Honestly with Bari Weiss

You may have noticed on this show that Bari Weiss is always asking her guests, “Do you believe in God?,” “What is your favorite biblical character?,” or “Do we need a religious revival?”

And you might be wondering why she keeps knocking on this door?

It’s partly because we’re curious about people’s metaphysical beliefs. But it’s also because we think something profound has gotten lost in our society, as we’ve lost traditional religion. 

You can argue that we are starting to see the beginnings of a religious revival, and even if you don’t believe in God, many think that the practice of religion—keeping Shabbat, going to church—has clear benefits like a community or a moral code. Religion, in other words, is a good program.

Our guest today, Ross Douthat, has a different perspective. Ross makes the case that we should be more religious—not in order to cure society’s many ills—but because it is the best way—the most accurate way—to understand the world around us. Belief in God, he says, is entirely rational.

Ross is a best-selling author, a columnist at The New York Times, and the host of a new podcast called Interesting Times. His newest book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The release is perfectly timed to our strange moment of “plagues, populism, psychedelic encounters, and AI voices in the air,” as Ross writes.

Ross says it’s not enough to argue that religion is simply good for society, or that we must be religious to sustain our civilization. Ross argues that it’s time for people to actually become religious. Bari presses him about this distinction.

And this week, as billions of Christians gather for Holy Week—the sacred days leading up to, and including, Easter—we are wondering if this return that Ross suggests is even possible. And if yes, will it fix our problems?

Today on Honestly, Bari sits down with Ross to understand why he thinks belief in God is the most logical way to understand our world, how he rationalizes and justifies faith, and how he thinks readers can move from doubt to belief.

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In 2025 it seems like there are two types of people—those who are insanely diligent about health, the people who learn everything there is to know about ingredients, the people who run every beauty or cleaning product through the EWG Working Group (a database where you can check for the presence of alleged toxins in household ingredients)—And then there are the rest of us. The people who go about their daily lives trying to do the best they can when it comes to health.

The problem is—as hard as most try—the world around us is laden with processed foods and chemicals. Their exact impact on the body is under intense debate. But there’s no question that America is facing a crisis of chronic illness. You don’t have to be a scientist or a doctor to see that.

There are countless experts out there—and we’re using the term “expert” loosely—with advice about what you should or shouldn’t eat. This advice, however, is often geared toward people who have more time and resources. So today we have someone who can thread the needle and give practical health advice.

Dr. Mark Hyman is one of America’s most famous doctors. He’s written 15 books, and he hosts a hit podcast called The Dr. Hyman Show. He is also an entrepreneur—and his new company, Function Health, is focused on empowering people to understand what is going on in their bodies, through lab testing.

Hyman’s fundamental insight is that rather than treating the sickness, which is the way Western medicine has typically been practiced, we should look at the root cause and focus on preventative care. To do that, he says we need to go upstream, to look at the way our food is farmed, processed, and how we approach the grocery store. He calls it functional medicine.

Today on Honestly, Bari asks him how we got so sick and how to eat better. She asks about sleep, stress management, environmental toxins, community, and loneliness. And if the solution is at the individualized level or at the policy level—and if policy change is even possible. And most importantly, she asks how we can all live better.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

This episode of Honestly is presented by POM Wonderful.

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If your head has been spinning since Donald Trump walked into the White House Rose Garden  and declared “Liberation Day” last Wednesday, we don't blame you. And not just because it was nauseating watching the stock market or your 401(k) crash down, but because it wasn't clear what exactly we were looking at. 

As our guest today, economic historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, wrote in our pages last week: 

"Depending on your worldview, you probably think Trump’s tariff blitz is one of two things. Either a committed protectionist is trying to Make America Great Again by killing “globalism,” ending “forever wars,” and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Let’s call this Project Minecraft. Alternatively, an unhinged demagogue is crashing both the world economy and the liberal international order, mainly to the advantage of authoritarian regimes…But here is what is actually happening: The American empire that came into existence after the failed autarky and isolationism of the 1930s is being broken up after 80 years. Despite Trump’s imperial impulses—wanting to annex Greenland, calling for Canada to become the 51st state—he is engaged right now in a kind of wild decolonization project."

Whether or not you agree with Niall’s conclusion, there’s no question that the real story here is not about the particular tariff rate for Cambodia or Taiwan; rather, it’s fundamentally about reordering America’s place in the world. 

Over the past decade, there’s been an intense debate over what role America should play on the world stage, in geopolitics, in trade, and in technology. Trump has made a very clear set of decisions on that question. And that’s the case whether or not most Americans understand the consequences.

So what are the consequences when the U.S. acts unilaterally to upend the global trading system? What is the outcome when the U.S. weaponizes its own economic power? What happens when the world order, as we know it, is upended? Will these actions embolden our adversaries, or weaken them? Will this ultimately make us poorer, or better off? Has the American empire reached its end? And, was this inevitable or self-inflicted? 

One note: While Bari and Niall were recording this conversation, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs. Notably, there’s no pause on the tariffs for China. In fact, it went up to 125 percent. But the point remains. And the face-off between America and China has only heated up. What does that mean? Is the twenty-first century destined to be ours, or China’s? All these questions and more with Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson.

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Depending on who you talk to, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are either the swampiest of swamp creatures—the epitome of all that is wrong with political journalism—or, alternatively, two of the most interesting, successful entrepreneurs in the new media landscape.

In 2006, VandeHei left The Washington Post to co-found Politico, where he was executive editor. His first hire was Mike Allen, then of Time magazine.

Politico turned into a massive hit, with Allen as its star writer. During the Obama years, Allen was so well-sourced that he became, in the words of Mark Leibovich at The New York Times, “the man the White House wakes up to.”

But then, in 2017, Mike and Jim decided to start something new—a website called Axios, which, in the beginning, was really a newsletter Mike wrote every day. They delivered news straight to your inbox and kept it short, snappy, and heavy on emojis. They called it “smart brevity.”

Their emails are filled with invocations to “go deeper” and “be smarter.” And at the end of the day, they send you an email called “Finish Line” that’s essentially life advice for young professionals on the make. A recent one advised millennials nearing middle age to begin something new, like ice skating, while another advised readers to ditch Google Maps to keep their brains sharp. It’s like MAHA for D.C.’s professional-managerial class.

They were, in a sense, pioneers of a new kind of online journalism. Long before seemingly everyone had a Substack, they were using one of the oldest internet applications—email—to get news to subscribers.

So Mike and Jim are big deals in journalism and have been for a long time.

But in case you haven’t noticed, and we don't know how you would have missed this if you listen to this show, journalism is in deep trouble. This is in large part because Americans have lost faith in journalists. According to Gallup, roughly two-thirds of Americans had a great deal of faith in the news media in 1970. Today, only 31 percent of Americans say the same—while 36 percent say they have no faith in the news media at all.

How can that trust be rebuilt? Are we destined to live in a world of different realities and alternative facts? Should the mainstream media apologize for all they have ignored or covered up or gotten wrong over the past few years?

To boil it all down: Does real, honest journalism have a future in America?

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John McWhorter is one of the greatest living experts on the English language—and many others, too. He’s an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia, a columnist at The New York Times, and he’s an unsung Broadway aficionado. He once told us he could not do an interview because he was busy rehearsing a cabaret show for his bungalow colony. It all sounds like a scene out of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

But in his day job, he is thinking about words, language, and—the not-so-controversial topic of pronouns. John is a true independent mind. He has been one of the most outspoken critics of liberal excess—his last book was called Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. But now? Now he’s taking a position that we suspect will provoke the other side.

In his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words, John makes the provocative case that the English language evolves in ways that don’t always make sense. But, he says, that’s okay. And he takes it a step further—saying the wide adoption of they/them in the singular, instead of he/him or she/her, works.

What are the stakes of these little words? For example, as a society, are we disrespecting women (and men) when we fail to acknowledge, in our language, who has dealt with the challenges of womanhood or manhood and who has not?

And what are the consequences of letting children adopt they/them pronouns, especially if it pushes them toward medical transition? At the same time, how do we create a society that is kind and inclusive but also reflective of reality? And can we even have both?

The broader context of this language conversation is about what can and cannot be said. We talk about this broader context—the state of the woke left, but also the rise of the woke right.

Bari puts all of these questions to the premier linguist and culture expert John McWhorter on this episode of Honestly.

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A few years ago Jay Bhattacharya was an obscure Stanford professor—a medical doctor who also had a PhD in economics. Then Covid hit, the lockdowns began, and “Doctor Jay”—as he is known—became a pariah in the medical community.

That’s because, along with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, Jay questioned whether the lockdowns were a good idea. They did this in an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. And this idea, in the madness of that period, was considered so dangerous by federal health and Big Tech that Jay was not only smeared, but censored. His words—on platforms from Reddit to Twitter to Facebook—were suppressed.

But here’s the thing: The lockdowns were pretty disastrous. We’re still dealing with their effects—the loss of childhood learning, the cancer screenings that were skipped, the inability of those with special needs to see the people who help them, the separation of families—just to name a few consequences. And it’s still unclear if those lockdowns were worth it.

Many powers tried to silence Jay, but he persisted. And today Jay is the new head of the National Institutes of Health. If you’re skeptical of karma, this turn of events may lead you to believe in it.

He’s leading this massive federal agency, sometimes called “the crown jewel of American science”—it’s the largest public funder of medical research in the world—at a moment when public health authorities need to rebuild trust.

But here’s the wrinkle. Jay has two bosses: President Trump, who initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop a Covid vaccine in his first term. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, who is also the most famous vaccine skeptic in America.

Walking the line here will inevitably be tricky for Dr. Jay. So, how can he do it? How does someone who believes that vaccinating your kids for diseases like polio and measles also confront the idea that large swaths of Americans have fear around vaccinating their kids? And how will he navigate an HHS that’s empowering discredited antivax crusaders — a move that, as The Wall Street Journal recently argued, is already vindicating Kennedy’s critics.

That’s among the many, many things Bari asks him in this conversation.

Jay has lived a remarkable life. And we get into all of it. His conversion to Christianity as a teenager and how his faith allowed him to stick to his values—and even to pray for Francis Collins, the former NIH director who called his ideas dangerous. The chutzpah it took to fight the entire medical establishment. How he ultimately triumphed against his critics. How he wants to put the National Institutes of Health on the frontline in the war against chronic illness in America.

And, most importantly, how can public health authorities make America healthy again? Today on Honestly, he tells us all about how he plans to do it all. 

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For the last quarter century, an Italian macher from New Jersey has been one of the most powerful people in the United States. If you’re a certain type of nerdy, obsessive, legally inclined conservative, he’s basically Taylor Swift. But most people don’t know who he is because he doesn’t want them to know.

He has never held or sought political office. He does not hail from Silicon Valley or Wall Street. He is not a writer, pundit, or political aide. He rarely does interviews. And yet his influence is hard to overstate. People in power—particularly presidents—trust and listen to him.

I’m talking about Leonard Leo, the animating force behind the Federalist Society and the key node of a growing network of conservative groups aiming to reshape the culture and the country. Whether you’ve heard of him or not, he has no doubt directly affected your life in some way.

Leo is the person who counseled George W. Bush to appoint Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He had an arguably even greater influence on President Trump. Trump was new to Washington when he first became president. Leo, on the other hand, knew everyone in town. Leo counseled Trump and helped pick and prepare Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett for confirmation.

And that’s just the Supreme Court. Leo has cultivated talent across every level of the judicial system.

Leo understands the levers of Washington. He understands how Congress works, how the press works, and most importantly, how the courts work. He is, in a sense, the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — the one that overturned Roe v. Wade. Which means he has changed American history—for better or worse, depending on your worldview.

Today on Honestly, Bari asks Leo about all of it: his relationship with Trump, their falling out (though he disputes this characterization), how he understands the divide on the right between the old guard like himself and the new characters like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. Bari asks about his so-called dark money groups, the $1.6 billion-dollar gift he was given, and the criticism he gets for wielding power and influence of this magnitude.

She asks about Trump’s willingness to defy the courts, and if Leonard sees it that way. They discuss Trump’s controversial moves like sending accused gang members to El Salvador and reinstituting TikTok. She asks why MAGA has recently rejected Amy Coney Barrett, and if gay marriage is a settled matter.

And most importantly, in a moment of institutional crisis in American life, Bari asks whether the Supreme Court can remain above the fray.

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The morning of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was detained at his apartment in New York City. Khalil is a 30-year-old Algerian citizen. He was born in Syria and is of Palestinian descent.

He came to this country on a student visa in 2022, married an American citizen in 2023, became a green card holder in 2024, and finished his graduate studies at Columbia University in December 2024.

Mahmoud was also the spokesman and negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that says it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and which played an active role in the rioting that took over Columbia buildings last spring.

He has not been charged with any crimes—at least not so far. But the White House wants to deport him on the grounds that he poses a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went as far as to post on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Many of us believe that Khalil’s ideology is abhorrent. He enjoyed the United States’ educational system—attending one of our most prestigious universities—while advocating for America’s destruction and for a group that seeks the genocide of the Jewish people.

At the same time, the case for his deportation is not clear-cut. Here’s the divide:

Some say this is an immigration case. As Free Press contributing editor Abigail Shrier has put it: “This is an immigration, not a free speech case. It’s about whether the U.S. can set reasonable conditions on aliens for entry and residence.” But others say this is, in fact, a free speech case that cuts to the heart of our most cherished values.

To figure all this out, we’re hosting three of the smartest legal minds we know. Eugene Volokh is an expert on the Bill of Rights who is currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He’s also a contributor to Reason magazine, where he runs his own blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder is a practicing lawyer and the director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center. Just yesterday, he filed a lawsuit in the District Court for the Southern District of New York against Khalil and several others for material support for terror. Jed Rubenfeld is a Free Press columnist and a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School.

This case is one we have written about extensively in The Free Press—and one that we are actively debating in our newsroom. So we were thrilled to be able to bring together some of the smartest people on this complicated issue.

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The other week Bari traveled to Austin, Texas, to host a debate on a simple little topic: religion and whether we need more of it.

There’s a line from Proverbs that has guided believers for at least the past 2,000 or so years. It goes like this: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” But for most of our lives, this message has been turned on its head.

We can’t entirely blame the so-called New Atheists, who dominated the American intellectual scene in the first part of this century, for the death of God—for that, we’d need to go back to Nietzsche or Darwin or the Enlightenment. But the point is that for people of Bari’s generation and cohort, to be an educated, sophisticated, respectable person was to be an atheist. Or at the very least, an agnostic.

The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian fell from 90 percent in 1972 to 64 percent in 2022, while the religiously unaffiliated (the so-called “nones”) rose from 5 percent to 30 percent in the same period, according to Pew Research.The shift toward secularism has been even more pronounced across the Atlantic. Among Europeans ages 16 to 29, 70 percent say they never attend religious services.

But after years of decline, this trend may be starting to reverse. A massive new Pew survey found that the share of Americans identifying as Christian has, after many years of decline, finally started to rise again. And the share of Americans identifying with other religions is actually increasing.

So are we better off with or without God?

The other night in Austin Bari sat down with Ross Douthat, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Shermer, and Adam Carolla. They came together to debate the following resolution: Does the West need a religious revival?

Ross and Ayaan argued yes. Ross is a New York Times opinion columnist. His most recent book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ayaan is an activist and best-selling author of many books including Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. 

On the other side, Michael Shermer and Adam Carolla argued no, we do not need a religious revival. Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. He, too, is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers on science, psychology, and faith. Adam Carolla is a comedian, actor, radio personality, TV host, and best-selling author. He currently hosts The Adam Carolla Show.

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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic.

Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power.

To see their way out of the political wilderness, the Democrats need a vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump. A vision that can bring back the disaffected Democrats who stayed home, or voted red for the first time, this past November.

While other liberals and progressives are doubling down on zombie ideas, afraid to come face to face with a country that has moved decisively to the right, Ezra and Derek are willing to face reality. They see that blue states are functioning—as Bari likes to say—similarly to the DMV. And as a result, people are fleeing to places like Texas and Florida.

If you’ve lived in a city like L.A. or San Francisco in the past decade, it’s pretty difficult to sell the idea that the government is working effectively. It’s why so many people are cheering for DOGE.

But while DOGE is taking a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy, Ezra and Derek are reformers who believe it can be fixed. They want to rein in the laws, regulations, and liberal thinking that have made it nearly impossible to do anything in this country.

They just wrote a new book about all of this called Abundance. Their thesis is simple: To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. 

