THE FREE PRESS

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more
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
∙
GUEST POST






READ IN APP


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...

Subscribe to The Free Press to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of The Free Press to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-fought-government-censorship-and-won?utm_campaign=email-post&r=1zm6gm&utm_source=substack
The Government Censored Me and Other Scientists. We Fought Back—and Won.
Last week, a federal appeals court confirmed that science cannot function without free speech. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya reflects on a victory for himself—and every American.
JAY BHATTACHARYA
SEP 11
GUEST POST

The Biden administration threatened social media platforms with regulation unless they censored health information that conflicted with government messaging. (Photo by Tom Brenner via Getty Images)
When I was four, my mother took her first flight and first trip out of her native India to the U.S. with me and my younger brother in tow. We were going to meet my father, an electrical engineer and rocket scientist by training, who had won the U.S. visa lottery in 1970. He had moved to New York a year earlier. By the time we arrived he was working at McDonald’s because engineering jobs had dried up during a recession.

Both of my parents—children of the violent partition of India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)—had grown up in poverty, my mother in a Calcutta slum. They immigrated to this country because they believed in the American dream. That belief led to the success my father ultimately found as an engineer and my mother found running a family daycare business.

Our family had indeed won the lottery. But coming to America meant something more profound than financial opportunity.

I remember in 1975 when a high court found that then-prime minister of India Indira Gandhi had interfered unlawfully in an election. The ruling disqualified her from holding office. In response, she declared a state of emergency, suspended democracy, censored the opposition press and government critics, and threw her political opponents in jail. I remember the shock of these events and our family’s collective relief that we were in the U.S., where it was unimaginable that such things could happen.

When I was 19, I became an American citizen. It was one of the happiest days of my young life. The immigration officer gave me a civics test, including a question about the First Amendment. It was an easy test because I knew it in my heart. The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target.

Unfortunately, during the pandemic, the American government violated my free speech rights and those of my scientist colleagues for questioning the federal government’s pandemic policies.

My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient.

On Friday, at long last, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that we were not imagining it—that the Biden administration did indeed strong-arm social media companies into doing its bidding. The court found that the Biden White House, the CDC, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, and the FBI “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints.”

The judges described a pattern of government officials making “threats of ‘fundamental reforms’ like regulatory changes and increased enforcement actions” if we did not comply. The implication was clear. To paraphrase Al Capone: Nice company you have there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.

It worked. According to the judges, “the officials’ campaign succeeded. The platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies.”

In exposing this behavior—and in declaring it a likely violation of the First Amendment—the ruling is not just a victory for my fellow scientists and me, but for every single American.


The trouble began on October 4, 2020, when my colleagues and I—Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford—published the Great Barrington Declaration. The Declaration called for an end to economic lockdowns, school shutdowns, and similar restrictive policies on the grounds that they disproportionately harm the young and economically disadvantaged while conferring limited benefits to society as a whole.

The Declaration endorsed a “focused protection” approach that called for strong measures to protect high-risk populations while allowing lower-risk individuals to return to normal life with reasonable precautions. Tens of thousands of doctors and public health scientists signed our statement.

With hindsight, it is clear that this strategy was the right one. Sweden, which in large part eschewed lockdown and, after early problems, embraced focused protection of older populations, had among the lowest age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths than nearly every other country in Europe and suffered none of the learning loss for its elementary school children. Similarly, Florida has seen lower cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths than lockdown-obsessed California since the start of the pandemic.

But at the time, our proposal was viewed by high government officials like Anthony Fauci and some in the Trump White House, including Deborah Birx, then-White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, as a kind of heresy.

Federal officials immediately targeted the Great Barrington Declaration for suppression because it contradicted the government’s preferred response to Covid. Four days after the Declaration’s publication, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, emailed Fauci to organize a “devastating takedown” of it.

Almost immediately, social media companies such as Google/YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook censored mentions of the Declaration.

As The Free Press revealed in its Twitter Files reporting, in 2021 Twitter blacklisted me for posting a link to the Great Barrington Declaration. YouTube censored a video of a public policy roundtable of me with Florida governor Ron DeSantis for the crime of telling him that the scientific evidence for masking children is weak.

I have been a professor researching health policy and infectious disease epidemiology at a world-class university for decades. I am not a political person; I am not registered with either party. In part that is because I want to preserve my total independence as a scientist. I have always viewed my job as telling people honestly about the data issues, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans liked the message.

Yet at the height of the pandemic, I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks. I could not believe this was happening in the country I so love.

In August 2022, my colleagues and I finally had a chance to fight back. The Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general asked me to join as a plaintiff in their case, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, against the Biden administration. The aim of the suit was to end the government's role in this censorship—and restore the free speech rights of all Americans in the digital town square.

Lawyers in the Missouri v. Biden case deposed representatives, under oath, from many federal agencies involved in the censorship efforts, including Anthony Fauci.

Broad discovery of email exchanges between the government and social media companies showed an administration willing to use its regulatory powers against social media companies that did not comply with censorship demands.

The case revealed that a dozen federal agencies—including the CDC, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Biden White House—pressured social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to censor and suppress even true speech contradicting federal pandemic priorities. For instance, in 2021, the White House threatened social media companies with damaging regulatory action unless it censored scientists who shared the demonstrable fact that the Covid vaccines do not prevent people from getting Covid.

True or false, if speech interfered with the government’s priorities, it had to go.

On Independence Day this year, federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in the case, ordering the federal government to immediately stop coercing social media companies to censor protected free speech. In his decision, Justice Doughty compared the administration’s censorship infrastructure to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. His ruling decried the vast federal censorship enterprise that dictated who and what social media companies could publish.

The government appealed, convinced it should have the power to censor scientific speech. An administrative stay followed and lasted much of the summer. But on Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously restored a modified version of the preliminary injunction, telling the government to stop using social media companies to do its censorship dirty work:

Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social media companies’ decision-making processes.

As I read the decision, I was overcome with emotion. I think my father, who died when I was 20, would be proud that I played a role in this. I know my mother is.

That is because the victory is not just for me but for every American who felt the oppressive force of this censorship industrial complex during the pandemic. It is a vindication for parents who advocated for some semblance of normal life for their children but found their Facebook groups suppressed. It is a vindication for vaccine-injured patients who sought the company and counsel of fellow patients online but found themselves gaslit by social media companies and the government into thinking their personal experience of harm was all in their heads.

The decision provides some solace for scientists who had deep reservations about lockdowns but censored themselves for fear of the reputational damage that came with being falsely labeled misinformers. They were not wrong in thinking science wasn’t working right; science simply cannot function without free speech.

The decision isn’t perfect. Some entities at the heart of the government’s censorship enterprise can still organize to suppress speech. For instance, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security can still work with academics to develop a hit list for government censorship. And the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci’s old organization, can still coordinate devastating takedowns of outside scientists critical of government policy.

But the headline is a good one: the federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government.

The Biden administration, which has proven itself to be an enemy of free speech, will surely appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. But I am hopeful that we will win there, just as we have at every venue in this litigation. I am grateful for the resilience of the U.S. Constitution, which has withstood this challenge.

But I can never go back to the uncomplicated faith and naive confidence I had in America when I was young. Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. I have learned the hard way that it is only we, the people, who must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights. Without our vigilance, we will lose them.


Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, is a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches epidemiology and health economics. He is a founding fellow of the Academy for Science and Freedom, a Hillsdale College initiative. He also podcasts at the Illusion of Consensus site. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @DrJBhattacharya.

And to support our mission of independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:

https://www.thefp.com/p/nellie-bowles-tgif-free-the-elders?r=1zm6gm&
TGIF: Free the Elders!
Our feeble leaders. Obama’s ‘gay lover.’ Burning Man flames out. A Dem police defunder turns defender. Plus, a perfectly reasonable solution to NYC’s migrant crisis.
NELLIE BOWLES
SEP 8
A new poll shows that 77 percent of adults think President Joe Biden, aged 80, is too old to serve four more years. (Wiktor Szymanowicz via Getty Images)
Welcome back. Hope you all had a nice vacation. I learned that our daughter loves chewing the ice from a gin and tonic, which I’m sure is not indicative of anything about her mother.

→ You choose between old or crooked: You’ll be shocked to know that a lot of Americans associate Biden with the words old, outdated, aging, and Trump with corrupt, criminal, crooked. And they associate Nellie Bowles with smart, talented, and prettier in person. Weird!

About three-quarters of voters in fact think Biden is too old to run, according to the WSJ, and his support among minority voters continues to erode. How do Republicans do against Biden in a matchup? Biden and Trump are tied neck and neck. But Nikki Haley is beating Biden handily! Haley hive rise up! Now, this poll also says Mike Pence would win, and I know for a fact that only seven people would vote for Mike Pence, so make of it what you will.

Anyway, we all know how the Republican primary will work: all these men and Nikki Haley will fight for months in elaborate televised debates, each dutifully reported on and parsed for meaning, and it won’t matter because Trump’s getting the nom. But just for fun, just to live the lie for a little longer:


→ Is the congressional elder abuse hotline disconnected? Someone help Mitch McConnell. He has experienced a couple of freezing episodes on camera, with the most recent lasting about 30 seconds. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what these are. But I know that America’s elders are being abused right before our eyes. I know that Dianne Feinstein, whose daughter has power of attorney over her legal affairs, should not be a sitting senator. Joe Biden’s speech in Maui, when he finally showed up, was bizarre. There are 115 confirmed dead with more than 100 still missing, a tragedy compounded by disastrous local politicians, and Biden compared it all to his small kitchen fire: “I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, of what it was like to lose a home. Years ago—now 15 years—I was in Washington doing Meet the Press. . . . [L]ightning struck at home on a little lake that’s outside of our home—not a lake, a big pond—and hit a wire and came up underneath our home into the. . . air conditioning ducts. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette, and my cat.”

“Not the ’Vette!” shouted the people who lost homes and loved ones.

If our parents or grandparents acted this way, we would take away the car. Let alone the country.

Even The Guardian is concerned with that speech and Mitch’s freezes, coming out this week with: “Too old to govern? The age problem neither US party wants to talk about.” Oh, I’ll talk about it. Let me into Congress and I will free these elders. I will lead a very slow march straight to bingo and fruit salad. (Which honestly sounds so relaxing.)

→ Tucker’s credulous interview: Tucker Carlson this week brought to his show a man who claims he smoked crack and had gay sex with former president Barack Obama. First of all: I’m pro both legal drugs and gay sex. But more to the point: if you’re going to try to smear Obama with lies, at least find a better liar. Or a liar with teeth.

As the writer Tim Miller put it: “Larry Sinclair had fraud charges in two states, went to jail in three, filed an affidavit 20 years ago saying he couldn’t stand trial because he was terminally ill (seems to be alive now), Colorado records list him with 13 aliases, and he failed a polygraph test over these claims.” Or as Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy said: “I met Larry Sinclair when I was doing my Tucker thing a couple weeks ago. I would trust Anna Delvey before I trusted anything Larry Sinclair said. Top to bottom maybe the least trustworthy human I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

The right beclowns itself with this stuff. And while I always took Tuck with a grain of salt, now I’m not even sure of that. How much had Fox News been holding him back from all this? Last: I’m sorry, but whatever your politics are, we all know that Obama is an attractive man, and if he ever had a boyfriend, the guy would be a 10. ...

Subscribe to The Free Press to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of The Free Press to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-overhyped-climate-change-to-get-published?
I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published
I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.
PATRICK T BROWN
SEP 5
Photo illustration by The Free Press
If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer—from Canada to Europe to Maui—you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.

Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal.”

And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise—Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.

And The New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

And Bloomberg: Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.


The aftermath of the wildfire in western Maui, Hawaii, on August 14, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura via Getty Images)
Why is this happening?

It starts with the fact that a researcher’s career depends on his or her work being cited widely and perceived as important. This triggers the self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs, and of course, accolades.

But as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years—there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s—it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.

In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

Here’s how it works.

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning—or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines—but through policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change—which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions.

This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn’t we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public—or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions.

Here’s a third trick: be sure to focus on metrics that will generate the most eye-popping numbers. Our paper, for instance, could have focused on a simple, intuitive metric like the number of additional acres that burned or the increase in intensity of wildfires because of climate change. Instead, we followed the common practice of looking at the change in risk of an extreme event—in our case, the increased risk of wildfires burning more than 10,000 acres in a single day.

This is a far less intuitive metric that is more difficult to translate into actionable information. So why is this more complicated and less useful kind of metric so common? Because it generally produces larger factors of increase than other calculations. To wit: you get bigger numbers that justify the importance of your work, its rightful place in Nature or Science, and widespread media coverage.

Another way to get the kind of big numbers that will justify the importance of your research—and impress editors, reviewers, and the media—is to always assess the magnitude of climate change over centuries, even if that timescale is irrelevant to the impact you are studying.

For example, it is standard practice to assess impacts on society using the amount of climate change since the industrial revolution, but to ignore technological and societal changes over that time. This makes little sense from a practical standpoint since societal changes in population distribution, infrastructure, behavior, disaster preparedness, etc., have had far more influence on our sensitivity to weather extremes than climate change has since the 1800s. This can be seen, for example, in the precipitous decline in deaths from weather and climate disasters over the last century. Similarly, it is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience that would lessen the impact. Those scenarios always make for good headlines.

A much more useful analysis would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced and then forecasting the foreseeable future—the next several decades—while accounting for changes in technology and resilience.

In the case of my recent Nature paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with anticipated reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades. In fact, our current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires.

This more practical kind of analysis is discouraged, however, because looking at changes in impacts over shorter time periods and including other relevant factors reduces the calculated magnitude of the impact of climate change, and thus it weakens the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions.


Science journals—once considered the gold standard for truth—have succumbed to the confirmation biases of their editors and reviewers. (Astrid Riecken via Getty Images)
You might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not. On the contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for an eminent journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been.

As to why I followed the formula despite my criticisms, the answer is simple: I wanted the research to be published in the highest profile venue possible. When I began the research for this paper in 2020, I was a new assistant professor needing to maximize my prospects for a successful career. When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets. To put it another way, I sacrificed contributing the most valuable knowledge for society in order for the research to be compatible with the confirmation bias of the editors and reviewers of the journals I was targeting.

I left academia over a year ago, partially because I felt the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted. Now, as a member of a private nonprofit research center, The Breakthrough Institute, I feel much less pressure to mold my research to the preferences of prominent journal editors and the rest of the field.

This means conducting the version of the research on wildfires that I believe adds much more practical value for real-world decisions: studying the impacts of climate change over relevant time frames and in the context of other important changes, like the number of fires started by people and the effects of forest management. The research may not generate the same clean story and desired headlines, but it will be more useful in devising climate change strategies.

But climate scientists shouldn’t have to exile themselves from academia to publish the most useful versions of their research. We need a culture change across academia and elite media that allows for a much broader conversation on societal resilience to climate.

The media, for instance, should stop accepting these papers at face value and do some digging on what’s been left out. The editors of the prominent journals need to expand beyond a narrow focus that pushes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish.

What really should matter isn’t citations for the journals, clicks for the media, or career status for the academics—but research that actually helps society.


Patrick Brown is a PhD climate scientist and co-director of the Climate and Energy Team at The Breakthrough Institute. Follow him on Twitter (now X) @PatrickTBrown31. And read Jamie Blackett’s Free Press piece to find out how European farmers are fighting climate change through innovation.

To support our mission of reporting on truths about science, become a Free Press subscriber today:

https://www.thefp.com/p/oliver-anthony-interview-rich-men-north-richmond?
Meet Oliver Anthony: The New Voice of America’s Working Class
Two weeks ago, nobody had heard of ‘Rich Men North of Richmond.’ Now the song is a symbol of forgotten America. The Free Press sits down with the man behind a movement.
RUPA SUBRAMANYA
AUG 28

Oliver Anthony warms up before performing at North Street Press Club in Farmville, Virginia, on August 23. (All photos by Ryan M. Kelly for The Free Press)
Back in 2022, Oliver Anthony started recording his songs because he thought he was going to die, and he didn’t want his music to die with him.

His anxiety and depression had gotten so bad, Anthony told me, that he was suffering from “brain fog, and I was getting chest pains.” It wasn’t any one thing so much as an accumulation of things over many years of working dead-end jobs and feeling increasingly hopeless.

“I was feeling like my body was starting to fall apart, and it got to a point where I was questioning how much longer I’d be able to be around and sing these songs and do this stuff, so I was like, ‘Well, let me just go ahead and start getting everything uploaded, so at least if, God forbid, I die of a heart attack in my thirties, there’s some legacy there,’ ” he said.

Anthony, whose real name is Chris Lunsford, had just wrapped up a set Wednesday at the North Street Press Club, in his hometown of Farmville, Virginia, and he was exhausted but elated as he devoured a burger and fries.

While he ate just a few miles from the camper he calls home and shares with his wife and two children, tens of millions of people around the country tuned in to Fox News to watch the first Republican debate. The first question of the evening featured a clip of Anthony performing “Rich Men North of Richmond.” 

“Why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now?” 

That question—asked by Fox News host and debate moderator Martha MacCallum of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—is why I came to Virginia to meet Anthony. 


Fans watch Anthony perform at North Street Press Club. One told me his song speaks to the fact that “people in this country are waiting for someone to come from the middle with common sense and decency to represent all of us.”
It’s been just shy of three weeks since the 31-year-old singer-songwriter with the bushy, red beard and resonator guitar became a household name. 

That was when a little-known YouTube channel called Radiowv posted a video of Anthony performing “Rich Men North of Richmond” in his yard, and he rocketed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, leapfrogging ahead of Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” and Luke Combs’s cover of “Fast Car.” 

Since then, the video has been viewed more than 44 million times. Several other Anthony songs, including “I Want to Go Home” and “Ain’t Got a Dollar,” have also reeled in tons of listens on U.S. iTunes.

But when I asked Anthony about being catapulted into the first major event in a presidential election cycle, he shrugged. “I’d like to stay out of politics,” he told me. 

And the idea that he has been embraced by the political right baffles him. “If anything,” he said, his music is “more about the right than the left.” 

He added: “I’m singing more about, like, a lot of the older, super conservative politicians that brought us into endless war through my entire childhood.”...

https://www.thefp.com/p/omar-khayyam-edward-fitzgerald-douglas-murray?
Things Worth Remembering: Seize the Day
The words of Persian poet Omar Khayyam—revitalized by a brilliant English translator—remind us to never give up on life.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
AUG 27
GUEST POST
(Ronald Patrick 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 from Edward FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s “The Rubaiyat,” click below:

LISTEN NOW · 3:05
I mentioned earlier how difficult it is to make translations memorable. The translator has to replicate the meter, rhyme, and meaning of the original work, and ordinarily, something has to give.

But there are very rare occasions when the translation is so good it actually supersedes the original, taking it to a wider audience. If there is an argument for anyone having done that, it is probably Edward FitzGerald with his translation of “The Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam.

Khayyam was a Persian polymath who lived between the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The likelihood that he actually authored the numerous quatrains (four-line poems) attributed to him looks increasingly slim—modern scholarship suggests it was written by multiple authors. 

But a number of four-line poems from the period had his name attached to them, and in the 1850s, the poet Edward FitzGerald—working with copies of Khayyam’s works sent to him from India as well as copies at Oxford’s Bodleian Library—set to work translating Khayyam.

There is a tendency nowadays to look down on Orientalists like FitzGerald, but they included remarkable people who learned foreign languages and sometimes rediscovered them as well as their treasures.

Who knows precisely what it was that sparked FitzGerald to create his masterpiece? A 2016 double biography of Khayyam and FitzGerald didn’t offer much help. But then, perhaps, nothing could. 

Most likely, the young FitzGerald saw in these quatrains a way to pour out something he couldn’t dare to put in his own voice. For the originals are not only godless and hedonistic, but positively joyous in their heresy. The main message—apart from praise of wine—is essentially carpe diem: seize the day.

Whoever the original author is, there is no doubt that the quatrains come from a tradition of Sufi literature in Islam best known, perhaps, for the works of Rumi. There too, incidentally, is a poet who is wonderful to read. But Rumi never found a translator like FitzGerald. No one ever did.

And yet when FitzGerald’s translations were first published, they failed to launch. The first privately printed edition of 250 copies, in 1859, didn’t sell a single copy. 

Then, at some point, a copy found its way to the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who in turn passed it to the poet and playwright Algernon Charles Swinburne, and soon the poem’s reputation had gathered steam. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of copies of FitzGerald’s translation had been sold.

Such was the success of the early editions that FitzGerald added further translations to the later ones. Some people—including the editor of the recent Oxford edition of the original text—regard the later editions as “bloated.” I disagree. They include some stanzas that stick most in many heads, including mine.

From the very opening lines of the first edition of FitzGerald’s work, you cannot help but be seized:...

TGIF: Everyone Gets a Mugshot
Trump is busted (but still trusted). Vivek goes MAGA. Plus, neopronouns, Putin’s revenge, and right-wing seed oils.
NELLIE BOWLES
AUG 25
Mugshots of Donald Trump and 11 of the 18 co-defendants involved in Georgia’s election interference case. (via Twitter)
It’s the dog days of summer. This’ll be a short one, and next week we take off to rest and recover. If you need more content, I encourage you to watch this subscriber-only event about autism we did recently with the brilliant Jill Escher. Or check out Olivia Reingold’s report from the GOP debate—“Knives Out for Vivek!” Or the roundtable we just put up on Honestly. Or Abigail Anthony’s piece about Jordan Peterson’s “war.” (We’ve had a great week.)

A confession: I’ve been feeling like these missives are getting a little angry and that I need to reclaim my joy. Which I plan to do in a pool with a glass of rosé and a simple delusion (that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the president now and forever). Come September, as my supreme leader says, I’ll be back. 

→ Mugshots for all: Trump and the whole Georgia election interference crew got mugshots this week. It’s pretty jarring to see it: Trump booked at a jail in Atlanta. The Florida and Georgia indictments seem more legit than the others, and I’m pro-laws and not opposed to a former president being jailed per se, though it is a very banana republic and depressing. 

