On June 2, 2020, I spent my 18th birthday entirely alone. For much of the day, I sat on my front porch, answering text messages from friends, but mostly I allowed time to pass in a crawl, the way it did for much of the COVID-19 lockdown. In the evening, I went inside and turned on the nightly news out of habit. It had become addicting watching the number of COVID cases rise and hearing concerned news anchors pour over virality data and quarantine horror stories. I spent my 18th birthday alone, shut away from my friends and family, watching people post black squares on their Instagram accounts in solidarity with George Floyd.  That same day, Dr. Anthony Fauci met with President Donald Trump, during which time Trump allegedly stated, “I love you, Tony. I want to give you a big hug.” After meeting for awhile to discuss vaccines, Trump called Fauci “close” to his desk and complimented him by saying, “You are looking real good.” According to Fauci’s diary, upon leaving the White House, he bumped into a friend and bragged about his performances on recent media hits. He then excitedly anticipated his plans for a morning breakfast meeting with Michael Caputo, the former assistant secretary for Health and Human Services. The previous day, June 1, Fauci bragged in his diary about getting to do a Zoom graduation ceremony for the Regis High School’s senior class. By his own judgement, they “loved it.” While hundreds of thousands of children and young adults were blocked from having actual graduation ceremonies, or meeting with family members, or having morning breakfasts with their friends, Fauci was living a normal life. After he spent months scaring Americans and convincing local and state governments that they had to shutter their doors, he was parading around D.C., doing media hits and making notes about which celebrities offered him public praise.  For members of Gen Z, the pandemic was the first major cultural event they experienced. Many were too young to remember 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis. While some of my friends vaguely remember a few things about the Obama presidency or Trump’s first term, very few of them were mature enough to be politically engaged. The pandemic stripped away their ignorance, forcing them to deal with the tyrannical political inclinations of Fauci, state governments, and liberal elites.  At the time, very few young people saw any upside to the COVID pandemic. It led to 46% of Gen Z reporting new mental health issues, 65% reporting feeling “very lonely,” and spikes in dangerous social trends such as transgenderism. Some students never got to say goodbye to their friends before leaving for college or, upon arrival, weren’t allowed to leave their dorm rooms without a mask. Numerous colleges required students to be vaccinated if they wanted to attend classes in person, while other universities and high schools simply told people to take virtual classes without any end in sight. Many of my teenage friends suddenly found themselves smoking weed every night to pass the time, or turning to dangerous illicit drugs just to “feel something.” With bars closed and parties cancelled, many of my former classmates started drinking alone in their rooms. Meanwhile, out-of-touch celebrities posted cringey videos of themselves singing “Imagine” and hiding in their Beverly Hills mansions.  For some Zoomers, the reaction to COVID was despair. But for many others, the reaction was defiance. After months of lockdowns and mask mandates, young people realized that their likelihood of getting sick was very slim and that quarantining barely mitigated the spread. As “two weeks to slow the spread” spiraled into endless months of forced isolation, many people realized the government was being weaponized against them. Just a few of my peers’ stories back this up.  Alex, who is now 26, dropped out of Northwestern just a few months into his freshman year after realizing the school’s online classes didn’t match its pricey tuition fees. In his free time, he taught himself computer programming. After landing a job at a well-known bank, he came to the conclusion that college was a scam, COVID was a scam, and that the only people who hadn’t lied to him were conservatives. Jake, 27, had recently graduated from high school and got into the trades during the start of the pandemic. After going into several people’s houses per day, he realized the quarantines had had very little effect on peoples’ safety and Fauci’s HHS had been spreading lies. Eric, 24, was forced to spend all of his time alone in his dorm room as a college student. He began listening to podcasts, starting with Jordan Peterson, and eventually wound up listening to Michael Knowles and Charlie Kirk every day. Within the course of less than a year, he went from being apolitical to volunteering for Turning Point USA.  