While conservatives and libertarians might say: Yes, exactly, let the free market do its thing, Ezra and Derek think the government can play a crucial role—if liberals will let it.

So how do we build a government that’s less like the DMV and more like the Apple Store? How will this government actually deliver for Americans and solve our most pressing problems—in housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare? And, how do we reverse our government’s long march into total incompetence?

Ezra and Derek have a lot of ideas on how we can get there. Today on Honestly, we hear them. This conversation challenged us, and we hope it challenges and surprises you too.

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Alex Karp is many things: a cross-country skier, a long-range shooter, a tai chi expert who might be the only man who knows how to wield a sword but doesn’t know how to drive. He’s also a collector of extremely prestigious degrees. His PhD thesis was called “Aggression in the Life-World: The Extension of Parsons’ Concept of Aggression by Describing the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” 

Since 2003, he has also been the CEO of Palantir, a software and data analytics company that does defense and intelligence work. Simply put, it’s a company that stops terror attacks—while also helping make sports cars go faster and pharmaceutical companies build better drugs.

Bari sat down with Alex Karp at UATX to discuss his new book, The Technological Republic, which offers a vision of how Silicon Valley lost its way and how the future of America and the West hinges on it finding its way back—fast. It just debuted on The New York Times Best Seller list.

They also discuss Barnard students occupying a campus building, the religious nature of woke culture, and DOGE. 

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Each one of us has a different conception story. For some parents, it’s a romantic night out, maybe over a candlelit dinner. For others, like Bari and Nellie, it involves a trip to a fertility clinic in a mall that doesn’t even validate parking. 

And of course, for some it’s a long, challenging, emotional process involving needles, hormones, and many false starts. We know a lot of our listeners can relate to that.  

Now, the topic of infertility often seems like the purview of a doctor’s office or a self-help book, or maybe a women’s health column. Where you might not expect to hear about it in painstaking detail is in Andrew Schulz’s new Netflix special. Schulz’s special is vulnerable, obviously funny, and a look into the taboo topic of male infertility. It’s called Life, and if you haven’t already seen it, blow off your plans tonight and watch Life instead. 

Now, the last time we had Schulz on this show was three years ago. It was in the thick of the woke culture storm, and Schulz was about to release a comedy special on Amazon. But when the streamer asked him to do what a lot of people at the time were being asked to do in comedy—censor his jokes—Schulz said no. He bet on himself and released the special independently. As he tells Bari today, he ended up making five times what he would have made with Amazon. 

We’ve been talking a lot on this show about the vibe shift that’s come for politics and tech. And it’s obviously come for comedy. But actually, we think you could make the argument that comedy created the vibe shift that we’re seeing in so many other parts of the culture. And perhaps that’s because comedians with podcasts have become like the Walter Cronkites of American culture. Theo Von is almost Barbara Walters at this point. And Andrew Schulz has found himself right in the thick of it. 

Last October on his podcast, Schulz sat down with then-candidate Donald Trump as he was running for president, for a candid 90-minute conversation. You can imagine the type of response he got for that. 

Today on Honestly, Bari asks Schulz about that interview with Trump and whether there are certain people who are beyond the pale. They talk about his difficulty conceiving, what it meant for his masculinity, and she asks about the decision to put his—and his wife’s—vulnerability on camera. And finally, she asks how to resist audience capture.

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You may have never heard of Sarah Wynn-Williams, but that’s about to change. 

She’s written a memoir about her nearly seven years at Facebook, the company that has since rebranded as Meta. In doing so, she’s become the company’s highest-ranking whistleblower. 

Until around 72 hours ago, the book’s existence itself was a secret. Wynn-Williams, a onetime New Zealand diplomat, was effectively the company’s top envoy to governments around the world. She traveled extensively with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg—the company’s two top leaders during her time—and her experiences with them often read like pure comedy, a mix of Succession and The Office. 

The book, however, is a lot more than that. It’s a shocking insider’s account of working at one of the world’s most powerful companies at the highest level, and the gap between the idealistic way it sold itself to its employees and the world. 

It’s called Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. And it coincides with the news that Wynn-Williams has filed an SEC complaint against the company, alleging that Zuckerberg agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the U.S. in the hopes that it would help convince Beijing to allow Facebook into China. 

On today’s Honestly, Bari and Wynn-Williams discuss her bizarre experiences, her thoughts on the future of Facebook, the pushback she’s already received, and why she wrote this book—despite the risk of taking on a corporate behemoth like Meta. 

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Earlier this week on Honestly, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Brianna Wu, and Christopher Caldwell shared their views on President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s showdown with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and on the Russia-Ukraine war more generally.

Simply put, Batya and Chris made the case that Russia is not an American adversary in the way China is and that Trump’s seeming sympathy toward Russian president Vladimir Putin is actually a strategic play to pull Russia away from China and into our orbit.

The conversation is provocative. It provoked many of us here at The Free Press. Not all of our listeners agreed with what they heard either. For some, it was frustrating or even angering to hear this perspective. Yes, contrary to popular belief, we do read the comments.

And there’s been a tremendous amount of debate inside our newsroom about America’s new posture regarding Russia and Ukraine, just as there is on all of the most important topics of the day.

We think that’s our strength. We believe in listening to arguments, in good faith, from people we respect. And if our panel show earlier in the week was dominated by a perspective sympathetic to Trump, today we want to offer a very different perspective from Eli Lake, Free Press reporter and the host of our new podcast, Breaking History.

In this episode, Eli explores how a different Republican president—Ronald Reagan—spoke out against Russian aggression. And how his words inspired dissidents from across the Soviet bloc, like the Czech playwright Václav Havel, to lead their own countries to freedom.

This is a show that looks to the past to illuminate the present, and we think this episode is especially important right now. So today, Eli Lake on Breaking History.

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It’s been four days since the diplomatic earthquake went down in the Oval Office between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian president Zelensky. The world is still feeling the aftershocks.

In Europe, leaders have been jolted into action. Ukraine’s European allies, including British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, met in London on Sunday to forge their own peace plan and agree on additional support for Kyiv.

In Moscow, officials are celebrating Trump’s approach to the conflict—and his foreign policy more generally. “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision,” said a Kremlin spokesman. Russian state TV described a new world order with Trump in the White House.

In Washington, administration officials have made it clear that it is up to Zelensky to apologize and patch things up if there is any chance of a U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal. “The president believes Zelensky has to come back to the table and he has to be the one to come and make it right,” one official told NBC News.

The Zelensky-Trump bust-up—and the war in Ukraine in general—is one of those important subjects where people we respect (including inside The Free Press newsroom) passionately disagree. There are plenty of other outlets that will give you only one strongly expressed view. But it is our conviction that the only way we can get to the truth is by seriously considering multiple perspectives.

The differences of opinion start with the question of what, exactly, we all watched on Friday.

Were Trump and Vance bullying a besieged ally in public? Or were we watching the White House finally stand up for American taxpayers?

Then there are the bigger questions: Is Trump’s Ukraine policy a long-overdue acknowledgment of the limits of American power? Or an unforced error that endangers not just America’s allies but America itself? And what are the chances of peace with honor for Ukraine?

Today we’ve brought together a group of people who answer those questions quite differently: Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, Democratic fundraiser and strategist Brianna Wu, and special guest Christopher Caldwell, author of multiple books, including The Age of Entitlement.

Both Batya and Christopher have pieces up in The Free Press right now:

“Zelensky’s Trumpian Trick” by Christopher Caldwell, and “What Average Americans Think of Trump’s Showdown with Zelensky” by Batya Ungar-Sargon. 

Other must-reads in The Free Press:

"Trump’s Foreign Policy Revolution" by Matthew Continetti

"J.D. Vance’s Fighting Words—Against Me and Ukraine" by Niall Ferguson

"A Fiasco in the Oval Office" by Eli Lake

"Ten Reasons for the Zelensky-Trump Blowup" by Victor Davis Hanson

"What Zelensky Can Learn from Netanyahu" by Michael Oren

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Have you ever gone on the internet and stumbled onto this combo of words, or perhaps non-words?: “Dogecoin.” “Shiba Inu.” “Hawkcoin.” “Bored Ape NFT.”

If that sounded like gibberish, don’t worry—we’ll explain. And also, time to start learning, because these terms come out of a new financial ecosystem—the world of crypto, a market that started 15 years ago and is now worth about $3.3 trillion.

This new world has caught the attention of none other than President Donald Trump. Since coming to office, Trump has appointed a crypto czar and floated the idea of a national crypto stockpile. And shortly Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin—as did Melania. Trump’s coin has reportedly generated $100 million in trading fees so far.

And to top it all off, Trump is taking calls from the biggest names in the business. One of whom is our guest today—Brian Armstrong. Brian is a 42-year-old San Jose native who changed the nature of commerce not only in America but all over the world. He co-founded a cryptocurrency platform called Coinbase in 2012. Now, it’s the largest crypto exchange in the US.

To some, he’s doing something as revolutionary as building rocket ships to Mars. To others, he’s growing an industry riddled with scammers, grifters, and criminals.

Armstrong says those stories are the sideshow and that Bitcoin—or perhaps another cryptocurrency—will prove itself to be as essential as the dollar.

Today on Honestly, Bari asks Brian why he thinks crypto is the way of the future, how he navigates eager regulators, why he’s been so politically active, how MAGA’s "America First" ethos gets along with the borderless, decentralized crypto zeitgeist, and if crypto is really as dangerous as some make it out to be.

We also talk about the DOGE, his recent meeting with Trump, and how he once stuck his neck out against the far-left mob.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Over the past year, right-wing parties across the West have been sweeping elections. Donald Trump in the United States, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and now Germany.

On Sunday, 83 percent of Germans went to the polls—the highest turnout since the Cold War.

The Christian Democrats, the country’s center-right party led by Friedrich Merz, won. But that’s not the big story. The big story is that the right-wing populist party, the AfD, came in second place with nearly 21 percent, the strongest showing since WWII.

There is a single reason why. It’s not the economy. It’s not the war with Russia. It’s not climate change. It’s immigration. And I’m not talking about jobs or wage deflation. I’m talking about the fact that over the past decade, Germany has seen a net migration of 5 million people, with more than 1 million of the new arrivals coming from Syria and Afghanistan.

And the rifts have been palpable. And here, I’m choosing two examples from just last week: An Afghan migrant suspect rammed a car through a crowd of people. Thirty-nine people, including several children, were injured. Just the day before the election, a Syrian migrant became the lead suspect for a stabbing outside of the Holocaust memorial. This all fundamentally tests the limits of assimilation and multiculturalism.

The dynamic here is the same that has characterized many Western nations. The center-left and the left have ignored the problem. And the right has named it—and filled the vacuum. As Michael Sandel has put it: “Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.” If there’s a line that captures the politics of our era, it is that.

Last week, the very question of whether migrants can adopt pluralism and Western ideals was also put to Australians, after two Sydney nurses went viral when caught on camera saying that they would kill Israeli patients that came into their hospital. One nurse was an Afghan refugee.

Here to unpack it all is Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, Democratic fundraising powerhouse Brianna Wu, and the founder of Quillette, Claire Lehmann.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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I’m sure you remember the images of Kfir and Ariel Bibas.

They were just nine months and four years old when they were kidnapped by Hamas along with their mother, Shiri, on October 7, 2023. It was impossible to look at the image of her shielding them, her eyes full of terror, the children clinging to her, and not think of the Holocaust. 

For more than 500 days, people around the world prayed for the safe return of these babies. Our hopes were raised on February 1, when the fourth member of the family—Yarden Bibas—was liberated after 484 days in Hamas captivity.

But as this episode goes live, Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas won’t be returning home alive. Hamas instead will hand over their remains. 

How can Israel live alongside an enemy that kidnaps and murders babies? And what does it mean for us to live in a world, where people in the West tore down posters of the Bibas children. 

My friend, Commentary magazine senior editor Seth Mandel, explains why in The Free Press: 

“In a better world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. . . . The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West. . . . It is impossible for the rest of us to pretend that we didn’t see a chunk of society, whether in person or online, rush to cross that line and cheer on the people who kidnapped two babies . . . .Kfir became a symbol because he is the answer to every relevant question about this conflict. His case is the war boiled down to its essence. Kfir is the dividing line. In a better world, there’d be no one standing on the wrong side of it.”

Before the devastating news of the Bibas children broke, Bari sat down with Matti Friedman, Free Press correspondent in Jerusalem. They happened to talk on the very day that Kfir and Ariel’s father, Yarden, was released after being kept in unimaginable conditions. Now Yarden confronts the nightmare that his entire family was murdered.

Bari and Matti talk about the toll of this war, why returning the hostages is so fundamentally important to the future of Israel, about the rise of anti-Jewish hate, and about how to be American, Jewish, and Zionist all at the same time, and how Jews are waking up to a new reality in 2025. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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A lot of people are wondering if things in LA would look different if Rick Caruso had won the mayoral race against Karen Bass in 2022. If he had been mayor when devastating fires began in the city last month, would he have prevented them from consuming about 40,000 acres, which is more than twice the area of Manhattan?

At the time he ran, many quietly supported the billionaire real estate mogul—scared to come out publicly against the candidate backed by Barack Obama and celebrities like Shonda Rhimes and Arianna Grande. But now many in LA are texting me, saying they wish he had won. Indeed, some of these lifelong Democrats are now saying that they are Republicans, or the very least they’re whatever Karen Bass isn't.

Caruso may have lost then, but he’s acting now like a de facto public official, launching and funding a nonprofit he calls Steadfast LA. He’s leveraged his connections to get companies from Netflix to Amazon to J.P. Morgan to help restore critical infrastructure in the city, he’s worked on how to quickly rebuild homes with the help of AI, and he’s figuring out ways to use America’s most advanced technology to prevent future fires.

Now, everyone in California is watching to see what Caruso does next. Will he run for mayor again? Or perhaps even governor of California? And most pressingly, can Caruso figure out a way to save Los Angeles?

We also talk about ethical issues around inmates and private-sector firefighters, and about hot-button topics in California—like Trump's plans for immigration, or how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and trans issues are affecting public schools.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Running The Free Press is Bari’s hobby, but her true passion is being a yenta. And one thing Bari has learned from talking to young singles is that there is a total breakdown of sexual relations these days between men and women. 

Some blame social media, dating apps, or the alleged feminization of men. But Louise Perry blames the sexual revolution. In 2022, Louise wrote this for The Free Press: “The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It’s a story about the triumph of the playboy.” This argument is the crux of her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which has just been adapted for young adults—called A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century: The Young Adult Adaptation of ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’.

This Valentine’s Day, Louise is here to explain how we went wrong as a society on dating, sex, porn, and marriage; how it is impacting women and men differently; how and if we can get back on track; how to date effectively in 2025; and how a revival of Christian sex ethics might be the answer.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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It’s Trump’s third week in office and there is no shortage of news to report. Last week, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard advanced in their congressional confirmation hearings for Health and Human Services secretary, FBI director, and Director of National Intelligence, and criticisms of Gabbard resurfaced over her meeting with former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and over her defense of Edward Snowden—who she refused to call a traitor.

Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States, making him the first foreign leader invited to the new Trump White House. At a press conference with President Trump, he looked like the dog that caught the car when Trump announced that the U.S. would take control of Gaza, and that the 1.7 million people living there would be resettled elsewhere. 

Trump also issued an executive order imposing a 90-day pause on foreign aid programs, which totaled around $70 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Kanye has gone nuts again; Trump backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts and said Elon would be heading to the Pentagon next, causing shares of defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to tumble; and the vibe shift came for the Super Bowl. 

To unpack it all today is Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon and political fundraising powerhouse Brianna Wu.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Two weeks ago, America thought it was leading the AI race. Then out of nowhere, an unknown Chinese start-up turned the American stock market—and that assumption—on its head. DeepSeek, a Chinese company founded less than two years ago, released a free AI chatbot that rivals the most advanced available open AI products. And they did it despite America’s prohibition on shipping our most advanced microchips to China. 

America was caught flat-footed, asking how did this happen? And could we actually lose this tech war? 

Now, if your understanding of computers stops at the term hard drive, don’t worry. Today on Honestly, Bari has two incredible guests, experts on both AI and China, who are going to break it all down for you. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor, AI expert, and a must-read writer at his blog, Marginal Revolution. He is joined today by Geoffrey Cane, an expert on China and the author of The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future. 

Today, how this happened and what it means. And can America win the AI war with China?

