I wanted to open this piece by drawing a parallel between Graham Platner and someone from my personal life. I thought of an acquaintance I knew who once had an abusive, manipulative, serially adulterous boyfriend, but that didn’t quite fit. I thought of another acquaintance born into immense family wealth who oozes charisma but just can’t seem to get their scattered life together. That didn’t quite fit either. I even considered a high school burnout from my youth, who joined the military and remained rough around the edges after. The reality is that Graham Platner is like a composite character of some of the most frustrating people I’ve ever encountered, all mixed into one singular disaster. I couldn’t hone in on any one example to properly make the point. Much ink has been spilled about Mr. Platner, and I myself had about five different columns from every different angle I considered writing about him. But I think the thing that stands out to me the most is how the fail-son liberal class tried to pawn him off as an everyman. Democrats claimed we all know a Graham Platner. They’re exactly right, actually. There are just two problems. The first is that nobody likes Graham Platner. We all loathe the sh*tty excuse for a man that our female friend or sister or daughter dates. The one that we can all spot from a mile away, who lies as easily as he speaks, who you know ends in disaster but somehow has the charm to prolong the trainwreck as long as possible. We’re all annoyed by that friend who may be good at heart but is a serial bullsh*tter, always with some new scheme they’re working on or hustle that’s going to change the world, but never has the follow-through to do anything with their life. It’s especially annoying if that person doesn’t have to succeed because they’ve got dad’s money to fall back on. We’re all uncomfortable around that edgelord friend who takes every joke too far, who can’t speak like a normal person around women, who still makes quips at age 33 that the rest of us left in the middle school bathroom. By a certain age, he becomes less of a friend and more of a nuisance. Nobody likes this guy, including the Democrats who endlessly excused Graham Platner’s behavior and pretended they do. That leads us to their second mistake: they pretended they liked this guy because they think you like this guy. The Ro Khannas and Morris Katzs of the world are not regular, everyday Americans, and have limited contact with them. In their warped head, they think Graham Platner is the everyman. He’s a vulgar brute, just like the middle-American truck driver. He treats women badly? Well so do all those religious husbands down south Democrats need to try to win over, don’t they? Oyster farming? The fellas down at the John Deere dealership will love this guy! Being so out of touch with reality is what allowed the elite liberal class to make this second mistake. While normal people saw immediately what Graham Platner is, his backers projected all of his flaws onto their fellow Americans. “He was in the military! Of course he jokes about veterans deserving to die and has a few screws loose!” “He isn’t a career politician! Of course his entire digital footprint is filled with heinous comments!” “He’s working class! Of course he does a little rape and woman-shaking!” I’ve known plenty of military veterans. Most of my family is what you would call the “rural working class.” I’ve got friends from back home who aren’t involved in politics. Newsflash: none of them behave the way Graham Platner does. That progressive elites think they do exposes a deep contempt in their souls. And just as an aside, I don’t think any of those people I know, despite being much better humans than Graham Platner, belong in the United States Senate. The body that was once home to our most impressive intellectuals and statesmen is not where broken people go to heal on their journey to find themselves, as Democrats tried to argue with the absurd Platner redemption-arc storyline. Take that nonsense to your priest or your therapist. The Platdenburg’s mid-air implosion was entirely foreseeable months ago, but somehow Democrats’ elite class fell into a trance of their own making. Despite the death rattle we are currently witnessing in Maine, his time is over. It remains to be seen if there will be any course correction from the menaces who tried to foist him upon our body politic.

