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A Great Night for Dems. A Bad Week for Biden. And Another GOP Debate.
What does it all mean for 2024? The Free Press reports.
OLIVER WISEMAN
NOV 9






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(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
This week got off to a bad start for Democrats, with a set of disastrous new poll numbers showing that Joe Biden trailed Trump in five of the six most important swing states. But by Tuesday night, things were looking up.

Because the party won big in a slate of elections.

To recap those results:

In deep-red Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear cruised to reelection as governor. Four years ago, Beshear won by less than half a point. This year he won by five points.

In Virginia, Democrats triumphed in statehouse elections, holding on to the Senate and gaining control of the House—which squelched the hype surrounding rising Republican star, Governor Glenn Youngkin.

Ohio voters, by a 12-point margin, backed an amendment that enshrines the right to abortion in the state constitution.

And in Pennsylvania, Democrat Dan McCaffery won the race to fill an open seat on the state’s supreme court, tipping the balance heavily in the Dems’ favor with five justices to two Republicans.

Explaining his win, McCaffery told Politico the top issue was “100 percent” abortion rights, and Biden wasn’t a factor at all. It was a similar story nationwide, with abortion serving as an electoral tailwind for Democrats across the country.

Take Ohio: the state backed Trump by eight points both in 2016 and 2020, and, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision striking down Roe v. Wade, Republican governor Mike DeWine passed a stringent “heartbeat” abortion ban. But this week the pro-choice side won big. In Virginia, Youngkin tried to tackle the abortion issue head-on, pushing for a ban after 15 weeks—a more moderate option than the restrictions signed into law by DeWine, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and others.

That didn’t seem to work either.

If our politics is in the middle of a big scramble—and we think it is; just look at the fact that RFK Jr. wins nearly a quarter of the vote in a hypothetical three-way contest with Trump and Biden—Dobbs is clearly a major factor, accelerating some trends, counteracting others, and further complicating an already volatile landscape. To wit: How many politically homeless voters might be voting Republican by now were it not for the salience of such a polarizing issue?

In last night’s Republican presidential debate, candidates were asked about abortion’s impact on the party’s presidential chances in 2024. Nikki Haley said she was “unapologetically pro-life” but urged her colleagues to be honest about what restrictions would be possible at a federal level. Ron DeSantis restated his support for “a culture of life.” Vivek Ramaswamy slammed a Republican “culture of losing.” Tim Scott made the case for a 15-week federal abortion ban. Chris Christie said he trusted Americans to make a decision on abortion limits “state by state.”

Democrats will have enjoyed watching them grasp for a satisfactory answer. But is the issue enough to paper over the many problems troubling the Democratic brand? Problems like an aging president dogged by claims of nepotistic corruption who, at 80 years old, most Americans do not think is mentally or physically up to the job? Or a progressive wing that has disgraced itself in the weeks since the October 7 attack on Israel?

And which party should be more worried about 2024?

For clarity on how Republicans should handle the abortion issue, we chatted to eagle-eyed observer of the Republican Party Matthew Continetti. For answers on how concerned Democrats should be about those dire Biden polling numbers, we turned to forecasting guru Nate Silver. Scroll down for their answers.

And don’t miss Peter Savodnik’s take on last night’s debate, in which the contenders grappled with meaty foreign policy questions, one candidate called another “scum,” and a third soft-launched his new girlfriend.


Matthew Continetti is the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism and an invaluable guide to the big-picture questions about Republican Party politics. I asked him if GOP candidates should be worried about the question of abortion—and whether they can find a more effective message on the issue.

I think at this point it’s inescapable that abortion is a political liability for Republicans. Since the Dobbs decision last June, Republicans have underperformed in election after election. And whether that is special elections, whether that is the ballot initiatives in red states, whether that’s the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, whether that’s Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky this week, I think it’s clear that all these elections are part of a pattern, and the pattern suggests that if the issue is abortion, the Democratic side will win.

The exception is that pro-life governors were reelected last year. People like Kim Reynolds in Iowa, Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Mike DeWine in Ohio. I think those candidates benefited from two things. One, the elections were choices between candidates, not up and down referenda on abortion. And two, they were experienced incumbents who could offer the electorate popular policies on the economy, education, crime, and other social issues.

But for novices, for challengers in open races, abortion is a severe liability. And it’s unclear to me how you go about addressing it, because many Republicans since 2022 have tried to avoid the issue. And many of them have lost. And then, in this past election, Glenn Youngkin tried to fight into the ambush by rallying his candidates around a 15-week limit. But he failed in his objective to capture both chambers of the state legislature. So if you don’t talk about it, you let the pro-choice side define you. If you do talk about it, it doesn’t seem to have much of an effect, because the electorate basically approaches the issue that it will resist any attempt to limit the practice.

It’s good to have something like the 15-week limit. But you also have to make the election about more than one issue. In Mississippi, of course it’s a deep-red state, but Tate Reeves kept the governor’s mansion by talking about the economy. I wonder if Youngkin had spent more time on the economy whether his candidates might have done a little bit better.

But I look at all these election results and it’s hard to say there’s a clear path. Now, there are two candidates in the presidential race who seem to have finessed it to some extent. There is Trump, who is triangulating away from the pro-life movement, at no cost to him in the primary or, it seems, in the general. And there’s also Nikki Haley, who has also distanced herself from attempts to restrict abortion and is doing well in Iowa and elsewhere. So maybe they will show that there’s a way that you can kind of finesse this issue. It’s hard to say, because the data is confusing. There are pro-lifers who win, but when the issue is up or down pro-choice or pro-restriction, the pro-choice side wins.


And on the other side of the aisle, with a year still to go until the election, how worried should Democrats be about the polls showing Biden’s advanced age is a major liability?

There’s no one I’d rather ask about that question than Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, now writing at his must-read Substack Silver Bulletin. I asked him: What’s a better signal of the Democratic Party’s chances next year—the national polls or this week’s election?

It’s so much easier to say, “Oh, the actual election results are more important,” but if you’re trying to predict a presidential race, I’m not sure a gubernatorial race in Kentucky or a ballot referendum in Ohio tells you very much.

The thing that would worry me if I were a Democrat is that the polls show that people are sick of Joe Biden. They show that if you replace Biden with a hypothetical unnamed generic Democrat, that generic Democrat does something like 13 points better. And it’s always a “grass is greener” thing, because you can imagine your favorite candidate. But the actual candidate has to be a compromise. Still, voters—especially low-turnout voters, younger voters, black and Hispanic voters—are sending a pretty clear message. They are saying, “Look, we’re just tired of this guy.”

But to replace a candidate at this point in time is a big risk. A huge risk. First, you don’t know who you’re going to get instead. Second, you don’t know if they’re battle ready. Whereas Biden did win last time. He’s done it before. So it’s a big risk, but it’s something Democrats have to think about because the message is coming very clearly from the polls. The public is saying: can you please nominate somebody other than Biden or Trump? That is part of the reason why RFK Jr. is getting 20 percent in some of these polls. It’s the highest a third-party candidate has had since Ross Perot in 1992. This is an unusual signal the public is sending.

The age thing is like 90 percent of it. There’s some degree of common sense priced into that assessment. Biden is at an age where people decline cognitively. And I think it’s perilous for Democrats to ignore this clear message that voters are sending.

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-elizabeth-barrett-browning?
Things Worth Remembering: Plunging Past This World’s Verge
Wilfred Owen forged indelible images of the Great War and the men like him who died in its trenches.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
NOV 5
“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent.
Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read the most stirring lines from Wilfred Owen’s “Spring Offensive,” click below:

LISTEN NOW · 1:52
If there is a single person known as the poet of the First World War, it is Wilfred Owen. The war was, as he wrote in the preface to the book of poems he never lived to see published, “my subject.”

As his early poetry and letters demonstrate, Owen was infinitely sensitive to the smallest things. He had that “negative capability” admired by Keats to look at a situation and absorb it. If he could have been a Romantic poet, he would have been. He even wrote a poem called “How Do I Love Thee,” like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But Owen was a romantic who was sent to the trenches...

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-untold-stories-of-gazans?
The Untold Stories of Gazans
What do ordinary Palestinians think about Hamas? The war? How are they surviving amid cascading tragedies? We spoke to them. Listen.
JOSEPH BRAUDE
NOV 2
Palestinian families continue to live under difficult conditions in their own cars after their houses were destroyed due to Israeli attacks in Khan Younis, Gaza, on October 29, 2023. (Abed Zagout via Getty Images)
Watch this video of a grieving woman in Gaza cry out. She says: “All this is because of the dogs of Hamas.” She’s immediately—literally—silenced.
Why?
Since taking power in a 2007 coup, Hamas has violently repressed all opposition to its rule. There is much to repress: recent Palestinian survey data shows most Gazans distrust Hamas, want an alternative government, and prefer economic development over war. But their individual voices are rarely heard. Those who speak out face prison and torture.

Some foreign journalists try to cover these voices but face deportation for doing so, while others show little interest in Palestinian grievances unrelated to the conflict with Israel.

My organization, the Center for Peace Communications, has been helping the population breach this communications blackout by interviewing Palestinians across the Strip, from all walks of life, about their travails and aspirations. A mother who dreams of her children getting a proper education. A photojournalist punished for taking pictures. A young couple who hopes to start a family, outside of Gaza.

Earlier this year, we released their testimony in a series called Whispered in Gaza: 25 short segments, using video animation to protect their identities, accompanied by Gazan polling, rights reports, and reportage.

Following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, we reconnected with these and other Gazans to gather new testimony. We sought to understand their reaction to the Hamas assault and their views of the developing war, and to document their struggle to survive amid cascading tragedies.

We are partnering with The Free Press to showcase their voices in a new series called Voices from Gaza, which you can watch below.

Jimmy Menkhaus, 42, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at birth and believed for years that he’d die in his mid-30s. (Photo by Sarah Rice for The Free Press)
Today in The Free Press, we bring you the extraordinary story of Jimmy Menkaus.

Until recently, all the big decisions Jimmy had made in his life were defined by the fact he had cystic fibrosis. The disease meant he’d be dead by his mid-thirties. In light of this, Jimmy was in a hurry to make sense of his short life. He wanted to know what it meant and what kind of God would do this. Jimmy also avoided some of the big things that give many of us purpose—matters like marriage and a family.

By 2019, Menkaus was 39, sick, and sure he was close to the end of his life. Then he took a trial drug called Trikafta.

The results were miraculous: the drug stopped the disease in its tracks. Trikafta had saved Jimmy’s life—but also turned his world upside down.

“When I was younger, I was older, but now that I’m older, I’m younger,” Jimmy tells his friend and Free Press contributor Jeff Bloodworth.

Jeff tells Jimmy’s story, and what happened when he was suddenly given decades more life.

The Unbearable Burden of Being
JEFF BLOODWORTH
·
NOV 1
The Unbearable Burden of Being
Jimmy Menkhaus was 15 when he first learned he’d be dead by his mid-30s.

It was a cold morning in Cincinnati on March 4, 1996, and his dad, Ed, was driving him in their brown Chevy Silverado to St. Xavier, a Jesuit high school where Jimmy was a freshman. Jimmy was reading aloud an article in the school paper, The Blueprint, about a chemistry teacher named Andrew Leudeke who was fighting for his life.

Just like Jimmy, Leudeke had cystic fibrosis. CF, as patients often call it, is an inherited disorder affecting 30,000 Americans that damages the lungs and digestive tract, producing a thick mucus that gradually overtakes the breathing passages and suffocates people with the disease.

Jimmy was fascinated. At the time, he knew very little about the disease. None of his family or friends had it. There was no internet to speak of. He had his inhalers, medical vest, compressor, and medications—all of which were supposed to help clear away the mucus gradually enveloping his lungs—but no one ever told him how long he could expect to go on like this. His parents, he later learned, thought it better not to burden him with that.

Now, the article in his hands was telling him it was a miracle that Leudeke was still alive at 35. It said he should have died ten years ago, and it went on to state he would almost definitely be gone soon.

Stunned, Jimmy stopped reading and put the paper down.

“That means I have lived half my life,” he told his dad.

Read full story https://www.thefp.com/p/cystic-fibrosis-life-extension-trikafta?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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Are We Tipping into a New World War?
Walter Russell Mead reads the geopolitical tea leaves. Plus: Joe Nocera on Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial and Eli Lake on the legacy of Frantz Fanon.
OLIVER WISEMAN
NOV 1






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Israeli army soldiers sit atop a tracked vehicle at a position in northern Israel on October 28. (Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images)
A “world spinning out of control.” Those were the words Wall Street Journal Global View columnist Walter Russell Mead used to describe the latest geopolitical developments when Bari interviewed him on the latest episode of Honestly this week. And it’s not hard to see why.

In the past 48 hours alone:

Houthi fighters fired at Israel from Yemen.

An Israeli air strike hit Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing a senior Hamas commander as well as Palestinian civilians.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray warned senators that the Israel-Hamas war has increased the chances of a terrorist attack against Americans in the United States to “a whole other level.”

Israel vanished overnight from maps on the Chinese search engine Baidu.

Egyptian prime minister Mostafa Madbouly said Egypt was “prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to ensure that no one encroaches upon our territory,” dismissing requests for the settlement of Palestinian refugees in Egypt.

On the podcast, Walter explains why the “pre-war era” we’ve been in for a while is “moving quickly and at an unpredictable pace” toward “something big and something bad.”

Let Walter give you the lay of the land. I can’t promise that it will be reassuring. But it will be clarifying.

Read an excerpt of Bari’s conversation with Walter here or click below to listen to the entire podcast:



A World Spinning Out of Control

The Free Press

Episode

Stories About ‘Waking Up from Woke’
A political realignment in three acts.
OLIVER WISEMAN
OCT 31
Seneca Scott with goats in West Oakland, CA, September 16, 2023. (Jason Henry for The Free Press)
A black activist fights the progressivism he says is destroying his city. Left-wing Jews say “screw the allyship” after seeing fellow progressives cheer Hamas’s pogrom. Immigrant New Yorkers oppose the new migrants coming to New York “with the expectation they’re going to be taken care of.”
Today in The Free Press, three stories paint a picture of a larger political shift happening in America.

It is sometimes said of the pandemic that it accelerated preexisting trends: we were already living online more and more, reinventing the traditional 9 to 5, automating ever larger parts of the economy, and abandoning shopping malls. And the lockdowns simply turbocharged it all.

Might recent weeks be having a similar effect on our politics? Could outrage at the horrifying events in Israel, the global explosion of antisemitism, and the Hamas apologism on campuses and in newsrooms, crystallize into a big political upheaval?

Yesterday, Elon Musk, responding to a Free Press story on X, said that “people are waking up from woke.” Last week, a similar argument was made by Konstantin Kisin in our pages with his essay “The Day the Delusions Died.” He wrote that “many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.”

One person who has felt disenfranchised from the left for years is Seneca Scott, a black Oakland activist fighting for the future of his city. Scott is a former progressive who used to support defunding the police. But then he changed his mind. In 2020, “I realized how deep the damage was,” Scott tells David Josef Volodzko in a profile for The Free Press. Oakland’s leaders, “the people we had put in place . . . were just complete frauds.” Now Scott says he’s aiming to start a revolution in his city that will spread across the country.