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Did you know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with naked dwarfs? Did you know that Catherine the Great—long smeared as a nymphomaniac—was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod’s genitals once exploded with maggots?

Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and it’s hard to remember any of it. But not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pages that you cannot put down.

Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature.

While most of Sebag’s books are biographies of people, Jerusalem is a biography of a city—a city, as he writes, that is “the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice in heaven and on earth.” The book takes you through Jerusalem’s 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, and it has just been reissued in paperback.

With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel and with Trump a few weeks into his second presidency, we could not think of a better person to talk to than Simon about this moment and how to understand it. 

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Fourteen years ago, Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It was received less like a book and more like a nuclear bomb. Here are some headlines from the time: “Why I Will Never Be a Tiger Mom.” “Why Amy Chua Is Wrong About Parenting.” “Amy Chua Is a Circus Trainer, Not a Tiger Mother.” “The Human Race Needs Elephant Mothers, Not Tiger Mothers.” “Amy Chua's Recipe for Disaster and the Externalized Cost of Book Sales.”

Then, just as the publicity around Tiger Mother died down, Amy came out with The Triple Package, about why some ethnic groups succeed. People called her racist. Then she came out in support of Brett Kavanaugh's court nomination in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (before he was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford). Afterward, people accused her of misogyny and grooming. And she was almost forced out of Yale for it. 

Then, in 2021, she was accused of hosting boozy dinner parties during COVID lockdowns and “dinner party-gate” was born. Yale punished her by barring her from teaching her “small group” first-year student contingency. 

Fast-forward to 2025. And the tables have turned.

Being a strict “tiger mom”? In. Free speech? In. Wokeness and hypersensitivity? Out.

Covid lockdowns? Definitely out. Vicious character assassinations at Senate confirmations? Out. As Free Press reporter Peter Savodnik just wrote: “The ideas that Chua was pilloried for are suddenly back in fashion.” 

Just a few weeks ago, she attended the inauguration of the incoming president and vice president—one of whom happens to be her former student and mentee. 

It’s easy to be a weather vane—to go where the wind blows. It's hard to be Amy Chua—to stand up for your beliefs even when they are not popular, even when it means personal consequences. On today’s episode, live in D.C. during inauguration weekend, Chua explains how and why she won—and what it feels like to be vindicated. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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It’s President Donald Trump’s second week in office, and he has wasted no time being the wrecking ball he promised his voters he would be.

On Tuesday, he issued a memo freezing trillions of dollars in federal funding, in his attempt to purge the government of “woke ideology,” which was followed by chaos and confusion—and ultimately blocked by a federal judge. Earlier in the week, Trump convinced Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro to accept deported Colombian migrants—who Petro had turned away from his borders only a day earlier—after Trump threatened a 25-percent tariff on Colombian imports to the U.S. 

Back in Congress, the Senate narrowly confirmed Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense in a dramatic tie-breaking vote cast by a hurried J.D. Vance who showed up just in the nick of time. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. is currently having his highly anticipated confirmation hearing to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Just as that began, Caroline Kennedy—the only surviving child of John F. Kennedy—came out Tuesday with a bombshell public denunciation of her cousin, calling him unqualified, “a predator,” and a hypocrite. She also alleged that he used to “put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks.” Can’t say we had that on our 2025 bingo card…

Finally, the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek sent tech stocks plummeting on Monday (to the tune of more than $1 trillion) after it rolled out a new app on the U.S. market that is a fraction of the cost of American AI competitors. All of which brought up questions—and panic—about our brewing AI war with China. 

To talk about it all, Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik is joined today by Brianna Wu and FP investigative reporter Madeleine Rowley, who spoke to Hegseth this week about his plans to end diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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There has been a cultural sea change over the last year when it comes to health in America. It is shepherded by an unexpected coalition of nutritionists, longevity experts, wellness influencers, holistic and functional medicine doctors, moms wearing babies and natural deodorant, mushroom shamans, and some vaccine skeptics. They’ve gathered under the banner of Make American Healthy Again, or MAHA, and they’re here to tell us that plastic cutting boards, Diet Coke, and pasteurized milk—all things that once seemed perfectly normal in American life—are actually killing us. 

A decade ago, if you read that list of personas you would think MAHA is some woo-woo, hippie progressive movement. But here we are in 2025, and this is the same group that helped usher Donald Trump to power. 

What does MAHA stand for? What does it look like when it marries itself to power? And what will MAHA actually be able to accomplish over the next four years, under their fearless leader—and risky Health and Human Services nominee—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? 

Live in D.C. during inauguration weekend, Calley Means, Jillian Michaels and Vani Hari explain. Calley is the founder of Truemed and co-author of Good Energy. Jillian is America’s original fitness expert and the author of nine books. Vani is the founder of Truvani, and you probably know her from her blog Food Babe. She also got Subway to remove “the yoga mat chemical” from its breads. And, the fact that there was a yoga mat chemical in its bread is the whole purpose of this conversation.

Today, the three MAHA whisperers explain why this movement just might be the most powerful political force in American life.

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President Donald Trump was inaugurated on Monday, and he came out swinging. On his first day, he signed 26 executive orders and rolled back about 80 of former president Joe Biden’s executive actions. (For comparison, Biden signed nine executive orders on day one; in 2017, Trump signed one; in 2013, Obama signed zero, and in 2009, just two.)

Trump was making good on the promises he campaigned on. On immigration, he’s trying to end birthright citizenship. On diversity, equity, and inclusion, he’s saying, “You’re fired” to federal DEI employees. On trans issues, he signed an order that declares only two genders. And on “America First,” he’s saying goodbye to the “Gulf of Mexico” and hello to the “Gulf of America.” 

Trump also announced Stargate, gave TikTok a second life, pardoned about 1,500 January 6 rioters, and pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.

Suffice it to say, there is much to discuss. Today, Bari Weiss is back with Batya Ungar-Sargon, Brianna Wu, and Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik to unpack Trump’s first week in office and what they think about…Elon’s arm.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball, a middle finger, the people’s punch to the Beltway’s mouth. And while this populist moment feels “unprecedented,” it’s not. The rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA. 

We have seen populist leaders like Donald Trump before. He stands on the shoulders of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, Alabama governor George Wallace, and Louisiana legend Huey Long. There have been populist senators, governors, newspaper editors, and radio broadcasters.

But only rarely has a populist climbed as high as President Trump. In fact, it has happened only once before. 

The last populist to win the presidency was born before the American Revolution. He rose from nothing to become a great general. His adoring troops called him Old Hickory, and his enemies derided him as a bigamist and a tyrant in waiting. His name was Andrew Jackson, and he’s the guy who’s still on the 20 dollar bill. 

On today’s debut episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake explains how Andrew Jackson’s presidency is the best guide to what Trump’s second term could look like. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Credits: Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency; PBS

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Being the Republican House leader is a little like marrying Henry VIII. At some point, you’re getting your head cut off. 

But for now, Mike Johnson remains not just physically intact—but in a position of incredible power.

Two weeks ago, Johnson was reelected Speaker of the House on the first ballot. Despite having only the narrowest of House majorities—the Republicans control the House by four votes, 219 vs. 215 Democrats—Mike Johnson was able to unite the Republican Party’s warring factions—moderates, the Freedom Caucus, the Raw Milk caucus, libertarians, hawks, doves, and whatever Lauren Boebert is—behind him. 

It was tough to pull off, as it would’ve taken only a couple of No votes to send him off to that Republican Valhalla where John Boehner chain-smokes and chugs merlot, Paul Ryan does push-ups, and Kevin McCarthy throws darts at a photo of Matt Gaetz.

Now, Donald Trump will become president of the United States and Mike Johnson will have the task of shepherding his agenda through Congress. And because the Republicans control the House by only four seats, the Speaker might have to get very close to some moderate Democrats—particularly those with constituents itching for a tax cut. 

Today on Honestly, Speaker Johnson breaks down this challenge. He talks about how the party moves forward with two different visions for America; why he thinks Biden was “the worst president ever”; he recalls an eerie experience with Biden in the Oval Office; and he even gives us a taste of his uncanny Trump impression.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Very few people have worked closely with President-elect Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him.

But former national security adviser to Trump, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster is an exception.

In his book At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he gives an honest account of working in Trump’s first administration: the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

Last week, McMaster sat down with Michael Moynihan at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for an in-person Free Press Book Club event to discuss it all. They talk about his moments of tension with Trump, his understanding of Trump’s foreign policy, and how Trump’s rhetoric toward adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press. And also, as McMaster puts it, Trump can be “so disruptive, he often interrupts his own agenda.”

They also get into the president-elect’s current cabinet picks—ones who McMaster sees as good, like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, but how good picks do not ensure a harmonious administration. They discuss Trump’s options for handling Russia, Iran, and Hamas in his second term, and why McMaster is surprisingly and cautiously optimistic about Trump 2.0.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institute in Washington, D.C. FDD’s experts conduct in-depth research, produce accurate and timely analyses, identify illicit activities, and provide policy options—all with the aim of strengthening U.S. national security and reducing or eliminating threats posed by enemies of the United States and other free nations. Learn more at FDD.org.

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Trump’s inauguration is right around the corner, and there is so much to cover about the new White House. In the coming weeks, we’ll have key figures in the Trump administration on Honestly to talk about what they are planning.

But, we all know that if Trump 2.0 is anything like Trump 1.0, there are going to be a lot of twists and turns here. And we want to analyze and break down each development that unfolds in Trump’s new administration.

Starting today and for the next few months, we’re going to bring you weekly episodes with two of my favorite guests: Batya Ungar-Sargon and Brianna Wu.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is a Free Press contributor and the opinion editor at Newsweek. Brianna Wu is a Democratic fundraiser and activist, and in her past life, a video game developer. If you’ve heard them together on Honestly before, you know that these two come from different sides of the political spectrum, but we really value hearing both of their perspectives, even—or especially—when they disagree. We think you will too.

Today, we’re going to cover the L.A. fires and their political implications, the civil war inside the MAGA movement between the nationalist populists and the free marketers over H-1B visas, and Mark Zuckerberg’s red pill moment and changes at Meta—and the pair give us their predictions for confirmation hearings beginning this week.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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It’s the biggest crime—and cover-up—in British history. And most people, at least until recently, haven’t even heard of it.

Thousands of young girls, mostly children, were systematically groomed and raped by immigrant gangs across the UK over a period of decades. Police turned the girls away. Detectives were discouraged from investigating. Politicians and prosecutors did their best to sweep it under the rug. Journalists skipped the biggest story of their lives. A culture of silence enveloped the United Kingdom. Why?

Today, we talk to two women who spoke out years ago about what was happening while nearly everyone looked the other way: the British feminist and author Julie Bindel, and the author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both took tremendous risks in highlighting the story while the legacy press largely looked away. Bindel is the author, most recently, of Feminism for Women and writes a popular Substack column. Hirsi Ali, a Free Press contributor, is the author of numerous books on radical islam, including Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, which helped bring attention to the grooming gangs scandal in 2021. 

Julie and Ayaan explain today what happened, how these rapes and murders were covered up in the name of preserving “social harmony,” how it’s still happening, why Elon Musk is suddenly tweeting furiously about it and how Britain’s ruling class is being forced to reckon with a scandal it had, until recently, successfully ignored. 

It’s a story about “tolerance” run amok, and how a civilized country can convince itself to accept the most uncivilized crimes imaginable.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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If you haven’t heard of Bryan Johnson or watched the new Netflix documentary about him, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, Bryan is a person who has given his life—and his body—over to the science of longevity. That means that he has essentially turned himself into a human lab rat, undergoing hundreds of tests and studies on every human marker imaginable in order to discover the best ways to stop the process of human aging.

What he’s found is unconventional, to say the least: He eats dinner at 11 a.m., he has swapped blood with his 17-year-old son, and he measures his nighttime erection lengths—just to name a few of the hundreds of things that you probably have never heard of a person doing in the name of health and longevity.

But it’s not just that Bryan wants to reverse aging and live forever. He also thinks we’re at the bleeding edge of a new kind of reality. He believes he’s akin to Amelia Earhart or Ernest Shackleton, and that he’s on the frontier of something big—something that will change everything about humanity as we know it.

In that way, this conversation is not just about wacky exercise routines and unusual supplements. It’s a philosophical discussion about the meaning and purpose of life, and what we’re all doing here on this planet. 

Today on Honestly, Bryan Johnson tells us about why and how he’s not going to die.

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There is something so delicious about a single, tight joke in one headline that captures the political moment, or even just the banality of our lives. Here are some examples: “Drugs Win Drug Wars”; “Nation Throws off Tyrannical Yoke of Moderate Respect for Women”; “I Have Decision Fatigue, Says Woman Whose Only Decision in the Last 7 Years Was Not Going to Law School.” These headlines are from satirical news sites like The Onion and Reductress. Both are on the political left. For most of Bari’s life, the big political comedy came from the left. Until The Babylon Bee, which launched in 2016. 

The Bee is a Christian conservative satirical news site, which may sound like an oxymoron. It did to us. Until we read it and discovered, it’s funny. Often really funny. While everyone else was busy criticizing and mocking the right, the Bee found success by filling a void. The Bee’s distinctive tagline is “Fake News You Can Trust.” 

Here are a few recent headlines: “Biden Cancels Aid to Syria After Finding Out Needy Americans Live There”; “Canadian Dentist Now Offering Euthanasia as Alternative to Cavity Filling.” The crazy thing about the Bee is that the headlines are often not just satire, but prophetic. Here’s an example, in 2020, the Bee posted: “Democrats Call for Flags to Be Flown at Half-Mast to Grieve Death of Soleimani.” And now Ivy League students are flying Hezbollah flags and mourning the death of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In 2021, The Bee published the headline "Triple-Masker Looks Down on People Who Only Double Mask." One day later, CNBC featured a graphic highlighting the higher efficacy of triple-masking. 

While the Bee has garnered fame or infamy depending on who you ask, they do try to be equal opportunity critics, poking fun at the right too. Here’s a 2016 headline about Donald Trump: “Psychopathic Megalomaniac Somehow Garnering Evangelical Vote.” And “Shocker: European Supermodel Who Married Billionaire Reality Star Might Not Actually Be Conservative.”

Still, in the past few years, The Babylon Bee has been the target of online censorship, deplatforming, and media scrutiny. Twitter suspended the Bee’s account in 2022, after it made a joke misgendering Admiral Rachel Levine, President Biden’s head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The Bee was later reinstated when Elon Musk took over Twitter, who said, “There will be no censorship of humor.” These days, The Babylon Bee still gets fact-checked by Snopes and USA Today, which perfectly encapsulates our internet age: a parody page getting its jokes fact-checked because people really can’t distinguish between truth and humor. 

Today on Honestly is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon, to talk about it all: the Bee’s Twitter suspension, how he views content moderation and censorship in 2025, the concept of punching down in comedy, and the growth of antisemitism on the far right. Seth also shares how he’ll keep being funny during the Trump presidency and why he believes “if it’s a joke we’re not supposed to make, it is probably the one we should be telling.”

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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This past year was not easy. But 2024 certainly was eventful. Joe Biden dropped out of the race at the eleventh hour, and Kamala Harris’s swift anointment brought us the joy of Brat summer. There was not one, but two assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the continued wars in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon; the sudden and surprising fall of the Assad regime in Syria; the murder of a CEO (and Luigi Mania); mystery drones over New Jersey; and finally, Trump's decisive reelection to the White House. 

On a cheerier note, 2024 was also the year of breakdancing at the Paris Olympics; Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard; SpaceX’s first commercial spacewalk; and Israel’s epic spy-thriller, pager-explosion attack on Hezbollah—not to mention they took out Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar as well. 

So, what will 2025 bring? 

We are starting the year, as we did last December, with a special 2025 predictions episode of Honestly. We called up some friends of the pod—people we trust in their fields—to get a better sense of what’s in store for the year ahead. 

Political analyst and former spokesperson at the Department of Justice Sarah Isgur tells us what we can expect in the Trump 2.0 White House. Linguist John McWhorter looks at new words and how language will evolve in the coming months. Our very own Suzy Weiss talks us through the cultural calendar. Stylist Leandra Medine clues us in on fashion trends in 2025, and last but not least: Historian Niall Ferguson tells us, as he did last year as well, whether or not we’re right to have nightmares about World War III—but for real this time. 

Some guests cheered us up, whereas others freaked us out. All of them were a pleasure to talk to. We hope you enjoy these conversations with some of our favorite people.  

