dinner was fine when it roasted him in 2011 or when comedians mocked him in absentia. Now that he’s back in the room as the elected president, suddenly it’s unbearable. Karem’s Salon piece is revealing. He praises past colleagues for “standing up” to Trump and laments today’s “compliant reporters” softened by buyouts and diluted by new voices. He wants the old rules back — where a small guild decided the narrative and everyone else followed. Americans rejected that model in 2016, 2024, and again now. The press isn’t dying — it’s democratizing. It’s becoming more representative, more accountable, and more responsive to the people it serves. The question isn’t whether the press will survive Trump. The real question is whether the old guard will adapt to a truly open marketplace or keep boycotting reality while the rest of us move forward. The press has never been more free. And that’s the American way. *** Bethany Miller is the Director of Communications at NRB, managing editor of The Conservateur, and a senior fellow at Concerned Women for America.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** The Cut has a knack for repackaging relational instability as self-discovery. The women-focused online arm of New York Magazine that brought us pieces like “Could Opening Your Marriage Lighten Your Mental Load?” and “I Regret Having Children” is at it again — this time with E.J. Dickson’s essay “The Secret to a Great Marriage? Crushes on Other People.” In it, Dickson begins by describing a co-worker named Phil, whom she compares to a swarthier Jake Gyllenhaal, and who, she notes, didn’t know what a “nut graf” was. She emphasizes that she did not know him well: by the time they stopped working together, they had exchanged only about 40 words, most of them about Steely Dan. She mentions him occasionally to her husband of nearly 10 years, who would joke about her “frissons of nervous energy” when asked if Phil had been at work that day. When she knew he would be in the office, she found herself lingering a little longer in front of the mirror — adding lip tint and mascara, taking extra care with her hair before meetings. Actually, much of the piece focuses on workplace dynamics and so-called “work husbands and wives.” One interviewee, Jill, 32, recalls that her now-husband once confessed to having a minor crush on a co-worker. At the time, she was feeling sexually bored in their relationship, and she describes the admission as unexpectedly “deeply erotic.” The couple later folded the subject into their pre-sex conversations. Jill said it “recalibrated” how she perceived him. “A crush while you’re married is like a little sweet snack that gets you through the 4 p.m. slump,” said Cara, 35. “It’s harmless and invigorating,” she said, “and reminds you you’re alive and kicking and yearning and thinking.” While some pushed back on the piece in the comments, most others were predictable: “Brace for puritan moralism,” one said. “Sad to see so many people missing the point,” wrote another, “it’s not about infidelity.” And finally: “It’s not that deep man … having crushes is human. Enjoy.” I was surprised to feel my body tense as I read the article through for the first time. I had lived out this theory as a college student, and the lessons were still living in my muscles — little “frissons of nervous energy” that I recognized now for what they were: alarm bells.  During a long-term relationship, I found myself co-creating a new music festival with an older mentor and friend. At first, it was innocent: writing grants after class, trading notes in a shared Google Doc. I admired his drive, his obvious talent. But admiration has a way of slipping its bounds. Soon, I felt that familiar, muscle-melting pull at the mere mention of his name. As the months passed, we were pulling all-nighters, contacting venues, creating floor plans, evaluating artist applications, united in a common purpose and building a shared world from scratch. I found my mind wandering: what other worlds might we be capable of sharing? Electric fingers grazed my leg under the table. I was sick with confusion, regret, desire. I was in trouble.  If this wasn’t “that deep, man,” how did I get here? From ruminating on a nagging desire to indulging it? From a passing thought to a habit of mind; from a shared project to a divided interior life; from keeping a little secret to hiding whole chambers of my heart?  What I thought was rare, even clandestine, was anything but. Some estimates suggest that as many as 85% of affairs begin at work. “Now we have a shared purpose,” psychologist John Delony explains. “We’re talking about how we feel about things. We have a goal, we have metrics. I’m spending more time with her or him than I am with my spouse. Of course it happens at work.”  Conservative politicians have gone to great lengths to avoid precisely this kind of entanglement, most famously Mike Pence, who has said he avoids dining, traveling, or spending one-on-one time with women who are not his wife. Even among my closest friends, this rule tends to draw skepticism, dismissed as a relic of the aforementioned “Puritan moralism” or an overcorrection bordering on paranoia. But is it overkill? The Christian ethic has never limited fidelity to outward behavior alone; it presses much deeper, into the interior life. Scripture consistently treats the heart as the true seat of fidelity, as Proverbs says: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). Jesus sharpens the point, saying, “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Desire untethered from discipline, he points out, is not neutral; it is formative. Thoughts