COVID taught young Americans that they couldn’t trust the government to make decisions for them. In the past few years, a majority of my peers have admitted a similar experience: that COVID caused them to see the tyrannical abuse of power inflicted by left-wing governments. It’s no surprise that Trump won the popular vote for Gen Z men in 2024; he represented freedom from radical leftism. I was not the only Gen Z kid who spent her birthday, or graduation, or weekends alone. I was one of many young people who realized that Fauci’s shutdowns and power grabs were nothing but narcissism. Gen Z will never forgive Fauci for lying to them, but they can be grateful that he showed them how dictatorial politicians can be. *** Brooke Brandtjen is a writer and journalist from Wisconsin who focuses primarily on culture, politics, and religion. She is a senior contributor at New Guard Press, a publication she joined while attending Hillsdale College. 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.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is set to testify Wednesday morning before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who heads the committee, subpoenaed the former White House medical adviser after Fauci first agreed to appear and then refused to testify. The hearing is expected to focus on the origins of COVID-19, federal funding for gain-of-function research, Fauci’s past statements to Congress, his preemptive presidential pardon from then-President Joe Biden, and his handling of the federal government’s response to the pandemic. It’s expected that many of the questions asked during the hearing will be colored by Fauci’s explosive diary entries, which were maintained on government servers and recently released by Sen. Paul. The entries detail Fauci’s private thoughts and knowledge — often in sharp contrast to his public messaging — including the origins of the virus, his feelings about different political figures, such as President Donald Trump, and his fierce obsession with media attention, celebrities, and fame. Read the full diary, below: For example, in January 2020 Fauci wrote that “we know the market was not the source” of the outbreak, privately indicating that he believed the Wuhan wet market was not where the outbreak started. Yet publicly, Fauci repeatedly suggested the wet-market theory was accurate. Numerous entries also detail how much positive press Fauci was receiving from the media and celebrities. “Press still hot and heavy about me,” Fauci wrote in April 2020. “Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.” Weeks later, he celebrated a “very flattering” front-page article about himself in The Washington Post, adding, “The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable [person] in the world.” In his diaries, Fauci also wrote negatively of President Trump and Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, the first governor in the nation to buck Fauci’s advice about shutting down daily life to “stop the spread.” On Trump, Fauci penned that the president was “truly an obnoxious adolescent.” Another entry read, “He is embarrassing the USA. However, 72,000,000 voted for him. Difficult to understand. Craziness has overtaken part of our country.” Fauci called DeSantis “a complete disgrace,” adding, “He is blocking the local authorities from mandating masks in various locations including schools. He is doing this while at the same time Florida is virtually on fire with surging cases.” Additionally, the health advisor appeared to take credit for influencing school closures. In one March 2020 entry, Fauci wrote that he had “convinced” then-New York City Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools and that California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom also decided to close schools based on what Fauci was saying publicly. Those entries stand in contrast to Fauci’s later public statements that he did not close schools or advocate for lockdowns. The diary entries also seem to highlight Fauci’s unwillingness to be transparent and honest with the American people when it comes to the effectiveness and risks of the COVID vaccines. Fauci said in the diary that he experienced a pulmonary infection and contracted COVID on multiple occasions despite his very public show of being vaccinated and receiving multiple booster shots. Those health episodes were not publicly disclosed at the time.