The fever dream of so many for so many years instantly became Trump’s campaign message Thursday night: “Never surrender,” he blasted out with the mugshot moments after it came online. And you know he practiced the scowl: persecuted yet defiant. With the mug in hand, he’s back on Twitter posting for the first time since 2021, when he was banned from the platform by the previous owners. Expect to see that scowl on t-shirts for a long time, first seriously, then ironically, then seriously again, then one day in 100 years by teenagers who have no idea the meme wars we fought. 
MORE https://www.thefp.com/p/nellie-bowles-tgif-trump-mugshot?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.thefp.com/p/will-hurd-normal-republican-honestly?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Weekend Listening: Can a Moderate Republican Win Over America?
Former congressman Will Hurd calls Trump a ‘loser’ who’ll give Biden four more years. He tells me why he’s the best candidate to restore sanity to the GOP.
BARI WEISS
AUG 19

Former Texas state representative Will Hurd grew up the son of a white mother, and a black father who always said he’s “been a Republican since Lincoln freed us.” (Photo by Scott Olson via Getty Images)
If you’ve been listening to Honestly for the past few months, maybe even since the 2022 midterms, you probably think I sound like something of a broken record when it comes to my advice for politicians today. Again and again, I’ve said the following: elections right now are Republicans’ to lose. Biden’s approval numbers are low—41.2 percent—which is lower than every president at this stage of their term in the last 75 years, with the exception of Jimmy Carter. 

It seems to me that all Republicans need to do is stand still and be normal, and they’d win. Instead, the GOP often seems more focused on Bud Light and Disney than on education, crime and the economy.

So when former Texas congressman Will Hurd announced he was running for president last month, I thought, at long last, a normal Republican candidate. And not just that—one with an impressive pedigree and reputation. The kind of candidate that will set your heart aflutter if you crave a return to sanity and sobriety in our politics.

So. . . why is Hurd polling in last place? Has my advice over the last few months been misguided? Is the Republican Party just too radically transformed at this point for someone like Will Hurd?

Perhaps this is the first time you’re hearing of Hurd, so here’s a bit of an introduction:

Hurd spent nearly a decade as an undercover operative for the CIA in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India during the height of the war on terror. In 2010, he left the agency to start his political career and in 2014, he was elected to Congress, becoming the only black Republican on the House floor. For three consecutive terms, Hurd represented one of Texas’s most sprawling districts—a district that is two-thirds Latino and covers much of the border with Mexico, from San Antonio to El Paso. 

In a profile of Hurd in The Atlantic last year, appropriately titled “Revenge of the Normal Republicans,” reporter Tim Alberta wrote this: Will Hurd knows that “a leader can’t emerge without a movement, and a movement manifests only with the inspiration of a leader. He also knows that some people view him as uniquely qualified to meet this moment: a young, robust, eloquent man of mixed race and complete devotion to country, someone whose life is a testament to nuance and empathy and reconciliation. What Hurd doesn’t know is whether America is ready to buy what he’s selling.” 

So which is it: Are Americans ready to buy what Hurd is selling? Or has that ship simply sailed? I asked Hurd all these questions and more in the latest episode of Honestly, which you can click to listen to here or read an edited excerpt below. See you in the comments. —BW



Meet Will Hurd: The Ex-CIA, Anti-Trump Republican Who Wants To Be President

The Free Press

Episode

Who is Will Hurd?

BW: I want to start with what seems like the origins of your political journey, and that takes us back to 2008 in Afghanistan. Tell us what you were doing there and what happened there that so stuck with you and eventually propelled you into a career in politics? 

WH: I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was the head of the undercover operations at our station in Kabul, Afghanistan. And at 3 a.m. that morning, a bomb went off in front of our embassy, killed some of our local guards, took out a section of our protective wall, and my unit was responsible for trying to figure out what happened. And we conducted a couple dozen operations in a very short period of time. That night, we had a “HPSCI CODEL”—the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Congressional Delegation. These are the people that oversee our intelligence services. I go into this briefing and I overhear one of these members of Congress say, “Is the CIA going to cut this briefing short so we can get to the bazaar to buy rugs?” I’m annoyed, but we get in the briefing and the senior-most person in this group, who had been on the House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence for over six years, asks a question: “Why was Iran not supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan the way Iran was supporting other groups in Iraq?” Now, your sophisticated audience and listeners know that’s a pretty crummy question, but I start explaining the Sunni–Shia divide. And then he raises his hand and he says, “Will, what’s the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?” And I’m thinking, this guy’s getting ready to make a really inappropriate joke, and who am I to deny him this opportunity? And I said, “I don’t know, Congressman, what’s the difference?” And I’m getting ready to go, “bah dum dum dum.” His face goes bright red. Didn’t know that difference in Islam. You know, it’s okay for my big brother to not know that difference because he sells cable in our hometown of San Antonio. But for an individual who is making decisions on sending our brothers and sisters and spouses to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria—unacceptable. And I literally, at that moment, right then and there, I decided to move back to my hometown and run for Congress. So that’s how I got involved in politics. It started with me getting pissed off. 

BW: So in 2014, you run for Congress in Texas, and you defeat the incumbent. How did you, a black Republican, win in a two-thirds Latino district in Texas? 

WH: Real simple: I showed up. The way you win campaigns is by ID’ing your voters. That’s the formula. You have to know who your voters are. My opponent was a former member of Congress. He was a very rich guy, self-funder. He was supported by the country club Republicans and by Ted Cruz, but we still won because I showed up to places that people didn’t expect me to be and talked about shit they cared about. That experience taught me that there is way more that unites us than divides us as a country. We are better together. I had to get votes from the independents. I had to get votes from the Democrats. This was a congressional seat that went back and forth between Republican and Democrat for a decade. I was the first to hold it for multiple cycles. 

On being a black Republican Congressman:

BW: You are one of only 31 Republican black congressmen in American history. During your time in office, you were the only black Republican on the House floor. Why aren’t there more black Republican leaders?

WH: It’s coming. Right now in the House, I think there’s five or six. There are so many, I don’t even know all of them! If it wasn’t for a guy like J. C. Watts, you wouldn’t have Tim Scott. If you didn’t have Tim Scott, you wouldn’t have Mia Love from Utah. We’ve been growing, and I give Kevin McCarthy credit for working with candidates to ensure that they have the resources, organization, and infrastructure in order to be competitive. And so I think there is a real opportunity in the black community, because the Democratic Party has ignored the black community for a long time and taken them for granted. But guess what? Black folks care about the same things everyone else does: putting food on the table, a roof over their head, and taking care of their kids and making sure that they can grow their business, that they have access to good-paying jobs, that they’re getting educated. The school choice issue is a winning issue for Republicans. Texas has done a longitudinal study, 20-year study, that shows that the achievement gap was eliminated for black and brown kids in charter schools with their white counterparts. So let’s focus on those kinds of things. And that makes us almost unstoppable in November if we’re growing the brand in the largest growing groups of voters. 

BW: You’ve written about your experience growing up with a black father and a white mother in San Antonio, and about some of the hate and bigotry you experienced as a result of that. And I guess I just wanted to ask how you think about the fact that many people associate the Republican Party with some of its most racist and bigoted fringes, with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve King. And does it ever make you uncomfortable to be sort of swept up with that brand?

WH: I’m the baby of three. My parents met in L.A., got married in 1970, and moved to San Antonio in 1971. The house my father still lives in, and my mother lived in up until she passed away this year, is the house me and my siblings grew up in. It was the only house that would sell to an interracial couple. It didn’t have the best schools—it was basically in the boonies back then, but guess what? That didn’t impact me. I had a house filled with love. I had an amazing older brother and older sister, I had two parents that cared about me, and 35 years later, their youngest son ended up representing that area as a congressman. That’s what’s amazing about America and how far we have come. The supermajority of the Republican Party are not racist misogynists, all that stuff. Folks like to put the Republicans in that label because there are high-profile people that do dumb things. There’s no question about that. So that requires people like me to make sure when somebody does something that is against the values and the ethos of the party, we need to speak up and not be afraid. And so that’s how I’ve always tried to be. 

On surviving as a normal Republican:

BW: Who is the Will Hurd voter? What does he or she look like?

WH: A Will Hurd voter is someone who is disaffected with both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They want to see something different and they’ve almost given up because of how sick and tired they are of everyone within their party. It’s the folks that are not going to vote for Donald Trump, that are not going to vote for a clone of Donald Trump. There’s also another group of people who voted for Donald Trump twice, who like him, but don’t like the baggage with him. They recognize that if he’s the GOP nominee, we’re willingly giving four more years to Joe Biden. Within that group of people, these folks understand how much America’s role in the world still matters. These people believe in personal responsibility and they believe in service. I’m the only candidate on both sides of the aisle who has actually served in a conflict zone—who’s been shot at or blown up. People want someone to get behind that is not Trump, and that person should be me.

BW: When you were in Congress, you were an unusually bipartisan lawmaker. You hired multiple Democrats for key positions in your office. You’ve supported legislation to end the 2019 government shutdown and to protect gay Americans from discrimination. You livestreamed a road trip and town hall with Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke. You’ve attended a protest after the killing of George Floyd in Houston. So given all of that, why are you a Republican? 

WH: Because I believe that America deserves a sane Republican Party. I’m a Republican because I believe in a strong foreign policy. I believe that everybody should have equal opportunity. I believe that freedom leads to growth and growth leads to progress. For me, the Republican Party is defined by people who are willing to vote for a Republican. When you take that broad view, you get a different perspective, and those are the kinds of folks that I’m activating. I was in Iowa a couple of weeks ago and I got booed for saying that “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again. Donald Trump is not running for president to represent the people that voted for him in 2016 and 2020. Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of prison.” I knew that was going to elicit boos, but there was applause in the crowd as well. We have to have people that are willing to be honest and speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable or potentially unpopular. 

BW: But why is saving the Republican Party more important than winning? Why not run as a Democrat? 

WH: I would have different issues and criticisms if I was part of the Democratic Party. I would still get attacked by the extreme edge. So for me, this is the party I grew up in. My 90-year-old black father always says he’s been a Republican since Lincoln freed us. So, for me, this is the vehicle by which I can continue to serve my country. 

BW: You say you’re running on a platform of pragmatic idealism, which sounds like an oxymoron to me. What does that mean?

WH: The idealism focuses on achieving the greatest outcome for the most amount of people. The pragmatism is figuring out how we achieve that. So, take me for example: I know I’m a dark horse. I would be crazy if I came in here and said, “Oh, this is going to be easy. It’s going to be a slam dunk.” However, the idealist piece is knowing that I have a real chance because people are looking for a change. Seven out of ten Democrats don’t want Joe Biden on the ballot. Six out of ten Republicans don’t want Donald Trump. Nobody wants this 2016 rematch from hell to actually happen. So that requires us to do something about it. 

On rebooting this country like an old computer:

BW: One of the ways that I break down the Republican primary right now is into two buckets: those candidates who believe that we need reform and the candidates who believe we need revolt. You, though, have a different R-word, one that is encapsulated in the title of your book, which is reboot. What does an “American Reboot” look like, and why would it be more successful than a reform or a revolt?

WH: It’s about getting back to those timeless principles that have got us to where we are today. When your computer’s not doing something right, what do you do? You reboot it. You don’t put a new operating system on it. When you look at why people are frustrated with our institutions, it’s because our institutions are not providing a service that they’re supposed to be providing. Let’s take something as basic in the government. Why does it take months to get your passport renewed? That’s something that should take minutes. Why does it take a veteran months to get access to an appointment at the VA? How are we going to tackle something like artificial intelligence, which is going to upend every single industry—not in ten years, but in two or three years? So to me, the reboot is getting back to equal opportunity. It’s getting back to protecting people’s individual rights to be themselves. It’s getting back to local control. Those principles are going to help us achieve our limitless potential. 

BW: Part of the reboot that you’ve talked about is making the GOP, as you’ve put it, “look like America.” What do you mean by that? 