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

***

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Whether you believe in the story of the virgin birth and the resurrection, or whether you believe that those miracles are myths, one thing is beyond dispute: The story of Jesus and the message of Christianity are among the stickiest ideas the world has ever seen.

Within four centuries of Jesus’s death, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It had 30 million followers—half of the empire. Today, two millennia later, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world.

How and why did Christianity take off, and how did it change the world in such radical ways?

Here to have that conversation is historian Tom Holland. Tom is one of the most gifted storytellers in the world, and his podcast, The Rest is History, is one of the most popular out there. Each week, he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, charm their way through history's most interesting characters and sagas. I can't recommend it more highly.

Holland's book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind chronicles thousands of years of Christian history, and it argues that Christianity is the reason we have America. That it's the inspiration to both the French and the American Revolutions. That it's the backbone of wokeness as an ideology, but also the liberal forces fighting it.

Today, Tom explains how and why the story of Christianity won, how it shaped Western culture and values, and if he thinks our vacation from religion might be coming to an end.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly.

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Merry Christmas, Honestly listeners! We hope you’ve been enjoying the parties, the spirit of charity, the lights, the tree at Rockefeller Center, the schmaltzy movies, and of course, the infectious Christmas music everywhere you turn.

But did you know that the Americans who wrote nearly all of the Christmas classics were . . . Jewish?

Indeed, many of the writers of your favorite Christmas jingles were the children of parents who had fled Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe during the great wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920. Sammy Cahn, the son of Galician Jewish immigrants, wrote the words to “Let it Snow!” and was known as Frank Sinatra’s personal lyricist. There is also Mel Torme, the singer-songwriter responsible for composing the timeless “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” His father fled Belarus for America in the early 20th century. Frank Loesser, a titan of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, wrote the slightly naughty “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He was born into a middle-class Jewish family, his father having left Germany in the 1890s to avoid serving in the Kaiser’s military. Johnny Marks, the man who gave us “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”—yes, he was also one of the chosens.

Then there’s the greatest American composer of them all, Irving Berlin. His “White Christmas” is one of the biggest-selling singles in the history of American music. Berlin’s earliest memory was of watching his family’s home burn to the ground in a pogrom as his family fled Siberia for Belarus before emigrating to NYC in 1893.

Today, Free Press columnist Eli Lake explores why and how it was that American Jews helped create the sound of American Christmas. We hope you enjoy this delightful and surprising jaunt through musical history. Happy holidays!

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

***

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Just a few years ago, as AI technology was beginning to spill out of start-ups in Silicon Valley and hitting our smartphones, the political and cultural conversation about this nascent science was not yet clear. I remember asking former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Honestly in January 2022 if AI was just like the sexy robot in Ex Machina. I literally said to him, “What is AI? How do you define it? I do not understand.”

Today, not only has it become clear what AI is and how to use it—ChatGPT averages more than 120 million active daily users and processes over a billion queries per day—but it’s also becoming clear with the political and cultural ramifications—and the arguments and debates—around AI are going to be over the next few years.

Among those big questions are who gets to lead us into this new age of AI technology, what company is going to get there first and achieve market dominance, how those companies are structured so that bad actors with nefarious incentives can’t manipulate this technology for evil purposes, and what role the government should play in regulating all of this.

At the center of these important questions are two men: Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And if you haven’t been following, they aren’t exactly in alignment. 

They started off as friends and business partners. In fact, Sam and Elon co-founded OpenAI in 2015. But over the years, Elon Musk grew increasingly frustrated with OpenAI until he finally resigned from the board in 2018. That feud escalated this past year when Elon sued Sam and OpenAI on multiple occasions to try to prevent the company from launching a for-profit arm of the business, a structure that Elon claims is never supposed to happen in OpenAI—and he also argues that changing its structure in this way might even be illegal.

On the one hand, this is a very complex disagreement. To understand every single detail of it, you probably need a law degree and special expertise in American tax law. But you don’t need a degree or specialization to understand that at its heart, this feud is about something much bigger and more existential than OpenAI’s business model, although that’s extremely important.

What this is really a fight over is who will ultimately be in control of a technology that some say, if used incorrectly, could very well make human beings obsolete.

Here to tell his side of the story is Sam Altman. We talk about where AI is headed, and why he thinks superintelligence—the moment where AI surpasses human capabilities—is closer than ever. We talk about the perils of AI bias and censorship, why he donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund as a person who has long opposed Trump, what happens if America loses the AI race to a foreign power like China, and of course, what went wrong between him and the richest man on Earth. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Last week marked a historic turning point in Syria. Rebel forces seized control of the nation, toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad and ending his family’s brutal 50-year stranglehold on power.

For decades, the Assad dynasty ruled through unimaginable violence—launching chemical attacks on civilians, silencing dissent with mass imprisonment and torture, and presiding over a civil war that killed an estimated 600,000 people and drove 13 million into exile.

In cities across the world, jubilant Syrians have celebrated the regime’s downfall, having deemed it to be one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships.

But not everyone is celebrating. Or at least, some people are saying there is reason for caution.

That’s because the coalition of rebel forces taking control of Syria now is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a militant Islamist organization which originated as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. Its leader is a Saudi-born Syrian who calls himself Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. A 21-year-old al-Jolani left Syria for Iraq in 2003 to join al-Qaeda and fight against America. There, he was captured by the U.S. and put into Bucca jail, which housed some of the most notorious al-Qaeda prisoners.

But since emerging on the world stage in the last week, al-Jolani has indicated that he is a reformed man, leading a moderated organization. He insists his al-Qaeda days and their methods—the detentions and torture and forced conversions—are over, and HTS is not going to persecute religious and ethnic minorities. But is it… true? 

Few people in the West might know that answer as well as journalist Theo Padnos. In October 2012, Padnos ventured from Turkey into Syria to report on the Syrian Civil War. There, he was captured by HTS (then known as Jabhat al-Nusra) and held captive for nearly two years. 

Throughout his captivity, Padnos endured relentless torture at the hands of his captors. He was savagely beaten until unconscious, given electric shocks, and forced into severe stress positions for hours at a time. All of this is to say nothing of the psychological torment inflicted on him.

Today, he joins Michael Moynihan to discuss his harrowing experience, the psychology of jihadists, and what the future of Syria will look like under the leadership of his former captors.

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Kemi Badenoch just became the first black woman to lead the UK’s Conservative Party, the oldest in British politics, colloquially known as “the Tories.” She’s also 44, has three children, grew up in Nigeria, actually worked at McDonald’s (unlike some American politicians who have claimed to), didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, and has a master’s degree in computer engineering. Not exactly your typical Tory party leader profile.

But it’s Kemi Badenoch who has just inherited a Conservative Party that has dominated British politics for decades until Labour Party leader Keir Starmer became prime minister earlier this year. The Britain that Starmer inherited—the Britain that Conservatives like David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak left behind—is a country with enormous debt, a shrinking GDP, a huge immigration challenge, and arguably a national identity crisis. Or as Free Press columnist and British historian Niall Ferguson has bleakly put it, “it seems that the UK has a national suicide wish.” 

Can Kemi Badenoch, the woman who has been compared to Margaret Thatcher, turn her party—and ultimately, her country—around? How will the rising star in British politics offer something different than the past five Tory leaders who served before her? And can she beat out not just the Labour left but also the growing threat from a very energized hard right? 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Democrats once seemed to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley. Perhaps you remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter and posted pictures of cabinets at the old office filled with “#StayWoke” T-shirts.

But just as the country is realigning itself along new ideological and political lines, so is the tech capital of the world. In 2024, many of the Valley’s biggest tech titans came out with their unabashed support for Donald Trump. There was, of course, Elon Musk. . . but also WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini; VCs such as Shaun Maguire, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and today’s Honestly guest, one of the world’s most influential investors and the man responsible for bringing the internet to the masses—Marc Andreessen. 

Marc’s history with politics is a long one—but it was always with the Democrats. He supported Democrats including Bill Clinton in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But over the summer, he announced that he was going to endorse and donate to Trump. Public records show that Marc donated at least $4.5 million to pro-Trump super PACs. Why? Because he believed that the Biden administration had, as he tells us in this conversation, “seething contempt” for tech, and that this election was existential for AI, crypto, and start-ups in America. 

Marc got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, which is said to have launched the internet boom. He then co-founded Netscape, which became the most popular web browser in the ’90s, and sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion.

He later became an angel investor and board member at Facebook. And in 2006, when everyone told Mark Zuckerberg to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion, Marc was the only voice saying: don’t. (Today, Facebook has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.)

He now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz, where they invest in small start-ups that they think have potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. And their track record is pretty spot-on: They invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft, and Oculus—to name a few of the unicorns. (And for full disclosure: Marc and his wife were small seed investors in The Free Press.)

Marc has built a reputation as someone who can recognize “the next big thing” in tech and, more broadly, in our lives. He has been called the “chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite,” a “cultural tastemaker,” and even “Silicon Valley’s resident philosopher-king.”

Today, Bari and Marc discuss his reasons for supporting Trump—and the vibe shift in Silicon Valley; why he thinks we’ve been living under soft authoritarianism over the last decade and why it’s finally cracking; why he’s so confident in Elon Musk and his band of counter-elites; how President Biden tried to kill tech and control AI; why he thinks AI censorship is “a million times more dangerous” than social media censorship; why technologists are the ones to restore American greatness; what Trump serves for dinner; why Marc has spent about half his time at Mar-a-Lago since November 5; and why he thinks it’s morning in America.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly.

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In the 2010s, Ryan Holiday was the head of marketing for the controversial clothing brand American Apparel, and the sought-after media strategist for people like the womanizing blogger Tucker Max. Then he wrote an exposé called Trust Me, I’m Lying, which lifted the veil on his world of media manipulation. 

Now, he is an advocate of the ancient philosophy of stoicism, which he roughly defines as the idea that we do not control what happens but we do control how we respond, and that it’s best to respond with four key virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. 

His series of books on stoic virtues have sold over three million copies worldwide. His latest book, Right Thing, Right Now, is about the necessity of living justly—even when it is hard. 

Today: why power corrupts, how ego can destroy you, whether we should remain loyal to people even when they do abhorrent things, the limits of free speech, and how to treat people in our everyday lives. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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This week marked a dramatic escalation in Syria’s 13-year civil war. Rebel factions launched their most audacious offensive in years, capturing Aleppo, the focal point of the war for over a decade. This marked the most serious challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s government and its Russian- and Iranian-backed allies in nearly a decade.

Syrian and Russian forces are currently unleashing joint air strikes in a desperate attempt to reclaim the city. Iran has thrown its weight behind al-Assad, promising increased support to shore up his faltering grip on power.

But Syria is just one piece of a much larger—and far more dangerous—puzzle.

The Middle East is on a knife’s edge. Just last week, Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the Lebanon border, but tensions remain high. In Gaza, Israel has continued its operations against Hamas, who still hold 63 hostages. And then there’s Iran—the architect of much of the region’s instability—whose escalating provocations make it seem like a direct war with Israel is no longer a question of if, but when. 

These conflicts are deeply interconnected, and the fall of one domino could set off far-reaching consequences. The potential power vacuum left by a weakened al-Assad regime could reshape alliances and alter the balance of power in ways that reverberate from Tehran to Tel Aviv, and from Moscow to Washington.

To help us make sense of these rapidly unfolding events and their implications for the region, Michael Moynihan is joined today by Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior analyst at The Times of Israel and one of the sharpest minds on Middle East politics. 

In this conversation, they unpack what’s going on in Syria, the root causes of tribal war and dysfunction across the Arab world, the ceasefire in Lebanon, what comes next in Gaza, the weakening of Iran, and what all of this means for Israel and the United States.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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As you’re recovering from indulging in stuffing and pecan pie, we wanted to bring you a special bonus episode we put together in collaboration with our friends at StoryCorps.

If you haven’t heard of StoryCorps, it’s an organization that has been gathering individual stories from across the country for over 20 years and collects them in the U.S. Library of Congress. StoryCorps’s online archive now has the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered.

Today, we wanted to play seven stories about gratitude. There’s one about a man’s deeply held appreciation for his father, a story about a mother who forgave the man who killed her son, and one about a busboy who prayed over Robert Kennedy right after he was shot in 1968. There’s a story about a first love, an unexpected friendship, and being yourself.

We know it sounds cheesy, but these stories made us laugh and cry, and we think you’ll love them, too. And as StoryCorps’s founder Dave Isay tells us, “Don’t forget about the beauty in poetry, and the grace in the stories of our loved ones and neighbors hiding in plain sight all around us.” 

Thank you so much to Dave and StoryCorps for partnering with us for this episode. If you want to have a conversation with a stranger across the political divide, sign up at One Small Step. If you want to honor a loved one over the holidays with a StoryCorps interview that goes straight from your phone into the Library of Congress with one tap, participate in their Great Thanksgiving Listen. And, of course, if you want to support one of our favorite nonprofits, you can donate here. 

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Happy Thanksgiving, Honestly listeners! If you’re anything like the rest of America, you’ll be spending the day with family, cooking turkey, eating sweet potatoes, and. . . watching football.

Whether or not you’re from Texas, the game on most American TVs on Thanksgiving Day will be the Dallas Cowboys. But just behind the players are the real stars of the show: blue and white pom-poms accenting sparkly white cowboy boots dancing to the sound of “Thunderstruck” for 41.8 million viewers at home.

We’re talking, of course, about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders—who you may have seen in the viral Netflix documentary, America’s Sweethearts—which is what today’s episode is all about.

Why, you might ask, would we talk about cheerleading on Honestly? Because as we watched the documentary, we realized that the show is about a lot more than cheerleading, football, faith, patriotism, and quintessential American culture. Yes, it’s about those things—and yes, it’s a reality show about making a very competitive dance team—but really, it’s a master class in leadership and excellence.

So today, we’re talking with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ director, Kelli Finglass. We ask her how she became the master operator she is today, leading an organization just as well as—or perhaps better than—a Fortune 500 company, how she created a culture of dedication and precision, and most importantly, what it takes today to build a phenomenal team. 

It’s a different kind of episode than you’re used to these days—no talk about Matt Gaetz or Elon Musk—but it’s an all-American conversation for an all-American day. And it couldn’t be more fitting and fun. We hope you enjoy it.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Peggy Noonan does what we try to do every day at The Free Press: tell the truth, make sense of things plainly and without pretension, frame the news in a way that helps the reader make sense of things, and put things in a historical context that gives the day-to-day depth and meaning. 

The very annoying thing about Peggy Noonan is that she makes the thing that we know is so very hard look so very easy. And she does it week after week after week in The Wall Street Journal—which adds up to more than 400 columns over the last 25 years. 

In her newest—and ninth—book, A Certain Idea of America, she collects 80 of her best columns published over the last eight years. Now, the idea that old newspaper columns might be good fodder for a book sort of seems like a weird idea, given that newspapers are most famous for being the next day’s fish wrapper. But somehow this book feels urgent and timeless. Which means that Peggy Noonan’s old columns are better than most people’s brand-new ones.

That’s probably because she knows a thing or two about rhetoric and American politics. She was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. She helped President George H.W. Bush get elected. She consulted for the TV show The West Wing. 

In today’s conversation, we talk about how Peggy understands Trump’s win and the political revolution that we’re living through, what it feels like to lose in a values war, and what it feels like to defend things like civility and decency in 2024. We also talk about Trump’s appointments so far, Peggy’s first meeting with Trump, and how, despite our troubles, America remains a good and great country—and why it’s so important for young people to know that. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly.

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Throughout the election, we heard one warning, repeated ad infinitum: A Donald Trump victory would precipitate a fascist dictatorship, and the United States would soon resemble Nazi Germany. 

But Democrats didn’t take up arms to defend the ramparts of democracy. They didn’t repel Trump’s storm troopers who descended on Washington. Instead, something more. . . traditional happened. President Joe Biden welcomed Donald Trump to the White House, congratulated him, and promised a “smooth transition.” (A courtesy, we should note, that Trump did not extend to Biden in 2020.)

But now that Democrats have lost power—both in the White House and Congress—what changes should they make to regain it? 

Here to answer that question today are Freddie deBoer and Ruy Teixeira. Freddie is a writer, self-described Marxist, and longtime critic of “social justice” identity politics. Ruy is a political demographer, Democratic strategist, and co-author of the book, Where Have all the Democrats Gone?