become patterns, patterns become habits, and habits, eventually, become actions. Crushes aren’t “harmless”; they’re the beginning of disordered desire that reshapes the heart and threatens our fidelity. “Take every thought captive,” Paul writes (2 Corinthians 10:5) because what you dwell on begins to shape what you want, and what you want begins to shape what you do. To indulge a wandering emotional or imaginative life is, in a real sense, to erode the foundation of a covenant that is meant to be steadfast regardless of passing urges. In other words, master your desires, or they will master you. This ethic serves another purpose: It keeps us from subtly turning one another into objects. The logic of the “crush,” as the article itself admits, depends on a kind of selective vision: “You’re getting to focus on the desirable parts of that person while ignoring the parts that wouldn’t actually be fun to deal with in reality. That’s super-sexy … Relish in the fantasy.”  That same logic appears more explicitly in other work by E. J. Dickson. In her 2016 article for the Washington Post titled “Don’t worry about sex robots. They won’t ruin sex,” she entertains the possibility that even deeply disordered desires might be safely redirected onto objects, writing that technologies like child sex robots could “serve as such an outlet.”  The mistaken assumption is that desire can be indulged, even trained, so long as it is displaced onto something non-human; that objectification is not only harmless, but potentially therapeutic. But to “relish in the fantasy” is, almost by definition, to flatten a person, to strip them of their full humanity and complexity and recast them as a vehicle for your own emotional or erotic gratification. In our marriage, my husband and I have resisted this ethic in ways that might seem excessive to secular friends: There are songs I no longer play because of the memories they evoke, restaurants we no longer visit because of vignettes they hold. We’ve chosen, deliberately, to build a shared world. And with each quiet act of discipline, each decision to honor him in thought and action, my desire is shaped and redirected, returning to the person it was always meant for. Every time, my crush on him grows deeper. *** Grace Salvatore is the senior editor of media, arts, and culture at Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Restoring the West and a contributor to Independent Women’s Voice.

The long-awaited sequel to 2006’s smash hit “The Devil Wears Prada” is getting some pushback, being accused of “blatant racism” for leaning into Asian stereotypes. “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” starring Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep, is getting blasted over a brief moment in a trailer. The scene introduces Andy Sachs’ (Hathaway) new assistant, Jin Chao, played by Helen J. Shen, who some say is portrayed as a nerdy, socially awkward Ivy League grad. In the trailer, Andy appears reserved upon meeting Jin, prompting the assistant to quickly rattle off her credentials. “If you don’t want me, you can interview someone else. That’s totally fine,” Jin says. “I did go to Yale, 3.86 GPA, lead soprano of [Yale singing group] the Whiffenpoofs, and my ACT score was 36 on the very first time.” Commenters also took issue with the way Jin donned a buttoned-up collared shirt and thick glasses, which they argue feel out of place for employees at a major fashion company. Social media users from around the world, especially in Asian countries, expressed their frustration with the clip. “The promotion up to this point was really great, but right before release, they suddenly hit us with blatant anti-Asian racism and flipped the car,” one user in Japan wrote in a post that’s been viewed more than 16 million times. プラダを着た悪魔、ここまでのプロモーションめっちゃ良かったのに、公開直前に突然ド直球のアジア人差別を見せつけてきて横転 https://t.co/uNUYIzXl7U — 黄色人種ちゃん (@dekaketu_purin) April 22, 2026 “We are in 2026… what made them think we’ll find this kind of racism funny,” another commenter said.  “Short stature, messy hair, childish clothing, big glasses, a ton of qualifications and high education and grades, servile and incompetent, a name that sounds just like ‘Ching Chang Chong,'” a third person echoed. “In this day and age, deliberately clipping out such a thick, over-the-top level of Asian stereotype that’s actually rare nowadays for ad use—did they judge that going full-on with the blatant discrimination would be more commercially appealing??” As The Hollywood Reporter noted, a lot of the widespread criticism is the result of X posts being automatically translated, meaning comments from around the world are being circulated in the United States. However, some, including Korean-American filmmaker Joseph Kahn, said the backlash reflects a cultural misunderstanding and claims that Jin is so weird she’s cool, at least to a Gen Z audience.  “There’s an uproar with Japanese Twitter about this Asian character. They feel she’s a caricature, which she is, but not about Asians but Gen Z. Her outfit is actually very couture in a film about fashion,” he wrote. “Her glasses and hair clips are of the moment. The body shape disparity comes from Anne Hathaway who mandated there would be ‘diversity of sizes’ which could either be taken as genuine virtue signaling or an actress wanting to be the skinniest and tallest onscreen. Nevertheless, the Asian character is being depicted as a fashionable, striver in the fashion world with typical Gen Z neurodivergency.” “Nerds don’t exist in Gen Z because they’re all awkward freaks and all dress like Nintendo cartoons,” he concluded. “Anyway Japan, welcome to America.”