A federal appeals court struck down a key part of Florida’s law restricting race and gender discussions in public colleges and universities on Tuesday.  The same people celebrating the ruling are also decrying a recent decision by the Texas State Board of Education that allowed biblical passages to appear on a secondary school reading list. The former is academic freedom, and the latter a violation of it. Naturally.  It’s easy to reconcile these positions by arguing that one is a religious matter and the other is secular. Clearly, it’s wrong to push one’s religion in the classroom. Therefore, we can rely on “separation of church and state” to privilege the speech of Florida college professors over that of Texas secondary teachers.  But for this distinction to matter, we require a clear definition of religion. What constitutes a religious belief as opposed to a philosophical opinion? Certainly not the mention of God — the Buddhist religion is staunchly atheist, yet it is held to the same standards as Christianity or Judaism in academia. Religions have a number of key components. They tend to include, in one form or another, unquestionable dogmas, heresies, priesthoods, and rituals.  Let’s consider the famous “is-ought” problem posed by philosopher David Hume. It is impossible to prove that one “ought” to do something using only descriptive statements.  For example, just because you can prove that stealing from someone will upset him, or damage the legitimacy of anti-theft laws, or cause him to seek vengeance on you does not itself prove an imperative that you shouldn’t steal. Only if you consider his feelings, the legitimacy of the law, or your own safety to be intrinsically valuable does the imperative become binding. And while these considerations may come naturally, they are not the product of unassailable deductive reasoning. In other words, when put to the incessant questioning of a two-year-old, “but why?” the answer must eventually become “because somebody said so” or “that’s just the way it is.” At least one moral postulate is necessary for the system to function.  Religion provides a workable axiology. It’s the oldest form of intellectual value theory known to man.  Everyone worships something; some of us just know it.  Consider veganism, for example. Committed vegans accept the intrinsic value of all animal life as a moral postulate. They consider eating meat or animal products to be sinful behavior that violates their moral code. Someone else eating meat doesn’t affect vegans in the slightest, yet they consider it an insult to a higher moral truth that they have postulated.  Imagine a Christian professor objecting in the classroom to the morality of same-sex marriage. He would be violating the separation of church and state. Yet when a professor asserts that veganism is morally superior to meat-eating, this is protected by academic freedom.  Even the most clinical theoreticians who reject progressive dogmas (which few actually do) often find themselves speaking with reverence of The Science (capital S, of course) and what it tells us. Far be it for us to rise above our stations and question the anointed Experts and their wisdom.  The problem is not the presence of value judgments in education. Had human education failed to privilege any one way of thinking over any other throughout history, we’d have never left the caves.  What’s more, absolute neutrality toward social issues is not only a fiction, but it’s an undesirable one. I, for one, would not favor living in a society where children were taught that a set of values that leads them to Hitler is on equal footing with those that lead them to Martin Luther King Jr. The extent to which religious practices should be allowed into the public sphere is a matter of debate. The trouble comes when educators try to play by a different set of rules by classifying their religious practices as different from religious practices they don’t like.  While the Florida ruling allows educators to espouse their faith toward race and gender dogmas, the Texas ruling requires that the Bible be taught strictly from a neutral, historical perspective. The double standard here should be painfully obvious.  The secular religion phenomenon has some clear benefits attached to it as well. It is most often through their religion that people find communities and become motivated to do good for the world. Atheists who wouldn’t be caught dead in a church might still be motivated to form groups and serve their communities by other commitments that fill the void of traditional faith (such as environmentalists cleaning up parks). After all, the is-ought problem demonstrates why no amount of clinical analysis can tell us what is ultimately worth loving, protecting, or forbidding. If one must reject the Abrahamic faiths, better that he find another outlet through which to do good than abandon good altogether.  The problem comes when “doing good” crosses the line from picking up trash in your neighborhood into blocking the roads because you didn’t get your way in the presidential election. Secular religions are seldom guided by ancient wisdom; they’re frequently guided by edgy teenagers on social media and ivory tower intellectuals who are safely insulated from the real world. For that reason, they often end up directing people’s religious zeal toward ends that are counterproductive.  Secular religions, even when they are predicated on principles that nobody disputes, are still systems of faith. Whenever we give educators the power to impart their faith onto their students, we run the risk of indoctrination that the founders feared. Taking God out of the equation does not erase this concern. If anything, it amplifies it. *** 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.