We talk about how Democrats became the party of elites, whether Kamala Harris’s loss is the death knell of identity politics, why abortion wasn’t enough to save the Democrats, and whether the party will learn any significant lessons from this historic defeat. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Trump’s gains among working-class voters of all races—according to exit polls, he won the majority of Latino men at 55 percent—represent the ongoing realignment of the Republican Party. What was once Reagan’s party of free trade, low taxes, and limited government seems to be shifting toward a multiracial working-class party that celebrates economic protectionism and credibly courts unions. 

But what will this shift mean for the future of the party. . . and American politics?

Trump’s cabinet appointments so far don’t paint a clear picture. His nominee for secretary of state, Florida senator Marco Rubio, has some clear neoconservative instincts. But Trump also tapped as director of national intelligence former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who has thundered against the “neocon” influence on her new party. 

So what is this new Republican Party? Is it still the party of Reagan? Is it still even a party of conservatism? 

Here to discuss it all today are Sarah Isgur, Matthew Continetti, and Josh Hammer. 

Sarah Isgur is a columnist for The Dispatch. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as Justice Department spokeswoman during the first Trump administration. Matthew Continetti is a columnist at Commentary, founding editor of The Free Beacon, and author of a new book: The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. And Josh Hammer is senior editor at large at Newsweek and host of The Josh Hammer Show. 

Today, they join Michael Moynihan to discuss Trump’s appointments, the significance of J.D. Vance, the roots of MAGA and where the movement fits into the history of the Republican Party, and the uncertain future of the American right. 

And if you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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On Tuesday night, president-elect Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new initiative in the Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”

Aside from the very strange fact that internet meme culture has now landed in the White House—Dogecoin is a memecoin—more importantly, what the announcement solidifies is the triumph of the counter-elite. A bunch of oddball outsiders ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood—and they won. And they are about to reshape not just the government but also the culture in ways we can’t imagine.

And there was one person I wanted to discuss it with. He is the vanguard of those antiestablishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel. People describe the billionaire venture capitalist in very colorful terms. He’s been called the most successful tech investor in the world. A political kingmaker. The bogeyman of the left. The center of gravity in Silicon Valley. There’s the “Thielverse,” “Thielbucks,” and “Thielists.” To say he has an obsessive cult following would be an understatement.

If you listened to my last conversation with Thiel a year and a half ago on Honestly, you’ll remember that Peter was the first guy in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016. That year, he gave a memorable speech at the RNC, and many in his orbit thought it was simply a step too far. He lost business at Y Combinator, the start-up incubator where he was a partner. Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who called Thiel’s endorsement of Trump “one of the most dangerous things” he had ever seen. 

Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics—at least publicly. He didn’t donate to Trump’s 2024 campaign. There was no big RNC speech this year. But the bigger change is a cultural one. He’s no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump.

On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but, in this conversation at least, still seems to venerate the way that the Ivy Leagues are an indicator of intelligence.

But perhaps that’s the secret to his success: He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own. And why wouldn’t you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding the e-payment behemoth PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir (which was used to find Osama bin Laden) to being the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel’s investments—in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few—have paid off big time.

His most recent bet—helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected as senator and then on the Trump ticket as vice president—seems also to have paid off. The next four years will determine just how high Thiel’s profit margin will be.

Today: Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump; why he thinks Kamala—and liberalism more broadly—lost the election; and why the Trump 2.0 team will be better than last time, with antiestablishment figures who are willing to rethink the system. We talk about the border, trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what we might face in a dreaded World War III.

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Even your most optimistic Mar-a-Lago member didn’t see Donald Trump winning the popular vote and taking all seven swing states. He even came within five points of taking the Democratic stronghold of New Jersey!

So, what on earth does the Democratic Party do next? 

They can stay the course and resist. It’s what they did the last time Trump won.

In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, America was stunned. Every time he opened his mouth, Trump exploded political norms, and the Democratic Party responded in kind. Being a mere opposition party—at least at that moment for the Democrats—was not strong enough for this situation they believed. Instead they needed to become a resistance.

And while Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately did not work. Democrats spent a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat, yet Americans didn’t care. The Democrats’ goal was to scrub Trump from future history. Instead, he now controls it. 

Democrats need to look inward if they want to have a shot at winning in 2028. They need to act like an opposition, not a resistance. 

Today, Ei Lake explains why this will require a different approach, but one for which there is already a template. He tells the story of how a few centrist renegades saved the Democrats from oblivion 40 years ago. In 1984, after Ronald Reagan’s 525–13 Electoral College landslide over Walter Mondale, the Democrats were not just in disarray—they were on life support. And yet, eight years later, they found their savior: a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. And they remade their party.

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Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. . . again. It was a historic political comeback for a candidate rejected by the people just four years ago. But this time, Trump took almost every coveted state: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. And he leads in Nevada and Arizona. The entire blue wall. . . turned red. And unlike 2016, this was not just an Electoral College victory. Surprising pollsters and betting markets alike, Trump also won the popular vote. To top it off, Republicans took control of the Senate, gaining four seats, and maybe more by the time this episode airs. Simply put, it was a red landslide. 

It is extremely rare in our history for a president to come back after losing a reelection bid so badly. In fact, Trump's rebound is bigger than Nixon's—bigger than Napoleon's in 1815. 

And yet it happened on Tuesday night with the most flawed candidate American politics has ever seen. How did he do it?

If you were only watching cable news over the last few years, you would be shocked by the outcome. But if you had been reading The FP, you probably were not surprised. Yes, Kamala had the support of Beyoncé, Oprah, Taylor Swift, and almost every A-lister with a pulse. She outraised Trump by around $600 million. She was endorsed by industry leaders in science and economics. But it’s been clear for some time now that the Democrats do not have the buy-in or trust of the American people. FP senior editor Peter Savodnik said it best: “They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.”

Still, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, CNN and MSNBC tried to explain away Trump's appeal, and the profound failure of the left, with accusations that the American people are the ones to blame.

But those explanations are not right. 

As exit polls came in, Trump showed strength with black and Latino voters. CNN exit polls showed he won about 13 percent of black voters (up from 8 percent in 2020) and 45 percent of Latino voters (up from 32 percent last election). It shows a massive pickup. He won among voters who make less than $100,000. And compared to 2020, Trump improved in cities, in rural areas, in suburbs. . . . as CNN's John Berman put it: “It’s kind of an everywhere improvement.”  

Here today to make sense of it all is FP contributor and Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, pundit and political powerhouse Brianna Wu, and FP Senior Editor Peter Savodnik. 

We reflect on why Democrats lost so dramatically and decisively; how Trump’s comeback happened, despite an impeachment, being found guilty of sexual assault, and 116 indictments; how Trump found success with black and Latino voters; what the next four years might look like with Trump returning to the White House; and if this will be a wake-up call for Democrats. 

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Our newsroom reflects our readers: We aren’t voting in unison. Today, Bari Weiss explains how The Free Press is handling Election Day inside the office. 

Read Bari’s full essay.

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Bullshit is an American tradition. Think the theatrics of P.T. Barnum, miracle products sold ad nauseam on television in the 1980s and, of course, politicians. Who can forget President Bill Clinton saying “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is” during his grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky scandal?

And then there’s Donald Trump. He presents as a man with no fact-checking filter, someone happily buying his own convenient bullshit. That’s not quite the same thing as lying. 

That isn’t to say Trump doesn’t lie. He’s a politician, after all. But he exists outside the binary of truth and lies. It’s the netherworld of flimflam, hyperbole, sales pitches, and ad copy delivered with all the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt contest. Donald Trump is a very modern artist, weaving a barrage of anecdotes, fake and real statistics, gossip, and memes into a nebulous and suggestive species of patter. 

Democrats have tried to paint Trump as an American Hitler, a Russian agent, a man consumed with evil and hatred. But what they fail to understand is that Trump’s casual relationship to the truth is an echo of past politicians. He is hardly the first bullshitter to ascend to the White House; he’s just the best ever to do it. He paints a picture of a reality he would like us to see, not as it really is. 

In this respect, Trump is the crack cocaine variant of many of his predecessors. Ronald Reagan was a folksy, sentimental bullshitter, a president as a Hallmark greeting card. Bill Clinton was a slick bullshitter, perfect for spinning stories at the dawn of the cable news era.

Today, Eli Lake explores the soft spot that Americans have for bullshitters like Trump, and their disdain for liars like Richard Nixon. He argues that if you want to understand why Trump may be on the verge of winning the White House again, you have to reckon with our country’s relationship to the pungent brown stuff. It pervades everything from our economy to our culture. Bullshit is dangerous when it comes to science. But in politics, bullshit is sadly essential. 

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Need a break from political programming? Well, today we have a special treat: It’s The Free Press’s scary movie Halloween special!

It’s that time of year: changing leaves, pumpkin spice lattes, animal costumes with sex appeal and, of course, gory, bloody, nightmare-inducing horror movies.

We all remember the first horror movie that we were allowed to watch—or maybe that we weren’t allowed to watch, but saw anyway: Silence of the Lambs, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Jaws, Carrie, Halloween, or The Shining. For today’s host Suzy Weiss, it was 20 minutes of the movie It—the TV miniseries from 1990, not the 2017 remake. Suzy remembers seeing Pennywise the Clown on the screen and thinking, This will take me years to get over. She still sometimes checks the drain!

Year after year, horror movies are consistently profitable—more so than dramas—but they are snubbed when it comes to award shows and critical acclaim. But here at The Free Press, we value and love horror, so much that we’ve gathered our scariest FP writers—Suzy Weiss, River Page, and Kat Rosenfield—to analyze four new horror movies.

River, Kat, and Suzy will review MaXXXine, set in grimy and glamorous 1980s Hollywood, about a night killer who targets a porn star who herself is targeting big-screen stardom. Apartment 7A, a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, about a woman taken in by an unassuming family. Longlegs, a serial killer story about an FBI agent trying to crack the case. And The Substance, about a woman who takes the latest anti-aging elixir, but at a harrowing cost.

They talk about what they loved, what they hated, and how they think each movie relates to our current social ills. We’ll also note this episode has spoilers, so let this be a warning!

Happy Halloween, folks!

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There are no perfect candidates. But what do you do when both candidates are not just imperfect but deeply flawed, and seen by many as unqualified for the job?

We are just one week away from a presidential election that will decide if the next four years are helmed by Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump. I know many people who are still undecided. Some of them work at The Free Press.

These undecided voters have just one presidential debate to reference, and as my friends at Open to Debate said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “I can confidently state that we haven’t yet seen a real presidential debate this year. Debates have devolved into political theater, with combative candidates, biased media, agenda-driven moderators, and a fixation on social-media sound bites. This structure fails to deliver the substance voters need.”

So today, we are here without the pageantry, makeup, or muted mics, to host not Trump vs. Kamala—though the invitation is still open—but instead two very smart people who represent each side of the choice that we are going to make a week from today. 

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and host of the podcast Making Sense. Today, he will explain why he is voting for Kamala Harris. Sam has spoken passionately and consistently on this issue since Trump came onto the scene; Sam calls him “the most dangerous cult leader on Earth” and highlights Trump’s character flaws. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse; he mocked a disabled reporter; he said John McCain wasn’t a hero; he called veterans “suckers and losers”; if we kept going with examples, we’d be here all day. Sam’s biggest issue is January 6 and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Sam writes, “The spectacle of a sitting president refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, culminating in an attack on the Capitol, remains the most shocking violation of political norms to occur in my lifetime.” 

On the other side, Ben Shapiro—lawyer, co-founder of The Daily Wire, best-selling author, and host of The Ben Shapiro Show—will explain why he is voting for Donald Trump. Ben argues that we were a better country under Trump and that his policies make us safer and more prosperous. There were no hot wars, no inflation crisis, and less traffic at the southern border with Trump as president. He makes the case that Trump will not be abandoned by the experts who advised him during his first administration, and he will delegate responsibilities to capable and trustworthy policymakers. He also argues that Kamala is an “incompetent and unqualified vice president” and that “radicalism defines her.” 

I suspect if you’re listening to this show, you know these two names and have listened to their shows before. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ben and Sam are two of the smartest, most influential, and most insightful voices on the American political scene. That’s one of the reasons we’re so thrilled to host this conversation today. The other is because it’s exactly the kind of conversation we need more of in this country, especially at this moment. I challenge you to think of one debate you heard during this election that was passionate and provocative, but also civil and respectful, between a Trump supporter and a Harris supporter. I can’t think of one. That’s why we put this together. And we really think you’re going to appreciate what you hear.

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We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’re standing at the precipice of what could be a third world war. At the very least, the thing that we refer to as the “Free World” is burning at its outer edges. Just a few weeks ago, Iran launched its largest-ever ballistic missile attack against Israel, while its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to wage war against Israel, making use of the steady flow of weaponry and funding from Iran—which is ever closer to having nuclear weapons.

The war in Ukraine continues to rage, with both sides engaged in intense fighting across multiple fronts. After over a year and a half of relentless Russian bombardment, Ukraine is barely holding the line as the grinding war of attrition drags on. According to The Wall Street Journal, more than one million people on both sides of the border have been killed or injured.

And then there’s China, which has lately been attacking Philippine and Vietnamese vessels in the South China Sea, terrorizing international waters with impunity as the world watches anxiously.

Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran have solidified a new axis of autocracy, united in its goal to unravel the Pax Americana and undermine American dominance. The question on our minds tonight is: What should America do about it?

Many Americans are saying they don’t want the United States to continue leading the world order. A 2023 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey revealed that 42 percent of Americans think that the U.S. should stay out of world affairs, which is the highest number recorded since 1974.

It is easy to talk about foreign policy as an abstract idea because war, for us, is thousands of miles away. But foreign policy is a matter of life and death. Not just for people around the world, but for the more than two million Americans that serve in our armed forces.

It’s conventional wisdom that American voters don’t prioritize foreign policy. But this year, given the state of the world, that might be different. Which is why we hosted a debate, live in NYC, on this very topic. 

Arguing that, yes, the U.S. should still police the world is Bret Stephens. Stephens is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and editor in chief of Sapir. As a foreign affairs columnist of The Wall Street Journal, he was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. And he is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.

Bret was joined by James Kirchick, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, writer at large for Air Mail, and contributing writer for Tablet. He is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. He is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Arguing that no, the U.S. should not still police the world is none other than Matt Taibbi. Taibbi is a journalist, the founder of Racket News, and the author of 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers. Matt was joined by Lee Fang. Lee is an independent investigative journalist, primarily writing on Substack at LeeFang.com. From 2015 to 2023, he was a reporter for The Intercept.

Be it resolved: The U.S. should still police the world.

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Gad Saad was born in Beirut in 1964 into one of the last Jewish families to remain in Lebanon. But the country that was once called “the Paris of the Middle East” began to turn.

Saad remembers one day at school when a fellow student told his class that he wanted to be a “Jew-killer” when he grew up. The rest of the kids laughed. By 1975, Lebanon descended into a brutal civil war and Saad said death awaited him at every millisecond of the day.

Even through the danger and turmoil, his family thought, This will pass over. We will be fine. Until someone showed up to their home in Lebanon to kill them, at which point his family fled the country and rebuilt their life in Canada.

In 2024, many of us in Western democracies find ourselves saying the exact same things: This will pass over. We will be fine. Even as Hamas flags and “I love Hezbollah” posters wave in cosmopolitan capitals across the West. How worried should we be? And, is there a way to roll back admiration for anti-civilizational groups? Those are just some of the questions we were eager to put to Saad in today’s conversation.

Saad said that witnessing the Lebanese Civil War gave him a crash course in the extremes of identity politics, tribalism, and illiberalism. He argues that immigrants like himself, who have lived without the virtues of the West—freedom of speech and thought, reason, and true liberalism—uniquely understand what’s at stake right now in Western cultural and political life. It’s no coincidence, Saad said, that the most prominent defenders of Western ideals are immigrants, people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and Masih Alinejad.

Saad is a professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences, and if you’re on X, we suspect you know his name. Unlike most professors, he has a million followers, and a knack for satire—so much so that Elon Musk seems to be one of his biggest fans. 

Outside of his X personality, he’s been teaching at Concordia University in Montreal for the past 30 years. But he’s now having second thoughts. Concordia is today widely regarded as the most antisemitic university in North America. Saad is now a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University in Michigan. He said he can’t bear the possibility of returning to Concordia given the antisemitism on campus.

All of this, he argued, constitutes another war: a campaign against logic, science, common sense, and reality here in the West, which he explains in his book: The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. 