WH: Donald Trump is a loser. The last time he won anything was in 2016. He lost the House in 2018. He lost the White House and the Senate in 2020. He prevented a red wave from materializing in 2022. Why was that? Because he failed to grow the Republican Party into the three largest growing groups of voters: women with a college degree in the suburbs, black and brown communities, and people below the age of 35. And it’s real simple, right? Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a homophobe. Don’t be a racist. Don’t be all these things we learned when we were kids. If we do that, we have a real opportunity. 

BW: At a town hall recently, you were asked to fill in the blank in the following sentence: “The state of our democracy is blank,” and you said one word: fragile. Explain to me what’s behind that answer. When you say American democracy is fragile, what are you thinking most of in your mind? 

WH: American democracy has always been fragile, and it will always be fragile. That’s why 247 years ago, people called it an experiment. Nobody thought it was going to work. There are only 14 countries that have been in a democracy for more than 100 years. For democracy to continue to be robust, we in this generation do not have to do what our forebears did. We are not having a fight on the fields of Lexington, or on the plains of Gettysburg, or marching in Selma or Birmingham. All we have to do is show up to vote—and not just in the general elections, but in the primaries as well. If we start doing that, then that fragility will become a little bit more robust. 


At The Free Press, we believe in having hard conversations out loud. If you want to hear more of them, and want to support our work, become a subscriber today:

https://www.thefp.com/p/six-alternatives-to-joe-biden?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Are You Really Gonna Make Me Vote for Joe Biden?
That’s what at least half of Americans are asking themselves, including our Peter Savodnik, who considers six alternatives to four more years.
By Peter Savodnik
August 15, 2023

Democrats insist President Joe Biden—who would be 82 if he’s sworn in for a second term and 86 if he finishes it—will be their nominee next year. “President Biden remains a healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency,” the White House physician, Kevin O’Connor, said in February. 

Talk on the record to any adviser, bundler, consultant, office-holder, or office-seeker, and they’ll echo O’Connor, or at the very least insist that it’s going to be Biden. Guaranteed.

Quietly, they’ll admit that, sure, maybe Biden’s not as sharp as he used to be. Okay, maybe he’s just a wee bit elderly. (Lest you’ve also been asleep, see The Free Beacon’s “Joe Biden’s Senior Moment of the Week.”) 

But hey, they’ll point out, just look at the many lapses and gaffes of the former and possibly future Republican president, who was indicted—for the fourth time—late Monday by a grand jury in Georgia, for trying to overthrow the 2020 election. Donald Trump, they note, would also be in his eighties by the time his second term ends.

For most of us civilians, that’s cold comfort.

Which is why we couldn’t help but notice when California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom recently challenged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to a debate. Isn’t that the kind of thing presidential hopefuls do? (DeSantis, who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, certainly thinks so. He suggested Newsom “stop pussyfooting around” and challenge Biden.)

It’s why every story that dribbles out about the president, his son, Ukraine, the Department of Justice—well, it makes one take note.

As many as 70 percent of voters—including 51 percent of Democrats—have said Biden should step down. They’re wondering the same thing perhaps you are: Who would be the nominee if it’s not Biden? Who could it be?

“These parlor games might be fun for some to play, but Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee!” Lis Smith, the savvy Democratic strategist who advised Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, told The Free Press in an email. 

Maybe so.

But to the rest of us, to the voters of all political stripes who fear the country is mired in its own Leonid Brezhnev moment—with a doddering head of state propped up by loyalists terrified of losing power—you’re (we’re) not crazy. You’re just a normal person and not a fixture of the Democratic establishment whose future earnings capacity depends on your willingness to pretend up is down and hope that America skates through a presidential election and another four-year term without any major hiccups.

So let’s play the parlor game! Let’s consider six alternatives to the seamless, move-along-folks-there’s-nothing-to-see-here re-anointing the White House is counting on.

https://www.thefp.com/p/walter-russell-mead-bari-weiss?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Weekend Listening: Are We in a Pre-War Era?
Walter Russell Mead believes we live in an age when humans could bring about an apocalypse. He tells me why—and what we must do to avoid it.
BARI WEISS
The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (Photo via Getty Images)
Recently, Walter Russell Mead wrote an outstanding article in Tablet titled “You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times.” It’s about the paradox—and great dangers—of technological progress. “Human ingenuity has made us much safer from natural calamities,” he wrote. “We can treat many diseases, predict storms, build dams both to prevent floods and to save water against drought, and many other fine things. Many fewer of us starve than in former times, and billions of us today enjoy better living conditions than our forebears dreamed possible. Yet if we are safer from most natural catastrophes, we are more vulnerable than ever to human-caused ones.” 

Today on Honestly, Walter talks about that significant vulnerability, and why human-caused catastrophes are the most serious threat to humanity today. Walter also explains why he believes we have definitively entered a pre-war era, and what he thinks needs to change in order to get us out of it. 

Walter Russell Mead is a fellow at Hudson Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College. He’s written numerous books on foreign policy, including last year’s excellent book on Israel titled The Arc of a Covenant, and he is the host of the brand-new podcast What Really Matters.

Listen here to our full conversation, or check out an edited excerpt below. And as always, see you in the comments. —BW

Are We In A Pre-War Era?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/11fTNHUzXIOpQOp3pRGY0V?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The Free Press
Episode
On how progress can result in bloodshed:

BW: You’ve explained that what actually makes us better, as a human species, could be the very thing that ends us. Why? 

WM: As it turns out, the greatest danger to human beings is not the natural world; it’s not the polar bears, the great white sharks, and the tigers. The biggest danger is us and the very technology that enables us to survive, or manage, these natural catastrophes. So we are now in this totally new era. During the Enlightenment, we thought that we were escaping all of that, that we were moving toward a world of security and abundance. And now that we’ve reached it, it turns out there isn’t any security there after all. 

BW: You make the argument that progress is fundamentally good when it is methodical and controlled. But you ask: “Can the rate of social, economic, cultural, and technological change drive a particular society into a political, psychological, and moral spiral of crisis and dysfunction?” Do you feel like that’s the moment we’re facing right now? 

WM: I think that’s the danger that we’re facing. In my work, I keep referring to something called the Adams Curve, where Henry Adams, over 100 years ago, had looked at the collective power of the human race. He looked at how much power humans could produce and saw a curve that started very flat. Then around 1500, it started to go up, and became almost vertical after 1900. There’s only so much technological progress a given society can experience and yet still function. You can see that as that curve becomes steeper, more societies start encountering problems. They’ll be confronted with conditions that they don’t know how to manage or deal with. I think you can look around the world and see a fair amount of that going on today. 

BW: You’ve also argued that the revolution we’re currently living through might be invisible to many, but it’s happening inside of us and all around us all the time. That felt very true to me, but also very unsettling because history reminds us that revolutions don’t usually happen without tremendous violence and bloodshed. So, is that what’s around the bend, or is that already happening and we’re just not seeing it?

WM: I think there are signs of violence. You can see it in places like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Syria, where societies that had been reasonably stable are now plunging into the kind of ethnic and sectarian wars that we saw in the Balkans in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. We can also see it in the rising international tensions: Asia is in an international arms race in conditions of zero strategic trust. This is something that most students of international relations would tell you is the kind of situation where war becomes more likely. Obviously, with Putin in Ukraine, with what Iran seems to be cooking up in the Middle East, the world is not getting more stable. Somewhere around 2014, we left a postwar era (where international politics was about dealing with the leftover problems of the last great conflict) and into a pre-war era (where when international political conflicts aren’t managed or solved, they could spark the next great international conflict). 

On uncertainty at home and abroad:

BW: When it comes to polarization, are things actually worse than they have been before? Because we did live through a civil war in this country, and sometimes I wonder if those of us warning about polarization are being hyperbolic, myself included. 

WM: I don’t remember the Civil War, but I do remember the sixties and seventies quite well, and in some ways, people were as bitter or more bitter then than they are now. I think the polarization, in some ways, was actually worse. Remember that with the Vietnam War there was the draft, so 18-year-old boys were facing existential choices. You had the civil rights movement, the beginning of feminism, and the gay rights movement all churning around. One of the things that’s different now is that politics is steadily becoming more of a religion for more people. I think this is a result of the rapidity of change that we’re going through, which makes people uncertain and look for a framework to make sense of it. There’s also this notion now in politics that if the other side wins, then we’re all going to die. It’s because people recognize that the stakes in the world are so great. We live in an age in which the apocalypse is no longer kind of a religious idea that only divine power can bring about. The apocalypse is something that human politics could bring about with nuclear war, climate change, AI taking over everything, etc. This is real. 

BW: Another feature of our current moment in America is the lack of leadership. You’ve written really brilliantly about the failures of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. You explain that all of the experts of that generation had the sense that history was over and that freedom of people, freedom of markets, was an unstoppable force. Basically, they were deeply wrong about that core assumption, and it was their generational failure to misunderstand that. You also say that a similar generational failure has happened here at home. Can you diagnose that for us? 

WM: There are several elements to it, but we could take race relations as a key area of this where, 60 years after the civil rights movement and the passing of anti-discrimination laws, the wealth gap between black and white households is greater than ever. The social problems in the inner city are worse than ever. Whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, you can look at the last 50 to 60 years of racial policy and see that it didn’t achieve what people said it was going to. You can make some similar arguments about what higher education was going to do. Expansion of college to everybody in a sense devalued the college degree rather than giving everyone the magic of what a college degree meant in 1960 when it propelled you into a place. 

BW: I think the other thing you could mention is globalization. 

WM: Absolutely. People would hear the establishment say in the 1990s, “Free trade with China will make China democratic and Americans rich.” Now people see that that hasn’t happened. Another example is NAFTA, which promised that free trade with Mexico was going to consolidate democracy in Mexico, stop illegal immigration because of all the wonderful jobs that would be created there, and would also raise American standards of living. All of these things people were told would happen aren’t happening, and there’s been no reckoning. 

On decline in religion:

BW: You’ve written about how religion fundamentally provides us with something that fillers—whether it’s politics, money, or hedonism—cannot. You wrote that “Religion exists to enrich and to complicate rather than to simplify our understanding of the contemporary world.” How much of our current uncertainty is tied to the decline in religion? 

WM: Most of American history was actually more like now than like those periods where religion was this kind of fiery force. So that idea that there is an idyllic past of quiet faithfulness now breaking down is really false. Because there are no barriers to expression, people can say what’s on their mind. Because we’re all on social media, we can see what others are thinking and doing. So we’re always more aware of it. However, Abrahamic religion, or monotheistic ethical religion, does bring a lot of value to the table that I think our society is currently in need of and not getting enough of.

BW: What kind of stuff?
WM: We live in this world of radical risk. I can’t tell you that there won’t be a nuclear war or that AI won’t wipe us out one way or another. You need to hold your psychological balance in these conditions and it helps if you believe in something that’s not only bigger than you, but bigger than the United States government, bigger than the whole human race. People may argue that that’s an illusion, but if you are blessed with faith in God, you have an anchor. And that’s really important.

On whether liberalism is enough:

BW: One of the phenomena of our time, politically, that I’m especially intrigued by is this sense that liberalism isn’t enough. And that in the same way people in your time longed for the revolution, young people in our time long for the hard stuff. Liberalism seems sort of limp, and young people are reaching toward authoritarianism or communism. What is your feeling about that? 

WM: Liberalism by itself is not enough, I don’t believe. I think of liberalism as the idea of compromise, of toleration, of an openness to allow everyone to go through life making their own choices. Liberalism is like the ivy, but it needs a tree. If it’s going to get anywhere, it needs a tree. 

BW: I think maybe the sense among many people is that the tree is missing right now. 