Read the full story of his political conversion here:
https://www.thefp.com/p/black-activist-saving-oakland-phony-progressives?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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The Tough Choices Facing America, Israel, and the West
As Israel ramps up operations in Gaza, Niall Ferguson, Matt Pottinger, and J.D. Vance on what happens next.
OLIVER WISEMAN
OCT 27

President Joe Biden addresses the nation to discuss the U.S. response to Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel and Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine on Thursday, October 19, 2023. (Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The war between Israel and Hamas is many things: a fight for the Jewish state’s survival, a destabilizing conflict that could easily escalate into something much bigger, and an acute test of American power. October 7 and the events that have followed in its wake are proving to be a pivotal moment.

As Israel expands its ground operations in Gaza, we’re interrupting our ordinary Friday scheduling to bring you a trio of pieces that we think offer answers to important questions about what Israel, America, and the West should do next.


First, Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens lay out the alarming stakes for Israel and its closest ally, arguing that there are no good options, but that inaction would be the biggest mistake of all.

Israel—and America—Have No Choice but to Act
NIALL FERGUSON AND JAY MENS
·
7:37 PM

Michael Oren: A War Against the Jews
Hatred of Israel cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
MICHAEL OREN
OCT 27
GUEST POST
https://substack.com/app?utm_source=email
Graffiti outside an apartment building in Berlin.
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ” — The Hamas Charter

“The conventional war of conquest was to be waged parallel to, and was also to camouflage, the ideological war against the Jews.” — Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933–1945


It wasn’t the rallies with “Keep the World Clean” posters and chants of “gas the Jews.” Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240 percent), United Kingdom (641 percent), and the United States (nearly 400 percent) convinced me.

It was, rather, one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. A realization that they, like me, surely tried to push out of their minds until the reality became unmistakeable.

This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews.

The insight began with the international media’s coverage of the conflict. Again, it wasn’t the press’s insistence on calling mass murderers “militants” or citing Hamas and its “Health Ministry” as a reliable source. For close to fifty years—as a student activist, a diplomat, a soldier, a government and military spokesman, and, above all, as a historian—I’ve grappled with the media’s bias against Israel. I’ve long known that the terrorists are “militants” solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible.

Instead, it was the media’s predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy.

In fact, there is probably a formula. Six million dead in the Holocaust procured us roughly 25 years of grace before the Europeans refused to refuel the U.S. planes bringing lifesaving munitions to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Fourteen hundred butchered Jews bought us a little less than two weeks’ worth of positive coverage.

Europeans, it’s long been said, never forgave the Jews for the Holocaust. Their guilt was collective and their antisemitism no longer socially acceptable. What a relief many of them felt when it became de rigueur to call Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians Nazi-like. Similarly, haters of Israelis can’t forgive them for being massacred by Hamas terrorists on October 7, and were relieved when, on October 19, they could go back to vilifying the “colonial apartheid state.”

October 19—that was the date of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital incident. Hamas claimed that an Israeli bomb hit the hospital and killed 500 civilians. Again, there was nothing new about Hamas blaming Israel for atrocities that never happened and counting as dead the many who didn’t die. What was unprecedented was the speed at which the world accepted this triple lie—not a hospital but its parking lot was struck by a Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli bomb, killing far fewer than 500. Nevertheless, reflexively, the world imputed evil to Israel.

Within hours of the al-Ahli bombing, both Israel and the United States revealed the truth behind it. Still, almost no one in the media apologized. A full week after the explosion, The New York Times was still bringing in “experts” to intimate Israel’s guilt. After all, the paper was subtly telling us, Israel is perfectly capable of bombing hospitals and, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, possibly bombed this one as well.

What was previously an inkling became, October 19, an epiphany. It marked the moment when I finally peered behind the headlines and recognized their ancient, vicious, core.

For many centuries, the term “innocent Jew” was an oxymoron. Jews were guilty by birth, by belief, and by ancestry. There is a religious tenet of Judaism, reenacted each year at Passover, that all Jews were present at the exodus from Egypt and when God gave the laws to Moses at Sinai. Twisting this is a Christian belief that all Jews were present at, and responsible for, the crucifixion. More than Pilate, more than Judas—a name not chosen randomly—the Jews were damned for deicide.

But killing God is only one of the sins for which Israelis—read: Jews—are being demonized in this war. Behind the reports of the deliberate Israeli bombing of Palestinian neighborhoods—reports that meticulously stress the number of children killed—lies the 144,000 children mythically massacred by the Judean King Herod.

Though understandably feeling vengeful toward Hamas and their allies in Gaza, the vast majority of Israelis do not want innocent Palestinians to die. Hamas, however, places its bunkers, rocket launchers, and headquarters in civilian areas. Though Israel warns these noncombatants to evacuate, Hamas tries to prevent their flight, sometimes at gunpoint. The goal is twofold: to kill as many Israelis as possible, and to kill Palestinians to win the sympathy of the world and so that Israel can be denounced internationally for war crimes.

Hamas’s strategy is clear. Yet much of the press prefers to ignore it. Instead, it repeatedly accuses Israel of seeking to inflict the maximum number of civilian deaths and especially of children. In the media’s rendering, Israel is the new Herod butchering Palestinian innocents.

Forgotten are the thousands of Gazans who followed Hamas terrorists through the ruptured fence into Israel where they joined in the mutilations and raping. Forgotten are the Gazans who beat and spat at a nineteen-year-old Israeli woman who was raped and paraded through their streets. Gone were Gazans who gave out candy and celebrated the slaughter of 1,400 civilians who were truly innocent.

Finally, there is the media meme that the Jews are responsible for their own suffering. This, too, has late Roman roots—in the belief that homelessness and oppression were the punishments due the Jews not only for killing God but then rejecting his resurrected son. Anyone being interviewed by the international press, as I am, repeatedly receives the question: “Doesn’t Israel, by opposing peace with the Palestinians, bear some responsibility for the Hamas attack?”

My response is to recall how Hamas opposed the Oslo process and every subsequent peace initiative, and that Hamas assassinated not only Jews but also the Palestinians who supported the two-state solution. I explain that the reason most Israelis now oppose that solution is because they know that Hamas would take over the nascent Palestinian state in a day. Israel bears much of the responsibility for tensions in the West Bank, I admit.

But the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is purely Hamas’s fault. As a deputy minister in the prime minister’s office, in 2017–18, I was tasked with improving living conditions in Gaza. I learned how Hamas used Gaza’s water pipes to make rockets and dug tunnels under the aquifer and drained it. I learned how Hamas diverted electricity to illuminate its underground bunkers and drastically limited the supply of basic commodities to the population, keeping it dependent on the terrorists. I learned that, when it came to Hamas, everything I knew about human decency was irrelevant.

These are my responses to the journalists. They listen but are seldom, if ever, convinced. Much of the press, I’ve learned, has internalized the ultimate antisemitic myth: that Jews just have it coming.

Accordingly, Noam and Yishai Slotki who, waking up to the news of the attack on October 7, instinctively put on their reserve uniforms and left their families to fight only to die and be buried side by side in Jerusalem—according to much of the media’s interpretation of this war, both Noam and Yishai deserved it. By the same token, Tamar Kedem-Siman Tov, a community activist, who, together with her husband and three beautiful children, was gunned down by Hamas, got her comeuppance.

The media is both a mirror and a disseminator of ideas, its two-way function incalculably amplified by the internet. So, the assumption of Jewish guilt and Palestinian innocence permeates the petitions signed by Hollywood stars and Starbucks workers that scarcely mention Hamas’s unimaginable crimes while emphasizing Israel’s imagined ones. So, the image of Jews as both child-killers and God-like in their powers translates into accusations that Israelis actually enjoy murdering women and children, deliberately targeting journalists, and crucifying the pure and powerless Palestinians. The notion that we Jews have it coming to us informed the letter, signed by more than 30 Harvard student organizations, claiming that Hamas’s barbarism “did not occur in a vacuum,” and that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” Not coincidentally did UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres open his October 23 speech to the Security Council by asserting, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.”

When Hamas itself says its targets are Jews, not Israelis, who’s to question Hamas’s supporters abroad who fail to make that distinction? When a Hamas terrorist phones his parents from a ravaged kibbutz and boasts, “I killed ten Jews with my own hands!” who will wonder why a Berlin synagogue is firebombed? When the UN and other international bodies refuse to condemn the mass evisceration, immolation, and brutal incarceration of Jews in tunnels under Gaza, who will be surprised by the silence of actors, writers, artists, and college presidents? And who will be astonished when Diaspora Jews in increasing numbers say they feel more secure in embattled Israel than on the streets of London, Paris, or New York? Five years to the day after the massacre of eleven worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, who will be shocked if another diaspora community is targeted?

In an agonizing irony, Hamas and its supporters have succeeded where the Jews have long failed. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Hatred of the Jewish nation-state cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. The war between Hamas and Israel, involving the largest and cruelest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, is a war against Jews everywhere. To paraphrase Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, this is the second war against the Jews.


Michael Oren was formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United States, a Knesset member, and a deputy minister of diplomacy in the prime minister’s office. For more of his writing on Israel visit his Substack, Clarity.


A recent poll of 18-24 year olds found that when asked, “In this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?” 48 percent said Hamas. Read Stanford junior Julia Steinberg to understand how antisemitism, aided by social media, has infected Gen Z: Why My Generation Hates Jews.

And to support the editors, reporters, podcast producers, fact checkers, and interns working to bring you the most up-to-date reporting and analysis from the war, subscribe to The Free Press:

https://www.thefp.com/p/on-double-standards-and-deafening-new-york-times?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-f487e6b5-a0fd-4afa-b872-161c7664c018
The aftermath of a blast at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on October 18, 2023. (Photo by Shadi AL-TABATIBI / AFP)
When I was at The New York Times, an op-ed by a Republican senator led to a crisis at the paper, and the longest editor’s note that I could remember. At least until the one that was published yesterday about the Gaza hospital bombing (more about that in a moment).

Let’s stick, for a minute, to the brouhaha of June 2020. Perhaps you’ll remember some of the details, like the fact that hundreds of colleagues signed on to a statement saying that Tom Cotton’s op-ed “put the lives of black NYT staffers in danger.” My boss—and the paper’s former Jerusalem bureau chief, James Bennet—was pushed out after being humiliated in front of the paper’s entire staff. His deputy, Jim Dao, was reassigned and ultimately left the paper. Adam Rubenstein, the talented young editor (and loyal friend of The Free Press) who had a hand in working on the offending piece, was scapegoated and resigned. And you know what happened to me.

I mention all of this because on October 17, The New York Times sent a false report to all of its readers that presented, as fact, Hamas talking points. It claimed that Israel had bombed a hospital, killing 500 people: “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.”

The headline was untrue on every level. The bomb was not Israeli, but a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israel that misfired. The bomb didn’t hit the hospital, but the hospital parking lot. Hamas claimed that 500 people were killed, but a senior European intelligence source told AFP he thought the death toll was under 50; U.S. intelligence estimates that the number stands between 100 and 300. And it wasn’t Palestinians that said as much to the Times, but the Gaza Health Ministry—which is run by Hamas.

There was no uproar at the Times in response to this journalistic malpractice—at least not in public. Perhaps some expressed their concerns privately, for fear of reprisal.

In the meantime, riots broke out across the world accusing Israel of genocide. Members of Congress, including Rashida Tlaib, broadcast this misinformation.

On Monday, six days after the fact, the Times finally published an editor’s note, saying “Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified.” I doubt that message reached the rioters in Tunisia who burned the Al Hammah synagogue to the ground.

Rep. Tlaib still hasn’t taken down her X post, which has 37.6 million views as of press time. Indeed, she is standing by it: the congresswoman said in an interview on Monday that “I cannot uncritically accept Israel’s denials of responsibility as fact.” (Astonishing that a sitting congresswoman takes the word of Hamas over the White House and Israel.)

Go back to Cotton. In the case of Cotton, there was not a single correctable error in the piece. Yet in the course of 48 hours, jobs were lost, and people were smeared and demoted simply for doing their jobs. (In fact, the piece, which argued for the legality of the deployment of national guardsmen to restore order in American cities, held up better than I would have thought—especially in light of the use of national guardsmen to quell the violent rioting in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.) In this case—publishing Hamas PR—has led the paper to issue a soft non-apology, lamenting that the story should have been presented more carefully.

How about maybe not at all until the facts are clear? How about not relying on Hamas propaganda? We think this story is so important because it’s become so familiar. The real question, as the war continues, is if news organizations like the Times will continue to take the word of Hamas uncritically.


Voices from Gaza

One of the biggest challenges for journalists covering this war is Hamas’s media blockade on Gaza. The regime controls on speech, and intolerance of dissenting voices, make it hard to get a proper sense of what ordinary Palestinians in Gaza really think. That’s why we’ve partnered with the Center for Peace Communications, an organization that has built a human network inside Gaza that can deliver honest testimony from ordinary Palestinians while protecting their identities.

In the first video in the series, we asked Gazan civilians what happens to international aid once it arrives in Gaza.

In the latest release, we ask Gazans for their opinions on the hospital blast last week that Hamas blamed on Israel but that subsequent evidence has shown was caused by a rocket fired from within Gaza.

Watch the video here: https://www.thefp.com/p/on-double-standards-and-deafening-new-york-times?
In Other News. . .

→ More fun at The New York Times: Perhaps you’ve noticed the byline Soliman Hijjy in recent days connected to stories out of Gaza. Soliman Hijjy, it turns out, is a fan of Hitler.

“In a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust” he captioned a photo of himself from 2018. In 2012 he wrote “How great you are, Hitler” in Arabic alongside an image of Hitler.

The Times said in a statement: “We reviewed problematic social media posts by Mr. Hijjy when they first came to light in 2022 and took a variety of actions to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards if he wished to do freelance work for us in the future.” We believe that people can change their minds, though we might draw the line at explicit adoration of Hitler.

→ WGA can’t condemn Hamas: The Writers Guild of America has decided to stay silent on Hamas’s October 7 atrocities while acknowledging that that decision would strike some of its members as “inadequate.” You bet it will.

WGA East says the decision follows a recent referendum in which members decided that leadership should “move away from public statements” that do not “direct involve our Guild, our industries, or the labor movement.”

Right. A “move away from public statements” from an organization that has weighed in on Asian-American hate and Roe v. Wade and “the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd” . . . and so on and so forth.

There have been some breathtaking examples of moral cowardice in recent weeks, but the WGA stands out for its ability to muster more outrage over AI-generated articles—they are “an existential threat”—than the mass murder of Jews.

→ Hogan dumps Harvard: Moderate Republican and former Maryland governor Larry Hogan has taken a stand against campus intolerance by announcing that he will not take up the fellowships he was due to start at Harvard next month. “I cannot condone the dangerous antisemitism that has taken root on your campus,” said Hogan in a statement Monday, adding that he hoped the move “may help further spur you to take meaningful action to address antisemitism and restore the values that Harvard should represent to the world.”

→ Mike Collins for Speaker! It’s hard to keep up with House Republicans’ attempts to pick a new Speaker after the defenestration of Kevin McCarthy a few weeks ago. Amid all the nihilistic ineptitude, we want to give Rep. Mike Collins a shout-out for lightening the mood with his tongue-in-cheek bid for the top job. Fed up with the impasse, he has announced a trollish run with a policy platform that includes: “Carmine’s for dinner at every conference,” “press releases out/memes in,” “no secret side deals,” and “no more having to listen to Frank Luntz at retreats.” We LOL’d.

→ Shaun King, Hostage Negotiator: Remember Shaun King, the identity politics grifter? Well, he’s back. And this time he’s single-handedly de-escalating the Hamas hostage taking. Or so he claims. In a very strange post on Instagram last Friday, King appeared to take credit for the release of two American hostages in Gaza, contending that he had “worked frantically behind the scenes” to make it happen. This, it seems, is a total fabrication. In a statement, the freed hostages’ family said: “Our family does not and did not have anything to do with him, neither directly nor indirectly. Not to him and not to anything he claims to represent.”