Today, Bari Weiss asks one of the most insightful and provocative thinkers about the risks of mob rule and extremism on the left, where these “parasitic ideas” came from and why they’re encouraged in the West, if progressive illiberalism is waxing or waning, and if these trends are reversible.

And if you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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In the last year, we’ve witnessed a disturbing trend among some on the fringe left, who cheer those they think are resisting Western imperialism. Even when those anti-imperialists are. . . designated terrorist groups. This misguided support was on full display on the anniversary of October 7, when protesters marched through London chanting, “I love Hezbollah”, and in New York, where they flew flags for the Iran-backed militia group flags and carried “New York for Hezbollah” signs. 

It was a remarkable sight, but unsurprising when you consider the distorted lens through which these extremists look at the war in the Middle East. To them, Hezbollah, the group responsible for killing 241 Americans in a 1983 terror attack and for murdering 85 innocents in Argentina in 1994, is simply a resistance group defending Lebanon from Israeli aggression. 

But is that how the Lebanese see Hezbollah? An armed Shia group as the defender of Lebanon, a country of many different religious and cultural communities? Defender of Beirut, a city that one Lebanese journalist recently called “a tolerant and diverse cosmopolitan center”? 

On today’s show, Michael Moynihan sits down with three people with intimate knowledge of what Hezbollah really is: a totalitarian force in Lebanon, an occupying force in Syria, the perpetrators of narco-terrorism and sex slavery, and the foot soldiers of Iran’s imperial project in the Middle East. 

Joseph Braude is an expert on Arab culture and politics, and the founder of The Center for Peace Communications, which partnered with The Free Press to produce the animated series Hezbollah’s Hostages. Hezbollah’s Hostages, which you can watch on The Free Press’s YouTube channel, interviews the victims of the terrorist group in Lebanon and Syria, who have spoken out at great personal risk. Episodes have covered the story of a Lebanese fighter’s indoctrination from childhood, the account of a Syrian woman abducted and forced into sex slavery, and the enlightening narrative of a Syrian who became a drug smuggler for the organization. Please check the series out, if you haven’t already. 

Makram Rabah is a history lecturer at the American University of Beirut and, through his frequent appearances on pan-Arab television, a fierce and courageous critic of Hezbollah. Makram lives in Lebanon, where his life is routinely threatened.

Finally, Hanin Ghaddar is a Lebanese journalist and author of the book Hezbollahland: Mapping Dahiya and Lebanon's Shia Community. She is a leading expert on the group’s history and its role within Lebanese society.

We discuss the history of Hezbollah, its function as an Iranian proxy, its unpopularity in Lebanon and in the broader region, the group’s criminal activities, like drug and sex trafficking, and the path forward for Lebanon now that Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah’s military capabilities. 

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It would have been unthinkable for Brianna Wu to have appeared on Honestly a decade ago (if the show had existed back then). But Brianna isn’t most people. I actually can’t think of anyone else quite like her.

She’s a trans woman who advocates passionately for trans healthcare, but thinks many trans activists have alienated women and feminists. She’s a progressive who once called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “one of the best politicians in America,” but is today a staunch supporter of Israel. She was cyber-attacked by an alt-right mob during Gamergate, but now thinks the political left acts just like that mob.

Brianna says her politics haven’t actually changed. Instead, it’s the Democratic Party that has morphed. And she says they’ve become unelectable. But Brianna is not sitting idly by while it runs itself into the ground. She wants Democrats to get back to common sense, kitchen table issues, which is why she’s launched a political action committee and is fundraising big time in the 2024 election cycle. 

At The Free Press we cover a lot of people whose politics have shifted over the past few years. But very few have experienced that evolution in public in the way that Brianna has. On today’s episode, Brianna tells us how Gamergate changed her life, the story of her political evolution, why she is a staunch supporter of Israel, and a critic of niche left causes, and what Democrats risk if they continue to alienate voters. 

***

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A few weeks ago, we had Sarah Longwell and David French, two prominent conservatives, on Honestly to explain why they’re supporting Vice President Kamala Harris this presidential election. 

There are a lot of people like them—conservatives who are so staunchly never Trump that they are supporting the Democratic candidate. What’s less common—or, at least, less talked about—are the Democrats who are voting for Donald Trump. Maybe there are fewer Democrats crossing the aisle to vote for Trump in 2024, but I’d guess that there are more who are just not willing to speak up because of the stigma. 

Today, we are talking with three people, all of whom have spent their lives identifying as liberal or progressive and are voting for Trump this year—and are loud and proud about it.

Shaun Maguire is a partner at the VC fund Sequoia Capital and has previously started five companies himself. In 2016, he said he was terrified of Trump winning and actively supported Hillary Clinton. But this year, Shaun gave Trump $300,000, saying he believes that “the Biden administration has had some of the worst foreign policy in decades.” 

Maud Maron is a lifelong progressive. She’s dedicated her career to those causes. She was a Planned Parenthood escort and worked for Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther and professor, who called Maud her “excellent research assistant.” She worked for many years as a public defender at The Legal Aid Society until she was canceled by the organization for “wrong think.” Maud ran for NYC’s City Council in 2021 and then for Congress in 2022 as a moderate Democrat. She says she’s no longer a Democrat and will vote Republican for the first time in a presidential election because of, among other things, the Democratic Party’s fixation on race over merit.

Shabbos Kestenbaum is a recent graduate of Harvard, who’s currently suing his alma mater for its failure to combat antisemitism. He says he disagrees with former president Trump on most issues, but on the most important ones, he’s in lockstep with him. Shabbos supported Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman in the past, but has moved right because he has seen firsthand how the excesses on the left have impacted college campuses—and particularly Jewish students—for the worst. 

There are a lot of people who are deeply dissatisfied with the options in this year’s presidential race, and are planning to write in someone on that line of their ballot. Shaun, Maud, and Shabbos are not doing that. They’ve gone the full 180 and are supporting the candidate they once hated. Why?

On today’s episode, how these three former Democrats got so disaffected with their party, how they grapple with the antisemitism on the right, how they contend with Trump’s questionable character, how they square Trump and J.D. Vance’s comments on Ukraine with their hawkish foreign policy views, and much, much more.

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We all know the horrid tale of what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. Waves of gunmen attacked families in their homes and young people attending a music festival. The marauders filmed their murders on GoPro cameras. They burned families alive in their safe rooms; raped, and mutilated their victims; and took hostages back to Gaza on golf carts. Why did they do it?

For many critics of Israel, the horrific violence of October 7 was the predictable response to the “occupation”—never mind that Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. To them, October 7 was a jailbreak from what progressives often call “an open-air prison.” 

But for the belligerents, in their own words, this war is for the defense of a mosque on top of a mountain. They called their massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood,” named for one of the two mosques that sit atop what is known to the Jews as the Temple Mount. This is where King Solomon’s temple once stood, and at its base is the Western Wall, where Jews have prayed since its construction in the second century BCE. It’s also known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, a noble sanctuary. It’s where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven in a dream. An October 10 Hamas communiqué justified their attack as resistance to thwart “schemes and dreams of Judaizing Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.”

This reveals something very important about the Israel-Palestine conflict: That it is not a territorial dispute. It’s a holy war, with roots in an ancient city with significance far beyond its 2.5 miles of limestone walls. The world knows it as Jerusalem. The Palestinians call it Al-Quds.

Hamas claims there is a plot by Israel to destroy Al-Aqsa—the mosque atop the Temple Mount that sits in the center of Jerusalem—and build a third Jewish temple where it now stands. It’s a lie. A lie that goes back a century. The man who first began to spread the libel was from one of Jerusalem’s great families that traced its lineage back to the prophet Muhammad himself. He was a seminary-school dropout, a fanatic antisemite, and a Nazi collaborator. His name was Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

Today, Eli Lake tells the story of al-Husseini, the origins of the 100-year holy war, and why it persists to this day. 

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We’ve released a few episodes on Honestly for the anniversary of October 7. Today, we’re bringing you one more conversation with someone who has been breaking news on the ground every single day of this war: journalist Trey Yingst.

On the morning of October 7, Trey was in Israel’s south, reporting on the massacre as it unfolded. He saw bodies dragged into vehicles, mothers trying to save their children, and the bloodshed—unlike anything he had ever seen—in the communities and kibbutzim. He reported these stories live on Fox—in many instances while rockets rained down on him and his crew, who often didn’t have time to take shelter. He remembers those early hours and days as “a true horror movie.” 

That was just the beginning of his reporting on the unfolding war, which has taken him into Gaza and more recently on an embed with Israeli troops into southern Lebanon. He tells these stories in his new book Black Saturday, which chronicles his reporting over the last year and the very real human stories of this war, both from the perspective of Israelis and Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Trey is the chief foreign correspondent for Fox News. He has reported from the front lines in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and since 2018, he’s been based in Israel. He says he tries to talk to everyone involved in the conflict, and he’s gone a long way toward doing so. He’s interviewed the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and he’s sat down on the Israeli side with everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu to Yoav Gallant.

If you’re someone listening who holds stereotypes about what a Fox correspondent might sound like, Trey will surprise you. Trey has unconventional and strongly held views about the future of the region, about whether Hamas can ever be defeated, and about what should happen next in the war. Most of all, he has an unwavering commitment to a kind of old-school journalism that tells stories of human beings in times of war, whatever side of the border they fall on. 

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We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it. 

Today on Honestly, Bari Weiss’s reflections on the anniversary of October 7. Plus, one of our most memorable episodes of the last year.

A quick note: Since the earliest hours of October 7, 2023, we have published more than 150 reports, features, essays, podcasts, and videos, many from on the ground in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and more recently, Lebanon and Syria.

In The Free Press, you’ll find all of those presented in one place as a resource, a historical record, and a reminder of the kind of journalism you are supporting when you support The Free Press.

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When Emily Oster was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church parking lot where they engaged in all kinds of unsupervised activities—throwing balls at each other in front of the church wall, climbing up trees and sometimes falling out of them, riding Hot Wheels until people skinned their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. There were a few broken arms. 

That experience of playing outside unsupervised in the dark—or walking a mile home from school in kindergarten—is very different from her own children’s experiences, even though they’re growing up in a very similar environment, with very similar parents. They aren’t leaving the house every day after dinner. If Emily had suggested that they walk home from school in kindergarten, even though it’s only a couple of blocks, there’s no chance that would have been met with the school’s acceptance.

Since 1955, there has been a continuous decline in children’s opportunities to engage in free play, away from adult intervention and control. In 1969, 47 percent of kids walked or biked to school, whereas in 2009 that number had plummeted to 12 percent.

How did we get here? What are the consequences of hypervigilant parenting? On kids’ happiness? On their well-being? Their mental health? And on their ability to grow into independent, self-sufficient, and successful adults? And, maybe most importantly, how can we alter this trajectory before it’s too late?

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce our new podcast series: Raising Parents with Emily Oster

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When we planned the conversation you’re going to hear today—a live conversation with Douglas Murray—we thought it would be a searching conversation that we’d release on the anniversary of October 7th, looking back at a year of war from a slightly quieter moment. You’ll hear some of that today. But the moment is anything but quiet.

As we prepared yesterday afternoon for this conversation, the war that Iran has outsourced to its proxies for the last year finally became a war being waged by Iran itself, as it launched over 100 ballistic missiles towards Israel. Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled into bomb shelters, while missiles rained down on their homes, with a handful making direct impact. As of this recording, two people were injured, and one person was killed—that person was a Palestinian man in Jericho. Just before that onslaught, at least two terrorists opened fire at a train station in Jaffa, Israel, killing at least six people and injuring at least seven others.

For many people, this war has been all we can think about since October 7th. But I fear that for many Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it isn’t. This is also a battle for the free world. As my friend Sam Harris put it in the weeks after October 7th: “There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.” It is a war between Israel and Iran, but it is also a war between civilization and barbarism. This was true a year ago, and it’s even more true today. Yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.

To choose just a few examples from the last week: at the UN, 12 countries—including the U.S.—presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Rashida Tlaib tweeted “our country is funding this bloodbath” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who The New York Times described as “beloved,” a “towering figure,” and a “powerful orator.” It read like a letter of recommendation. At Barnard, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all our martyrs we salute.” In Ottawa, protestors shouted, “Oh Zionists, where are you?” and targeted a Jewish residential street filled with schools and senior living homes, simply because the street is filled with Jewish homes and institutions. During the UN General Assembly, U.S. taxpayer dollars provided personal security for Iranian leaders, so that they could walk the streets of New York and speak before the UN—the same Iranian leaders who are plotting to kill senior American leaders.

No one understands the moral urgency of this moment better than my friend and guest today, Douglas Murray.

Douglas Murray isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members. And yet it is Douglas Murray who understands the stakes of this war and the moral clarity that it requires.

Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, to Israel. Douglas remained in Israel for months as he reported back with clarity, truth, and conviction. Douglas is the best-selling author of seven books, and is a regular contributor at the New York Post, the National Review, and here at The Free Press, where he writes our beloved Sunday column: “Things Worth Remembering.”

There is no one better to talk to in this moment, as we watch in real time as the Middle East—and the world as we know it—transforms before our eyes.

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Megyn Kelly cut her teeth in the mainstream media and became one of the most influential voices in the political debate. From her meteoric rise at Fox News to her stint at NBC, Megyn Kelly has been a central figure in American journalism for over a decade. 

You might recall her contentious exchange with then-candidate Donald Trump during a Republican presidential debate in 2015. Kelly asked him about the names he’d called women—such as “fat pigs” and “dogs.” Trump’s response, in part: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.” He later went on CNN and accused Kelly of having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.”

Kelly has since abjured the mainstream—she now hosts a podcast on SiriusXM and YouTube that has fast become one of the most popular political shows in the country. Her success captures the broader media shift away from brands like Fox and NBC to more personal, one-on-one relationships between commentator and consumer. (For example, she’s let her audience know she plans to vote for Trump, despite their past quarreling.)

People are hungry for unbiased, unfiltered information. And in the last few years, there has been an explosion of independent media: outlets like ours here at The Free Press, podcasts like this one, Substack newsletters, Twitter feeds, YouTube shows—all promising an alternative to the mainstream. 

But is independent media always trustworthy? Does it need some of the guardrails and editorial processes that were once common at legacy outlets? Because if one peers into this independent—and often right-wing—media landscape, one cannot help but notice the frequent descents into conjecture and conspiracy theory, from commentators like Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, and Bret Weinstein. 

While Megyn is normally the one doing the grilling, today it’s her turn in the hot seat. Michael Moynihan and Kelly discuss the role of conspiracy theory in our current discourse, where she stands politically these days, how the legacy press is handling the presidential election, how she says she avoided “Trump Derangement Syndrome” even as some of Trump’s most die-hard supporters showered her with threats, and her guiding principles as a journalist.

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Last week, a man armed with an assault rifle was apprehended on a southern Florida golf course. He was planning to murder Donald Trump on the links. It was the second near miss in two months. It seems likely that the shooter, Ryan Routh, was acting alone. But he is not alone in the hatred he has for Trump. He shares that with millions of Americans. In many people’s eyes, the 45th president of the United States is an existential threat to our republic. And ever since Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, his opponents have treated him as such. 

They were shocked because Trump broke many of the rules of modern politics. From the minor to the unprecedentedly major. This dynamic between Trump and his haters has changed the chemistry of American politics. In 2016, Trump shocked the country when he led rallies where his adoring fans chanted, “Lock her up.” Eight years later, crowds chant “Lock him up” at Kamala Harris’s rallies. In this respect, Routh is part of a larger problem that is tearing our country apart. When the other side vying for power is considered so beyond the pale, the norms of political decorum and fairness are worth breaking to stop an opponent that threatens our very system. You hear it from both parties. Trump is an “extinction-level event.” If Kamala wins, our country will become “Venezuela on steroids.” 

One escalation begets the next, until the old customs and rules of our politics have changed forever. We take it for granted today that we settle our elections with voting and not shooting. But republics don’t last forever. And when they fall, violence almost always follows. 

What leads a republic to choose the gun over the ballot? Because it doesn’t happen all at once, at least if history is any guide. In ancient Rome, the rule-breaking of one man—and the response of his enemies—created a crisis from which the Roman republic never really recovered. His name was Tiberius Gracchus. And while they were different in many ways, he was the Donald Trump of his day. 