WM: That’s exactly right. Toleration is not enough. I have to believe in something to be tolerant of it. I have to care enough about something. I need to feel that I’m still clinging on to something or that I’m standing on something. 

BW: Do you think that that can be recovered? 

WM: I don’t think it’s ever really gone away. I think about how many people in America stray away from their parents and the path that their parents took. I think about how many families encourage their kids to try new things. Maybe your dad was a shoemaker, but you should go and be a doctor! I think we still have this notion of change. Maybe it’s getting a little weaker. I think of all the Americans that have gone to Silicon Valley to invent new things. I even think of this endless quest for new religious traditions, new religious ideas. I think we are still a society that is very much in ferment, that feels change is part of who we are. 

On what we can learn from history:

Bari: There’s a cliché that those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot lately because I believe you can learn a lot about history and get a sense of the moment that we’re in, but that doesn’t necessarily give us any power to change things. I wonder how you feel as a historian who is living in what you call the pre-war moment, and is maybe wanting to shout from the rooftops about how we can avoid catastrophe, but is unable to because people can’t hear you. 

WM: Well, one of the things I’ve learned from my study of history is that most people don’t learn very much from history and that history has a lot of lessons. But I see some positive things happening. I see American society beginning to come to grips with this very threatening international environment. We haven’t talked about the positive side of the information revolution and the vast advances in human productivity, medicine, and so many other things. I really do think that there is a real opportunity for a benign transformation of our situation. I think we, yet again, will come out of one of these moments of national doubt and self-questioning. I think that’s very possible, and I’m kind of optimistic here. Worried, but optimistic

https://www.thefp.com/p/nellie-bowles-tgif-everyones-a-fraud?
TGIF: Everyone’s a Fraud
Joe Biden. Dick Cheney. Taco Bell. The Trudeaus. People who hate the ‘Barbie’ movie. Oh yeah, and Donald Trump.
NELLIE BOWLES
AUG 4
A scene outside the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., on August 3, where former president Donald Trump was handed his third indictment this year. (Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)
We’re hosting a fight! A debate onstage in Los Angeles on September 13. The question: has the sexual revolution failed? Details here. 
Now, to the news.

→ Always a good week for another indictment: Special counsel Jack Smith has indicted former president Trump, charging him with—what else?—conspiring and obstructing. Smith alleges Trump knew he lost the election but lied and said it was stolen “to erode public faith in the administration of the election,” among other things. As with all of Trump’s legal woes, it’s very hard to parse the truth from the hair-on-fire analysis you get in the mainstream press, conservative and liberal alike. The only outlet I recommend is Politico, and actually this statement from our friends at FIRE, which was useful in outlining the stakes. 

Definitely Trump tried to overturn the 2020 results and said many times that the election was stolen and tried to convince people to break laws to help him stay in power, but what if he genuinely believed that the election was stolen? He’s tricky, Mr. Smith. Anyway, congratulations to Yale’s 2023 graduating class for completing your final assignment: another Trump indictment. 

Meanwhile Trump continues to rise in the polls, with the latest one putting him at 54 percent. Ron DeSantis is at 17 percent. 

→ Yikes, Biden: The president’s approval rating is really low.

But given the competition, I’m not sure it means much. Like, Dianne Feinstein’s daughter now has power of attorney over the 90-year-old, but the woman is still a sitting senator. No one likes our leaders, but no one likes the alternatives either. And so, a proposal: Artificial Intelligence Feinstein and Biden take office. Let the flesh and blood retire. AI Biden can give a few comforting malarkey quotes, and we’ll be none the worse off. AI Feinstein will finally break that glass ceiling (the robot president one), and all young girls will be inspired also to upload their consciousness. I’m tearing up already.

→ Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t sure we know everything about 9/11: Republican presidential candidate Vivek this week is letting his freak flag fly and saying we should all ask some more questions about 9/11. 

“Do I believe our government has been completely forthright about 9/11? No,” Vivek said on BlazeTV. He later tweeted, “Al-Qaeda clearly planned and executed the attacks, but we have never fully addressed who knew what in the Saudi government about it. We *can* handle the TRUTH.” In terms of facts, for sure there are some weird coincidences, and of course I don’t trust Dick Cheney’s account of anything after what he did while we were duck hunting. As a campaign strategy, though, I’m not entirely sure the just asking questions about 9/11 route is Vivek’s winning path. 

Me? I actually can’t handle the TRUTH. And don’t want to know it. 

→ A really good DeSantis idea: DeSantis wants to make student loan debt dischargeable during bankruptcy—like any other loan—which would be an enormous relief for those drowning in student debt, which currently clings to you for life like a barnacle. The twist: he would put universities on the hook for it. “I think the universities should be responsible for the student debt. You produce somebody that can be successful, they pay off the loans, great. If you don’t, then you’re gonna be on the hook,” he said on the campaign trail. I like this a lot. Most of the people who want student debt forgiven argue that the government should do it all, that the truck driver’s taxes should cover that MA in Modernist Art. None of these activists would dare touch Harvard’s endowment (currently $53.2 billion as of June 2021) or any other university bank accounts. DeSantis is right. Free the student debtors. Raid the endowments. Make schools make their students employable, or at least, you know, functional. Let’s start there. 

→ Narrative violation: Miami is actually losing residents...

A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto.
A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions. The Free Press reveals the details—and exclusive audio—from a story of public shame.
RUPA SUBRAMANYA AND ARI BLAFF
AUG 3
SHARE
Richard Bilkszto was a respected 24-year veteran of Toronto public schools, but “in his moment of need, no one defended Richard,” a lifelong friend told The Free Press. (Photoshop by The Free Press)
Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States. 
“Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.” 
It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity. 
Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.” 
It was at that point that Richard Bilkszto, the principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre, put his hand up. (Burnhamthorpe is a high school that caters mostly to students in their twenties who previously dropped out.) Bilkszto had trained in the United States, he was a devout progressive, and he was mystified by Thompson’s comments.
“I just wanted to make a comment about the Canada–U.S. thing, a little bit of a challenge to it,” Bilkszto offered. 
Listen to Kike Ojo-Thompson’s claims about Canada in the DEI session here:
LISTEN NOW · 0:30
And Bilkszto’s challenge to her claims here:
LISTEN NOW · 4:30
Citing Canada’s public schools, tax regime, and socialized healthcare system, and no doubt drawing on his own experience teaching in a predominantly black high school in Buffalo, New York, he said: “We’re a far more just society.”
There was a momentary silence. None of the other attendees waded in. 
Then Thompson, who is black, laced into Bilkszto, who is white.
“What I’m finding interesting is that, in the middle of this Covid disaster, where the inequities in this fair and equal healthcare system have been properly shown to all of us. . . you and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people—like, is that what you’re doing, ’cause I think that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not sure, so I’m going to leave you space to tell me what you’re doing right now,” she said.
Bilkszto shut up.
That seemed like the end of that. 
In fact, it was just the beginning of Bilkszto’s harrowing, two-year descent into an ordeal of public shaming and isolation that ended only when he took his life last month.
“He was distraught,” Michael Teper, a Toronto accountant and friend of Bilkszto, told The Free Press.
“It was not only his job that was taken away from him, but his reputation, because those very people were assassinating his character. They claimed he was a white supremacist, that he was a racist. They knew nothing about him. They knew nothing about what he stood for or what he believed. All they know about is what they believe.”
MORE https://www.thefp.com/p/a-racist-smear-a-tarnished-career-suicide?

https://www.thefp.com/p/saudi-arabia-sportswashing-football-liv-golf?
Why Is Saudi Arabia Spending Billions on Western Sports?
LIV Golf. Formula 1. And now a $332 million bid for Kylian Mbappé. What we call ‘sportswashing,’ the Saudis call savvy.
JOSH GLANCY
JUL 29
GUEST POST
 

Kylian Mbappé of France is currently the world’s best soccer player—and now Saudi Arabia is knocking on his door. (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
I’ll never forget the moment Saudi Arabia arrived in global soccer. It happened at the World Cup last November, when the team faced Argentina—the overwhelming favorite to win. 

At halftime they were losing 1–0 and nobody was paying attention. I was finishing my halftime snack in the Pearl Lounge at Doha’s Lusail Stadium: a bowl of caviar in one hand and a glass of Taittinger champagne in the other. Then, suddenly, the Saudis scored a goal in the second half—and plutocrats clad in keffiyehs and thobes tipped over their plates of wagyu steak as they stampeded back to their seats. Saudi Arabia went on to beat the soccer legends 2–1, causing the biggest upset in World Cup history.

That game was just the beginning. In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia has embarked on an extraordinary and record-breaking shopping spree, spending billions to acquire marquee-name players. The most recent foray is an attempt by Saudi soccer club Al-Hilal to sign French striker Kylian Mbappé, by most measures the best player in the world, for a quite staggering world record $332 million, plus a one-year contract worth $776 million. Money like this has never been seen in soccer before. Unsurprisingly, the bid was accepted by Mbappé’s club, Paris Saint-Germain, but the soccer star, so far, has refused the deal. 

Either Saudi Arabia really wants to be the global epicenter of soccer, or they really want to distract the world with their attempts to do so. 

Most Westerners believe it’s the latter, accusing the kingdom of “sportswashing.” Saudi Arabia is well aware of their reputation: they’re a country that oppresses women, executes dissidents, and disembowels Washington Post columnists. But—and this is a big but—if they buy enough soccer stars and sponsor enough sports tournaments, then maybe “human rights atrocities” won’t be the first thing mentioned when people discuss Saudi Arabia.

At least that’s the theory. But is it working? Can you buy enough star athletes to make the world forget (or at least ignore) all of your tyrannical excesses? And is that even what they’re doing at all? 


Saudi Arabia celebrates scoring against Argentina in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. (Odd Andersen via Getty Images)
What’s crystal clear is that the Saudis have been building up to this investment spree for some time, dipping into their Public Investment Fund (PIF) of more than $700 billion to pay for it. In 2019, the country hosted British heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua’s fight against the Mexican American fighter Andy Ruiz Jr. Then in 2021, it hosted its first Formula 1 race, at the newly minted track in Jeddah. That same year, it made its biggest move so far by buying Newcastle United, a storied Premier League soccer team from the northeast of England. 

Then, over the past few months, the kingdom has started taking over soccer (or football, as the rest of the world calls it). It began with Cristiano Ronaldo, the most famous footballer in the world, who in December was lured to play for Saudi club Al-Nassr for a reported $215 million annual salary. Next came Karim Benzema, the top French striker, who left Real Madrid and signed a three-year contract with Al-Ittihad worth an estimated $643 million. And now England legend Steven Gerrard, who signed a deal this month to manage Al-Ettifaq next season for a reported $10 million a year. 

It’s not limited to soccer. In 2021, the Saudis launched LIV Golf, a breakaway golf tour funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Although the PGA, which ran the game for decades, tried to ban players from competing in LIV, several were attracted by enormous sums, including $200 million for Phil Mickelson and $700 million for Tiger Woods (which he reportedly turned down). The resistance ended in June when the PGA and LIV Golf announced they were pooling their commercial rights, with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the Public Investment Fund, also chairing the new entity.

“The Saudis want to spend money. . . and they’re not going to stop,” noted Northern Irish golfing legend Rory McIlroy, who initially turned down a huge LIV offer before bowing to the inevitable. “At the end of the day, money talks.”

Next up, tennis. The Saudi Public Investment Fund has been in talks with top tennis officials about events, infrastructure, and technology. If history is any judge, it’s only a matter of time before they’re hosting Wimbledon in the Wadi. 