→ Samantha Woll, RIP: On Saturday morning, the 40-year-old Jewish woman and synagogue president was found stabbed to death outside her home. On Monday, the Detroit police chief said that the police did not think the killing was motivated by antisemitism. It is still under investigation.

→ Cashing in on the AI gold rush: While some of us are busy debating whether AI is going to lead to the annihilation of the human race, college kids are more interested in cashing in. The Wall Street Journal reports that more and more students are dropping out to follow their AI dreams. “It’s hard to focus on your homework when you’re thinking about how you could run all the factories in America,” says David Zhi LuoZhang, 20.

The Long Road to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Plus: a 3,100-mile race to transcendence.
BARI WEISS
OCT 21
The Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race. (Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The Free Press)
The news from the Middle East remains grim. The State Department has issued a worldwide travel advisory. China has dramatically expanded its nuclear arsenal. And a U.S. warship has intercepted multiple missiles near Yemen.

But fear not! Disciples of Bengali guru Sri Chinmoy have been trying to do something about it.

Today in The Free Press, Suzy Weiss reports from Queens, where the world’s longest certified footrace, which takes place in almost endless laps around a four-block loop for 3,100 miles, has just finished. “The goal,” says one participant of the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, is “to bring humanity together.”

How’s that working out?
3,100 Miles to Nowhere
SUZY WEISS
1:11 AM
3,100 Miles to Nowhere
Down 84th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, around the four blocks that circle Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School, 14 people are running 3,100 miles in an attempt to do an even harder thing: transcend themselves.
“It’s a spiritual journey,” Jason Lester, the only American runner taking part, tells me during his 50th lap of the 33rd day of the 52-day race.

I’m wheezing, trying to keep up with him and Adrian Papuc, who came to Queens from Romania. I’m far too late in the game and far too out of shape—I ran high school cross-country, but was the slowest on the team and once lost a trail race to a girl on crutches—but I’m not past trying to achieve some measure of inner peace, especially these days. Even if it means getting up early on a Sunday to take the train, then a bus, to jog around a high school.

When I ask Lester why he thinks he’s the lone U.S. citizen he retorts, “I don’t see myself as an American. We’re all one.”

“The goal of this is to bring humanity together, and stop having these borders,” he explains. “There’s no way that we’re gonna be one in any of our issues that we have until we take those walls down.”

Read full story https://www.thefp.com/p/3100-miles-to-nowhere?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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Can a Donor Revolt Save American Universities?
After universities both-sides the mass slaughter of Jews, Bill Ackman, John Huntsman, and others are saying ‘the buck stops here.’
JACOB SAVAGE
OCT 16
∙
GUEST POST





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Columbia University’s Low Library in 1926. (Photo by Irving Browning/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)
Since the beginning of The Free Press, we have paid particular attention to the story of institutional capture—specifically, to the story of how America’s great institutions of higher education, charged with educating the country’s future leaders, have been taken hostage by an illiberal ideology that has replaced the pursuit of truth with moral confusion and knee-jerk social justice activism.

In the days since Hamas began its war on Israel, we have seen that ideology in full blossom as students have cheered for terrorists on the quad and administrators have tried, for the first time, to stay out of it.

The reaction has alarmed university donors. One of them is Marc Rowan, who sits on the Wharton School’s board of overseers. He made news in our pages earlier this week when he announced he was closing his checkbook—and urged other people of conscience to do the same. Some, as you will read below, have followed suit.

Who will be next? And has the woke bill finally come due? — BW


For years, even though the far left never had real political power, social and cultural power were all theirs. Fortune 500 CEOs bent the knee—literally, during the summer of 2020. NPR aired breathless segments with academics who defended looting, or argued for the destruction of the nuclear family. The more extreme you were, the more attention you got.

So when Hamas brutally murdered babies, raped women, and took the disabled as hostages, it was business as usual, at least on America’s college campuses. Silence from the universities; cruel and maximalist rhetoric from left-wing student groups.

But then something weird happened. People started to say no.

It began with Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire, who had been doomscrolling since news of the attacks first broke. On Tuesday, he came across an open letter, signed by over thirty student groups from Harvard—his alma mater—which blamed Israelis for their own murders.

“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” the Harvard statement read. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

Ackman and his friends exchanged incredulous texts.

“I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” Ackman tweeted. “If, in fact, their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known.”

A dozen CEOs quickly joined Ackman.

A few hours later, Ryna Workman, the president of NYU’s Student Bar Association, learned that Winston & Strawn, the corporate law firm that had offered her a six-figure job, rescinded its offer. Not long after, the Bar Association removed her as president.

This was the new cost of publicly supporting Hamas, as Workman had done in an email sent to the entire law school: “Hi y’all,” Workman wrote, in a newsletter that should have been about study breaks and internship opportunities. “I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians.” Workman went on to say that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” This before the charred bodies were even in the ground.

While schools like Northwestern and Stanford may not have had the moral clarity to condemn Hamas, Playboy cut ties with the porn star Mia Khalifa for cheerleading the massacres in Israel.

Journalists—yes, journalists—who wouldn’t have dared cross the party line suddenly broke hard. Even TMZ got in on the game.

NPR hosts and Los Angeles Times reporters (Misha Euceph and Adam Elmahrek, say their names), who assumed they would always be on the right side of history, were relegated to hysterical arguments about whether murdered babies were or were not decapitated.

Normies came out of the woodwork—from my favorite jewelry store owner to Sopranos fan sites to artists and comedians to any number of household names. LeBron James! The Rock! Reese Witherspoon!

Back at Harvard, all those students who hadn’t thought twice about putting their names on a pro-murder statement were in a blind panic. Some tried to explain away their participation. Others sent plaintive emails to professors (“Completely Terrified” read one subject line, oblivious to what it means to be an actual victim of terror). Before long, not a single public signatory to the original statement remained.

There’s more than a little schadenfreude in watching would-be corporate lawyers realize that they do not, in fact, enjoy the Mandate of Heaven. All it took was a single rescinded job offer to reveal America’s pitchfork-wielding socialists as the careerist weasels they always were.

Ryna Workman walked into a wall so they could all run away.


For years now, liberals and centrists have been mutely seething. “Discussions about these issues have been happening quietly,” Ackman told me. “Problems related to the woke movement, the impact on college campuses, have been bemoaned but not acted upon. People didn’t speak out publicly.”

We all know the feeling. The hushed whispers as two liberal acquaintances suss each other out, discovering that neither quite believes that natal men should compete in athletics against women, that not all cops are bad.

“You’d see some ridiculous statement, and you’d laugh it off,” Ackman explained. “But people are dying. People are being raped. People are being mass murdered.”

Liberals and centrists seem to have paid attention to conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target. Then came the scandal surrounding Ibram Kendi’s antiracism center at Boston University. Having burned through over $20 million, he now faces an inquiry from the university. Kendi’s disgrace cracked the window—and the horrific responses to the Hamas attacks opened the door.

And yet it is only now—after all the histrionic and outraged statements about #MeToo and BLM and Ukraine and Roe v. Wade—that universities are discovering the virtue of institutional neutrality.

“Our university embraces a commitment to free expression,” Harvard president Claudine Gay said of the pro-Hamas protests on campus. “That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.” This is, to put it gently, a newfound commitment. Just four years ago, the institution she runs sided with the illiberal mob, and opened an investigation into a law school dean after he joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense.

“I do not foresee that I will be issuing statements on political, geopolitical, or social issues that do not directly impact the core mission of our University,” Northwestern President Michael Schill wrote in a public message to senior university leadership.

“In recent years, many universities have gotten into the habit of issuing frequent statements about news events,” read Stanford’s long-delayed statement. “This creates a number of difficulties. . . . It can enmesh universities in politics and create a sense of institutional orthodoxy that chills academic freedom.”

What strange timing.

For years, the woke left has incessantly appealed to these sorts of authorities to take strident positions on the Current Thing and to squelch dissent of anyone who disagreed. The same people who denounced you as a conspiracy theorist for thinking that Covid might have come from a lab, who have framed and memed every issue, no matter how tangential, through the lens of racial essentialism (including murdered Israeli civilians, as “settler-colonialists,” can never be innocent), are claiming they are the victims now.

Don’t let them.

Because when the furor dies down, Ryna Workman and her fellow travelers will, no doubt, find suitably remunerative positions. Already the so-called blacklist is being walked back.

As perhaps it should be. We need neutral institutions. And the silence of Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford matters only insofar as how vocal they’ve been about other issues. In what world should a student body president—or a university administrator or an HR lady or a PR flack—set the terms of our political discourse?

Maybe, just maybe, a new equilibrium can be reached. Maybe we can agree that political litmus tests for employment are bad, that requiring DEI statements is bad, that not every organization and every individual needs to comment on every political issue.


Until then, Penn offers an example of what a turning point might look like.

Marc Rowan, the chair of the board of overseers at Wharton who, in 2018, donated $50 million to the business school, called in these pages for donors to close their checkbooks until the university’s leadership changes.

Just yesterday, Vahan Gureghian, a member of Penn’s board of trustees, resigned. He cited the school’s “broken moral compass.”

The Huntsman family, for whom the main building at Wharton is named, described their alma mater as “unrecognizable” and announced they would “close its checkbook on all future giving to Penn.”

“The University’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low,” the family said in a statement.

“None of these institutions are solvent without the support of their alumni,” Ackman said of the brewing donor revolt. “Perhaps this is the beginning of a catalyst for change.”


Jacob Savage is a writer living in Los Angeles.

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The Gaza Hostage Crisis Is an American Hostage Crisis
The U.S. could be facing the most serious hostage crisis since the Tehran embassy attack of 1979.
BARI WEISS
OCT 11
Protesters hold photos during the “Jewish Community Vigil” for Israel in London. (Photo by Kin Cheung via AP)
In recent days, we’ve been working around the clock to bring you the clearest sense possible of exactly what is happening in Israel. Our goal is to bring you the best on-the-ground reporting, analysis, and firsthand accounts of this war.

Throughout all of this, we have tried to do something difficult: look evil in the eye. It’s important to understand what just happened in order to understand what will come. It’s important to understand what just happened so that it never happens again.

That’s what I spoke about in two interviews yesterday on MSNBC and Fox News.

Today, we’re running a piece by Armin Rosen, a writer for Tablet, on perhaps the most urgent aspect of the ongoing crisis: the hundreds of hostages captured on Saturday and being held in Gaza.

Armin points out that, if the estimated number of Americans being held by Hamas is even close to correct, the United States finds itself in the most serious hostage crisis since the Tehran embassy attack of 1979. Then, the assailants were the Islamists who now rule Iran. Today, they are funding Hamas.

Speaking at the White House on Tuesday, Joe Biden called Hamas’s attack “sheer evil” and said that “as president, I have no higher priority than the safety of Americans being held hostage around the world.” In other words, the Gaza hostage crisis is an American hostage crisis.

Scroll down to sample an excerpt of Armin’s piece—and click the link to read in full.
The Gaza Hostage Crisis Is an American Hostage Crisis
ARMIN ROSEN
·
OCT 10
The Gaza Hostage Crisis Is an American Hostage Crisis
The hundreds of Hamas fighters who carried out a murderous rampage inside Israel over the weekend returned to the Gaza Strip with an invaluable new strategic asset. On Sunday, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, told journalists that the Islamist group had captured “dozens” of hostages with American citizenship. If this number is even remotely accurate, the assault would be the largest mass abduction of Americans since the Tehran embassy crisis of 1979.

Hamas has likely divided those hostages across unmapped underground sites throughout Gaza, foreclosing the possibility of a single, swift rescue operation. The hostage issue threatens to inject a future source of divergence into Israeli and American objectives during the crisis.

In a speech at the White House Tuesday, Joe Biden said that he had “no higher priority than the safety of Americans being held hostage around the world.” Outgoing House speaker Kevin McCarthy listed “rescue all American hostages” as the U.S.’s top priority in the unfolding war. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that, as of Tuesday, the exact number of American hostages remains unknown.

Israel must now weigh the survival of American hostages against neutralizing active threats against other groups of civilians, and also against the country’s stated war aim of disarming Hamas, which would likely require a massive ground operation in which most, if not all, of the hostages would be killed. Hamas, meanwhile, can parade American corpses through downtown Gaza and claim that they are victims of the Israeli assault.
MORE
https://www.thefp.com/p/gaza-hostage-crisis-is-an-american-crisis?

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Two Murders—and the Cost of Luxury Beliefs
The death of two progressive activists shocked the nation. And that says everything about crime and class in America.
ROB HENDERSON
OCT 5
Ryan Carson and his girlfriend on a bench before the attack. (Via X)
Recently, two high-profile supporters of “justice reform” were murdered.

At 4 a.m. on Monday, Ryan Carson, a 32-year-old social justice and climate change activist, was walking with his girlfriend in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when he was stabbed to death by a stranger. Only a few hours earlier in Philadelphia, activist and journalist Josh Kruger was shot and killed in his home.

And two Democratic lawmakers who voted to “redirect funding to community-based policing reforms” have been recent victims of violent crime.

On Monday night, blocks away from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked by three armed men. (The lawmaker survived the incident unscathed.) In February, Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her apartment building in Capitol Hill. A homeless man demanded she allow him into her home to use the restroom, then he punched her and grabbed her around the neck. She escaped after throwing hot coffee on him.

Of course, these people did not deserve harm because of their support for soft-on-crime policies. But I’ve long argued that many people who hold “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes—are oblivious to the consequences of their views. Support for defunding the police is a classic example.

Luxury beliefs can stem from malice, good intentions, or outright naivete.

But the individuals who hold those beliefs, the people who wield the most influence in policy and culture, are often sheltered when their preferences are implemented.

Some online commenters have said that my luxury beliefs thesis is undermined by these tragic events, because the victims were affluent and influential—and they still suffered the consequences of their beliefs.

But the fact remains that poor people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime. For every upper-middle-class person killed, 20 poor people you never hear about are assaulted and murdered. You just never hear about them. They don’t get identified by name in the media. Their stories don’t get told.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault, and twenty times more likely to be victims of sexual assault than Americans who earn more than $75,000. One 2004 study found that people in areas where over 20 percent of inhabitants live in poverty are more than 100 times more likely to be murdered than people in areas where less than 10 percent of residents live in poverty.

Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances. And we are living with the consequences of the elite’s luxury beliefs when it comes to public safety and criminal justice. Indeed, the massive spike in violent crime across the U.S. is a reminder of the power of elite opinion.

A study from 2014 found that strong support for a policy among the middle class has virtually no effect on whether that policy will be adopted. In contrast, strong support among Americans in the top income decile—those who earn at least $173,000 a year—doubles the probability that a policy will be adopted.

Who was most likely to champion the fashionable “defund the police” cause in 2020 and 2021?

A nationwide survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police. Among Democratic voters, white Democrats were more likely to support reducing police funding than black or Hispanic Democrats.

In response to elite opinion in 2020, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, and many other major cities in the U.S. reduced police spending.

Most people didn’t want to defund the police, but the most affluent sector of society did. And so it was implemented.


French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that “distance from necessity” signals high social class. Similarly, in his book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell points out that the presence of physical danger is a marker of low social class. For instance, among occupations, a big reason why being a diesel mechanic or an electric power line installer is considered working class—while being a schoolteacher is middle class—is that the former jobs are more dangerous.