Democrats don’t know what to make of young men — look no further than their catastrophic attempts to sanitize Graham Platner as proof — but finding a figure who resonates with guys isn’t that hard. In fact, there’s a Hollywood star whose roles always seem to connect with men. Of course, it’s Ryan Gosling. “Project Hail Mary,” whose screen time was dominated primarily by Gosling and a puppeteered alien, scored the biggest opening weekend this year for a non-franchise film. Making $683.3 million worldwide, the movie also received 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s success is due in no small part to Gosling, who has become one of the most beloved and relatable actors in Hollywood. Back in 2023, Gosling stole the show in “Barbie.” Gosling’s Ken struck a chord with young men across America. Guys would dance and sing to the song “I’m Just Ken,” ironically or earnestly expressing the pressures and pent up feelings a feminized America has wrought on them over the years with lyrics such as “Doesn’t seem to matter what I do, I’m always number two,” and “No one knows how hard I tried.” Songwriter Mark Ronson, who co-wrote “I’m just Ken” with Gosling, said the song “has helped young boys emotionally.” “The song tells boys that it’s OK to be runner-up,” Ronson said. “The internet’s caused a level of isolation in boys and this idea of male camaraderie and sharing your feelings is a nice and unexpected thing to come out of it.” Gosling’s relatability has also turned him into a meme. In 2018, the “literally me” meme began with a post on Facebook comparing a nerdy boy on his computer to five popular male characters of the “loner” archetype. “Wow, this is literally me,” he thinks. It became wildly popular. Gosling is now a frequent feature in variations of the meme. One person on Reddit explained it this way: “[H]e plays a lot of characters who are awkward, quiet, lonely/struggling romantically, and/or depressed (most notably the Driver in Drive and Officer K in Blade Runner 2049, but Ken fits too), and given that he’s also quite good looking, wears stylish costumes, and is portrayed as a cool badass despite those relatable flaws, he’s ripe for disaffected young men to semi-ironically, semi-not heavily relate to him.” In the “literally me” trend, guys post jokes about their inability to talk with their female peers, loneliness, and lack of compliments, with one comment asking, “Y’all are getting compliments at all???”  Through internet culture, this loner archetype evolved into the “sigma male,” a romanticized version of the lone wolf. Alt-right writer Theodore Beale coined the term in 2010. “They are characterized by their autonomy, self-sufficiency, and preference for solitude, making them intriguing figures who don’t fit neatly into established social categories,” Beale said.  Young men connect with Gosling so well because his characters in films such as “Drive” and “Blade Runner 2049” are alone, can’t express their feelings, and struggle to find love. This pain of inadequacy and isolation is romanticized. Gosling’s roles idealize being alone, fully self-sufficient, and not “needing” anyone. But that life is actually exhausting, and you can see this exhaustion played out. Gosling is the face of the “modern loner” with a thousand-yard stare.  “He’s not just one guy,” the host of Reel Emotion said. “He’s everyone who’s ever looked out a window and wondered if anyone cared.” The pain of Gosling’s characters in these films is further amplified by the fact that they remain alone — the world reminding them that it’s “not for them.” “That’s why people keep editing Ryan Gosling in all these sad edits,” Reel Emotion said. “To impersonate something that we’ve all felt.” Lately, Gosling’s films have shifted from merely relatable to more aspirational. Gosling’s move from lone-wolf characters to men who find happiness in relationships comes after his marriage in 2022. In an interview, Gosling said becoming a father changed his perspective on his career, making him want to create films that he can bring his whole family to. “Project Hail Mary,” he said in an interview, is “so hopeful as well, which, I think, is what I really responded to. This idea of ‘okay enough with the dystopian future ideas that are so bleak and offer no solutions.’” Journalist Anthony Breznican wrote for Esquire that “Project Hail Mary” is actually about “male loneliness.” Men specifically struggle with forming and maintaining deep friendships with other men. “We believe in that old maxim, ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed,’ and we’re there for that 100 percent — as long as we’re not the one ‘in need,’” Breznican said. In the film, Dr. Ryland Grace, played by Gosling, sounds like many lonely young men today.  “I didn’t have much of a social life back when things were normal,” Grace says. “Sometimes I’d grab dinner with other faculty and staff at the school. I’d have the occasional Saturday-night beer with old college friends.” Then, Grace finds “Rocky,” an unlikely alien friend reminiscent of E.T. They develop a deep connection that stems from each of them bearing the weight of a civilization on his shoulders. With a seemingly impossible task and a shared mission, they develop a bond.  