The Democratic fundraising platform for nonprofits, ActBlue Charities, is processing donations for an organization that fought for the release of an illegal immigrant whose tale of being wrongly detained by federal agents imploded amid revelations of a violent domestic assault. ActBlue Charities and ActBlue Express appear to be processing donations for Cosecha, a group organizing anti-ICE protests across the country. Cosecha is listed as the sponsor on a petition that received more than 12,000 signatures to “free Martin Soto.” The organization promoted the since-debunked narrative that Soto, an illegal immigrant, was “kidnapped by ICE while getting diapers.” “In 2026, our fight is urgent. The attacks are louder. The systems of detention, deportation, and exploitation are more violent. But so is our resistance,” the fundraising page reads. Soto, 31, became the leader of the hunger strike that began at the end of May in ICE’s Delaney Hall detention center in Newark. Soto’s account unraveled this week after a police report obtained by The Daily Wire showed that he was arrested by the Kearny Police Department for a violent domestic assault on February 1, the day Cosecha and others said he was nabbed by ICE. ICE picked Soto up the next day from the Hudson County Correctional Center, federal law enforcement sources said. A police report recently obtained by @realDailyWire has blown up the narrative that the Delaney Hall hunger strike leader was an innocent man who was nabbed by ICE while buying diapers for his baby. This story is very reminiscent of the “Maryland man” narrative the media and… pic.twitter.com/khFRzJTXQy — Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) July 28, 2026 During the alleged assault, Soto “purposely” caused “bodily injury” to an unnamed female victim “specifically by using his hands, both opened and closed to strike” her “in her face, causing minor scratches and cuts to her face and neck,” according to the police report. Soto then “placed a hand over” her “mouth so she could not scream for help,” the report stated. The Daily Wire could not immediately confirm the identity of the assault victim. When a donor gives to an organization like Cosecha, ActBlue Charities takes the donation as the “merchant” before giving the donation to the nonprofit group, which pays the Democratic fundraising arm a processing fee. ActBlue Charities exploits a tax “loophole” that allows it to move donations without publicly disclosing them, according to Capital Research Center. “Every year both of ActBlue’s nonprofit wings report spending zero, or nearly zero, dollars on charitable grantmaking despite taking in millions of dollars from donors for the explicit purpose of regranting it to other organizations,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher for Capital Research Center, wrote in April. “They do this by abusing a loophole in the tax code which allows them to list the donations as a liability in escrow rather than a grant since, they claim, they are merely processing a payment, not making a grant.” ActBlue Charities and Civics reported a combined $8.6 million in “Escrow or custodial account liability” in 2024 as ActBlue Charities disclosed $57,500 in grants to only two organizations, according to Thayer. “This allows ActBlue to avoid disclosing the names of the vast majority of the organizations it is giving money to, even though donor-advised funds, which do functionally the same thing, have to disclose all of the money they disburse as a grant,” Thayer added. ActBlue did not respond to a request for comment. In its petition to free Soto from ICE detention, Cosecha wrote that the Peruvian national “does not need to be in prison to pursue his immigration case,” adding that “Martin needs to be outside, with his wife and children.” Soto’s wife, Gabriela, championed her husband’s sob story and led protests outside Delaney Hall during the hunger strike. She maintained that ICE “abducted” her husband who she said “committed no harm.” She also launched a GoFundMe page for her husband that has raised more than $67,000. Gabriela Soto did not respond to a request for comment. Media outlets ran with Soto’s victim narrative and published headlines like “Father picked up by ICE while buying diapers for his kids” and “Kearny Mom Barely Scraping By Weeks After ICE Took Husband During Diaper Run.” “This is the pattern: a sympathetic claim built to go viral, while the facts sit unread in a file. Delaney Hall was inspected and cleared, its officers branded jailers of the innocent on stories that collapse the moment you check the record,” Scott Mechkowski, a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project, recently told The Daily Wire. Gabriela Soto maintained that on February 1 she “suddenly got a phone call from a number listed as ‘prison/jail'” shortly after “Martin stepped out to get diapers” for the couple’s 11-month-old son. At that time, her husband was still in local custody after having been arrested for the domestic incident by local police in Kearny. “My heart dropped,” she wrote in a column published in June. “When I answered, I was terrified about what had happened. As soon as the call ended, I raced over to Delaney Hall to get some answers.” “A guard there told me Martin was in ‘good hands’ and once he was processed, he would be able to see me during visiting hours. I was relieved to hear he was safe, but when I started hearing about the conditions inside Delaney — rotten food, medical neglect, and more — I began to doubt the guard’s words,” she wrote. Cosecha did not respond to a request for comment. Soto’s hunger strike carried on for weeks as detainees refused the facility’s meals while filling up on commissary snacks, including sushi and clams, to protest what they called poor conditions inside the detention center, The Daily Wire reported.