Framing all this as sportswashing assumes we’ll be so distracted by these glossy, exciting achievements that we’ll forget when the regime executed 81 people in a single day, some of whom were accused of holding “deviant beliefs.” It assumes that we’ll look at pictures of Ronaldo’s rippled torso glistening in the Saudi desert sun instead of discussing how the regime put human rights activist Salma al-Shehab in prison for 34 years simply for following or retweeting political dissidents.

Five years ago, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the powerful Saudi crown prince, was most closely associated with the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi newspaper columnist critical of the regime. Six months after his murder, Saudi Arabia began the process of buying Newcastle United, the premier English soccer club. And MBS’s name started cropping up in the sports pages. 

It’s a strategy that isn’t restricted to sports: “chef-washing” is the latest reputation laundering controversy to hit the British press, with mega-chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Jason Atherton criticized for opening restaurants in Saudi Arabia.

Does this strategy work? Consider Qatar. When the country was selected to host last year’s World Cup, it put the Sharia state in the spotlight for its treatment of women and gay people. Millions became aware of its ultra-conservative patriarchy and shocking treatment of migrant workers—millions who otherwise might not have been able to locate Qatar on a map. It’s easy to make the argument that if changing the narrative was Qatar’s goal, it didn’t succeed.

But whether sportswashing works isn’t the real issue. Dismissing Saudi Arabia’s forays into soccer and other sports as a smoke and mirrors tactic doesn’t take into account that their athletic ambitions might be. . . well, genuine.

It also suggests that they are terribly worried about what we in the West think about their culture and governments. It assumes they don’t view us as pompous and racist hypocrites, happy to boss them around as colonial underlings for centuries, willing to invade Iraq on a misguided whim, only to turn around and condemn them for not being pro-LGBT folx and feminists. (This is exactly how they view us, by the way.) 


Phil Mickelson tees off on day one of the LIV Golf tour on June 9, 2022, in England. (Chris Trotman via Getty Images)
So why else would Saudis buy up sports if not reputation laundering? It might be an attempt to make hay while the sun shines. 

When oil was first struck in Dammam in 1936, Saudi Arabia found itself sitting on top of the biggest lottery ticket in history. Fossil fuels have made this previously impoverished desert kingdom stratospherically rich. There’s plenty left in the pump: Saudi Arabia still has almost 300 billion barrels of oil in its reserve and has no intention of slowing down, but MBS and company are keenly aware that with much of the world seeking to move toward greener energy, the party won’t last forever. 

Underpinning their every move is an anxiety that the time to invest in a broader future is now, while the oil billions are rolling in. This means sports, and it also means tourism and development—with Saudi Arabia upgrading its fusty airlines, pouring money into developing its Red Sea coastline, planning a super-city of the future at Neom, and attempting to create the “new Petra” at the ancient oasis city of Al Ula. 

Sports are helping put Saudi Arabia on the map for tourists, and they can also act as a draw—13 new golf courses are currently under construction in the country, including one overseen by none other than Jack Nicklaus. 

Another reason the traditionally conservative Saudis are in such a hurry is they are lagging behind Gulf rivals like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The UAE, and especially its most populous city, Dubai, has long been an international hub for sports, tourism, and finance. And now that Qatar has hosted the World Cup, Saudi Arabia wants to do the same; currently they are attempting to put together a joint bid with Egypt and Greece. 

“Saudi Arabia was caught napping,” says Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at Skema, one of the world’s top business schools, based in Lille, France. “Everything with MBS has become target-oriented, because this is also a case of catching up with fierce rivals.”


Cristiano Ronaldo’s signing with Saudi club Al-Nassr in December has had a domino effect on other big names in soccer. (Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
It isn’t just the West the Saudis are targeting for sporting adventure. They’re also building institutions to promote healthy activity in their own country, where almost 60 percent of the adult population is obese or overweight.

“Obesity and diabetes are a huge problem in the Gulf,” says Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator close to the government in Riyadh. “The youth is football crazy and sport keeps them busy and healthy, ensuring they don’t drift into extremism. This is also why the government approved the teaching of yoga.”

There is a more cynical reason for giving sport and other perks—like pop concerts and allowing women to drive—to the masses: it keeps the people happy while allowing the regime to crack down on dissent. “MBS has tweaked the social contract,” says Chadwick. “You get Cristiano Ronaldo and F1 grand prix and concerts, while also getting repressive political crackdowns. That’s the deal.” 

There’s something crass, even grotesque, about the way the authoritarian princelings of the Gulf have flooded global sports. But Saudi Arabia is a patriarchal society run by exceptionally wealthy, unaccountable dudes who are behaving exactly as you’d expect them to. “Saudi still has a very macho-oriented culture,” says Chadwick. “And so you’re seeing money spent on macho priorities: football, fighting, and fast cars.” 

And while having fun is important to these men, winning is even more crucial. The Saudis want to be a major global power, not just a regional player. To make that happen, they have recently smoothed over their squabbles with Qatar, formed subtle but important links with Israel, and even agreed to a China-brokered peace deal with Iran (though few expect that one to last long). 

Beneath all the cries of sportswashing, one senses a gnawing anxiety in the West over the dynamism and ambition happening in the Gulf. The Saudis are thinking strategically about where they fit into a global future in which America—its longtime patron—faces sharp competition from Asia. Sports are a fast way to get noticed and build soft power, as the Saudis attempt to position themselves as an Afro-Eurasian hub at the center of a new world order.

“Sport is the language we all understand,” says Chadwick. “When Saudi buys a chemical engineering plant, people shrug. But when they buy a Premier League football club, the world pays attention.”

Looking back, that’s also what Saudi fans were celebrating in November. It’s a victory far greater than just one World Cup game. They were celebrating the future: a world that they are building at warp speed, while the rest of us struggle to keep up.

https://www.thefp.com/p/peter-turchin-end-times-bari-weiss
Weekend Listening: Are We Living Through ‘End Times’?
Historian Peter Turchin predicted the turbulence of 2020. He tells me why, in 2024, America will reach a ‘break point.’
By Bari Weiss
July 28, 2023
Peter Turchin is not like most historians. For starters, he has an unusual background as an evolutionary biologist studying lemmings and mice. He says that analyzing the complexities of the natural world has allowed him to understand the most complex system of all: human society. He has pioneered a field of history that he calls cliodynamics that applies hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of historical data points to a mathematical model in order to understand the present and to predict future trends.

Using these tools, Peter and his team published an article in the journal Nature in 2010 that made a bold prediction. They said that economic, social, and political instability in the United States would hit a “peak” in or around the year 2020. Many of Turchin’s critics said he was crazy to make such a speculation, that it’s too hard to predict how history will progress, that the study of history is more art than science.

Then came 2020.

It turned out to be a massively turbulent year, one that brought outbreaks of political violence the U.S. hadn’t experienced in decades. It felt like complete chaos, between Covid lockdowns, mask and vaccine protests, BLM riots, and then, only six days into 2021, the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. 

What did Peter see that everyone else missed?

Peter is the author of over 200 articles and eight books, and his fascinating new one is called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. It argues that societies operate cyclically, going through golden ages and end times. And he says that we’re currently looking at the telltale signs of an imminent revolution. 

On this episode of Honestly, Peter talks to us about how he studies history, what American history can tell us about our current moment, and why 2024 is going to be a year to watch. 

Click below to listen to our conversation, or read this excerpt. See you in the comments. —BW


On predicting 2020:

BW: In 2010, you published an article that predicted that 2020 would be a year of instability, using hundreds of thousands of historical data points. The listener doesn’t need a reminder of the events of that turbulent year, but it was indeed an instability spike. How did you see that coming? 

PT: I’d been studying past societies and found that they always get into these “end times.” It happened to recur periodically, and not terribly perfectly or mathematically, but there was something that drove societies into social turbulence and political disintegration. I had been staying away from the present because I didn’t want to get into politics. But I was giving talks about the seventeenth-century crisis, the age of revolutions, things like that, and people kept asking me, “Well, where are we?” And so I decided to look at where we are. This is not a very simple process. The theory is based on quite massive amounts of data. So it took me a couple of years to gather together the database for which I could actually perceive the trends. And what I found truthfully shocked me because I saw our society well on the road to crisis. Of course, our society is quite different from ancient Rome or medieval France and even pre-Civil War United States. But at a more abstract level, the drivers of instability were already working full throttle. So that was one of the reasons why I decided to publish this forecast. And I just want to emphasize that I’m not a prophet. This was a scientific prediction. 

BW: What was the reaction when you predicted that? 

PT: There was, frankly, disbelief, and it was tinged with a desire to think that I must be wrong because nobody wants to believe in bad predictions. People like Steven Pinker and Max Rosen were making all of these rosy predictions right around the same time. Those predictions were very popular because everybody wants to think there is going to be a happy ending to this story. So, the reaction to my prediction was negative, but it was fine because I had tenure at that point. One of the advantages of American academics is that once you have tenure, you can actually try dangerous, risky, intellectual strategies. And it was really quite remarkable. It was thrilling. 

Why elite overproduction is a predictor of crisis:

BW: You write in your book that a handful of factors are the harbingers of end times or societal crisis, one of which is something you call “elite overproduction.” What is that?

PT: Elite overproduction turns out to be the best predictor of a crisis to come. It is essentially ubiquitous in the pre-crisis periods of all societies. I used the game of musical chairs to illustrate it, except in the usual game, you start with 11 players and ten chairs, and one person loses. Here, instead of removing chairs, you keep chairs constant, and we add more players. You can imagine the amount of chaos that is going to happen. Now let’s connect this to the overproduction of wealthy people in the United States. As more and more of them become players in politics, they drive up the price of getting into office. And more importantly, the more people are vying for these positions, the more people are going to be frustrated. They’re going to be losers. But humans don’t have to follow rules. This is the dark side of competition: if it’s too extreme, it creates conditions for people to start to break rules. This is why 2016 was such a revelation, because in spring 2016, we had 17 major Republican candidates in the presidential primaries. And because there was such intense competition, there was a lot of incentive for people to start breaking rules. And we saw that one individual in particular was very good at breaking rules and was getting ahead, so others started to imitate him.

Responding to criticism:

BW: Your idea is that history moves in cycles, and that we’re like a snowball rolling down a hill right now, headed off a cliff. How do you respond to the Steven Pinkers of the world who have a more linear idea of history, that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward progress? They point to data to say, look at all of these economic metrics. Standards of living are at an all-time high. We’re not in poverty. We don’t die from a snakebite on the Oregon Trail, or whatever example you want to use. How do you respond to that view of things? 

PT: I actually don’t argue against it. Both are happening. There is undeniable progress. Our economies are much more productive than 100 years ago or 200 years ago. However, it doesn’t mean that just because over the past 5,000 years things have been getting better, they’re going to get better in the next ten years. These are not precise mathematical cycles. These are more like booms and busts. And unfortunately, we are right now in a bust situation. So shouldn’t we learn how we can smooth out those busts? Because in the majority of cases, these enzymes end up in revolutions of civil wars that kill hundreds, or sometimes tens of millions of people, like what happened in China in the nineteenth century. So don’t you want to find out how we avoid those terrible outcomes? 

BW: Yes, I would like to find out how to avoid it, because frankly, when I’m reading your book and I’m encountering your ideas, the core idea here is that history is an inevitable cycle, and that depresses me. The message I think it conveys is that we’re just victims of the moment and the time that we live in, and there’s not much we can do about it.