The vast majority of educated people have never been in a real fight or experienced serious physical injury. On occasion, I’ve wondered if this is why many of them believe words are “violence.” They have never known serious physical pain. I recently spoke with an editor at a prestigious magazine who explained how shocked he was to learn from Tara Westover’s memoir Educated how frequently people who work in junkyards experience cuts, scrapes, bruises, and burns. Physical pain—even bodily soreness—was just not a reality in this person’s world.

I had a professor in college who liked to say that common sense is like air: the higher you go, the thinner it gets. Sadly, it will probably take more high-profile deaths and attacks for people to wake up. When a bunch of peasants are killed, the luxury belief class shrugs. But when the nobility and petty nobility are targeted, the narrative shifts. It’s only when those in positions of influence and privilege feel the consequences of their beliefs and policies that real change is seriously considered.

https://www.thefp.com/p/country-music-my-great-migration?
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Country Music and Me: My Great Migration in the Wrong Direction
I’m black. Country music is supposedly white. But this summer my father and I reveled in the sounds of the South.
EVAN GARDNER
SEP 30

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View of the Johnny Cash Bar in Nashville, Tennessee. (Valerie Macon via via Getty Images)
It’s Sunday night in Nashville, and my father and I wade into a sea of cowboy hats. Most of the 4,000 seats are filled—the women in denim cutoffs with matching hats and boots; the men in faded flannels. Almost everyone is sipping hard seltzer or whiskey out of Dixie cups.

Center stage, Dylan Marlowe from Georgia is strumming his six-string and crooning: In a world that’s changing, I sure as hell ain’t, son. The host, with his porkpie hat and salt-and-pepper soul patch, stands to the side. They’re enveloped by the red glow of the lights behind them and the sign, front and center, staring down at the raucous crowd: GRAND OLE OPRY.

This is where Johnny Cash once played. And Elvis. And Garth Brooks. This is where Vince Gill and Patty Loveless performed their emotional 2013 rendition of “Go Rest High on That Mountain.” This is where Merle Haggard, in his final 2015 Opry appearance, did “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink.”

This is where the gods of country make their name. This is Mecca, and tonight we’re making the pilgrimage.

As we take our seats, Marlowe wraps up his set, and William Lee Golden and the Goldens stride onto the stage.

With his white beard trailing down to his belt buckle, the frontman takes his place in the famous Opry Circle. The circle has a diameter of six feet, and it’s made of maple and white oak. It is a holy place in a holy place. This is where greatness happens.

As the opening notes of “You Are My Sunshine” pour from the stage across the audience, my dad and I glance at each other.

“Do you remember your mom singing this to you before bed?” he whispers.

“Of course,” I say.

The thing is, I’m not supposed to like country music. Country is the South, and the South is slavery and burning crosses and church bombings. Morgan Wallen, the reigning king of country, recently went viral for saying the n-word. And by the way, I’m black, and country music is white.

But country music isn’t truly white, because nothing in America is entirely white or black or anything else, and nothing that endures—nothing with value—is about race at all. It goes beyond that.

Sure, country is the music of trucks and whiskey and your hometown, which is usually, but not always, in a state that was once in the Confederacy. At first blush, it sounds a lot like white folk music.

But suppose you switch the Ford flatbed for a drop-top Lambo, the whiskey for Patron, and “Sweet Home Alabama” to “Straight Outta Compton”: magically, it begins to sound a little blacker. Or the sound: the heart of country is the banjo, the first iteration of which was a gourd with animal skins attached to wooden necks—imported from West and Central Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during the transatlantic slave trade. Or the structure of that sound: country revolves around a three-chord progression not that dissimilar to the 12-bar blues, which is built around the first, fourth, and fifth notes of a scale.

And let’s not forget some of the country stars themselves: Charley Pride, a black man born on a sharecropping farm in Sledge, Mississippi, is a three-time Grammy winner and number 18 on CMT’s “40 Greatest Men in Country Music,” and Darius Rucker, a black man from Charleston, South Carolina, holds one of the top five best-selling country records of all time.

To insist on viewing country, or any other art form, through a racial lens is to obscure its history and to miss the beauty in that art form. It is to sap the art of its art.


My trip to the Opry began 14 hours earlier, very early in the morning, when my father and I left our apartment in lower Manhattan and headed down South.

As a kid, the city was all I ever knew.

Same for my father, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. “Down South” was where his classmates went to visit family. It was rural and backward and mysterious. It was where Arthur Green, the manager at the bottling factory where my Dad worked as a teenager, came from—the place where Green lost his two front teeth and his two middle fingers in a wood-chopping accident that supposedly ended with his fingers jumping off the chopping block where some chickens ate them.

This is the South I pictured awaiting our arrival as the skyscrapers disappeared into plastic white crosses tucked between American flags and pine trees. Despite our ancestors upending their lives to flee the South, here were my father and I speeding toward it.

That afternoon, we crossed the state line separating Virginia and Tennessee, and pulled into a Love’s gas station to get a snack. I was in my Brown University sweats and a hoodie, clean-shaven, with a Nikon camera around my neck, and it seemed like everyone else in the mini-mart attached to the gas station was wearing a thick beard and an Under Armour Freedom t-shirt. Next door to the Love’s was a Quality Suites; on the other side was the perfectly groomed football field of a Catholic school. In the parking lot outside the mini-mart, I saw a sheriff pressing two men’s heads into the side of his squad car, and I tried to hurry out the door, but my dad stopped me.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Buying a lottery ticket,” he said. “Everyone who wins the lottery gets their ticket from a Piggly Wiggly down South.”

A few hours later, the Nashville skyline came into view. We were staying in a ritzy part of town, the Gulch. It was teeming with new apartment complexes and hipsters in athleisure, and as we made our way to our hotel, my dad remarked that it looked just like Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

There were superficial traces of the Old South: Rosa Parks Drive, John Lewis Way. (The next day, we went looking for what we thought was an old plantation, Belle Meade, but it turned out to be a gated community.)

My mother had always forbidden me from going down South. The racism, the violence, the not-so-distant past. So I stayed in the universe I came from: I went to Saint Ann’s (Lena Dunham’s alma mater) and to Brown University. I took classes like “Writing the Revolution.”

But then, one day last year, I heard Morgan Wallen’s “Sand in My Boots” and fell in love with country music. “Sand in My Boots” is lyrical and mournful—it’s a story about hope and promise in the land of “sunburnt Silverados” and “heart-broke Desperados,” and potholes and dogwood trees.

Around the same time, I started my nonfiction writing seminar, which started with a quote from the literature scholar Stanley Fish: “Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences.” And that started me down the road of thinking more seriously about words, sentences, language, and the meanings behind them.

The more I listened to country—its lyrics and its poetry—the more I realized how much it applied to people like me. Country music, after all, is the music of the forgotten. Think of Luke Combs singing So just remember when you’re drivin’ through nowhere / To us, that’s the middle of somewhere.

Yes, I know: I’m from Tribeca. I attended a tony private school in the cradle of American power and prestige, and I’m a junior at an Ivy League university. I’m hardly “forgotten.” But in a summer when country music dominated the charts, a lot of people clearly felt like me. Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” spent 16 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In the last week of July, the top three slots on that list were dominated by Jason Aldean, Wallen, and Combs. In August, upstart Oliver Anthony, with his “Rich Men North of Richmond,” became the most talked about music sensation on YouTube. On Thursday, NBC broadcast the first-ever People’s Choice Country Awards, live from the Grand Ole Opry, due to popular demand.

How could the music of so many also be the music of those left behind by everyone else?

The point is country is the music of those we don’t always see, those who don’t fit squarely into the categories of mainstream, contemporary America.

It was only in Tennessee, the land where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, that I began to see the rigidity of those categories—and, more importantly, to imagine those categories falling away into something richer and more powerful. It was only there that I could begin to integrate all the apparent contradictions of music and race and history and culture.

Including the contradiction that is my mother.

When my mother drinks one too many glasses of rosé and lets herself travel back through memories buried below the Mason-Dixon line, she inevitably returns to her childhood in Texas. Backyard baby back ribs in a homemade vinegar sauce cooked by an auntie or cousin down the road. A block full of friends. A potbellied uncle. It is a wonderful place cocooned by a much more dangerous place shot through with lynchings and segregationists and people who pine for the old Dixie. It seems incongruous.

The South, maybe more than anywhere else in America, is where the old black and white cultures and heritages overlap, intertwine, become something transcendent. This is what I felt while enveloped by the sounds of William Lee Golden singing a song my mother once sang to me. This is where I finally grasped the ethos of country as explained by the great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis—that even in the face of deep suffering, “optimism is not naive.”


Outside the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum. (Courtesy of the author)
One month after returning from Nashville, I found myself at a Luke Combs concert in Philadelphia seated next to a woman with a Blue Lives Matter tattoo.

That night, Combs was singing his cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Over the summer, the song had risen to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, which had upset a lot of people on the site previously called Twitter, since a white, straight man (with a beard! from North Carolina!) was apparently appropriating or exploiting a gay black woman’s song.

In the arena, surrounded by 60,000 fans, there was no controversy. No manufactured anger. No one accusing anyone of usurping someone else’s lived experience. All I could feel was the warm sense of connection that makes this song so rich. It turns out that the desire to live outside other people’s boundaries was not just a Southern thing.

In Philadelphia that night, it seemed like the whole world was a Luke Combs fan.

Even as his accent tells you that his is a different story than Chapman’s, the words remind you that it’s the same. The car he and Chapman sing of is equal parts sweet chariot and Ford F-150. They are both racing to the same place, and that place is freedom and self-realization, both beautiful and uncontainable.


Evan Gardner is an intern at the Free Press. You can check out his previous story “Taylor Swift Unites America” here, and you can find him on X, formerly Twitter @EvanGardne9.

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Trump supporters outside the second Republican presidential primary debate at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Hello and welcome back. Since last week was so good, so truly perfect, I really can’t try to compete with myself. I ought to retire in the glory of it, but then I’d have to find a hobby or learn how old my daughter is. Anyway, this week, Suzy Weiss and Olly Wiseman contributed greatly. Let’s get to the news.

→ The race for VP heats up: Fox News hosted the second Republican presidential debate last night, and there in the Reagan Library, all the candidates gathered to run for Vice President, or President If Trump Has a Stroke, or President If One of These Crimes Gets Too Real. And what a race it is. Chris Christie got in a not-at-all-prefab jab about how they’re going to call him Donald Duck for “ducking” the debates. Nikki Haley continued her violence against Vivek Ramaswamy when she told him: “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.” Truly, I’m obsessed with Nikki Haley. She looked great, no notes. Every time Ron DeSantis got a line out, he gave a strange, nervous half-smile, which is humanizing because I also struggle with anxiety and where to put body parts when on TV. The highlight for me was a TikTok goat milk soap commercial.

We’ve got a great episode of Honestly just up capturing the whole spectacle—Michael Moyhihan at the Trump rally in Michigan Bar and Peter in Simi Valley, where they got peed on by a horse. Don’t ask, just listen here.

→ What do we mean exactly by “person of faith”? Trump has had a few very good polls this week, and one deeply perplexing one. The majority of Republican voters see Donald J. Trump as a “person of faith,” according to a poll by HarrisX for the Deseret News. In fact, they see him as more religious than Mitt Romney, who definitely wears the Mormon underwear, and Mike Pence, whose faith is so strong it disallows him from looking female baristas in the eye. Trump. . . more faithful. . . than Mitt Romney and Mike Pence. I don’t even mean this as a pro-Pence take (sick), since for me personally, the one thing I like about Trump is how absolutely godless he is. My walnut-sized brain simply cannot grok the idea of Trump as your top Republican of faith. If Trump’s a man of faith, I am a pastor. My only takeaway is that I am deeply, criminally out of touch with Evangelical America.

The other very good Trump poll is so alarming that the place that published it quickly disavowed it as “an outlier” while others in the mainstream press tore their garments. The poll (take a breath with me) shows Trump beating Biden by double digits. This was from The Washington Post and ABC, two brands that should not have done the #Resistance moms dirty like this. But honest to god, the poll shows that if Americans had to choose today, 51 percent would pick Trump, while 42 percent would pick Biden. 2016 to 2020 was only the trailer.

If you’re a nice Democrat who wants to win, you might think: can we pivot? No. This is your life now. Nate Silver this week has a great piece simply headlined: “It’s probably too late not to nominate Biden.”

→ If you can’t beat him at the ballot box, maybe bankrupt him? If there’s one thing Dems can definitely do, it’s continue to swamp Trump in legal woes until maybe they just exhaust the man. A judge in the New York attorney general’s fraud case declared Old Orange and his top executives and heirs liable for “persistent and repeated fraud” and cancelled his New York business license. The goal is to make him pay $250 million in fines as penalties for bank fraud. As always, I believe all allegations about shady business deals. The Trump steaks were actually old shoes mailed in plastic wrap? I completely believe it.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden received $250,000 in cash from Beijing in 2019, and the address listed for the wires was his dad’s house, where he lived at the time. Nothing to see there. It’s called consulting, guys. He has a law degree.

But speaking of President Biden, there is a whole workflow at the White House built around making sure he doesn’t fall, which Axios reported this week. It includes having Biden avoid the high stairs into Air Force One, do special balance training, and wear more supportive shoes. Good advice for us all. I say release the full routine!

→ Requiem for Gavin: I almost ended a dinner party the other night by admitting something really appalling, really sick: I have a soft spot for Gavin. I. . . I like him. I like him bantering with Sean Hannity after the debate, taking hits and hitting back. I like him bantering with CNN, also post-debate. He seems relaxed and happy, and most importantly, he seems super alive. Eyes open and bright, feet firmly on the ground. Hair thick and very firm.

I also like that Gavin doesn’t have hard-and-fast principles. He responds to voters. If enough people get really upset he’ll, like, wander through a homeless encampment and talk to locals on camera and say this is bad. Late last week, Newsom sided with cities that want to be able to legally clear homeless encampments, a case that could go to the Supreme Court.

And this week, Newsom vetoed a major progressive bill that came to his desk: it would have given a parent advantage in a custody battle if they were in favor of “gender-affirming care.” You see, if enough people get really mad that their children will be taken away if they don’t give them hormone therapy, Gavin will sort of amble over, sigh, sign the veto, and move along.

He is a politician, just here to please, and I like that about him. Commenters, eat me alive. Today is my true coming out: I like Gavin.

→ Commander keeps biting: Commander, Biden’s beautiful German shepherd, bit a Secret Service agent. Again. Actually this is the eleventh known bite of a White House employee by Commander. This news is close to my heart—we have a perfect, beautiful shelter dog who yes, occasionally communicates with his teeth. Granted, he’s a ten-pound shih tzu-dachshund mix, so it’s slightly less alarming than a German shepherd. But Mr. President, you and me, we both need to be really honest with ourselves and rehome our dogs to people who don’t host as much. It’s time, sir (I say into the mirror).

→ New York continues to rage against migrants: New York City residents remain appalled that migrants would dare to come to their town, a town that is full of love, emphasis on the word full. When New Yorkers said sanctuary city, they meant for nepo babies whose dads were cancelled. Buses with migrants are being met by locals with chants of: “You’re not welcome.”

There are certainly enormous policy problems leading to this crisis, but the individual migrants should be treated with respect and, yes, love. This behavior is just another day in Trump’s America! (Wait, I’m getting word that Biden is our president. And, oh my god, Kamala Harris is or was our border czar? Well, at least New York City is a MAGA stronghold.)

A lot of it just doesn’t make sense. In El Paso, mothers are using cardboard to protect themselves and their kids from barbed wire as they crawl under the fencing and into America. In other locations, thousands of people just stream in through seemingly open doors. Also, did you know that we denied a green card to the guy who basically invented 5G? He’s from Turkey, and went to MIT, and China got him instead. Make it make sense!