Religion may have declined, but our appetite for gurus remains insatiable. Increasingly, people who need direction and advice have been looking to tech founders and CEOs. They are rich, of course — and most of us want to be rich — and they are thought to be especially insightful on the future. Now, a tech founder or CEO might have good advice (and not just on fixing your computer). Successful people really can have useful insights on what it takes to succeed. People working on the cutting edge of innovation can have useful insights about the future of society. It would be silly and resentful to deny it. But I think some people have been making a mistake in seeing tech leaders in quasi-religious terms, not just as interesting people but as an enlightened class. Simultaneously, tech people seem to have been dangerously emboldened by attention. They have started to believe that their every thought is infused with genius. On the “Modern Wisdom” podcast, for example, Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList and prolific social media mind-blower, says he is above having demands on his time. He doesn’t just mean skipping meetings. (Why be rich if you can’t skip meetings?) He means that he is: … not expected to go to couples dinners … not expected to go to birthdays … not expected to go to weddings. Fun! To be fair, before we call Ravikant “Worst Husband of the Year,” he adds that the same applies to his wife. But this sort of Naval-gazing still dresses up borderline sociopathic behavior as spiritual insight. I’m sure all of us have gone to birthday parties or weddings with a slight feeling of resentment, but we still went for the sake of someone else. Try telling a close friend that skipping their wedding was a valuable exercise in “freeing up … time” and you’ll soon find yourself with a lot more time when you might have been seeing friends. And then what’s the point of having time at all? I’m not sure Mr. Ravikant behaves like this in practice. But his words fit a pattern of tech founders and CEOs framing bizarre antisocial behavior as the key to productivity and efficiency. The more radically monomaniacal and hermetic people are, they seem to think, the more successful they will be. “I’ve never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20,” says Alex Karp of Palantir when asked for the advice he would give young people. Now, I’m not denying that some ambitions demand a serious level of work-life imbalance. I’m a lowly opinion commentator — hardly someone who’ll be asked for advice from young people — and even I have spent a lot of sleepless nights miserably trying to finish columns. But does anybody think that Karp’s experiences are representative? Does anybody think you have to work on a Friday evening to be successful? Or did a lot of people in tech — like, in fairness, a lot of us outside of tech — not have a great social life at 20 to begin with? The Twitter account “Chase Passive Income” is a fun satirical insight into the kind of LinkedIn-maddened perspective that this sort of pseudo-wisdom could encourage. “Spoke to 1,000 billionaires to learn how they got rich,” Chase muses: Here’s the shocking thing Not a single one of them said they got rich by attending their kid’s little league games Lesson learned. Never making that rookie mistake again. Again, I don’t disagree that achieving something exceptional sometimes takes exceptional behavior. At the very least, it takes very hard work. Stubbornly refusing to work weekends or in the evenings means it is almost impossible that you will win the Super Bowl, found a tech company, or even — sorry, “even” — become a doctor. But this kind of extremism is unhelpful. In most cases, we simply don’t have to — and won’t be able to — work all the time in order to be successful. (No one could call Jeff Bezos a professional mediocrity, and the former Amazon boss has talked about his love of “puttering.”) To suggest otherwise raises the question of what it even means to be successful. What is the point of “success” if you don’t have a social life? What is the point of “freeing up … time” if you don’t make time for a friend’s birthday? Personal success entails more than professional success. Sure, there will be exceptional cases. But exceptional cases definitionally make for bad advice. It’s tempting to wonder if this kind of inhumane thinking has fuelled the development of inhumane technology — algorithms colonizing our consciousnesses, dating apps sucking the romance from our hearts, and AI slop drowning creativity. This is a bit unfair. No one forces us at gunpoint to download an app. Technology develops as it does because it meets demand, even if it isn’t the healthiest form of demand. That said, I think tech leaders should sometimes reflect on what their work is actually achieving. They might not need work-life balance, and that’s morbidly impressive, but we really do have to balance technological progress with civilized societal existence. Even if that sometimes means going to a wedding. *** Ben Sixsmith is the Online Editor at The Critic. 