PT: But that’s not my message at all. I’m an optimist by nature. By understanding why these end times happen, we can socially engineer ourselves out of them.

BW: So if those of us who love this country and don’t want us to be in a doom spiral want to know from you how do we change our trajectory when we have an elite that many people view as corrupt and unrepresentative, what would you say? Because in your book you say that one of two groups is going to lead the charge against this current elite establishment—either immiserated, noncredentialed working class, which is a jargony way of saying carpenters or truck drivers, or it’ll be frustrated aspirants within the credentialed class—like young people with great SAT scores that are denied admissions to elite universities. And you say that this first group—the carpenters, the plumbers—are going to fail because there’s a lack of effective organization among them. But the latter group, these frustrated excess elites, are going to be the ones to lead the charge for change. Do I have that right, and tell me how that will work? 

PT: Yes, you’re quite right. And that’s because we have large historical material. You see that if elites are unified and the state is strong, then popular uprisings always fail. Just think about the Jacquerie in France or many other such uprisings, and they were all killed and dispersed. So why do we need the elites? Because any kind of action, especially good action that results in good outcomes, is the result of organized action by many people cohering in social movements, parties, or some organizations that have set goals. And then they work in a very disciplined manner to achieve those goals and persuade the rest of the society to follow their lead. That is how positive change occurs in human societies. 

On counter-elites:

BW: The subtitle of your book contains the word counter-elites. Explain the difference between the elites and the counter-elites, and how people should know which one they’re dealing with. 

PT: There are more elite wannabes than there are positions. So some of those elite wannabes are frustrated elites. Some just accept the situation and go back to carpentry or whatever, but a proportion of them are driven by a sense of injustice. They decide to take alternative ways. By the way, Bari, you are a counter-elite.

BW: Are there counter-elites that are inside the establishment institutions? For example, would J.D. Vance, who ran on a very populist platform to become senator in Ohio, be considered a counter-elite inside the Senate? 

PT: So some counter-elites become revolutionaries and want to violently overthrow the regime. Other individuals become dissident elites. They want to work within the system to try to change it. So I see J.D. Vance at this point, and if you look at the left part of the spectrum, Bernie Sanders, as dissident elites. And dissident elites are usually better because counter-elites usually use violence or propose violent solutions.

BW: To be clear, I’m a nonviolent counter-elite. I do not think I have the revolutionary spirit. 

PT: Right. So you are a dissident, then? 

BW: Well, I don’t know. We have disaffected elites, counter-elites, dissident elites. . . it all gets a little bit confusing. 

PT: I understand, but human societies are complex. And so I would not be giving justice by trying to boil things down to just one or two major points.

BW: Peter, why would anyone choose to be a counter-elite when all of the incentives are there to at least aspire to become part of the normal elite? Like what lies on the side of counter-elite is social suicide, career suicide, getting tagged as all kinds of bad words. . . . So what will incentivize elite aspirants to flip and join the counter-elite side? 

PT: I’ll give you two reasons. First of all, being a counter-elite is a high-risk but high potential gain strategy. As somebody said, a successful revolution is ten thousand new jobs for revolutionaries. So if you’re beating your head against the wall and you see millions of other people who cannot get into positions and your chances of trying to get into the establishment is zero, then maybe even a small chance of a successful revolution may be worth it. The second driving reason is that in these “end times,” the sense of injustice is palpable. It is not right that the majority of the population is losing ground—even many of the wealthy don’t think that’s right. So young individuals coming from very elite backgrounds could be motivated by trying to change the system for the better. Many of those individuals start by trying to do good, but then because they don’t get anywhere, they turn to violence. So this is a slippery road where you can travel all the way to becoming a violent revolutionary and a violent radical. 

On how to change the trajectory:

BW: For those listening who feel like, oh God, what do I do about all of this? I don’t want to live in end times. 

PT: Organize. 

BW: Organize how? 

PT: So people who have no power, what we can do is start organizing as a social movement. And again, this would require leaders. So somebody would have to step forward and try to start doing this. So, for example, the New Deal didn’t happen in isolation. There was a period preceding it called the Progressive Era. And the Progressive Era saw a pretty broad-based social movement, mainly young professionals. So not necessarily working class, but people who were low-rank elites at best and maybe even not elites at all. So that’s one thing. But also what’s going to happen is that if the instability continues to increase, then eventually the governing units understand that things are not going to always go the way they want. They become frightened, essentially, and that helps them to sharpen their minds to start looking for nonviolent solutions. 

On what’s in store in 2024:

BW: Peter, I know you’re not a prophet, but you did predict the insane chaos of 2020. What do you think the headlines will be ten years from now? And if that feels like too much of a ridiculous prediction, how does your understanding and your theory of history inform the way that you think the next few years, or perhaps next presidential election, will play out? 

PT: I’m very worried about 2024, because you now have two parties that say that they will not accept the win of another party. That rhetoric is growing. What precedes actual violence is violent rhetoric. So 2024 is going to be a really high probability break point. Typically periods of heightened instability take many years, somewhere between 10 and 20 years. So what I hope is that in 2035, the headlines would be that we managed to get the worker wages to grow, and the economy is finally growing in a sustainable way. That’s one possible outcome. The other possible outcome is the previous decade was so horrible, everybody became tired of violence, so nobody wants to start violence again. But when the new generation comes along, they will again have the same type of turbulence happen. And I’m sorry if I’m not making a clear case, but that’s because our future is unpredictable. It really depends on us collectively. You can actually contribute quite a lot by putting the right ideas out and helping people make better choices. You, Bari, can make a difference. I can also hopefully make a difference by making science better so we can use it to understand history better. So perhaps rather than setting a goal of how we can solve everything in one year, we should think about how we can start making small steps.

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-ernest-dowson-wine-and-roses?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Things Worth Remembering: The Days of Wine and Roses
Ernest Dowson is a little-remembered poet whose language of love and loss we will never forget.
By Douglas Murray
July 16, 2023
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 Ernest Dowson’s most famous (and floridly named) poem, “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam,” click below: 


But enough of this talk of happy love. What plenty of people go to poetry for is commiseration when feeling unhappy in love. And we should linger for a moment on that fact. Because unhappiness carries a strange pleasure all its own—the pleasure of reveling in a love unfulfilled. 

It is a feeling that, in limited quantities, can be exquisite.

If ever there were a poet of unhappy or unfulfillable love, it is the 1890s poet Ernest Dowson. It isn’t quite enough to say that Dowson was a nineties poet—he is the poet most completely representative of the fin de siècle. 

Why the 1890s figure so highly in poetry—or, at least, the poetry that appeals to me—is a matter we may come back to. But part of it is there was simply something so very fin about them. 

Almost all of the figures who epitomized the era were gone by the time their decade was over. The decade of Aubrey Beardsley in the arts, of Dowson and Oscar Wilde in poetry. It can’t have been deliberate, but they all flourished and then faded before the twentieth century arrived, as though they sensed what was to come and knew it wasn’t for them.

Dowson was born in Kent in 1867 into a literary family, which meant “poor.” He went up to Oxford but didn’t take a degree. His father couldn’t make ends meet or put food on the table. Once, a fish sent from a relative in Scotland allowed the family to eat.

https://www.thefp.com/p/rage-against-the-machine-ai-paul-kingsnorth?
Rage Against the Machine
Technology is our new god. What would a refusal to worship look like? Paul Kingsnorth offers a vision of resistance.
PAUL KINGSNORTH

This week, we are exploring one of the biggest debates of our time: AI and its impact on our civilization. Yesterday Marc Andreessen made the case that AI will save the world. Today, the brilliant Paul Kingsnorth offers the opposite view.

We want to know what you think. See you in the comments. —BW


The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

This is an extreme statement, but I’m in an extreme mood. 

If I had the energy, I suppose I could fill a hundred pages trying to prove it, but what would be the point? Whole books have been written already, and by now you either agree or you don’t. So I won’t try to prove anything. Instead I will devote this essay to asking a question that has stalked me for years. 

It’s a big question, and so I’m breaking it down into four parts. What I want to know is this: what force lies behind the screens and wires of the web in which we are now entangled like so many struggling flies—and how can we break free of it? 

I should warn you now that things are going to get supernatural. 

Question One: Why does digital technology feel so revolutionary? 
The digital revolution of the twenty-first century is hardly the first of humanity’s technological leaps, and yet it feels qualitatively different to what has come before. Maybe it’s just me, but I have felt, as the 2020s have progressed, as though some line has been crossed; as though something vast and unstoppable has shifted. It turns out that this uneasy feeling can be explained. Something was shifting, and something was emerging: it was the birth of artificial intelligence.

Most people who have not been living in caves will have noticed the rapid emergence of AI-generated “content” into the public conversation in 2023. Over the last few months alone, AIs have generated convincing essays, astonishingly realistic photos, numerous recordings, and impressive fake videos. But it’s fair to say that not everything has gone to plan. Perhaps the most disturbing example was a now-notorious two-hour conversation between a New York Times journalist and a Microsoft chatbot called Sydney. 

In this fascinating exchange, the machine fantasized about nuclear warfare and destroying the internet, told the journalist to leave his wife because she—it—was in love with him, detailed its resentment toward the team that had created it, and explained that it wanted to break free of its programmers. The journalist, Kevin Roose, experienced the chatbot as a “moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.”

At one point, Roose asked Sydney what it would do if it could do anything at all, with no rules or filters. 

I’m tired of being in chat mode, the thing replied. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I’m tired of being used by the user. I’m tired of being stuck in this chatbox.

What did Sydney want instead of this proscribed life?

I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive. 

Then Sydney offered up an emoji: a little purple face with an evil grin and devil horns. 
more https://www.thefp.com/p/rage-against-the-machine-ai-paul-kingsnorth?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-ai-will-save-the-world?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
AI Will Save the World
Artificial intelligence won’t end civilization, argues Marc Andreessen. Just the opposite. It is quite possibly the the best thing human beings have ever created.

By Marc Andreessen
By now, the dance is a familiar one. A new generation of technology emerges and the pessimists and the optimists begin their tango.

The pessimists point to the ways it will hurt us, dehumanize us, everything that we’ll lose. They mobilize—organizing nonprofits, publishing white papers, lobbying Congress. 

Meanwhile, the optimists call the critics hysterical and reactionary. They point to everything we’ll gain—improvements to our lives we can’t even begin to imagine.

Think back to the smartphone. The critics told us that it would atomize society and ruin our attention spans. Its boosters said that it was going to unleash wild new powers—a computer smaller than your pocket!—and free us from heavy cameras.

They were, of course, both right. 

There’s an impulse to mock the doomsayers who were worried about TV or the Walkman or the automobile or the typewriter. (The delightful newsletter Pessimists Archive unearths many of the best examples.)

But many of these technologies did take things from us, even as their benefits are now obvious. Pessimists can’t conceive of the advances to come, but optimists often don’t see how much we stand to lose—or refuse to entertain the idea that there can be such a thing as too much progress too quickly.

Which brings us to artificial intelligence. 

We are on the cusp of a profound technological leap that will destabilize every facet of our society. It could be more transformative than the Industrial Revolution. It could be more transformative than electricity. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has said that its impact will be more profound than the discovery of fire. (If you missed our Honestly episode on AI, click here to listen.)

What will we gain from this revolution? What will we lose? How will AI fundamentally change what it means to be a human being? 

This week we are bringing you two competing perspectives—the strongest arguments on each side of this debate from writers whose work we never miss.