One person trying to figure it out is Elon Musk, who I guess is our president now. Yes, Elon went to Eagle Pass border crossing in aviators and a little scruff of beard like he works for Vice. The plan: to “see what’s really going on.” He’s holding the camera himself, asking local officials to describe what they’re seeing. It’s great TV. ...

TGIF: The Book of Revelations
Trump is a person of faith. RFK Jr. is a 9/11 truther. NYC turns MAGA. Elon heads to the border. Plus, I must confess. . . I like Gavin Newsom.
Trump supporters outside the second Republican presidential primary debate at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Hello and welcome back. Since last week was so good, so truly perfect, I really can’t try to compete with myself. I ought to retire in the glory of it, but then I’d have to find a hobby or learn how old my daughter is. Anyway, this week, Suzy Weiss and Olly Wiseman contributed greatly. Let’s get to the news.

→ The race for VP heats up: Fox News hosted the second Republican presidential debate last night, and there in the Reagan Library, all the candidates gathered to run for Vice President, or President If Trump Has a Stroke, or President If One of These Crimes Gets Too Real. And what a race it is. Chris Christie got in a not-at-all-prefab jab about how they’re going to call him Donald Duck for “ducking” the debates. Nikki Haley continued her violence against Vivek Ramaswamy when she told him: “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.” Truly, I’m obsessed with Nikki Haley. She looked great, no notes. Every time Ron DeSantis got a line out, he gave a strange, nervous half-smile, which is humanizing because I also struggle with anxiety and where to put body parts when on TV. The highlight for me was a TikTok goat milk soap commercial.

We’ve got a great episode of Honestly just up capturing the whole spectacle—Michael Moyhihan at the Trump rally in Michigan Bar and Peter in Simi Valley, where they got peed on by a horse. Don’t ask, just listen here.

→ What do we mean exactly by “person of faith”? Trump has had a few very good polls this week, and one deeply perplexing one. The majority of Republican voters see Donald J. Trump as a “person of faith,” according to a poll by HarrisX for the Deseret News. In fact, they see him as more religious than Mitt Romney, who definitely wears the Mormon underwear, and Mike Pence, whose faith is so strong it disallows him from looking female baristas in the eye. Trump. . . more faithful. . . than Mitt Romney and Mike Pence. I don’t even mean this as a pro-Pence take (sick), since for me personally, the one thing I like about Trump is how absolutely godless he is. My walnut-sized brain simply cannot grok the idea of Trump as your top Republican of faith. If Trump’s a man of faith, I am a pastor. My only takeaway is that I am deeply, criminally out of touch with Evangelical America.

The other very good Trump poll is so alarming that the place that published it quickly disavowed it as “an outlier” while others in the mainstream press tore their garments. The poll (take a breath with me) shows Trump beating Biden by double digits. This was from The Washington Post and ABC, two brands that should not have done the #Resistance moms dirty like this. But honest to god, the poll shows that if Americans had to choose today, 51 percent would pick Trump, while 42 percent would pick Biden. 2016 to 2020 was only the trailer.

If you’re a nice Democrat who wants to win, you might think: can we pivot? No. This is your life now. Nate Silver this week has a great piece simply headlined: “It’s probably too late not to nominate Biden.”

→ If you can’t beat him at the ballot box, maybe bankrupt him? If there’s one thing Dems can definitely do, it’s continue to swamp Trump in legal woes until maybe they just exhaust the man. A judge in the New York attorney general’s fraud case declared Old Orange and his top executives and heirs liable for “persistent and repeated fraud” and cancelled his New York business license. The goal is to make him pay $250 million in fines as penalties for bank fraud. As always, I believe all allegations about shady business deals. The Trump steaks were actually old shoes mailed in plastic wrap? I completely believe it.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden received $250,000 in cash from Beijing in 2019, and the address listed for the wires was his dad’s house, where he lived at the time. Nothing to see there. It’s called consulting, guys. He has a law degree.

But speaking of President Biden, there is a whole workflow at the White House built around making sure he doesn’t fall, which Axios reported this week. It includes having Biden avoid the high stairs into Air Force One, do special balance training, and wear more supportive shoes. Good advice for us all. I say release the full routine!

→ Requiem for Gavin: I almost ended a dinner party the other night by admitting something really appalling, really sick: I have a soft spot for Gavin. I. . . I like him. I like him bantering with Sean Hannity after the debate, taking hits and hitting back. I like him bantering with CNN, also post-debate. He seems relaxed and happy, and most importantly, he seems super alive. Eyes open and bright, feet firmly on the ground. Hair thick and very firm.

I also like that Gavin doesn’t have hard-and-fast principles. He responds to voters. If enough people get really upset he’ll, like, wander through a homeless encampment and talk to locals on camera and say this is bad. Late last week, Newsom sided with cities that want to be able to legally clear homeless encampments, a case that could go to the Supreme Court.

And this week, Newsom vetoed a major progressive bill that came to his desk: it would have given a parent advantage in a custody battle if they were in favor of “gender-affirming care.” You see, if enough people get really mad that their children will be taken away if they don’t give them hormone therapy, Gavin will sort of amble over, sigh, sign the veto, and move along.

He is a politician, just here to please, and I like that about him. Commenters, eat me alive. Today is my true coming out: I like Gavin.

→ Commander keeps biting: Commander, Biden’s beautiful German shepherd, bit a Secret Service agent. Again. Actually this is the eleventh known bite of a White House employee by Commander. This news is close to my heart—we have a perfect, beautiful shelter dog who yes, occasionally communicates with his teeth. Granted, he’s a ten-pound shih tzu-dachshund mix, so it’s slightly less alarming than a German shepherd. But Mr. President, you and me, we both need to be really honest with ourselves and rehome our dogs to people who don’t host as much. It’s time, sir (I say into the mirror).

→ New York continues to rage against migrants: New York City residents remain appalled that migrants would dare to come to their town, a town that is full of love, emphasis on the word full. When New Yorkers said sanctuary city, they meant for nepo babies whose dads were cancelled. Buses with migrants are being met by locals with chants of: “You’re not welcome.”

There are certainly enormous policy problems leading to this crisis, but the individual migrants should be treated with respect and, yes, love. This behavior is just another day in Trump’s America! (Wait, I’m getting word that Biden is our president. And, oh my god, Kamala Harris is or was our border czar? Well, at least New York City is a MAGA stronghold.)

A lot of it just doesn’t make sense. In El Paso, mothers are using cardboard to protect themselves and their kids from barbed wire as they crawl under the fencing and into America. In other locations, thousands of people just stream in through seemingly open doors. Also, did you know that we denied a green card to the guy who basically invented 5G? He’s from Turkey, and went to MIT, and China got him instead. Make it make sense!
One person trying to figure it out is Elon Musk, who I guess is our president now. Yes, Elon went to Eagle Pass border crossing in aviators and a little scruff of beard like he works for Vice. The plan: to “see what’s really going on.” He’s holding the camera himself, asking local officials to describe what they’re seeing. It’s great TV. ...

https://www.thefp.com/p/justin-trudeau-self-immolation?
Justin Trudeau’s Self-Immolation
The Canadian prime minister has alienated the largest democracy on Earth and played host to a former Nazi. And that was just this week.
RUPA SUBRAMANYA
SEP 29
GUEST POST
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is facing an international—and existential—crisis. (Artur Widak via Getty Images)
OTTAWA — In the span of five days, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has managed to alienate the government of the largest democracy on Earth; anger key allies from Washington, D.C. to Canberra; and outrage Jews around the world.

Now, the promise of Trudeau—the young, strapping progressive born into political royalty, with his ostensibly forward-looking ideas about medically assisted suicide, puberty blockers, and the suspension of truckers’ civil liberties—is on the brink of imploding.

Late Tuesday night, limousines clustered outside Parliament, as senior officials from Trudeau’s Liberal Party feverishly debated how to right this ship and save the prime minister.

That emergency powwow took place four days after Canada’s Parliament honored 98-year-old Ukrainian Yaroslav Hunka. The Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, introduced Hunka as a “Ukrainian hero” and “Canadian hero” who fought against the Soviet Union during World War II. The whole of Parliament rose to give him a standing ovation. It later emerged that Hunka did indeed fight the Soviets—or, as Rota put it, the Russians—but alongside the Nazis.

Hunka’s appearance came as part of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s trip to Canada, where he hoped to bolster support for the war against Russia. Zelensky seemed unfazed by Parliament’s honoring Hunka (he gave a fist pump in support)—even though he is Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust. (It’s unclear how many people in Zelensky’s family were killed. The president has said that his great-grandparents were murdered when the Nazis burned down their village, which was common practice during the war.)

But afterward, pretty much everyone else seemed horrified, and on Monday, Rota (like Trudeau, a member of the Liberal Party) apologized to the Jewish community, and on Tuesday, he resigned.

Trudeau refused to accept blame. Instead, he sought to link the controversy to Russia’s “disinformation” campaign against Ukraine while acknowledging that the Hunka affair was “deeply embarrassing” to Parliament—the leader of which is Justin Trudeau. Then, yesterday, he gave a short speech in which he blamed Rota for this “horrendous violation”—which, he noted, hurt Jewish people as well as “Polish people, Roma people, 2SLGTBQIA+ people, disabled people, racialized people.”

That debacle is competing for headline space with Trudeau’s other recent catastrophe: his decision to blame India for an extrajudicial murder on Canadian soil.

That happened earlier in the week, on Monday—the first day of the fall session of the Canadian legislature after a long summer recess. Trudeau declared that “agents of the government of India” were behind the recent murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in a Vancouver suburb.

Nijjar was a Sikh plumber who had been born in India, immigrated to Canada, and ultimately gained Canadian citizenship. He was also a vocal advocate for Sikh autonomy. He had long embraced the Khalistan movement, which calls for a separate Sikh state in the northern Indian province of Punjab. (The movement spawned a terrorist insurgency in the 1970s that included the 1984 assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and the 1985 bombing of an Air India jet flying from Toronto to London, which killed 329 people—the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history.)

Nijjar was suspected of planning a bombing in Punjab and wanted in India on terrorism charges, and, in fact, Interpol issued a so-called red notice calling for his arrest in November 2014. On June 18 of this year, Nijjar was gunned down outside the Sikh gurdwara, or temple, where he was president. So far, no one has been apprehended for the crime.

Then, on September 18, Trudeau announced he had intelligence showing India was responsible for the murder. This was followed by a diplomatic tit for tat, with Canada expelling an Indian diplomat and India expelling a Canadian diplomat. Canadian authorities cautioned Canadians against traveling to India. India denies its involvement in Nijjar’s death.

There are two big problems with Trudeau’s claim: First, the evidence that the Indian government or its “agents” were involved in the murder appears wobbly. (On Sunday, Canadian Defense Minister Bill Blair indicated the evidence has yet to be confirmed.) Second, even if that evidence is airtight, pretty much everyone agrees that the smart, diplomatically astute thing to do is to speak with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi or his foreign minister behind closed doors to avoid a public spectacle.

That, presumably, is why longtime Canadian allies like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia have been signaling their displeasure with Trudeau’s tangle with Modi—who the West would like in its camp, especially given the escalating tensions with India’s neighbor China. (Recall that in November 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly rebuked Trudeau at a G20 summit in Bali.) U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has expressed “concern” over Nijjar’s killing, but has yet to condemn India for it while encouraging the Canadians to press on with their investigation.

Now, the Americans and Brits and everyone else in the West finds itself in the awkward spot of having to say something indicating concern or dismay about Nijjar’s death while trying to avoid alienating Modi, who—say what you will about India’s nationalist prime minister—has been an important bulwark against Chinese hegemony in South Asia and elsewhere.

We should be clear about what prompted this protracted diplomatic disaster last week: domestic politics. Trudeau’s poll numbers are abysmal, with even young Canadians backing the Conservative Party over Trudeau’s Liberal faction, 32 percent to 24 percent.

When Trudeau was elected in 2015, he was seen as a breath of fresh air, a charismatic departure from the outgoing, stodgy Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. But then, Trudeau’s government was engulfed by a series of corruption scandals, and then it came out that Trudeau had appeared in blackface at parties several years earlier.

Then the pandemic happened, and Trudeau projected the image of a statesman—but he went too far. He shut down the truckers’ protests. He declared an emergency. He was seen, increasingly, as having a quasi-authoritarian tendency. And he lost the heart of the country.

And it may not be long before the heart of the country ultimately dispenses with Trudeau.

Rupa Subramanya is a Canadian-based writer for The Free Press. Read her piece “I Report for The Free Press. And I Can’t Post My Stories on Facebook,” and follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @rupasubramanya.

Inside Iran’s Influence Operation
How the Iranian regime insinuated itself into official Washington.
JAY SOLOMON
SEP 27
From left: Ali Vaez, Ariane Tabatabai, Dina Esfandiary, Adnan Tabatabai, and Robert Malley. (Photo illustration by The Free Press)
We are living through a strange but wonderful moment in which many of the country’s best reporters no longer work inside legacy publications. Instead, they work in new newsrooms, including this one.

Among those reporters is Jay Solomon, who used to break stories for The Wall Street Journal. Now he writes about foreign affairs and national security for Semafor. We were especially struck by his recent scoop about Iran’s widespread influence operation—a scoop that already has House and Senate Republicans calling for an investigation—and we are grateful to Semafor for allowing us to share it with all of you. —BW

In the spring of 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues—particularly its nuclear program—by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the Iran Experts Initiative.

The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails reported for the first time by Semafor and Iran International. The officials, working under the moderate president Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative: at least three of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance.

The documents offer deep and unprecedented new insights into the thinking and inner workings of Iran’s Foreign Ministry at a crucial time in the nuclear diplomacy—even as Tehran’s portrayal of events is questioned, if not flatly denied, by others involved in the IEI. They show how Iran was capable of the kind of influence operations that the U.S. and its allies in the region often conduct.
READ MORE https://www.thefp.com/p/inside-iran-influence-operation?

The Free Press Things Worth Remembering: The Fleeting Innocence of Youth
W. B. Yeats celebrates the beauty and the naivete of ‘a child dancing in the wind.’
DOUGLAS MURRAY
SEP 24
(Photo by Jean-Noel De Soye via Getty Images)
Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read W. B. Yeats’s poem “To a Child Dancing in the Wind,”

LISTEN NOW · 2:32
People often go to poetry for advice. It puts an awful lot of pressure on the poets, but some embrace that role as sage or seer.

Irish poet William Butler Yeats certainly didn’t mind the mantle. “The Second Coming,” for instance, written in the aftermath of the First World War, really does feel like a work of prophecy. There are few better descriptions of imminent collapse, of things falling apart, than his famous lines from that work.

The center cannot hold

… The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

And yet, I have always had a slight problem with Yeats. His early poetry is almost too quotable; certain works like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” are too twee. And at the end of his career, Yeats was too immersed in the sort of nonsense mysticism that Roy Foster deals with as seriously and sympathetically as he can in his two-volume biography.