I had just left dinner with friends in northern Washington, D.C., last Friday. After we said goodbye, I started walking alone through Le Droit Park toward the nearest metro station. Within minutes, the sirens started. Several police cars appeared almost immediately — and almost as quickly, the street was filled as black teenagers flooded in from several directions at once. Some walked, others sprinted, and teens carrying blaring speakers took over the street. Hundreds of teens packed the roadway. I asked a few of the kids running past what was happening. They yelled obscenities at me and kept going. Soon I realized that I had found myself in the middle of a “Teen Takeover,” the social media trend that that goes viral for the wrong reason every few weeks. It’s this generation’s version of a flash mob, and this version almost always ends in violence. Just earlier this year, a “Teen Takeover” in D.C. took over the internet with footage of numerous teens trashing a Chipotle, throwing metal chairs across the restaurant.  I moved to the edge of one of the groups and walked with them. An 18-year-old girl named Mekala told me the event was coordinated by “DPR.” I asked what the letters stood for and she didn’t know, only that “DPR” puts these events together for teens to “come out and have fun.” She said the organizers reach the kids through Instagram. It turns out DPR is the District of Columbia’s Department of Parks and Recreation. The teens I spoke to that night said they were there for the government-organized event. Its Instagram account identifies it as a government organization that organizes “fun programs and events.” One of those events, according to the department’s website, is called Late Night Hype. It’s a program it created in 2021 to give teens and young adults “safe, high-energy spaces to connect after hours.” The government office had planned a Late Night Hype event at the Banneker Rec Center Fields just north of Le Droit Park, according to its online schedule of events. Attendees knew what was coming. A young Muslim man in a keffiyeh named Janar joined us as we walked. I asked him what the kids usually do at these DPR events. He answered without softening it: “All these n*gg*s out here are wildin’.” He described how the teens rob each other and take each other’s shoes and clothes. Mekala said that at most of these events the teens “go overboard” and take it to “the next level.” When I asked what that looked like, Janar said, “You gonna see.” We moved through alleys, dodging police cars and leaving spots fast because fights kept starting. Mekala said DPR calls these “late night hype” events for teens and families to hang out and have good fun. The signs, she said, are made on the spot to get “experience with graffiti.” As both Mekala and Janar warned, fights broke out. I moved closer to one of the fights to record it. As I approached to get footage, everyone was running the other way. Seconds later, I witnessed a masked teenager fire off a gunshot. I stopped for a second. The masked ones ran and the rest of the crowd continued faster with them. I had gotten Mekala’s phone number and was able to reconnect. “This is why we can’t have fun because they want to act a fool,” she told me. Mekala told me the area was under a youth curfew. No one cared. She said these kids “target other people.” Then she said something more direct. She has watched, on multiple occasions at these same events, kids shooting at each other or jumping kids. She said it was commonplace. I asked several teenagers in ski masks why they covered their faces. One said, “I can’t say too much.” Another said, “They gonna lock us up.”  A witness near me claimed the police had “shot people,” which almost certainly didn’t happen. What happened was pepper balls after the gunfire and after more fights started inside the running crowd. The teenagers stampeded in short bursts with no clear provocation, even with National Guard standing in view, and they kept doing it. I asked an officer for comment. She said she could not give details but confirmed an investigation into the discharge of a weapon was open and that numerous shots had been fired. I told her I had a video of one of the shots. She told me to submit it through their information page so I could be listed as a witness. At that moment, they had no other footage of the shots. While I spoke, other officers dealt with teenagers yelling obscenities at them and stretched caution tape to protect the crime scene. I gave authorities my statement and left. On the way out, I watched officers arrest the person I had seen fire the first shot. No further official information has been released.  What the Department of Parks and Recreation frames under the guise of an opportunity for teenagers to gather and have fun instead fosters a place for teens to commit crimes. They all knew what was going to happen.  This was not an isolated night. As Heather Mac Donald has written in The Daily Wire, the same trend is popping up from Chicago to Florida, and repeated outbreaks inside Washington itself. Large groups of urban teenagers, often coordinated online, take over public space and the mass violence follows with enough regularity that participants treat it as expected. According to the teenagers who attend these events regularly, the violence happens at nearly every single one. I wonder what they would say to the children who have been murdered by others at these takeovers, whose behavior they condone.  There are Late Night Hype events planned for the next three Fridays this summer. The Department of Parks and Recreation did not respond to a request for comment.