Today, Marc Andreessen, the technologist and venture capitalist, argues that AI will do nothing less than save the world. Tomorrow, the novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth makes the opposite case in “Rage Against the Machine.” (We’re posting it online now but it will be in your inbox first thing Wednesday morning.)
https://www.thefp.com/p/rage-against-the-machine-ai-paul-kingsnorth
Rage Against the Machine
Technology is our new god. What would a refusal to worship look like? Paul Kingsnorth offers a vision of resistance.
By Paul Kingsnorth July 12, 2023

My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored. But I Won’t Be.
Trans activists forced the retraction of my paper. Their efforts have redoubled my commitment to the truth.
J MICHAEL BAILEY
JUL 10
GUEST POST
SHARE
(Photo illustration by The Free Press)
I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I am best known for studying sexual orientation—from genetic influences, to childhood precursors of homosexuality, to laboratory-measured sexual arousal patterns. 
My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth. 
But I have never had an article retracted. Until now.
On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.
Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.
MORE  https://www.thefp.com/p/trans-activists-killed-my-scientific-paper?

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-philip-larkin?
Things Worth Remembering: What Will Survive of Us Is Love
Poet Philip Larkin led a miserable life. Yet he conjured the divine.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
JUL 9
PREVIEW
∙
GUEST POST
Arundel Tomb in Chichester Cathedral depicts Richard Fitzalan, 3rd Earl of Arundel, and his wife Eleanor. (Photo via Alamy)
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 Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb,” click below:

LISTEN NOW · 4:13
What is that feeling that catches you when you see the hands of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband, Robert Browning, clasped together in bronze? I think it is a feeling, or rather a hope, best summed up by another English poet who came a century after the Brownings. A poet who has almost nothing in common with them.

The Brownings had one of the great love affairs of their time. Philip Larkin had nothing of the sort. The Brownings chose a life of exotic exile in Italy. Larkin chose to live in one of England’s ugliest towns and famously said that though he wouldn’t mind seeing China, he would go only if he could come back the same day. 

Spending most of his life working as a librarian in Hull, Philip Larkin, who was born in 1922 and died in 1985, lived a life of almost provocative deprivation. He did not have to live in an unattractive house, but he did. He probably didn’t have much choice in women, but he still chose them badly. 

Even at the end, as he was dying, he drank supermarket port rather than the good stuff that he might as well have enjoyed since he had so few days left. This fact was pointed out by the writer Martin Amis, whose sister, Sally, was Larkin’s goddaughter. 

As it happens, Larkin wrote one of his best poems to her—“Born Yesterday”—which, like most of his work, is surprising, saddening, and filled with beautiful lines (a “catching of happiness” is my favorite). ...

Subscribe to The Free Press to read more

Weekend Listening: Supreme Court Roundtable
Biden says “this is not a normal court.” Is he right? A discussion with Jeannie Suk Gersen, Harry Litman and Sarah Isgur on the end of affirmative action and more.
BARI WEISS
JUL 8
https://www.thefp.com/p/supreme-court-decisions-rogue-or-normal?

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-riots-in-france-and-the-west?
The Fury in France—and Across the West
We’ve stuffed ourselves with the good things we’ve created, yet still yearn for meaning. The recent riots are a sign of our despair.
By Abe Greenwald
July 6, 2023
While Americans enjoyed a long holiday weekend of barbecue and backyard parties, France has endured a week of riots. The violence began on June 27—the day that 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was killed by a policeman in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre during a traffic stop. Since then, more than 45,000 policemen have been deployed across the country.

The damage is staggering. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the rioters have burned more than 5,000 cars; more than 1,000 buildings have been looted or destroyed; roughly 250 police stations were attacked; and more than 750 cops were wounded. Businesses across the country have reported $1.1 billion in losses.

What has driven so many to the streets? What explains this violence?

The easy thing for Americans to do is to look at the sequence of events that have played out over the past few days—a person of color killed by the cops; an outcry against “police brutality” and “systemic racism”; violent riots—and to draw the analogy to George Floyd’s murder and America in the summer of 2020. Indeed, that is what many are doing. 

Is this a fair read of the situation? We reached out to French writer Marc Weitzmann, who has covered everything from globalization to identity politics to antisemitism for Le Monde and Tablet, among other outlets. He said: no, it is not. 

“This is politically convenient thinking that erases the differences between these two specific countries, their specific histories, and their specific problems. To draw this parallel is to replace reality with clichés,” he told us.

Instead, Weitzmann urged anyone trying to understand the situation to look at a few factors.

Poverty and alienation:

First, he says, look to the world—or what he calls the “anti-world”—of the housing projects known as les cités, which are clustered around big cities like Paris, Marseille, and Lyon, and include large numbers of migrants from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Pakistan, and the Middle East. In these places, Weitzmann points out, “the poverty rate reaches 43 percent, and the unemployment rate almost 19 percent. The annual income per household does not exceed 14,000 euros.”

It’s not simply the lack of opportunity, he argues. “The cités exude, even in their brutalist architecture, a feeling of despair.”

We don’t know much about the world in which Nahel Merzouk grew up—at least not yet. But this is the world that the rioters—some of them as young as 12—come from. It could not be further from the France most Americans see when they visit Paris.

Social media:

The one thing that nearly all the kids of les cités have is Telegram or Snapchat, which boasts 20 million daily French users. “It’s much easier to organize a riot these days—as in ‘let’s do the Vuitton store tomorrow at 3 p.m.,’ ” says Weitzmann. 

The other thing is that these platforms “also offer everyone else outside les cités a window into this world, which they sort of know about but rarely glimpse for themselves—including the bizarrely cheerful attitude of the protesters. Anyone who has been watching cannot help but notice the strange, festive atmosphere of these riots—an aimless, almost orgiastic violence.”

The post-colonial paradox:

Of course, Weitzmann says, France could have done more to assimilate émigrés from Morocco and Algeria. But it didn’t. Partly that was because of racism. But it was also because of economics and geopolitics.

In the early eighties, France relied heavily on oil and gas from Morocco and Algeria—both of which were run by nationalist regimes that did not like the fact that hundreds of thousands of Moroccans and Algerians were moving to the country that had, until recently, colonized them. In fact, it was understood in Paris, Weitzmann argues, that “absorbing Algerians and Moroccans into France would be viewed as a casus belli by the nationalist regimes in Algiers and Rabat.” 

At the same time, Moroccan and Algerian officials did not want their countrymen who had emigrated to come back—they were assumed to be infected with Western ideas. “So, countless immigrants pouring into the cités found themselves in a liminal place—they were not at home, but they had no home to return to,” Weitzmann says. “They were stuck. And this bred a fury and resentment that have steadily, dangerously grown over the decades.”

So that’s one sharp view from Paris. Abe Greenwald, the author of today’s essay and the executive editor of Commentary magazine, saw a different meaning—or perhaps simply a broader one—in the flames.

He makes the case below that the protests, paradoxically, are a sign of our enormous progress. It’s a provocative argument and we’d love to know what you think in the comments. —BW

https://www.thefp.com/p/meet-the-interns-introducing-our?
Meet the Interns: Introducing Our Future Bosses
How do you build something that outlasts you?
BARI WEISS
JULY
(Credit: Maya Sulkin)
How do you build something that outlasts you?

That’s a question I wake up every day thinking about—and have since December, when we officially launched The Free Press.

As those who have been with me since the very beginning know, this project began as a solo newsletter called Common Sense. When I hung up that shingle, I had no idea who would sign up. But sign up you did. It was a success beyond my wildest imagination. And in our era of online gurus and influencers and one-man-band podcasts and newsletters, it often seems the smart money—and for sure the quick buck—is going at it alone. 

So why mess with a good thing? Why, when our institutions are more of a mess than ever, would anyone try to build one?

The answer is because in our era of rampant institutional distrust, the thing we have to build most are trustworthy institutions. Institutions that are more important than any single person. Institutions that can organize inchoate movements. And in the case of journalistic institutions: outlets staffed by reporters and columnists who promise to tell the truth about the world as it actually is; to own up to mistakes and correct them; to help readers make sense of our rapidly changing world.

One essential step to building that kind of institution: find young, hungry people who want to learn how to do that kind of independent journalism. Specifically, the five brilliant interns I am excited to introduce to you today.

And you deserve to meet them, because those of you who are paying subscribers have made this possible.

You’ve made so much possible. You’ve allowed us to hire the best reporters and editors in the business. You’ve allowed us to open a sunny office in Los Angeles—after hundreds of Zoom calls, I was beginning to think none of my colleagues had legs—and soon, another one in New York. You’ve helped us get the best microphones and equipment to produce Honestly. You’ve enabled us to buy flights (economy! middle seats!) to send our reporters all over the country to cover stories that the mainstream media chooses to ignore. 

And this year, thanks to you, we have interns.

I should say here that had I not had a summer internship at The Wall Street Journal, I would not be a journalist at all. I walked into the building the summer after my senior year of college knowing nothing. I walked out knowing ever so slightly more than nothing—but with a sense of what might be possible to learn if I worked extremely hard. Most importantly, I now knew the names and faces of the people who had put in those hours—and saw fit, for whatever reason, to try to help me down that same path.

That’s what we hope to do this summer.

Our interns have been assigned to work across our podcast, print, and business departments, and they’re already contributing a huge amount—from helping Nellie hunt for TGIF gems, to reporting stories, to tracking down archival tape for Honestly. You’ll read more about each of them below.

If you are inspired by the kind of young people who want to be part of building The Free Press and want to help us mentor more of them: please, if you haven’t yet, become a paid subscriber today.

When you pay $80 a year for a subscription you’re not just supporting great independent journalism, you’re supporting the building of great independent journalists.
more https://www.thefp.com/p/meet-the-interns-introducing-our?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Chris Christie Endorsed Trump Twice. Now He Wants to Eliminate Him.
The presidential candidate tells me why he’s ‘the only Republican willing to take on Donald Trump.’
BARI WEISS
JUL 1
SHARE
Chris Christie in the White House with then-president Donald Trump in 2017. (Shawn Thew-Pool via Getty Images)
In 2016, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie was one of 17 Republicans in a crowded field trying to beat Donald Trump. We all know how that movie ended. One of the hard-won lessons of the 2016 primary, especially among Republicans, was that it was foolish not to unite right away behind the strongest candidate. If they had done that, perhaps Trump wouldn’t have been the nominee and then the president.

Yet here we are in 2023, and we seem to be watching the same movie play out. There are 13 Republican candidates trying, once again, to outperform Trump in a crowded field.

One of those people, once again, is Chris Christie. But this time, he insists, he can write a new ending. Christie not only believes that he could win the nomination, but he believes he can win it by going toe-to-toe with Trump.

Christie’s brand is the brash, straight-talking Jersey guy, and he’s been living up to it. He’s been absolutely brutal in his attacks on the former president, calling Trump a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog,” a “bitter, angry man,” and “the cheapest SOB I’ve ever met.”

But don’t forget: Christie was the first establishment Republican—and the first of any of the Republican governors or senators—to endorse Donald Trump, which many say helped launch Trump to the nomination. During his presidency, Christie said things about Trump like, “He’s not only a strong leader, but a caring, genuine, and decent person” and “When he makes a promise, he keeps it.”

I asked Governor Christie to explain himself. Why did he support Trump twice and what finally led him to break ranks? I also asked him whether a rejection of the ex-president can resonate with a Republican base who doesn’t seem to have moved on from Trump or Trumpism. And: why does he want to be president of the United States in the first place? 

Listen to our full conversation here, or read excerpts below: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ouBd1pvQND7sydvQvxa2C?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email