This all makes Yeats feel a bit out of date. A poet like Tennyson, who was born in 1809, might have been able to retreat into Arthurian legend, but how could a twentieth-century writer like Yeats still be into sprites and all that stuff?...

https://www.thefp.com/p/president-joe-biden-too-old-honestly?
Weekend Listening: Is Biden Too Old to Be President?
Most Americans say yes. But Frank Foer, who wrote a book on the president’s first two years in office, claims his advanced age is a plus.
THE FREE PRESS
SEP 23
Joe Biden turns 81 in November. (Win McNamee via Getty Images)
As we tumble toward 2024, anxiety among Democrats is beginning to simmer. It’s easy to understand why. Just look at what happened last week: Biden was giving a press conference in Vietnam about upgrading the country’s diplomatic ties when he started rambling: “The Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, ‘He’s a lying, dog-faced pony soldier!’ Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about global warming.” Then he said, on mic, that he was going to go to bed. A voice suddenly emerged and jazz music started to play. Biden tried to answer another question, but they cut off his mic.

According to a recent CNN poll, 56 percent of Democrats are seriously concerned for Biden’s current level of physical and mental competence. Sixty-two percent of Democrats said they are seriously concerned about Biden’s ability to serve a full second term. Another poll, by AP-NORC, found that 69 percent of Democrats surveyed think Biden, who turns 81 in November, is too old for a second term.

Among the people not yet convinced that Biden needs to be in a nursing home is Atlantic staff writer Frank Foer. Foer’s new book, The Last Politician, tells the behind-the-scenes story of Biden’s first two years in office. Foer says he started as a Biden skeptic. The incoming president was, in his estimation, a bloviator who dangerously fetishized bipartisanship. But he emerges some 400 pages later with a rather more charitable view of the president. Biden is “the father figure of the West,” someone deeply experienced in foreign policy and racking up policy victories at home. Biden, he writes, “is an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human. He will be remembered as the old hack who could.”

But. . . why doesn’t that come through to the public? Will Americans buy that narrative of Joe Biden in 2024? What of Hunter Biden’s legal troubles? The impeachment inquiry? What should we make of the many Biden alternatives eagerly waiting in the wings, and what would it take for one of them to step forward?

Listen to Honestly guest host Michael Moynihan pose all these questions and more to Foer by clicking here to listen to the episode—or read an edited excerpt below.



Is Biden Too Old to Be President? Frank Foer Isn't Sure.

The Free Press

Episode

On Foer changing his mind about Biden:

MM: You went into this having an opinion of Joe Biden. You don’t really elucidate what that opinion was, but you say it changed during the reporting for the book and you came out with a more positive idea of him as a person and a politician. Explain that a little bit.

FF: I’ve always thought he was a bit of a hack and that he was artificial. It’s like his stories are the same stories over and over again. There was this sense that he would say anything to a crowd and then do something different behind closed doors. But over time, observing him up close, I think some of his hackish tendencies mutated into things that I saw as strengths that I see disappearing from the rest of our political system. One of the things that I think is so interesting about the guy in the end is he’s so messy. He’s one of the most supremely human beings I’ve ever met. And the messiness informs the way that he practices politics. Because he wears his ambitions, his insecurities, his humanness on his sleeve, he’s able to identify those qualities in foreign leaders or Republican senators that he deals with. That forms the basis for the calculations he makes when he’s dealing with them.

On Bidenomics:

MM: Let’s talk about Bidenomics. People are rallying to Bidenomics but the economy is not great. A vast majority of people polled in both parties think it’s in a rough patch. Gas prices are rising, inflation is eased, but it seems to be ticking up again. And if you listen to people like Larry Summers, they say this is the problem with spending. The spending has created this issue that was probably necessary in some way or another during the pandemic. But after the pandemic, the spending continued creating out-of-control inflation. What do people around Joe Biden think about this messaging? Because it’s going to be a very difficult one for him to deal with in the next campaign.

FF: I think that the Summers critique has a lot of truth in it. You had this wave of pandemic spending, a lot of which happened in the Trump era, and then you have this extra bit of it that happened with the American Rescue Plan that accelerated preexisting inflationary trends. But his big objection to the American Rescue Plan and that inflationary spending was that it’d make it impossible to spend money in other programs that would have long-lasting impacts on the American economy. I think that inflation was going to be a problem for them regardless of the rescue plan. But any inflation beyond a certain level is economic pain to people. And inflation has come down faster in the United States than it has in other countries around the world.

On criticisms of Biden:

MM: Are there any criticisms about Biden that you think land?

FF: Sure. In terms of their Covid policy, there are a lot of right-wing critiques that I think are justified. They could have pushed harder to reopen schools. I think it’s maybe more complicated, obviously, than some of his critics portray. But in the end, it was a place where he should have devoted greater political resources and he didn’t.

MM: He didn’t want to upset Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the largest donor to the Biden campaign.

FF: Right. The other element that I think is important to recall is that the nation was potentially on the brink of labor strife around schools. And maybe you could argue it was worth forcing a confrontation there. But there was real anxiety on behalf of teachers about going into schools. And so he had a strategy for managing that. I would argue he could have been more aggressive in pushing them. I think that the vaccine mandate that he imposed in the end of September of his first term was a mistake, that his instinct had been right about vaccines headed into that, that vaccines were a question of persuasion and that coercion was never going to work, and that he did something that was legally dubious by imposing a vaccine mandate and ultimately counterproductive and ended up exacerbating a lot of the culture war around the vaccine. I think in terms of foreign policy. I think the chapters on Afghanistan in my book were very harrowing to report, and I felt like I was talking to people in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal who were traumatized themselves by the whole experience. And while I think the idea of withdrawing from Afghanistan was correct, I think that his unwillingness to engage with the humanitarian consequences of that decision was a great failing on his part from the left. The other thing I would say, just criticizing him from the center, is the push he made for voting rights was both nonsensical from a political perspective. He was never going to be able to get the maximalist Democratic version of a voting rights bill, and it also distracted from coming up with a centrist voting rights bill that would have addressed the primary problems that Trump and his subversion tactics pose to democracy. That struck me as the real threat, not whether somebody could get a bottle of water at the hundred foot mark in line.

On Biden’s age and whether or not he’s too old to run again:

MM: Let’s talk about the thing that the media doesn’t stop talking about, and apparently is a very important issue to voters, too: age. In your book—I don’t want to say you’re dismissive of it, but you say that Biden should look at his age as a strength and something to be presented as experience. And that he’s pretty sharp and he gets his notes and gives them back to people with all of his notations. And he’s pretty engaged in policy argument. That doesn’t really come through to the American people.

FF: I have thought so much about age since my book has come out, and because it is something that is on everybody’s mind. When I was reporting the book, I was chronicling two years of governing and the political demands placed on Biden were very different during those two years than they are now. So there’s a question about Biden’s mental acuity and his governing capacity over the course of the last two years and where he sits at this moment in time.

MM: A CNN poll the other day said that 73 percent of Americans are seriously concerned for Biden’s current level of physical and mental competence. That’s three quarters of Americans!

FF: He has the ability to think through a major problem in a way that does reflect experience. So if you were to give him a mental acuity test of the likes that Nikki Haley has suggested the president should take, I’d say he would pass it. And I’d say that his age has made it harder for him to be an energetic communicator with the American public. One of the strange things about his presidency is the way in which he’s omnipresent. He gives speeches every day, he talks every day, and yet he seems to be this guy who’s at a remove.

MM: The other day, Biden said he was at Ground Zero the day after the September 11 attacks. He wasn’t. He said that he was a professor, I think, at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching political theory for four years. He wasn’t. Said something similar about his grandfather dying in the hospital the same day. He falsely claimed to have been arrested during a civil rights protest. He falsely claimed that he, quote, “used to drive an 18-wheeler,” falsely claimed to have visited the Pittsburgh synagogue where worshipers were killed in a 2018 mass shooting, falsely claimed to have visited Iraq and Afghanistan as president, told a false story involving a late relative and a Purple Heart, and falsely described his interactions decades ago with late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. He frequently refers to his son, Beau Biden, who died of cancer, dying in Iraq. At what point is that lying and not a gaffe?

FF: It’s clearly a tendency that is deeply ingrained in him that these are not straight examples. They’re part of a pattern of the way that he describes himself and his role in events in history. And there is something both disturbing about it on some level and, I think, very reflective of something deep in his psyche, that this desire to be at the center of the narrative and to have a version of events that kind of meshes with some idealized version of those events.

MM: But you’re reluctant to call it lying.

FF: On the surface, yes, it is. It is lying. But there are different reasons why people lie. And I think that needs to somehow be wrapped into the way in which we morally judge them. The pattern of lies are really always about himself, not about other people. And they’re self-aggrandizing. And so it’s this tendency towards self-aggrandizement, which is super connected to the way that he exists as a politician and super connected to all of these insecurities that he has. I mean, that’s how I think about it.

On Hunter Biden:

MM: You don’t mention Hunter in the book. He gets one passing mention. Why did you choose to not dig into that a little bit?

FF: I was writing about the first two years of his presidency, and Hunter was not a significant part of that narrative. And there weren’t very many questions that were posed to the White House as it related to Hunter Biden. And I wish I had more about Hunter Biden as an individual and as a figure. And that was something I got close to getting some interesting stuff on, and then I just couldn’t nail it down.

MM: There’s a lot of people on the right who see this as an opportunity to launch an impeachment investigation when there’s some curious things there. But nothing I would suspect would allow somebody to be like, oh, we can impeach him on this one. What about it, though, seems curious to you and you would like to know more?

FF: I know what everybody knows. And that doesn’t seem to me to add up to anything remotely impeachable at this stage.

MM: So where was his failing? Where was his moral failing?

FF: I think he knew that Hunter Biden was clearly running a business that was exploiting the Biden family name and was dealing with certain figures that were in areas of the world that were adjacent to what Biden was working on. And he should have been able to say, I understand you’ve got to make a living, but this is too important for you to be working here. To me that’s not that hard of a conversation to have. And where the Biden story gets interesting is all the ways in which that does then become a complicated story for them to have a conversation, because there’s so many layers of guilt that are built onto this. I think of this as a family story as much as a political story, although it is clearly a political story. Hunter Biden was never the son that he loved most. Beau was going to be the one who was going to carry the torch for the family dynasty. Hunter was always kind of the hatchet man in that operation.

On Kamala Harris:

MM: Let’s talk a little bit about how you became quite popular in conservative media, I’m sure to your surprise, when it came to some of your reporting on Kamala Harris. Your book seems to be slightly tough on her in some parts and not on others. What do you make of her vice presidency?

FF: I would like to thank Fox News and the New York Post. There’s this comedy where a lot of people who bought my book under false pretenses are giving it one-star reviews on Amazon, which I will happily take in exchange for the sale. There’s part that I understand about the way in which right-wing media operates and cherry-picks stuff from a book. That’s totally appropriate and in its way honorable. But there’s other ways—I’ve seen how Jesse Watters on Fox News just makes things up. There was a story in the book about how Biden was looking at a map of Kabul during the evacuation and was looking at a parking lot and said, oh, this is a place where refugees could gather. And then suddenly in the Fox News version of it, it became “Joe Biden actually wanted to build a parking lot in Kabul, and his aides were laughing their asses off at him because he’s so mentally deranged.” What’s the real question about Kamala Harris? Because every vice president suffers from some version of what she’s suffered from, which is struggling to figure out their role in the White House. They have this relationship with the president where they end up, on some level, resenting the president for constraining them.


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The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won
Louisiana congresswoman Laurie Schlegel wanted porn websites to do more to protect her state’s children. Now her law is the blueprint for the rest of the country.
NANCY ROMMELMANN
SEP 21
Laurie Schlegel, a certified sex addiction therapist, first decided to take on the porn industry after hearing Billie Eilish talking about the damage pornography did to her as a child. (All photos by Emily Kask for The Free Press)
Before Laurie Schlegel decided to run in a special election to fill a seat in Louisiana’s House of Representatives in 2021, she asked her son for permission.

“I asked him and he just boldly told me like, ‘Mom, I’m 16 and I love you and please don’t take offense to this, but I just don’t need you as much anymore,” explains Schlegel, in a black jumpsuit, green liner on her eyes, when we meet at her blonde brick home in downtown Metairie.

“And so that hurt.”

But she quickly got over it and immediately started working on her campaign. Even though the licensed sex addiction therapist and pro-life Republican faced a tough race against Eddie Connick, the scion of a storied New Orleans political family and cousin of singer Harry Connick Jr., his pedigree did not help his chances. Nor did a campaign flyer that read, “Sending a social worker to the legislature would be like washing money down the drain.”

His gambit landed with about as much grace as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”

“Social workers from my district contacted me and were like, ‘How can I help you?’ ” explains Schlegel, 44.

In April 2021, Schlegel won the seat with 52 percent of the vote, and immediately planned to address the usual concerns of the 45,000 residents in her district, such as crime and education. But a few months after she took office in May 2021, she decided on a different agenda: taking on online porn.

What she has since achieved—after two years in office—has made international news. Not only has Schlegel curbed the billion-dollar online porn industry for the first time in history, forcing websites to protect kids in Louisiana and pull out of at least three U.S. states, she has offered a legislative blueprint for others across the country.

“I am truly humbled to see that we began a movement that has swept the country and began a long overdue conversation about how we can protect kids from hardcore pornography,” she says.


Schlegel’s crusade started back in December 2021. She had listened to The Howard Stern Show and 21-year-old pop sensation Billie Eilish talking about online porn. Eilish told Stern that she began watching “abusive” images at the age of 11, and that this had warped her sense of how to behave during sex and what women’s bodies look like.

“No vagina looks like this,” Eilish told Stern. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

Schlegel was struck by Eilish’s openness, that she was “just a young girl being vulnerable enough to share those details with the world.”

The singer’s story also chimed with Schlegel’s professional experience both as a sex addiction therapist and a court-appointed special advocate for abused and neglected children in the foster care system. She knew the issues facing young clients raised on unlimited free online porn—the decoupling of intimacy from sex; the inability to get aroused without porn playing in the background; a warped idea of what your partner actually wants.

“If you’ve never had your first kiss but you’ve seen hardcore pornography, it’s going to mold the way you view sexuality,” Schlegel said. “You’re not dealing with a fully formed adult brain that's like, ‘Oh, so I shouldn’t strangle my partner?’ ”

If Schlegel understood the damage pornography causes, she also knew how easy it is for children to access it. And she realized that now she was a state legislator, she was uniquely positioned to do something about it.

She soon settled on the idea of legislation that, if passed, would require porn sites to confirm their customers were 18 or older before they could click through to their content.

“You can’t be 10 years old and go into Mr. Binky’s—that’s an adult bookstore in my district,” she says. “This is public policy we’ve accepted across the board in brick-and-mortar stores, but we’ve just been giving a pass to the internet.”

While Schlegel attends a nondenominational Christian church and describes her faith as “very important to me,” she had no desire to impose her morality on others over the age of eighteen. “Adults have rights, so I get it,” she says, explaining that all she wanted was to craft a bill making it harder for kids to access videos like “I Invite My Stepsister to Take a Bath to Fuck Her Hard and Cum in Her Ass.”


Opponents to Schlegel’s law claim it stifles free speech. “I think the porn industry’s way to fearmonger is to say, ‘Well, now you adults aren’t going to be able to access it,’ ” she says.
Within days of hearing Eilish’s story, Schlegel contacted Dr. Gail Dines, a sociologist and anti-porn scholar whose 2015 TEDx Talk, Growing Up in a Pornified Culture, captured Schlegel’s concerns. The two women made strange bedfellows—Dines self-identifies as a “progressive, Jewish, pro-sex feminist who believes in free speech”—but they agreed the porn industry had gone too far, and something had to be done to stop it.

Both Dines and Schlegel were frustrated by the way that porn had seized the narrative, convincing the public that any regulation of their content was a death blow to free speech.

“I think the porn industry’s way to fearmonger is to say, ‘Well, now you adults aren’t going to be able to access it,’ ” says Schlegel.