The 2024 film “The Fall Guy,” an action-packed comedy with a surprisingly well-designed plot, is similarly driven by a relationship. Gosling’s character, Colt Seavers, starts out in a wonderful relationship with Jody Moreno, “the girl of his dreams,” until he gets in an accident that ruins his stuntman career. Then, he hides and abandons her. When they get reintroduced, there’s tension and a lot of effort from Seavers to heal the relationship matched by plenty of distrust from Moreno. Seavers works to save her production and clear his name, which culminates in a confession of his feelings toward her. This scene is the moment he finally decides to be vulnerable, expressing how stuntmen are trained to be “invincible” and never admit to pain, always giving the thumbs-up. Journalist Jeffery Zaslow wrote in the Wall Street Journal that guys tend to form bonds by doing things together. They don’t often share their emotions or insecurities with each other, but will with their wife or close female friends. This dynamic plays out in “The Fall Guy” and “Project Hail Mary.” Seavers confesses his love for Jody; Grace sacrifices his future for Rocky. One pours his heart out; the other shows he cares by his actions.  “Researchers say women’s friendships are face to face: They talk, cry together, share secrets,” Zaslow writes. “Men’s friendships are side by side: We play golf. We go to football games.” This doesn’t mean guys don’t express emotions to each other. Grace, when the mission is completed and he and Rocky are going their separate ways, feels sad in what should be a joyous moment. When Rocky asks why, Grace — in the book from which the film is adapted — says, “You’re my friend. Heck, you’re my best friend. And pretty soon we’re going to say goodbye forever.” More boys and young men want to see male characters in caring and affectionate fatherly roles. “Today’s youth want to see boys and men portrayed on screen showing emotional connection and vulnerability and moving away from isolation and other masculine stereotypes,” according to UCLA research. They want masculinity defined by “emotional availability” and “joyful connection,” instead of the lone wolf archetype. From ages 15 to 24, men look for films with nurturing and emotionally available men, demonstrating “positive models of masculinity.” In a culture that says holding a door open for a woman is “toxic masculinity,” young men are confused and frustrated. Gosling is helping them understand their struggles and pointing to a better path. He gives an example of masculinity in his films that is healthy, nurturing, and vulnerable. No wonder so many guys say, “He’s literally me.” *** 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.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the Republican Party’s most influential voices on national security and a close ally of President Donald Trump, has died at 71 after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” “On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness. Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period,” his office said in a statement Sunday morning. A cause of death has not yet been released, though emergency responders were reportedly dispatched to Graham’s Capitol Hill home for a cardiac arrest. https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2076211412112670839 The longtime politician had served as a United States senator for South Carolina since 2003. This is a breaking story. Stay with The Daily Wire for updates.

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars. *** In 1775, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth sat down and did some math. The American colonies were doubling in population every 20 years, primarily due to a high birth rate. Projecting forward, he calculated that by the year 2000, America would have a population of 1.28 billion people. He wrote the number in capital letters, as he was so overwhelmed by the thought. When the year 2000 arrived, we came in about a billion short. A new report from the Institute for Family Studies, “The Demographic Dead End,” opens with Wigglesworth’s forecast and then explains, in careful and sometimes alarming detail, why it failed and what comes next. The authors, demographer Lyman Stone and researcher Peter Foreshaw Brookes, have built what they call the most reliable published reconstruction of historic American fertility: birth rates for every state back to 1917, and for Massachusetts back to 1660. The report was released to mark the country’s 250th birthday. Click here for more Manhattan Institute content. The headline finding is simple. The American birthrate has fallen below 1.6 children per woman. Replacement fertility requires about 2.1. The United States is now in its third extended period of below-replacement fertility, after the Great Depression years and a stretch from 1972 to 1989. The current period, though, has lasted longer and fallen lower than either of the previous two. If the trend continues, Stone and Brookes project that the American population will peak around 351 million in the 2050s and then decline. Why? Here the authors have uncovered something genuinely novel: evidence that the fertility collapse is not only economic, but social. Americans are not having fewer children because they want fewer children. They are having fewer children, in part, because friendship has thinned and social support for family life has weakened. Surveys show that Americans want more children than they are likely to have. The IFS report puts desired family size at about 2.4 children on average; a 2025 Gallup survey found an even higher ideal family size of 2.7 children. Americans