For the last five years, if you walked onto almost any American college campus, you would have found an office and staff dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI in higher education grew out of civil rights–era efforts in the 1960s and ’70s as a well-meaning attempt to recruit more diverse faculty and students—but the movement exploded after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

DEI officers at higher education institutions tripled after July 2020. At the University of Michigan alone, DEI staff grew to 241 people at an annual cost of over $30 million.

And it wasn’t just universities. There was a moral panic about structural racism in nearly all of our most important institutions. What followed was a cultural shift that permeated into job interviews, mission statements, and email signatures across the Western world.

At face value, those missions—diversity, equity, inclusion—seemed pretty noble.

But what did it look like for those words to be implemented?

Critics would say: A new rubric emerged, where people’s value was determined by the historic suffering of their identity groups and not individual merit.

Eventually, the tide turned on DEI. In 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-based affirmative action. And when the second Donald Trump administration took office in January 2025, it moved aggressively against DEI. Today, over 300 colleges and universities have eliminated DEI requirements, closed DEI offices, or altered their DEI policies.

So what actually happened inside those offices? My guest today, Michael Yassa, was a professor of neuroscience at University of California, Irvine, when, in 2020, his university asked him to serve as associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at UC Irvine’s School of Biological Sciences.

In this episode of Confessions, Yassa and I discuss how DEI initiatives became performative and failed to realize their promise. We agreed on some things (that land acknowledgments are performative), but not everything, and that’s why I hope you’ll watch.

Yassa still believes in “good DEI,” though he tells me he wouldn’t use those words anymore. We debated the data on class versus race as a proxy in admissions, what DEI offices actually did, and whether there’s a need for DEI offices to be reformed rather than gutted.

In the nearly three years since Hamas’s attack on October 7, as the world has changed, I’ve often wondered what future there is for Jewish life in the West.

It doesn’t take much prompting to think about: One scroll on social media and you’re flooded with blood libel conspiracies. When I turn my phone off, in the hopes of touching some grass, I look up to…

This week, a few news stories caught our attention.

Former congresswoman Katie Porter said she supports taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants, during the Democratic California governor’s debate. 

Closed-circuit television cameras helped catch two men who violently attacked a 77-year-old man in Seattle, undermining mayor Katie Wilson’s claim that “turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer, but it will certainly make our neighborhoods more vulnerable.”

And the judge presiding over the case of accused White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter Cole Tomas Allen said about his jail conditions: “At a minimum, I should be apologizing to him. We are obligated to make sure he’s taken care of. Mr. Allen, I’m sorry that things have not been the way they are supposed to.”

In each example, a form of empathy was on display. But what happens when it misfires?

In the new book Suicidal Empathy, evolutionary behavioral scientist and professor Gad Saad makes the case that the West’s most celebrated virtue has been weaponized, miscalibrated, and taken to a place that is actively destroying the societies it claims to protect.

In Rafaela's conversation with Gad, they look through the most striking examples: open-door migration policies that reshaped Europe, grooming gangs that went unaddressed for decades, brazen shoplifting that closed stores in low-income neighborhoods, open-air drug markets built on compassion and designed for catastrophe, the cultural relativism that shields radical Islam from scrutiny, and politicians—from Seattle to New York City—whose empathy has come at a devastating cost to everyone else.

Gad also explains why women are more susceptible to suicidal empathy, why the left is more afflicted than the right, why communism will always appeal to the young, and why Jews are consistently on the wrong side of the empathy hierarchy—even as antisemitism surges across the West.

And perhaps most urgently, Gad explains what it will actually take for the West to wake up.

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The Middle East remains in turmoil. Trump is waging “Project Freedom” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; the war with Iran continues; the United Arab Emirates just dramatically departed from OPEC; Israel is still fighting on its northern border with Lebanon; and Hamas’s grip on Gaza persists.It can be hard to keep track of this—much less make sense of it. Which is why I sat down with Free Press Middle East analyst Haviv Rettig Gur to ask him about all of it. We also examined escalating settler violence in the West Bank, and why Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tacitly supports it; UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s appearance on the cover of British Vogue; the latest Gaza flotilla; and likely presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel’s recent declaration that “the days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily are over.” And overall, can the region shake its martyrdom ideology?

Find Unpacking Israeli History — a production of Unpacked — on your favourite podcast app or YouTube, and subscribe today: https://unpacked.bio/6il

“There is nothing like the feeling of putting someone you carried for nine months inside of your body into the ground wrapped in white fabric. I was burying part of myself. Not just my DNA and my soul, but my essence, my identity, my Before, my mouth, my personality, my breath, my rest of my life. Me.”