At Schlegel’s request, Dines delivered a webinar to the bipartisan Louisiana Legislative Women’s Caucus in January 2022. Among its most jarring findings is that minors who view pornography are more likely to believe women enjoy being raped.

“People were shocked at Dr. Dines’ research and the type of pornography that kids can access on the internet and how it impacts them,” says Schlegel. “You could see from their follow-up questions that they’d had no idea and that many were appalled.” After the session, lawmakers were eager to offer Schlegel whatever support she needed. “I had even some of my Democratic colleagues saying, ‘How can we help you push this?’ ” she says.

Meanwhile, Schlegel began researching legal precedent. She was looking for a sweet spot where a law would limit minors’ access to pornography without being struck down as unconstitutional. She says she got in touch “with constitutional lawyers, people who can take a look at my ideas and the language and ask, ‘Could this pass constitutional muster?’ ”

There was also the technical question of how exactly to verify someone’s age online. During the pandemic, an electronic age verification system, called LA Wallet, had been authorized to accept digital driver’s licenses and ID cards as legitimate forms of identification in Louisiana. After getting assurances that LA Wallet could provide the technology to “verify someone’s age without giving any other identifying information,” Schlegel crafted Louisiana House Bill 142.

The legislation requires online publishers of porn sites to require age verification, via an LA Wallet program called VerifyYou Pro, Anonymous edition, that users are over 18.

By February, Schlegel had introduced the legislation in the lower chamber. HB-142 sailed through the Louisiana House (96–1) and State Senate (34–0) in June 2022. And when the law went into effect this past January, Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site, lost 80 percent of its traffic in Louisiana.

Soon after, two dozen states proposed copycat policies; Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas have now all passed similar legislation. This summer, Pornhub chose to pull out of Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia entirely rather than comply with the new age verification requirements.

Visitors in those states are now greeted with a video of a fully clothed Cherie DeVille, star of the films MILFs Like It Big and Slut Inspection, urging users who support internet freedoms to contact their state representatives. Pornhub further cited in a July 2023 statement that the laws “jeopardize user safety and privacy” and encouraged “all members of our community to stand up for your freedom to enjoy and consume porn privately.”

The Free Speech Coalition, which represents the porn industry, has filed lawsuits in several states, arguing age verification laws are “ineffective, unconstitutional, and dangerous.” U.S. District Judge David Ezra recently agreed, calling Texas’s law “constitutionally problematic because it deters adults’ access to legal sexually explicit material, far beyond the interest of protecting minors.” As of September 19, a three-judge panel in Texas reversed the earlier decision and, for now, is allowing the law to stand.

Opponents of age verification say these laws are an overreaction, that publishers are being forced to wall off their sites on the off chance the content might harm a child. As well as First Amendment objections, anti-censorship advocates worry about privacy. They note, for example, that every driver’s license in Louisiana was recently exposed to cyberattack.

Schlegel says she understands some of her critics’ concerns, but believes the law is “100 percent not unduly burdensome to adults. . . . If you go on Pornhub’s site in Louisiana, the [age verification] process takes less than a minute for you to get unlimited [access to] whatever pornography you want to look at.”

Meanwhile, Schlegel is thrilled that an idea she had while listening to the radio has had such a widespread effect across the nation.

“Getting HB-142 passed and signed by the governor felt amazing,” says Schlegel. “While it may sound cliché, I ran for office to make a difference, especially when it comes to kids.”


In August, Schlegel got a second law passed, which heavily enforces the first. “How can you sit back and do nothing? That wasn’t an option for me.”
Over a lunch of po’boys and onion rings, Scott Schlegel explains the challenges he and his wife have faced. “I mean look, we’ve been together since we were 17 years old, we support each other,” says the district court judge for Jefferson County.

There was the time she nearly died in childbirth the week of Hurricane Katrina. Freshly out of the hospital with their newborn son, the couple drove out of New Orleans just before the storm hit.

“I just felt so bad Scott had to board up the house by himself,” says Schlegel.

There was also Schlegel leaving a 10-year career as a pharmaceutical rep in 2011 to get a master’s in marriage counseling, a decision partly inspired by the Bible study class she led, after which women would stay to talk about their relationships. “I want to be a marriage counselor and help marriages,” Schlegel recalls telling herself during her training. “I just didn’t want to do addiction, and then lo and behold, I’m doing addiction work.”

This happened because her second-ever client, while Schlegel was doing her training at Catholic Counseling Services, told her he was a sex addict whose problem had started with online porn.

“This was something I wasn’t familiar with,” she says. She realized that by helping people with their sex lives, including porn addiction, “I’d still be helping marriages, because a lot of people come in with that, and it’s really working on betrayal, too.”

Schlegel started work as a licensed professional counselor in 2016, and in 2021 got her master’s of arts in marriage and family counseling from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. She still practices—a sensible move, given that Louisiana representatives earn just $16,800 a year. While her opponents complain about the burden HB-142 places on visitors to porn sites, Schlegel is the one helping her clients sort through the wreckage caused by underage porn addiction.

“When you see the naked form, you get aroused. I think that’s very natural,” she says. “But what pornography presents I don’t think is natural, or at least a majority of it. Most of it is very aggressive when it comes to the woman. I think a lot of pornography is violence masquerading as sex. . . . I have seen people lose it when we talk about the addictive quality. Despite the consequences—broken marriages, lost jobs—it’s still a hard behavior to quit.”

With her age-verification legislation in the books, Schlegel also passed bills addressing crime and education during her first term. But she soon returned to her commitment to building a wall between kids and what she calls “the pornoverse.”

“In order to do better enforcement, I passed a second law, HB-77,” she says. “If you’re not complying with the [first] law, then our AG can bring a lawsuit.” That law went into effect in August.

In order to convince the legislature the second bill was needed, she first went onto one of the porn sites flouting HB-142 and copied down the titles of videos on the landing page.

“Fifty little thumbnails that any 10-year-old can see,” she tells me, while opening a manila envelope marked, “Please Be Advised Before Opening: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.” Inside is a list of the titles she saw, which she distributed to lawmakers and which she now reads aloud.

“Daddy, please don’t come inside of me, I AM your daughter.” “Teenage bitch doesn’t know I’m fucking her.” “Ebony Miles loves white man cum to swallow.” “Did our stepdad fuck us last night?” “Sexy stepsis and friend tag team 3 big cocks.” “Intense ass pegging after he cums. . . ”

She looks up at me. “I mean, I don’t know if you want me to continue.”

Of the pushback from the porn industry, Schlegel says: “They’re obviously fighting this because they don’t want to be regulated, of course; who wants to be regulated? But they haven’t been, and I think that’s why they’re so irresponsible, whether it’s to women or to children. And so yeah, it’s going to be a fight.”

Schlegel herself will be continuing, not only with her political career—she plans to run for reelection in 2024—but with her movement to protect children from pornography. She appreciates that there will be lawsuits, and that people do not want their data mined. But she’s not buying the idea that what she sees as a minimum of safeguards will be the end of internet freedom as we know it.

“Once you understand the gravity of this issue and realize what kinds of hardcore porn young kids freely are seeing online and how it is impacting them, how can you sit back and do nothing?” she asks. “That wasn’t an option for me. And hopefully doing nothing is not an option for the country going forward.”

Schlegel slips the list of obscene titles back in the envelope. “This is the beginning conversation,” she says. “It’s not the end for me.”


Nancy Rommelmann is the co-host of the podcast Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em and writes the Substack Make More Pie. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @NancyRomm. And read 16-year-old Isabel Hogben’s Free Press essay “I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway.”

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Watching Girls Die Online
Female starvation as spectacle has a very long history. But now ‘thinfluencers’ have millions of followers.
HADLEY FREEMAN
SEP 19
GUEST POST
READ IN APP
(Photo illustration by The Free Press/ Getty)
When raw food influencer Zhanna Samsonova died in July at the age of 39, after reportedly eating only fruit for the past seven years, she was just the latest person to join a tragic club: anorexic influencers who have starved themselves to death in public. Other recent examples include Amy Ellis earlier this year, who had 140K followers on TikTok, and Josi Maria in 2020, who had 138K followers on Instagram. There was also Kylie Jaye, a so-called fitness guru who died a few weeks before her birthday, and Nikki Grahame, a reality TV star, who was found dead the following month in her London flat in April 2021.

The rate of mortality in this depressing segment of the influencer business is shocking, but inevitable. Anorexia—an illness that disproportionately affects girls and women—is often dismissed as a silly problem silly girls get from looking at too many photos of fashion models, but in fact it has the highest rate of mortality of any mental illness.

Eugenia Cooney, with 689K Instagram followers, is easily the best-known anorexia influencer today. In photos and videos taken by her mother, Cooney poses in costumes—Cowgirl Barbie, Hawaiian princess—that show her skeletal body to maximum effect. Inevitably, the skinnier she becomes, the greater reaction she receives on social media.

I suffered from anorexia in the ’90s, long before most social media influencers were born. Like most anorexics, I developed the illness in adolescence, and I was hospitalized nine times, for nearly three years in total. It took me 30 years before I felt I had enough perspective on my experience to write a book about it, and one of the most common questions I’ve been asked since it came out last spring is, “How do you think you’d have been affected by social media if it had been around when you were ill?”

Instagram didn’t exist then, but the fashion industry did. Kate Moss and her slivers of hip bones were widely blamed by politicians and the media for planting an unhealthy goal in so many girls’ heads. I remember hearing about this on the TV news during my first hospitalization and feeling completely mystified. I was 14 at that point and had never looked at a fashion magazine in my life; I hadn’t even heard of Kate Moss.

Growing up, I had heard of anorexia, as I loved listening to my parents’ Carpenters records as a kid, and I was dimly aware of the illness being the cause of Karen Carpenter’s death. Still, I was not trying to copy her any more than I was trying to look like a model. I simply had a fear of growing up and becoming a woman and I didn’t feel ready to separate from my mother. But in between hospital stays, when I was back home, I would fixate on the thin models in fashion magazines and in music videos on TV, because they seemed to validate my anorexic mindset: being perfect means being thin.

So, I can’t say Kate Moss staring blankly from a glossy magazine helped my perception of what a healthy woman looked like—just like the “thinspo” accounts on Instagram can’t be good for young girls today—but neither one even slightly accounts for the prevalence of anorexia. International rates of anorexia generally hold steady, although the number of American teen girls who were hospitalized for it doubled over the pandemic.

Instagram says it bans any account that “promotes, encourages, and glorifies eating disorders”—otherwise known as “pro-ana” accounts, as in “pro-anorexia.” But this is either ludicrously disingenuous or dangerously naive. Many anorexics deny they have anorexia. Since it’s a mental illness, a lack of self-awareness generally comes with the territory. So in late April, when Samsonova showed her 38.4K followers a plate of heartbreakingly tiny “plant-based dumplings with sunflower seeds pâte,” just four months before her death, she likely wasn’t consciously encouraging anorexia. Rather, she was, as she repeatedly wrote in her captions, promoting what she insisted was a healthy way of eating. The line between a “raw food influencer,” as she described herself, and an anorexic one is, well, painfully thin.

Vegetarianism and veganism are not eating disorders. They are, however, great ways to exclude major food groups in a socially permissible way. Like many anorexics, I was first a vegetarian, and I look back on that now as a gateway drug to the disorder. It taught me from a young age to divide foods between those that were permissible and those that weren’t. Rather than seeing eating as a pleasure, it became an identity, and a moralistic one: was I a good person who conscientiously ate good foods? Or a slovenly one who unthinkingly ate bad ones?

Cooney clearly wants people to see how thin she is, although her supporters insist she isn’t encouraging others to look like her. “She is not endorsing a way of life, she is just showing hers,” is a typical comment. Josi Maria was more typical of today’s anorexia influencer, in that she claimed she wasn’t showing off how thin she was; rather, she was “charting her recovery”—a recovery that required her to post regular photos of her wasted body in a bikini or workout clothes. My guess is that these women, like a lot of anorexics, have dual awareness, both that they are thin and proud of it, and that they still want to be thinner. When I was at my worst, I took photos of myself naked in front of a mirror with my disposable camera—the analog version of a selfie. I didn’t show my photos to other people; they were just my private trophies. This secretive, more furtive way of glorying in one’s illness is very common among anorexics. It’s just that the ones who show their bodies—like Cooney—are more visible.

When people talk about Instagram accounts that fetishize anorexia, they tend to focus on the anorexic herself. Look at how thin she is, and look at how she’s encouraging others to be sick, they huff, as though one can reasonably attribute malice or even motivation to someone so ill.

But it’s the followers who are more culpable, the people who sign up to watch these young women sicken and die right in front of them. For a lot of people, there is something thrilling in watching a woman waste away, maybe because it seems like the ultimate expression of female self-denial, a feminine helplessness, a sexless kind of self-published pornography.

Female starvation as spectacle has a very long history. Women in the early to late Middle Ages who starved themselves were later worshipped as saints, such as Wilgefortis (meaning strong virgin), Rose of Lima, Orsola Giuliani (known as Saint Veronica Giuliani), and probably most famously, Catherine of Siena. Almost all of these young women stopped eating when their parents were arranging their marriages. Catherine of Siena’s parents were hoping she might marry the widower of Catherine’s adored older sister, who died in childbirth. Catherine was less than thrilled at this idea and starved herself until any thoughts of marriage were moot. After she died in 1380 at the age of 33, her worshippers left offerings of food at her shrine. Even in death people were still nagging her to eat something.

The self-denial of Catherine—and the others—was seen as akin to holiness. While it’s tricky to compare eighth- to fifteenth-century women with twenty-first-century ones, the phenomenon of girls and women starving themselves has existed for millennia. And even if Catherine of Siena and Zhanna Samsonova were not classified as suffering from the same syndrome, they both learned that a woman not eating is an effective way for her to seize control when she feels otherwise powerless. All the saints listed above stopped eating at the time their parents were urging them to get married. I paused time by starving and arresting my puberty.

Anorexia gave me nothing. All it did was take away my teens and twenties. But for the medieval girls, it gave them enormous power. Like today’s anorexia influencers, these once-anonymous girls accrued followers, clout, and fame. Today’s influencers go one step further—seizing control of their image on social media, ensuring that they are entirely defined by their skinniness, frozen forever in their photos as young, sick, and popular.

I left the hospital for the last time in 1995, when I was 16 years old. I had spent almost three years in psychiatric institutions where my every bite was monitored. Then—save for two therapy appointments a week—I was on my own. I rejoined the education system and, at my therapist’s wise suggestion, went to a new school where no one knew me. I told no one that I’d been in the hospital, because I no longer wanted to be locked into that identity, with people always watching what I ate. I even changed my name. I was given a chance to start over, and it saved me.

What hope is there for anorexic influencers, whose past is always on the internet, and who know their appeal depends on them being ill? There have always been, and sadly, probably always will be girls and women suffering from anorexia. The truly sad part is that they now attract millions of followers.
Hadley Freeman is the author of Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @HadleyFreeman.

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https://truthpress.com/news/the-real-data-behind-the-new-covid-vaccines-the-white-house-is-pushing/
The Real Data Behind The New Covid Vaccines The White House Is Pushing
ByTruth PressPublished11 hours ago
What if I told you one in 50 people who took a new medication had a “medically attended adverse event” and the manufacturer refused to disclose what exactly the complication was — would you take it?

And what if the theoretical benefit was only transient, lasting about three months, after which your susceptibility goes back to baseline?

And what if we told you the Food and Drug Administration cleared it without any human-outcomes data and European regulators are not universally recommending it as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is?