Tiberius, like Trump, was an elite who turned on the elites, a class traitor who channeled the resentments and anger of the common man against a system rigged against him. Both men disregarded the unwritten political rules of their era. And, in turn, those norm violations prompted their enemies to disregard the rules themselves. In Rome, this cycle led to bloodshed and eventually the death of the republic itself. 

In America, we remain a republic, for now, but the cycle of escalations between Trump and his opponents strains our foundations like no political crisis since the civil war. Today, Eli Lake explains what the beginning of the end of the Roman republic tells us about the fate of our own republic.

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If you’re a listener of this show, then you’ve probably heard of the horseshoe theory. It’s basically this idea that when you go far enough to the left and far enough to the right, the voices start to sound pretty similar. This is certainly the case when you listen to sound bites of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump talk about trade and tariffs. 

But during this time—what my colleague Peter Savodnik has called our great political scramble—some voices don’t seem to fit in anywhere, voices like that of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Senator Paul is a bit of an anomaly on the American right. He’s traditionally libertarian, pro free trade, pro market, and anti subsidy. He’s a deficit hawk and criticizes both Trump and Biden on spending, and he is one of just seven senators who still refuses to endorse Trump. He says it’s over the $1.9 trillion deficit.

Senator Paul says to lower the deficit we’d need to cut military spending, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, and cut Social Security. But neither Republicans nor Democrats will go near those sacred cows these days. 

All of these attributes make him an endangered species in a party that is less fiscally conservative, more protectionist, and increasingly anti immigration—all positions that are antithetical to Rand Paul’s libertarian worldview. At the same time, Senator Paul is having somewhat of a renaissance when it comes to his foreign policy outlook. The new right and the MAGA movement are the opposite of the Reagan-era neocons skeptical of our ambitions abroad, and firmly against the “forever wars.” All stances Senator Paul agrees with. 

Today, we talk to Senator Paul to find out how he fits into the new right, when Republicans stopped caring about balancing the budget, why he wants to cut military spending, and cut aid to Israel. We ask if the U.S. can remain the world’s hegemon, while spending less, and if that’s even still a worthy goal, and finally, how Donald Trump and J.D. Vance totally lost the plot.

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On Tuesday, hundreds of encrypted pagers in Lebanon and Syria began exploding at the same time. Lebanon’s health minister said Tuesday that at least nine people were killed and 2,800 were injured. The tiny country’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients suffering from burn wounds, blown-up hands, and groin injuries. The pagers belonged to members of the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. 

Then, just 24 hours later, a second wave of thousands more explosions again went off simultaneously in Lebanon: This time not only pagers, but also walkie-talkies all belonging to Hezbollah terrorists. 

It was the stuff of spy movies—an incredibly sophisticated and precise operation unlike anything we’ve seen before. And while Israel has not officially taken responsibility, this kind of imaginative sabotage has Mossad written all over it. Hezbollah has vowed retaliation against Israel. 

This comes after almost a year of Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel. Since October 7, the constant barrage of attacks has forced some 100,000 Israelis to flee their homes on Israel’s northern border. Nearly a year later, they still cannot return. 

All of this, of course, is part of a much larger, more dangerous game being played across the region—Israel’s shadow war with Iran, its most formidable adversary. For years, Israel and Iran have avoided direct conflict, preferring to fight through Iran’s regional surrogates—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen. All of them fueled by Iranian money, weapons, and ideology.

Will Israel’s alleged tactical brilliance this week—jokingly dubbed as Operation Below the Belt on social media—deter Hezbollah from continuing to launch the missiles and rockets into Israel that make it impossible for Israeli citizens to return home? Or is military intervention—a ground invasion—inevitable?

As Eli Lake wrote in The Free Press today, “Israel cannot defeat its enemies by waging war only in the shadows.” 

Today, I sat down with journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dexter Filkins to talk about all of it. Dexter has been covering wars in the Middle East for decades for The New York Times and The New Yorker, and has been called “the premier combat journalist of his generation.” 

In our conversation, we discussed the state of the war, political divisions within Lebanon, Iran’s nuclear program, the viability of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, and the difficulties for the United States of disengaging from Middle East conflicts. 

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The American dream is the most important of our national myths. It’s the idea that, with hard work and determination, anyone in this country can achieve middle-class security, own a home, start a family, and provide the children they raise with a better life than they had. Is that still true?

On the one hand, our economy is the envy of the world. We are the richest country, leading the pack when it comes to innovation. And more people choose to move here for economic opportunity than to any other nation.

And yet, everywhere you look in this country, there is a growing sense of pessimism. A sense that you can work hard, play by the rules, even go to college, and still end up saddled with debt and unable to afford the basics, like a home.

Americans were told that higher education would be their ticket to the good life. Now, there’s more than $1.7 trillion dollars in student loan debt hanging over a generation. Americans were told that free trade would make everyone prosper. But try telling that to the 4.5 million people who lost their manufacturing jobs in the last 30 years.

Perhaps all of this is why a July Wall Street Journal poll found that only 9 percent of Americans say they believe that financial security is a realistic goal. And only 8 percent believe that a comfortable retirement is possible for them.

Now, do those numbers reflect reality? Or just negative vibes?

Last week, we convened four expert debaters in Washington, D.C., to hash out the question: Is the American dream alive and well?

Arguing that yes, the American dream is alive and well, is economist Tyler Cowen. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He also writes the essential blog Marginal Revolution. Joining Tyler is Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian Reason magazine and co-host of The Reason Roundtable podcast.

Arguing that no, the American dream is not flourishing, is David Leonhardt, senior writer at The New York Times and the author of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. David has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Joining David is Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.

Before the debate, 71 percent of our audience said that yes, the American Dream is alive and well, and 29 percent voted no. At the end of the night, we polled them again—and you’ll see for yourself which side won.

This debate was made possible by the generosity of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. If you care about free speech, FIRE is an organization that should be on your radar.

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Last night was the much-anticipated presidential debate between incumbent vice president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. There was no live audience, but the bashing and accusations, one against the other, were all the same. 

Trump called Kamala a Marxist. Kamala called Trump a liar. Kamala said Trump is for America’s wealthiest. Trump said Kamala is for killing babies at term. Trump said Kamala “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” And Kamala said Trump is simply a disgrace.

Of course, they went head-to-head on the normal issues: the economy, tariffs, abortion, China, fracking, policing in America, January 6, foreign policy, and—eating cats!? Not so normal. 

If you didn’t watch the debate, if you’re not on social media, or if you didn’t receive memes from your family group chat, let me explain. First, Kamala baited Trump on a question about his campaign rallies.

It got under his skin. He fell for it. Which then led him into a long rant about immigrants, which brings us back to the cat thing. Because in his words, immigrants are crossing the border, settling in Ohio, and stealing—and eating—our pets.

The moderator fact-checked him: “We have talked to the city manager of Springfield, and there are no credible reports of pets being taken and eaten.” To which Trump responded: “But I saw it on television!”

All Kamala needed to do was stand there and smile. As the debate went on, Trump reaffirmed that he thinks he won the 2020 election; He doubled down on the idea that doctors are executing babies after they’re born; and he referred to the January 6 rioters as “we.” He also quoted Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. And again, all Kamala needed to do was stand there and keep smiling. 

So what does it all mean? What impact will it have? Will independent voters, or swing-state voters, change their mind based on Kamala and Trump’s performance? Did Kamala clarify her policy positions and provide the substance that voters want to hear from her other than “joy” and “vibes”? Did the muted mics limit Trump’s abrasive demeanor? And most importantly, who won the debate? The answer seems pretty clear.

To discuss all this and more is Free Press contributor and opinion editor at Newsweek, Batya Ungar-Sargon; contributing writer at The Week, Newsweek, and Slate, David Faris; and Free Press writer and editor Peter Savodnik.

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Tucker Carlson is perhaps the country’s most influential conservative commentator; his eponymous podcast is routinely among the most downloaded shows on the internet. Despite his endless fulminations against the mainstream media, Carlson has an impeccable mainstream media pedigree. He’s hit for the cycle on cable news, having hosted shows on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. After he was fired from Fox News in 2023, under circumstances that are still hotly disputed, Carlson quickly reconstituted his career on his own—free of corporate shackles, with no institutional guardrails, and with a professed willingness to explore topics that his former mainstream media colleagues wouldn’t touch.

Last week on his show, he did just that, airing an interview with a man most people in the mainstream won’t touch: a podcaster named Darryl Cooper, who Carlson called “the most important historian in the United States.”

In reality, Cooper is an amateur historian with no publishing record—no books, no academic articles. He produces a popular history podcast called Martyr Made, in which he does deep dives into subjects like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the cult of Reverend Jim Jones, and the trials of Jeffrey Epstein. He has previously described his personal politics as those of a “non-racist fascist.”

On Carlson’s show, Cooper demonstrated some of those fascist tendencies when he identified Winston Churchill—not Adolf Hitler—as the “chief villain” of World War II. He wasn’t a hero at all, Cooper argued, but a “psychopath” who forced Nazi Germany into a war that it didn’t want. And what of the Holocaust? Cooper doesn’t speak of Jewish victims, but vaguely of “prisoners of war" who the Nazis “just threw. . . into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.” 

In September 1941, a mere week after Nazi troops occupied the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, that city’s Jews were ordered to congregate for “resettlement.” Under threat of severe punishment, they obliged. . . and were loaded into trucks to be transported a short distance to Babi Yar, a ravine just north of the city. In a two-day orgy of violence, 33,000 Jews ended up dead. Innocents, not prisoners of war; children forced to lie on top of those pushed into the pit before them, then executed with a bullet in the back of the head. This is how they ended up dead.

Tucker Carlson, who has the ear of millions of conservatives, including Donald Trump, and who secured a prime time speaking spot at the Republican National Convention, said nothing in response to Cooper’s revisionism. No pushback. Not an arched eyebrow. Just unalloyed praise for an extremist autodidact, America’s “best” historian.

Cooper defended himself on Twitter by assuring his critics that Hitler was indeed desperate to make peace and was also willing to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” Jewish problem was not in quotes. When another user pointed this out, Cooper responded: “Was there not a problem involving the Jews in Europe at the time?”

Hitler apologia and antisemitism packaged as brave historical inquiry is not new. We’ve heard versions of these arguments from extremists on the left and right for decades. But why is there a sudden resurgence of these odious ideas on the American right? 

Today, we talk to Victor Davis Hanson to help us answer this question. Hanson is a classicist and historian, the author of two dozen books, including the critically acclaimed The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. And for years, Hanson was a weekly guest on Tucker Carlson’s television show. We discuss his relationship with Carlson, the accuracy and derivation of Darryl Cooper’s claims about the Second World War, and why so-called “anti-elitism” often drifts into antisemitism.

If you want to learn more, read Bari Weiss on the rise of anti-history here.

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Last year, at colleges across America, students etched themselves into history, or infamy, with the most dramatic campus protests in a generation.

In preparation for the fall semester, some major universities—from NYU to UCLA—have implemented new rules and decided to enforce old ones to protect Jewish students from activists who had declared sections of campus no-go zones for Zionists. Universities that turn a blind eye to the Tentifada phenomenon now risk violating federal statute. 

Nonetheless, the chaos appears to be returning. At Temple University, protesters marched in solidarity with Palestinian “resistance against their colonizers.” Last week, a man attacked a group of Jewish students with a glass bottle on the University of Pittsburgh campus outside the school’s “Cathedral of Learning.” Meanwhile at the University of Michigan, four agitators were arrested during a “die-in.”

So clearly the danger is not yet over entirely for campuses, even though some of the steam may be leaving the movement. The Democratic National Convention, for example, was supposed to be the exclamation mark of rage, but the protests barely registered as a tussle. 

But history teaches us that it takes only a few student true believers to make quite a mess once they decide that boycotts and sit-ins aren’t making a difference. 

To understand this moment and the risk these student protesters pose, Free Press columnist Eli Lake looks at America’s history with Ivy League domestic terrorists. More than 50 years ago, campus unrest also spilled into the streets and moved off the grid as a small and lethal group of radicals called the Weather Underground took the plunge from protest to resistance. But the Weather Underground railed against the establishment. Today’s campus protesters are supported by it. Call them. . . the Weather Overground.

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A few weeks ago, at the much-anticipated Democratic National Convention, we witnessed the coronation of Kamala Harris. It was a star-studded event. We got the Obamas, the Clintons, Mindy Kaling, Kerry Washington, Kenan Thompson—and Oprah! Basically every Democratic A-lister you could think of came out in high fashion. (Kamala came out in a Chloé pantsuit.)

And then there were the Republicans: Mesa, Arizona mayor John Giles, former Trump White House staffer Olivia Troye, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, and former U.S. representative from Illinois Adam Kinzinger.

The purpose of their speeches was not only to warn Americans about the dangers of Trump—a message we’ve heard over and over again since 2016—but to give other conservatives permission to do the same. To not just oppose Trump, but to vote for the Democrat.

Two of those conservatives are here with us today: David French and Sarah Longwell.

David is an evangelical, pro-life conservative. He’s a former attorney who has worked on high-profile religious liberty cases. He was a staff writer at National Review, a senior editor at The Dispatch, and now he’s an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

Sarah is a political strategist and founder of Republicans Against Trump (now called the Republican Accountability Project). She’s also the founder and publisher of the Never Trump opinion website, The Bulwark.

The policy positions Sarah and David hold are not in lockstep with Kamala’s, not even close. So I ask them: Why is Kamala worthy of their vote? What do they think about the chasm between their political positions and Kamala’s? And do they support Kamala because she’s not Trump, or do they actually see something in her?

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In the past few weeks, there’s been an increasing number of threats to freedom of speech around the world.

In France, authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov for failing to adequately moderate content and prevent criminal activity on his platform. 

In the UK, since the outbreak of anti-immigration riots, police have arrested individuals merely for posting comments online. The Labour-led government has suggested expanding measures to remove “legal but harmful” content. 

In Brazil, President Lula’s administration has proposed new regulations requiring social media companies to monitor and remove “harmful content,” and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice just banned X altogether in the country. The ruling came after the platform missed a deadline to name a new legal representative there.

From Hungary to Pakistan, the right to speak your mind, particularly on the internet, is more precarious than ever. 

Even in the United States, with our free speech rights enshrined in the Constitution, polls suggest an entire generation has grown up thinking it should be illegal to say something inaccurate or hateful. Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz said as much: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

So how did we get here? And, where is this all going? 

Today, Michael sits down with the intrepid journalist Matt Taibbi, who knows this issue inside out. When The Free Press launched, he reported the Twitter Files with Bari Weiss, and together they exposed how government agencies had pressured Twitter to censor undesirable information, including skepticism of Covid lockdowns and opposition to Covid-related public school closures. 

In this conversation, Matt and Michael talk about what’s happening in Europe, Brazil, and here in the U.S. They discuss the factors that precipitated the so-called “misinformation wars,” from 9/11 to Brexit and Trump’s election, that convinced elites of the need to enforce restrictions on speech. And they talk about why these efforts are doomed to backfire. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, is one of the most consequential American entrepreneurs of our time.

Whole Foods began in 1980 as a small hippie health food store in Austin, Texas. Under Mackey’s leadership, it grew into the largest organic foods supermarket chain in the United States, selling to Amazon in 2017 for nearly $14 billion. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the company revolutionized the food industry, mainstreaming health-consciousness for a mass market. 

Despite the company’s crunchy progressive brand, Mackey is a staunch capitalist and a steadfast defender of free markets. He popularized the term “conscious capitalism,” which marries capitalism and social responsibility, and and emphasizesinges the role of businesses in creating a sustainable and ethical impact on society at large. 

Today, a conversation about what it takes to build a company like Whole Foods, what it is like to have enormous wealth, the role of unions in the American economy, and why he kicked his own father off the board of the company.

And to read Mackey’s full story, check out his new book, The Whole Story. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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It’s that time of year again–reliably bumming out students and parents alike… it ’s back to school! But back to school is also a time to reflect on the state of education in this country… and it’s not all that great. 

America is one of the richest countries in the world. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at our education statistics. We’re 16th in science globally. In Math, we scored below the average and well below the scores of the top five countries, all of which were in Asia. And in 2018, we ranked an astonishing 125th in literacy among all countries according to the World Atlas. 

As we tumble down the international tables, public schools around the country are getting rid of gifted and talented programs. They’re getting rid of standardized testing. All while trying to regain ground from COVID-related learning loss…

So how did we get here? Why have public schools deprioritized literacy and numeracy? What role have teachers’ unions played in advocating for public education in this country and also in holding kids back by protecting bad teachers? How is socioeconomic segregation hurting academic performance? And what kinds of books should really be taught in public schools? 