These are the words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin in her new memoir, When We See You Again.

Many will recognize Rachel as the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was abducted by Hamas from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.

Hersh survived 328 days in captivity. And during that time, Rachel and her husband did everything in their power to bring him home—traveling to Davos, meeting with Pope Francis, addressing the UN, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, and making countless trips to Washington, D.C.

And still, after nearly a year in captivity, Hersh was murdered, shot six times at close range by Hamas. There was gunpowder in his hair when he was found.

“And after all of that torture, misery, agony, burning, searing, battering, and torment,” Rachel writes, “I now found out: that had been the good part. He had been alive. . . . Hersh let me prove how much I loved him by letting me go into the arena to battle without training or armor, just with my tiny fists of primal love. He gave me hope that I could save him by wrestling with the world. He kept breathing so that I would be motivated; he kept me motivated so that I would keep breathing. I was, and I still am.”

I sat down with Rachel to discuss her new book, a firsthand account of her fight to bring Hersh home and the grief that followed. In it, she reflects on why she is grateful for the days she spent fighting for her son; what it meant to grieve so publicly; what she learned from former hostage Or Levy, who met Hersh in the tunnels; and how her faith deepened after Hersh’s death.

This is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

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Some of you may know the name Changpeng Zhao—or CZ, as he’s almost universally known in the tech and finance worlds—as crypto’s richest man. Forbes calculated his net worth as greater than $110 billion. That puts him ahead of Bill Gates, though CZ denies it.

He founded Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, transforming it from a start-up …

Two years ago, in the wake of burgeoning antisemitism after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, Elise Stefanik sat across from the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania and asked them a simple question: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct? Their non-answers…

Late last night, the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire. But the first day has already proven rocky: Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel all reported missile and drone attacks from Iran; Israel carried out major air strikes against Hezbollah, raising questions about whether Lebanon is included in the ceasefire; and Ira…

On Wednesday night, President Trump delivered a 19-minute address on Iran. As expected, he stressed his accomplishments: “In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. . . . Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them. . . are now dead.” And he issu…

“It is the greatest honor of my life to be visiting the Islamic Republic of Iran right now.”

These were the words of Calla Walsh, a 21-year-old American from Cambridge, Massachusetts, while standing in the IRGC Aerospace Exhibition in Tehran last July.

She continued: Iran “is under genocidal siege by the United States, by the Zionist entity. It is a great…

Mass migration. Net-zero carbon goals. Expansive welfare states. Identity politics. Limited defense spending. Throughout the 2010s, all these policies became causes du jour across the European continent. It was an intellectual mood captured by three famous words from former German chancellor Angela Merkel: wir shaffen das roughly meaning “we can handle…

The 2026 Winter Olympics brought us Alysa Liu, the Hughes brothers, and a scandal colloquially referred to as “Penisgate.” It emerged when some ski jumpers were accused of injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid—the same substance used in lip fillers—to expand their suits’ surface area and improve their jump distance. Sounds niche, right?

Well, it’s…

For 50 years, Dennis Prager, one of the most important and influential conservative thinkers of the 21st century, has made a single core argument: Without God, there is no good and evil—only opinion. He advanced it on the radio, in five volumes of biblical commentary, in more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civil…

In the past 15 years, the consensus on marijuana has changed dramatically. After Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize weed in 2012, others quickly followed suit—and marijuana is now legal for recreational use in 24 of the 50 states. With widespread legalization, the stigma that surrounded weed has largely fallen away.

Almost overni…

Taylor Fogarty once made $15,000 a month for making content on OnlyFans.

She was a self-described “degenerate” party girl in Brooklyn—drinking, doing drugs, dating women, drifting between identities, and eventually signing up for sugar-daddy websites because, as she tells it, “It just felt normal.” Sex work was empowering, she was told. Men were going to…

For much of the past decade, parents of children distressed about their gender were asked by medical providers: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”

Parents and communities were told it was their responsibility to affirm the identity of every child who said they were transgender and help secure a medical treatment plan. A wave of childr…

Lately Free Press reporter Maya Sulkin has been talking to people who have changed their minds—people who’ve left ideological movements or seriously questioned worldviews they once held.

Here, she’s joined by Richard Hanania. He’s a writer and political commentator, a columnist for “UnHerd,” and the author of a Substack focused on foreign policy, American politics, and social science.