are actually on track for fewer than 1.6. The gap between desired and actual family size is the widest it has been since the early 1970s. So what is blocking people? The standard answers are money and housing, and the report takes those seriously. But its centerpiece is a new survey of 4,784 Americans between 18 and 50, and the results point somewhere else: at peer culture. The researchers asked respondents how many kids their three closest friends had, and how those friends would react if the respondent had another baby. Would they offer to help? Cook meals after the birth? Or would they worry about their career stalling or stop inviting them out? The answers were associated, to a startling degree, with the desire to have children. For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up. Compare that with religion, the variable social scientists often concentrate on when looking at birth rates. Young Americans who never attend religious services want about two children. Regular attendees want about 2.7. Religion matters, but helpful friends matter just as much, if not more, and the statistical models suggest the two effects are separate. Additionally, having friends with kids predicts wanting more kids yourself. The report shares a striking null result: the closeness of people’s relationships with their own parents predicts almost nothing about how many children they want. The average family size of peers matters about twice as much as the respondent’s own number of siblings in childhood. Psychologists will not find this shocking. Humans are mimetic creatures. We calibrate our appetites, our outlooks, and our life plans by watching the people around us, as well as the people just above us. So it should not surprise us that the report finds a “celebrity effect” as well. Respondents named the public figure they most admired. The researchers then looked up how many children that figure had. Each additional child born to an admired celebrity predicted about 0.15 more desired children for the fan. The effect was strongest among young women. It is “empirically possible,” the authors write, “that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars to have children might produce more children in society than spending the same money on child tax credits, if her choice sways her wide fanbase.” Still, there is a crucial catch in the data. Admired celebrities and friends with kids shape what people want. They do not shape what people do. When the researchers looked at actual intentions—meaning couples who wanted more children and concretely planned to have them—the celebrity effect nearly vanished. In fact, the only social variable that still moved intentions was having friends who would actually help: watch the baby, bring the meals, change the diapers. Having supportive friends raised the share of couples intending to have another child from around 30 percent to about 45 percent. Put simply: ambient culture sets the aspiration, but real-world friends lead to actual births. A society can be awash in pro-family influencers and still be barren if nobody is willing to babysit. Friendship, though, is collapsing. The number of close friends Americans report has been falling for decades. Time spent with friends has dropped sharply, particularly for the young. The report cites new economics research with a title that says it all: “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” The study contends that smartphone adoption itself depressed birthrates. Seen this way, the fertility crisis looks less like an economic problem and more like a downstream symptom of the loneliness problem. The friendship recession and the baby bust are the same recession. What to do? Stone and Brookes offer a policy program bolder than the usual child tax-credit tinkering. The flagship is what they call American Birthday Accounts: invest $15,000 at every citizen’s birth, let it compound, and unlock it only when that child grows up and has children of his or her own. A married couple could receive on the order of $100,000 at a first birth. The authors estimate that this could raise birthrates by 20 to 40 percent, at a cost of less than 1 percent of the federal budget. But the more original ideas are the cultural ones, and they follow from the friendship data. Perhaps most provocatively, the authors suggest “digital blue laws” that would tax smartphone data usage on weekends to nudge people off their phones and back into each other’s living rooms. Some of these ideas will strike readers as fanciful. But the diagnosis behind them is hard to dismiss. For most of human history, children were raised inside a thick web of siblings, neighbors, and friends. Nobody had to be persuaded that family life was aspirational, because it was visible everywhere. We have thinned that web to a few strands and are surprised that people hesitate to envision babies within it. The report ends with a note of optimism: demographic decline is a choice, and choices can be reversed. The question is whether Americans are willing to rebuild the ordinary social world that once made children thinkable: full pews, crowded porches, friends within walking distance. A country that cannot produce friendship will not produce much of anything else. *** This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here. Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, and the best-selling author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.