Free speech isn’t free at Texas universities. Apparently, it comes with strings attached, or at least that’s what I was told when I tried to host a pro-life event that got so derailed, I had to call on Students for Life of America’s (SFLA) attorneys for a demand letter to try and get it back on track. It’s not just me. Students at the University of Texas, both at Dallas and Austin, are suing the University of Texas system after being censored when schools used a Texas law as an excuse to limit free speech on college campuses. While the law is not currently enforceable, college campuses across Texas are still holding strong to their censorship regime — and it’s up to students to stand up for their rights. My story began when I tried to host a speaker on campus at the University of Texas as part of my SFLA activities. Rather than welcoming pro-life voices, the university demanded almost complete disassociation from SFLA for the event to go on, which made the event itself virtually impossible. More specifically, the office told my group that our event could not include branded or promotional materials featuring both the outside organization and my student organization, Horns for Life; help managing the event; filming for social media; or co-sponsorship with SFLA or any off-campus organization. That not only impacted my free speech rights, but my freedom of association, too. In 2019, when Texas passed Senate Bill 18, it reinforced Supreme Court precedent that outdoor campus spaces are public forums, thereby ensuring free speech protections at universities. In a total betrayal of these values, Texas passed Senate Bill 2972, or the Campus Protection Act, in September 2025 under the guise of protecting campuses from disruptions and preserving safety during “end-of-term” periods and even during specific times of the day. The Campus Protection Act stopped students from engaging in acts of speech between 10 pm and 8 am, as well as from bringing guest speakers, amplifying sound, or using percussive instruments at demonstrations in the final two weeks of each semester. It is extremely broad, even disallowing student speech in private conversations, whether in dorm rooms or outdoor meeting spaces. “The First Amendment doesn’t set when the sun goes down,” said FIRE senior supervising attorney JT Morris. “University students have expressive freedom whether it’s midnight or midday, and Texas can’t just legislate those constitutional protections out of existence.” The bill was so unprecedented and broad that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas issued an injunction stopping the law from being enforced only a month later. Despite the injunction, Texas universities continue to use these rules at the campus policy level. UT Austin cites SB 2972 as a justification for their policy that “states that a guest speaker may not staff a table or set up exhibits.” Not only is pro-life speech being targeted, but religious speech and expression as well. A group of students has sued the UT system and its various representatives on behalf of their Texas college groups, including The Fellowship of Christian University Students at UT-Dallas, after they were prevented from bringing a minister to campus to pray for them during their class finals. Texas Woman’s University enacted regulations on free speech, calling it a “limited public forum.” The school placed limits on the times, places, and methods in which students can demonstrate on campus while telling them “nothing in this policy may be construed to limit or infringe on a person’s right to freedom protected by the United States and Texas Constitutions,” as if the rules do not inherently do exactly this. Texas Tech University’s Lubbock campus also has similar rules now coming under fire. While it is always advisable to follow campus rules, that does not mean Texas students cannot challenge them in the courts or otherwise. Disallowing all guest speakers, claiming a limited public forum, imposing time limits, and limiting amplified sound all have precedent for being deemed impermissible in certain circumstances, especially if the university is using Senate Bill 2972 as an excuse to enforce these rules. Using field representatives or coordinators from affiliate organizations to assist students in challenging university decisions against student organizations is a great first step. SFLA staff are equipped and eager to help our students. Additionally, reaching out to organizations like FIRE allows student groups without resources from a larger organization to seek help navigating legal routes addressing free speech challenges. A university is a place to experience new ideas, diverse opinions, and freedom of discourse. The acts of tabling on campus and hosting speakers are not separate from this mission. These unconstitutional rules do not disappear on their own. To see students’ free speech rights protected on university campuses again, students must speak up against the injustices happening on their campus and beyond — and the courts must follow their lead. *** Tiffany Lomax is a senior student at the University of Texas at Austin. She serves as president of the Horns for Life chapter, where she is involved in pro-life advocacy and organizing events on campus.  