That’s what we know about the new COVID vaccine the Biden administration is firmly recommending for every American 6 months old and up.

The push is so hard that former White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha and CDC head Mandy Cohen are making unsupported claims the new vaccine reduces hospitalizations. long COVID and the likelihood you will spread COVID.

None of those claims has a shred of scientific support.

In fact, if the manufacturers said that, they could be fined for making false marketing claims beyond an FDA-approved indication.

The questions surrounding Moderna’s new COVID vaccine approved this week are still looming.

Pfizer’s version, approved this week as well, also has zero efficacy data and has not been tested on humans at all. We only have data about antibody production from 10 mice.

The FDA, or Moderna (frankly, it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes), should disclose what happened to the patient who took the new vaccine and had a complication that required medical attention.

The public has a right to know.

The last time the Biden administration approved and recommended a novel COVID bivalent booster, last fall, with no human-outcomes data, it was an epic fail.

Only 17% of Americans took it (and some of those were forced to do so by their employer or school).

Not foreseeing such weak public support for the booster last year, the Biden administration had prepaid pharma $4.9 billion for 171 million doses — many of which were tossed in the wastebasket.

Now it is making the same mistake.

Two weeks ago, the Biden administration upped its orders for the pediatric version of the new COVID vaccines from 14.5 million doses at $1.3 billion to 20 million doses for $1.7 billion, which is more than four times as many pediatric doses as were used last year.

There clearly seems to be a special push this time to give it to children — the same group European regulators are not supporting.

In fact, the original Moderna vaccine was banned in parts of Europe for people under age 30.

European doctors are not alone.

Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine-mandate supporter and FDA adviser from the University of Pennsylvania, told The Atlantic this week that he’s not going to take the new COVID vaccine.

He didn’t take the bivalent booster last fall either, despite being 72 years old.

While he disagreed with Jha on the booster, he recently confessed, “Yes, he was wrong, but you know you can’t say that exactly.”

Yes, you can.

America is tired of political apologists as medical experts. They want the truth.

Offit is at least more honest than most experts who put their heads in the sand and parroted whatever public health officials said.

Pfizer made $100 billion during the pandemic. It can afford to fund a randomized trial to demonstrate to the American people the new booster is effective.

That’s the scientific process.

Unlike influenza, COVID-19 is constantly circulating, so there is ample opportunity to run a trial; indeed, Moderna already ran a randomized trial.

Its trial of just 50 people began four months ago and oddly only reported 14-day side effects.

Why didn’t it enroll more people in its trial? Why didn’t it report three-month effectiveness and do a proper trial?

Conducting a placebo-controlled trial in people during this time would not only yield useful information; it would enable further study of those subjects three and six months from now, when a winter surge may occur.

Let’s be honest: Follow-up studies of COVID vaccines in general have revealed a disappointing truth — mild efficacy against infection is transient, lasting just a few months.

Perhaps Pfizer and Moderna knew the FDA regulatory process was greased for them and they didn’t have to.

It’s time for the FDA to resume its role as a regulator and not the marketing department for Pfizer and Moderna.

It is possible a new booster may help downgrade the severity of COVID infection for select high-risk populations, but that’s all the more reason a proper clinical trial is needed.

It’s also worth noting the CDC’s new recommendation ignores natural immunity, which means many schools will do the same.

A February Lancet review of 65 studies concluded natural immunity is at least as good as vaccinated immunity and probably better.

So if a college student had COVID a few months ago, the CDC wants him or her to get the new shot anyway, but the correct scientific answer is the risks are expected to outweigh the benefit.

Supporters of pushing the novel COVID boosters point to the annual flu-shot approval process, which does not require a randomized trial.

But COVID vaccines are very different from flu vaccines.

COVID vaccines have higher complication rates, including severe and life-threatening cardiac reactions. Flu shots have a 50-plus-year safety record whereas COVID vaccines have been associated with a serious adverse event rate of one in 5,000 doses, according to a German study by the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut.

Another study, published last year in the medical journal Vaccine, estimated the rate of serious adverse events to be as high as one in 556 COVID vaccine recipients.

And for young people, the incidence of myocarditis is six to 28 times higher after the vaccine than after infection, even for females, according to a 2022 JAMA Cardiology study.

That’s one of the reasons a study that we and several national colleagues published last year found that college booster mandates appear to have resulted in a net public health harm.

Finally, at a molecular level, some scientists are concerned about what is called immune imprinting and additional ways multiple booster doses can weaken the immune system.

A study published last year in the journal Science described a reduced immune response among people infected who then received three COVID vaccine doses.

If public health officials get their way, a healthy 5-year-old boy will get 72 COVID vaccine shots over the course of his lifetime, if he has an average lifespan, with a risk of myocarditis after each one.

Inexplicably and defying science, the CDC is saying even if a child had COVID three weeks ago, he or she should still get the new COVID shot.

Two of the FDA’s best vaccine experts are gone. Dr. Marion Gruber, who was director of the FDA’s vaccine office, and her deputy director, Dr. Philip Krause, both quit the agency in 2021 in protest over political pressure to authorize vaccine boosters for young people.

Ever since the loss of these two vaccine experts, the agency’s vaccine authorizations have been consistent with an overly cozy relationship between pharma and the White House.

Pushing a new COVID vaccine without human-outcomes data makes a mockery of the scientific method and our regulatory process.

In fact, why have an FDA if White House doctors can simply declare a drug to be safe after discussing secret data in private meetings with pharma?

If public health officials don’t want a repeat disappointing turnout of Americans who get the COVID booster shot, they should require a proper clinical trial to show the American people the benefit.

Public health leaders cannot afford to squander any more credibility and money on interventions with no scientific support.

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Why the Murder of Mahsa Amini Could Lead to Revolution
One year after the killing of a young woman in police custody, Iranians—rich and poor, male and female—refuse to give up the fight, writes Masih Alinejad.
MASIH ALINEJAD
SEP 16
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GUEST POST






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An unveiled woman stands with thousands of protesters headed toward Aichi cemetery in Mahsa Amini’s hometown of Saqqez to mark 40 days since her death. (Photo via UGC/AFP/Getty Images)
Last year, Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old woman from the town of Saqqez in northwestern Iran, came to visit family in Tehran—a stranger in a strange land.

On September 13, she was exiting a subway station with her brother when she was stopped by the morality police for wearing an “inappropriate hijab.” It’s unclear what she was actually wearing that day—her mother says it was a “long, loose robe”—but she was locked up and beaten for this so-called crime.

Three days later, on September 16, Mahsa Amini was dead.

At first, photographs circulated showing her lying in a coma in a hospital bed with tubes in her mouth and nose. Security forces claimed that Mahsa had suddenly collapsed in detention and suffered a heart attack.

But a doctor from the hospital told me via encrypted message that Mahsa had died before she ever arrived. Leaked medical scans revealed that her skull had been fractured. The hospital photos, it turned out, were part of a regime cover-up—a fact that spread like wildfire throughout the country thanks to the reporting of fearless Iranian journalists.

As I looked at her face in that hospital bed, I could not stop thinking that I could have been Mahsa Amini.

Mahsa and I both grew up in small provinces, and I remember how lost I felt the first time I visited Tehran, a city of 9 million people. I was 18 in 1994 when I was arrested for producing leaflets calling for greater dissent in Iran. I was held in prison and questioned for weeks before being released to my family. Later, I became a newspaper reporter in Tehran, but in 2009, I left my country for good after my stories displeased the regime too many times.

Eventually I moved to the United States, hoping to secure safety for me and my family. But the arm of the Iranian regime is long. Two years ago, brutes of the Islamic Republic tried to assassinate me at my home in Brooklyn.

I have since lived in more than two dozen safe houses, trying to outrun an Iranian regime hell-bent on seeing me dead. According to the White House, there have been 31 credible threats against my life on U.S. soil over the past year alone.

But I refuse to remain silent about the evils of my country’s regime, especially to women. I saw the death of Mahsa—who had just been accepted to university, with dreams of becoming a lawyer—as the stand-in for all Iranian women.

I was not alone in what I saw. On September 17, at Mahsa’s funeral in Saqqez, distraught citizens—mostly women but also many men—swarmed the streets, shouting “Death to the dictator.” Some women burned their headscarves.

One day after her funeral, I gave my first interview about Mahsa’s murder on Iran International TV, the biggest diaspora station. I could not control my tongue. I called upon the people of Iran to up the ante: to come out into the streets in greater numbers, to burn the morality police vans, to make their voices heard. To stop at nothing to get justice for Mahsa. The interviewer stopped me in my tracks and said she couldn’t air such inflammatory remarks.

But the anger that had festered for over four decades of clerical rule had already exploded.

Over the following months, protesters—from the affluent residents of north Tehran to the poor ones from the south side—took to the streets. They dyed fountains blood-red and threw rocks and even Molotov cocktails at police stations. Women discarded and burned their hijabs or cut their hair in public. Others knocked the turbans off the heads of Iranian clerics on the streets and ran away, in protest against the misogyny of the regime. At the World Cup in December, the men of our soccer team refused to sing the Iranian national anthem. Men now bravely stood in solidarity with women at one of the biggest television events in human history.

The regime sent in troops to crush the revolt. During the crackdown, more than 500 protesters have been killed, a quarter of them women. Another 20,000 have been jailed. At least seven were executed after brief show trials. UN experts estimate that at least 5,000 children have been poisoned in what they describe as “targeted chemical attacks against girls’ schools” that have been reported in “91 schools located in 20 provinces across Iran.”


People across the Islamic world, like this crowd in Istanbul, have united against the Iranian regime, demanding justice for Mahsa Amini. (Ozan Kose via Getty Images)
No one can predict how or when revolutions start. The Arab Spring was ignited when a fruit seller set himself on fire. Could the injustice of Mahsa’s death be the spark of a revolution?

I believe it with all my heart.

One year after Mahsa’s killing, women continue to defy the regime’s compulsory hijab laws even though it could get them imprisoned or killed.

Take the case of Zeinab Kazemi, who removed her hijab in February at an engineers’ gathering in Tehran. This month she was sentenced to 74 lashes. After she was sentenced, she wrote on Instagram, “I have never regretted raising my voice for justice and against oppression, and I still don’t.”

Iranian journalist Nazila Maroufian was thrown in jail for interviewing Mahsa Amini’s father last year. After she was released, she posted a photo of herself without a headscarf and the message, “Don’t accept slavery, you deserve the best!” She is currently detained in an Iranian jail, and is now on a hunger strike, in protest against the sexual assault she has reportedly endured behind bars.

Then there’s 18-year-old revolutionary Asal Jazideh, who was shot in the eye when she tried to help her mother as she was being arrested by Iranian security forces. One year later, Asal broke her silence from exile, declaring, “I endured pain, mentally and emotionally, but my belief in the #WomanLifeFreedom revolution and its people remains unbroken.”

American women should say their names. They should make Zeinab and Nazila and Asal as famous as Mahsa herself.

The United States also should stay true to its founding ideals and stop giving money to—and conducting business with—a country that opposes freedom and human rights. Democracy everywhere is endangered when religious dictatorships are allowed to act with impunity.

Many American lawmakers understand this. Just this week, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan measure limiting Iran’s ability to import or export weapons. Sadly, the Biden administration is moving in the opposite direction. On September 13, the White House announced a deal offering $6 billion in return for U.S. citizens held in Iranian prisons.

Biden’s people have promised that any money released to Iran will be given only to U.S.-approved third-party vendors for food and medicine. But this is deeply delusional. It will only go toward subsidizing terrorist activity or get lost in a deeply corrupt system.

You simply can’t make deals with terrorists.

Meanwhile, in Iran, the flame of the revolution still burns strong. That’s why security forces are braced for protests today, on the one-year anniversary date of Mahsa Amini’s death.

And when I look back at videos from last year’s protests, of unarmed women and men, walking arm in arm toward armed morality police guards, laying down their lives in pursuit of freedom and dignity—I know we will not stop until we defeat them.


Masih Alinejad is an Iranian American journalist, women’s rights campaigner, and best-selling author of The Wind in My Hair. Follow her on Twitter (now X) @AlinejadMasih, or on Instagram @masih.alinejad. And click below to hear Masih on Honestly speaking about the seismic effects of Mahsa Amini’s death.

Free Press
TGIF
Biden’s gaffe-tastic week: Our elder-abused president found himself onstage in Vietnam giving a press conference about upgrading the country’s diplomatic ties when he started rambling. I swear to god, these are the words that came out of his mouth: “The Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, ‘He’s a lying, dog-faced pony soldier!’ Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about global warming.” As the ramble continued, he said: “Remember the famous song, ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’?” Then he said he was gonna go to bed, and then went on to something about the “Third World,” then corrected himself because we don’t say Third World, it’s the Southern Hemisphere. Suddenly a voice comes on overhead: “Thank you, everyone. This ends the press conference.” Jazz immediately starts playing, loudly. Biden tries to answer another question, but they’ve cut his mic.

Upon his return to the U.S., President Biden gave a speech on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which he falsely claimed that he was at the World Trade Center the day after the attacks. He said: “I join you on this solemn day to renew our sacred vow: never forget. Never forget. We never forget. Each of us—each of those precious lives stolen too soon when evil attacked. Ground Zero in New York—I remember standing there the next day, and looking at the building.” Fact checks like this, to me, aren’t a huge deal (I always remember myself as the hero of situations; if I drive past a car crash, I sort of think I probably also saved a baby from the car, and the best thanks is to LIVE, goddammit!). But technically speaking, Biden didn’t go to Ground Zero the next day. He went more than a week later. Even CNN fact-checked that one.

→ Fun to give Vivek a hard time: I’m not sure why, but it’s very fun to find wacky stuff Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says, likely because he’s willing to say a lot of crazy things. This week’s gem: “Had dinner with @JakePaul on Sunday. He changed my mind and convinced me to join TikTok. . . . It’s bad when the CCP collects data from U.S. users via TikTok, but the truth is it’s no better when ‘American’ companies like Airbnb do the same thing by handing over U.S. user data to China.”

Where to begin? I guess if you want to be president of the United States of America, you should think America’s interests come first. So if a Chinese company spies on American citizens just like America does, maybe that’s equal on some cosmic moral level, maybe equal under the eyes of God, but if you are the President of these United States, China spying is much, much worse. As my favorite, Matt Yglesias, says: “I miss the days when only wild-eyed leftists would say stuff this dumb.” With the Republican primary in full swing, we are honored and excited to continue to bring you the craziest nuggets, which was probably also what was on the menu at the Vivek–Jake Paul dinner.

→ Smoking gun: In another historic first for the Biden administration, the president’s son has been indicted on three federal criminal counts relating to gun possession. As you’ll remember, Hunter had an absolutely squeaky-clean, not at all dicey plea deal ready to go, but that fell apart in July. Thursday’s indictment is an about-face from special counsel David Weiss, and it means we face the prospect of yet another high-profile, politically relevant court trial between now and Election Day 2024. It also means that the president’s son faces up to a combined 25 years behind bars.

Hunter’s alleged crime—that he lied about his drug use on a form he filled out when buying a gun—set up the strange prospect of a Democratic president’s son leaning on the Second Amendment to stay out of jail. But don’t expect the NRA to rally to his defense. “Laws should be applied equally against all criminals,” NRA spokesperson Billy McLaughlin told Politico.

All that matters, of course, after justice being served equally, yadda yadda, is that Hunter gets in on the prison yard friendship forged between Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewife Jen Shah.

→ Our friends in the CIA would never do that: A CIA whistleblower claims the agency paid agents to say Covid came from a wet market...

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