But before the world knew Richard Hanania, they knew Richard Hoste. Under that pseudonym, Hanania wrote things like:

“The ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.”

“Women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.”

“If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist.”

In 2023––at which point Hanania had become a prominent right-leaning social media personality––an exposé by “HuffPost” revealed that Hanania and Hoste were the same person.

In the wake of the “HuffPost” revelations, Richard published an essay titled “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do.” He publicly reckoned with his past and described the path that led him away from those bad ideas.

Maya wanted to speak with Richard about how he went from the extreme fringe to the mainstream.

They talked about what first drew him to extremist ideas about race, gender, and immigration, fueled in part by personal grievance and isolation. Rather than describing a single moment of conversion, Richard lays out a process of years of exposure to data, failed predictions, real-world experiences, and thinkers who rejected both left-wing dogma and racial identity politics. Over time, he says, many of the claims underpinning his earlier worldview simply stopped adding up.

They spoke about what it felt like to have his biggest secret exposed at the height of his professional success, and how he chose to respond. He also shared his perspective on guilt, accountability, and how people—especially young men who find identity and community in the darker corners of the internet—can find their way back to reality.

If you watched the Super Bowl, you may have seen the Make America Healthy Again commercial. It featured Mike Tyson speaking about his sister Denise, who died at 25 from a heart attack linked to obesity. Tyson also spoke candidly about formerly weighing 345 pounds and experiencing suicidal thoughts. And he’s not alone: Roughly 40 percent of Americans are obese, and six in 10 live with at least one chronic disease.

The message of the ad was clear: “Processed food kills.” And as Tyson confesses, his addiction to junk food nearly cost him his life.

But one American doctor has been sounding this alarm for years. Dr. Mark Hyman has written 15 books, hosts the hit podcast “The Dr. Hyman Show,” and is now a contributor at CBS News. His company, Function Health, uses comprehensive lab testing to empower people to better understand what’s happening inside their bodies. He has also just published a new book, “Food Fix Uncensored,” an updated and revised version of his 2020 bestseller.

In the book, Hyman details how the American food system—from farm to factory to grocery store aisle—has been corrupted by corporate money, lobbyists, and special interests, who have incentivized us to shift our diets from whole foods to ultra-processed products loaded with artificial ingredients, sweeteners, and chemical flavorings. As Hyman often notes, we now live in a “soup of toxins.”

Rafaela Siewert sat down with him to discuss why America seems to have sleepwalked into this crisis; how we can take on powerful food interests; what the human and economic costs of the current system are; whether drugs like Ozempic actually make us healthier; and how new trends to advance longevity are reshaping health and medicine.

Until late January 2026, Glenna Goldis was an assistant attorney general for the state of New York in the Consumer Frauds and Protection Bureau. Then, she was fired by New York attorney general Letitia James for opposing so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors. In a piece for The Free Press, Glenna wrote about how she came to see childhood gender transition as a form of consumer fraud built on deceptive claims, and how sounding the alarm led to her firing.

Free Press senior editor Emily Yoffe sat down with Glenna to discuss her investigation into pediatric gender medicine, the free-speech fight that followed, and her thoughts on why the Democratic establishment continues to support these interventions while ignoring medical evidence and public opinion.

It’s not every day we witness the downfall of a pro-orgasm wellness guru. But in June 2025, a federal jury sent founder—and alleged cult leader—Nicole Daedone to jail.

Two decades earlier, Daedone had founded OneTaste, a global wellness company promising sexual education, empowerment, and even enlightenment.

The company’s signature offering was a 15-minute clitoral-stroking method called “orgasmic meditation,” or OM, supplemented by for-purchase demonstrations, workshops, and retreats for members to immerse themselves in the practice. The goal was to make OM as common as yoga or meditation. “Do you want to OM?” was meant to reverberate across the San Francisco wellness community.

At its peak, OneTaste drew endorsements from Gwyneth Paltrow, Khloé Kardashian, Theo Von, and Tim Ferriss. But behind closed doors, a very different reality was taking shape—one that former members say involved exploitation, labor violations, and sexual trauma. Some have even called it a “prostitution ring.”

“Bloomberg” journalist Ellen Huet spent six years investigating OneTaste and broke the first story about its abuse. She chronicles the rise and collapse in her new book, “Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult.”

Rafaela Siewert asks her what really happened inside the organization; how to understand consent and agency in a cult environment; how the movement took on religious overtones; and how, in the end, this “wellness revolution” left so many lives in ruins.