We have been importing the people who hate our country and wish to destroy it. They believe in Third Worldism, the philosophy that all the problems of the Third World can be laid at the feet of us here in the West.  But there’s more. The people in the Democratic Party elite apparently believe that the West owes it to the Third World to destroy itself, or who view the Third Worlders as fellow travelers, helping them to accomplish that goal. It’s time to talk about the seemingly irreversible slide of the Democratic Party toward deep radicalism that will destroy our country. But to understand that, we have to understand the existential crisis facing our civilization.  There’s a rap song by a Syrian-born artist that’s becoming incredibly popular online. The lyrics read:  Separate our loved ones and slaughter our children. Take our blood for granted and demonize our revolutionaries, Steal our knowledge, keep our people oblivious And torture our spirits and denounce us our rights Colonize our countries and appoint our rulers Appropriate our goods and burn down our trees But who would you be without us Bomb our roofs, make us out as liars And watch our pains and belittle our agony Ignore our tears and close our eyes Mutilate our faces and deny our feelings Destroy our dreams, objectify our bodies and darken our skies and kill our peace We will keep standing still And our love stands in us. But who would you be without us? You would not be without us. You will not be without us.  The video shows a very angry young woman marching. Behind her are a bunch of other people from what appear to be third-world countries, many of them Muslim countries. Why is this important?  Because this is, in its essence, what we have imported. We in the West have imported people who hate our guts. And then there is a group of people in the United States who hate the systems, who have allied with those people to create a mass movement. That is what is happening with people such as Hasan Piker, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Zohran Mamdani. The basic idea among these people is that the reason other countries suffer is because the West did something wrong to them. Now, the West owes them something. Therefore, if you are living in the West and you realize that it’s pretty great and pretty prosperous, but you feel alienated because your parents are from somewhere else. As a result, you blame your parents’ problems on the West that took them in, and you blame colonialism and colonization.  The reality is that this female rapper is apparently from Syria and lives in Germany.  Germany never colonized Syria. Ever.  In fact, if you’re going to talk about the colonization history of Syria, you can talk about the Islamic colonization of Syria. Syria, of course, used to be a Christian country long before it was a Muslim country. But then it was colonized by Muslims, and then the Ottoman Empire controlled it for 400 years. The only Western country to control Syria in the last millennium was France for 26 years. The Assad regime controlled Syria for twice as long as France did.  You may have noticed that in that entire description of Syrian history, Germany never came up. Germany just took in millions of Syrian immigrants and migrants during the Syrian civil war.  Syrian refugees entered Germany when Angela Merkel decided to import a bunch of Third World refugees out of some sort of misplaced sense of guilt. The narrative that is told by the Third Worldists is far too simplistic. The reality is that colonization has been a routine part of human history. It is not merely done by the West. Islamic colonization took over the entire Middle East, moved into Europe, and still controls large swaths of Africa. There are all sorts of colonization efforts. It is worthwhile to note that the institutions set up by British colonizers made those areas more prosperous. In fact, the countries that retained British institutions, in particular, are the most prosperous countries in Africa, and the ones that reject those British institutions, those Western institutions, completely fail. European colonization is responsible for the end of slavery in the areas where there is no slavery. It’s also responsible for the institution of systems and ideas such as private property. The idea from the Leftists is that all the problems all over the world are the responsibility of the West. And then we decided that we should import all those people.  There are about 4.5 million Muslims in the United States, up from 1.1 million in the year 2000, a 400% increase. That includes over 10% of the population of New York. Many of those people are undoubtedly decent citizens, but how many of them sympathize with the decolonial ideology of somebody like the Syrian rapper? According to the polls, the answer is a lot. A recent poll asked how many British Muslims believe al-Qaeda planned 9/11. The answer: 4%. Does that sound like a deradicalized population that loves the West? Another poll at the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre a decade ago showed that two-thirds of French Muslims wanted Charlie Hebdo prosecuted for cartoons of Muhammad. Does that sound like a philosophy that is in keeping with French standards of speech? Today, some 57% of American Muslims believe that October 7 was at least somewhat justified.  We can pretend away these ideological conflicts. It doesn’t make them disappear. We imported a lot of people who do not like Western civilization.  That doesn’t mean all Muslims in the West don’t like Western civilization. I know Muslims who do, but the notion that importing millions of Muslims from third-world countries, or people from other cultures that don’t appreciate Western civilization, would be a good idea, is idiocy.  That raises the question of why the West imported all of this in the first place. The answer is that there are a bunch of homegrown people in the West who believe our civilization is inherently guilty and ought to be torn down. They tend toward the Marxist Left. The Marxist Left believes that America was founded in sin, that America’s foreign policy and the West’s foreign policy more broadly have been about exploitation and evil. The French existentialist and Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the foreword to one of the most important anti-colonial books of the 20th century, a book called “The Wretched of the Earth,” by Frantz Fanon. Sartre wrote: “We are all complicit in a thousand-year-old oppression. You know well enough that we are exploiters. Our precious sets of values begin to molt; on closer scrutiny you won’t see one that isn’t stained with blood.”  He argued that we actually needed to import people from the Third World to destroy us. The Marxists on the Left love this stuff. They are into this stuff. Suicide is the answer. Western values are evil, and they have to be destroyed. In the United States, this is the coalition that’s taking over the Democratic Party.  Why is the Democratic Party doing this?  Some are doing this because they’re actual Marxists, and they’re happy to travel as fellows with Third Worldism as a front for their destructive goals. There’s a long history of that. Marxists in Africa worked alongside the Third World to fight the West. And then there are Democrats who just hate the Right so much that they will find any ally, side with those people, and will treat any Democrat who works with Republicans, or at least any Democrat who doesn’t want to burn every single thing down, as a traitor.