Today, we're diving deep into these questions and more with three experts who bring diverse perspectives to this debate:

Richard Kahlenberg is Director of the American Identity Project and Director of Housing at the Progressive Policy Institute. His many books and essays have focused on addressing economic disparities in education. Maud Maron is co-founder of PLACE NYC, which advocates for improving the academic rigor and standards of K-12 public school curricula. She’s also the mother of four kids in New York City public schools. Erika Sanzi is a former educator and school dean in Rhode Island. She is Director of Outreach at Parents Defending Education, which aims to fight ideological indoctrination in the classroom. 

We discuss the misallocation of resources in education, the promise and perils of school choice, and how we can fix our broken education system. 

And if you like this conversation, good news! All week this week at The Free Press—as summer ends and kids return to class—we’re pausing our usual news coverage to talk about education. We’ve invited six writers to answer the question: What didn’t school teach you? 

With elite colleges peddling courses on “Queering Video Games,” “Decolonial Black Feminist Magic,” and “What Is a Settler Text?,” there’s never been a better time to go back to the proverbial school of life.

To get those essays in your inbox every morning from today until Saturday, go to thefp.com and become a subscriber today. 

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In the 1972 presidential election, Democratic candidate George McGovern was soundly defeated by Richard Nixon. It was a bloodbath. He lost 49 states, a result widely attributed to his positions being “too liberal” for the American mainstream.

Four decades later, in a more liberal America, McGovern released a book called What It Means to Be a Democrat, outlining core values that define the Democratic Party. Because, he argued, in his day, during the “1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. . . it was obvious that a spirit of wide embrace was missing both inside and outside the convention hall.” The party had “splintered” into warring factions. This, McGovern argued, could never be allowed to happen again.

Here we are again, 50-plus years later, back in Chicago, back at the Democratic National Convention. There’s the version that’s inside. And there’s the one that’s outside, with left-wing demonstrators in the streets demanding the party forcefully oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, beseeching Democrats to somehow precipitate an end to capitalism and support various other identity-related progressive causes.

They marched and shouted, faces swaddled in N95 masks or tightly wrapped with keffiyehs, beneath a sea of Palestinian flags, punctuated by the occasional hammer and sickle. There was only one American flag to be found—a prop to be doused in lighter fluid and set alight. 

Inside the convention hall, we passed countless people in red, white, and blue dresses and jackets and hats, while volunteers handed out signs that simply read “USA.” And while all those stuffed into Chicago’s United Center seemed energized by the Kamala coronation, we found divergent views on what it means to be a Democrat.

At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month, there were no divergent views. No Never-Trumpers. No holdout Nikki Haley supporters. No contingent of free-traders, tax-cutters, or libertarians. The MAGA faction had fully purged the dissenters.

A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that while 86 percent of registered voters said they knew what Donald Trump stood for, that number fell to 64 percent when the same question was asked about Kamala Harris. Some of this can be attributed to her many policy flip-flops, some to her decision to avoid almost all interaction with media. . . and some to the Democrats’ emphasis on vibes over policy. 

So we came to Chicago to ask the question: What does it mean, in 2024, to be a Democrat? 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Most humans are cautious by nature. We naturally like to do what’s comfortable and safe. But comfortable and safe don’t usually lead to. . . well, success. In fact, the most successful people in the world share something in common: They love risk. 

That’s true of the best poker players, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and crypto traders. All of these people consider statistics; they embrace uncertainty; and they make bold predictions that ultimately pay off for themselves—and sometimes for humanity. 

How do they do it?

Our guest today, Nate Silver, has a theory on what drives successful people, how they think, and how they achieve enormous success—or, at times, catastrophic failure.

He just wrote an entire book about it. On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything analyzes these types of people and the principles that guide their risky decision-making—which, he argues, is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy.

Nate, one of the most sophisticated thinkers on risk and uncertainty, is a statistician, sports analyst, professional poker player, and the founder of FiveThirtyEight, a website that revolutionized political reporting with its data-driven election predictions. 

Today, Nate discusses why it’s important to take more risks, and how he sees the current election playing out. 

If you hear statistics and data and probability and analytics and roll your eyes, we get it. But this is a conversation that goes beyond all that. Nate explains what frustrates him about his critics, why he is happy to no longer be affiliated with FiveThirtyEight, and how his biggest passion—poker—helped him become one of the world’s most famous prognosticators.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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A few months ago, we learned about a young man whose name we’re withholding, which is something we very rarely do, because he insists it’s for his safety. 

This young Palestinian man is from a small village in the West Bank, and he grew up there with limited access to water and without a regular supply of electricity. Most of the kids he grew up with dropped out of school and went into manual labor. But this young man chose a different path. He won a scholarship to study abroad for college. He earned three degrees in three different countries. And then he landed a tech job with an Israeli company, of all places. (For context, among the 360,000 workers in the Israeli tech sector, there are only a few dozen Palestinians from the West Bank.)

His story is one of setbacks, hardships, and discrimination, but also of hard work, perseverance, unlikely friendships, and in the end—against all odds—success. 

But then his life was ruined. . . by a social media post. On October 7, he woke up in his home in the West Bank to the news of the massacre happening inside Israel. While some people in his community celebrated, he was horrified. He posted how he felt online: “What sad and horrible news to wake up to and out of words and unable to digest what’s going on right now. I’m Palestinian and firmly stand against this terror. I pray for the safety of my friends, colleagues, their loved ones, and everyone else affected.” He continued to post about how he felt—six posts in total.

Suddenly, he says, 500 people unfollowed or unfriended him on social media sites. People blocked him on WhatsApp and, in real life, people just stopped speaking to him altogether. 

And then, people started calling him a “traitor.” And as he said in this interview, the word traitor means something in the West Bank. “It means they are going to kill you.”

Since that day, he hasn’t been able to commute to Israel to work. The crossings are closed and the work permits for Palestinians have been suspended. He stays home with his family, and he doesn’t go out because he says it’s just too dangerous. He feels isolated, unsafe, and scared for himself and for the safety of his family. 

I often talk about courage, and about the courage to speak your mind even when it’s unpopular or dangerous. I often reference my personal heroes, people like Natan Sharansky or Masih Alinejad. But so few people are willing to walk in their footsteps in real time, in real life, when the stakes are the highest imaginable.

My guest today is one of those people. Today, he explains where he gets the strength to speak up, even if it means risking his life, and why remaining silent in the face of the atrocities of October 7 would have made him no different from those who committed the crimes.

One final note: if you’re a listener of this show, then you will understand how much this person needs our help. So, if you have a job opportunity that can provide sponsorship, please email contact2024m@gmail.com.

And if you want to contribute to his relocation effort, you can support his GoFundMe.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Never before have people felt more comfortable weighing in on other people’s lives.

What diet to do, what to wear, how to make yourself attractive to the opposite sex, whether or not you should put money into that new crypto coin, if you should let your kids self-soothe, and on and on—but most of it, this endless supply of advice, is actually pretty bad.

Weekly popular advice columns, like Dear Abby and Ask E. Jean, have vanished. And in their place is finger-wagging, political posturing, and straight-up bad tips.

A New York Times reader sought advice on how to deal with her daughter, who is in a polyamorous relationship with a married man. She wrote, “My daughter tells me she would like to bring this man on our family trip to Greece this year. It may be petty, but I don’t want to foot the bill for another woman’s husband. And I don’t see any way this relationship can lead to my daughter’s happiness. Should I lay out my boundaries and risk my daughter not joining me on vacation?”

Instead of saying what any sane person would, which is: “Get this man as far away from your daughter as possible,” The New York Times advised the mother to shut up and do better. “This is about respecting your adult daughter’s choices. As a show of respect, read up on polyamory before you broach the subject with her.”

The thing is, we’re in an advice desert, but we’ve never been in greater need of good advice.

Some people consult friends, therapists, or tarot readers when they need direction in life. Other people pray or go to confession. Many people seek the advice of a mentor.

But at The Free Press, we like to visit this woman who lives on a hill in Pasadena and makes a mean onion dip. Her name is Caitlin Flanagan. You may have read her writing in The Atlantic, or you may have read her book Girl Land or On Thinking for Yourself. Caitlin is someone who has her finger on the pulse. Whether you’re reading her essays, her books, or her Twitter feed, she is just always right.

So today, Free Press reporter Suzy Weiss and Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan are here to answer your questions about. . . everything, from relationships to politics to children to animals (yes, animals)!

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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A few weeks ago, very few people outside of the Beltway and niche media circles had ever heard the name Tim Walz. Almost overnight, the relatively obscure governor from Minnesota started to gain traction thanks to a viral clip where he called J.D. Vance “weird.”

It resonated with a lot of people. He came across as direct, plainspoken, and affable. And on Tuesday, August 6, Vice President Kamala Harris officially announced him as her running mate. 

The conventional wisdom was that Harris would pick a moderate Democrat. But is Walz a true moderate? Because if you go online, there is a split screen reality about who Tim Walz actually is.

On one side: Midwestern nice guy Democrat who grew up in a small town in Nebraska, is a National Guard vet, was a high school teacher, a football coach, a congressman, governor, and to top it all off, a gun owner and a hunter. Policy-wise, he’s worked with Republicans to pass infrastructure investments. He cut taxes for working families. He passed a law to provide paid family and medical leave to Minnesota families.

But on the other side: he’s as radical as radical progressives come. Here are some policies cited to support that argument: during the pandemic, Walz set up a phone line so Minnesotans could report their neighbors for violating Covid rules. He allowed Minnesota’s health department to ration lifesaving Covid drugs based on race. Walz made Minnesota a “trans refuge state,” signing a law that allows the state to take custody of a child whose parents refuse “gender-affirming care.” He also established a council to implement DEI training in statewide agencies. And after George Floyd’s murder, he said: “My administration will use every tool at our disposal to deconstruct generations of systemic racism in Minnesota.” This, as the city was burning.

Then, there is the secondary story of Tim Walz, which is not about Tim Walz at all.

Until Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro appeared to be the frontrunner as a charismatic, handsome, and moderate governor from a key battleground state the Democrats need to win. Why didn’t Kamala choose Shapiro? Did anti-semitism play a role?

To explain all of this are three of my favorite writers and thinkers: Free Press contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik, and Free Press columnist Joe Nocera (or, as he likes to be called, our in-house-liberal). Suffice it to say, they all have very different opinions on Walz.

Today: Who is Tim Walz? Why did Kamala Harris land on him? What does this choice say about the state of the Democratic Party? And in the race toward the White House, does it even matter?

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Last month, we ran an episode here by one of our amazing reporters, Eli Lake, that took us back to the tumultuous year of 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson dropped out of his own reelection race, and the resulting turmoil at the Democratic convention that followed that summer in Chicago. At the time of that episode, of course, Biden was still in the race, and Eli was guiding us through that history lesson in order to help us make sense of the present moment, and to indicate what might happen next. 

Today, Eli is back on Honestly to do what he does best: look back in time and help us make sense of our baffling present.

VP Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. She has the wind at her back, though she hasn’t given a single interview, and every day someone else announces they’ve been coconut-pilled.

But in her anointment to the top of the ticket, there’s been a strange and silent rewriting of history by the press and party loyalists with the support of a lot of tech companies, who together are changing our collective understanding of the present and of the very recent past. Eli argues this has happened before. And not in America. . . but in the Soviet Union, and also in the works of brilliant writers like Milan Kundera and George Orwell, who imagined something, he argues, like what we’re seeing right now.

While that might sound like hyperbole, listen and decide for yourself. Because whether you agree or disagree with Eli’s conclusions, I’m confident you will learn so much from listening to this episode.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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On Monday, the markets had one of its worst trading days since the 2008 financial crisis. Stocks tumbled around the world, with a global sell-off, amid fears of a recession. The VIX (an index often called “Wall Street’s Fear Gauge”) was at times today as high as we saw it when the economy was shutting down for Covid. 

This comes on the tail of a pretty insane news cycle: a presidential assassination attempt, Joe Biden dropping out of the race, the coronation of a new Democratic nominee, a stolen election (actually) in Venezuela, a Middle East on the brink of war. . . should I go on? But the most pressing issue to most Americans is and always has been the economy. 

And with everything else going on, many of us have been paying far too little attention to the economic story here at home, and the policies that may have brought us to this moment we find ourselves in today. 

To explain how we got here is Larry Summers. Summers was Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, and he was the director of the National Economic Council under President Obama. He was president of Harvard for five years. And he is one of the world’s most prominent economists. 

Today: What is going on in the market? What caused it? Was it avoidable? What happens next? And what are the long-term repercussions? 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Today, we have a special story from two friends and former Free Pressers, Andy Mills and Matt Boll. They have a new podcast, Reflector, that I think you’re going to love, and we’re sharing an episode where they look at some of the hidden truths and misconceptions about alcoholism and how to treat it.

Alcohol consumption increased more during the Covid years than it had at any time in the past 50 years. In fact, Americans were drinking so much that from 2020 through 2021, there were approximately 178,000 alcohol-related deaths, which is more deaths than from all drug overdoses combined, including opioids.

And yet most Americans with a drinking problem never speak to their doctors about their drinking, and fewer than 6 percent of them receive any form of treatment whatsoever.

Today, a woman named Katie tells the story of her self-experimentation with a little-known but highly effective drug to combat her alcohol addiction.

It’s not only an incredibly moving story of one woman’s journey but it also gets to the bigger question of why these types of medications aren’t widely used in America, and it challenges everything we know about alcoholism and how to treat it.

Check out Reflector wherever you get your podcasts, or by going to reflector.show and becoming a subscriber. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com/subscribe and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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On Saturday afternoon, a Hezbollah rocket fired from southern Lebanon struck a soccer field in the village of Majdal Shams in Israel’s north, slaughtering 12 children.

For the last 10 months, many have warned that Israel is on the brink of a major war with Hezbollah. But the truth is that Hezbollah has been fighting—and winning—in Israel’s north since October 8. For the past 10 months, Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy terror group that controls southern Lebanon, has essentially redrawn the northern border of Israel by pummeling the border towns daily with rockets, leaving 225 square miles unlivable for Israelis and displacing around 80,000 Israeli citizens.

Israel—pounded by Iranian proxies from all directions—now faces one of the most perilous moments in recent history. The prospect of an all-out war with Hezbollah, which could very well spread to a larger, more dangerous regional war—perhaps directly with Iran—seems closer than ever. 

What is Israel going to do? Will Israel choose to confront Hezbollah, or will they respond in a more limited way to avoid the regional escalation that the Americans so fear? How does U.S. policy, and the upcoming presidential election, influence Israel’s strategic calculation? Is Kamala Harris equipped to bring calm to the region? Or are Israelis just waiting for Trump to return to office? Is America’s current policy—which is the containment of Iran—backfiring and inadvertently creating a regional crisis? Most importantly, should we be thinking about the war with Gaza and the war with Hezbollah as discrete fights, or are they all part of a broader war that’s already underway between Israel and Iran?

Answering those questions today is Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv is a journalist and writer for The Times of Israel, and he is one of the most important and insightful thinkers of our time on Israel and the Middle East.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com/subscribe and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Most of the media-verse right now is focused on a handful of serious and important questions: Kamala’s VP pick, if Democrats have been anti-Democratic, if Kamala can receive Biden’s campaign money without a legal battle. And whether or not China will see the opportunity of our lame-duck president to make moves against Taiwan.

But today we aren’t here to talk about any of that. Today we’re here to talk about memes and whether or not Kamala Harris is “brat.”

On Sunday, July 21, we found out that President Joe Biden was stepping down from the race because he posted a letter on X. Then, 23 minutes later he endorsed Kamala Harris as the nominee and that was it. 

Days went by, and we didn’t see him or hear from him. And we’re all supposed to accept that as normal. And in his absence something really strange happened. Kamala Harris became a Gen Z icon. Kamala became “brat.”

And if you’re anything like me, you’re not exactly following. So, let us explain: the singer Charli XCX posted Sunday on X that “Kamala IS brat,” a reference to her new album called Brat. Which, for those who don’t know, according to Gen Z, is this summer’s official vibe and aesthetic. Don’t worry, if you still aren’t following, neither are the talking heads on CNN or Fox.

But whether they understand it or not, Kamala’s campaign does. Her staff changed her campaign’s X page to the brat chartreuse color (the album’s theme color), with the words “Kamala HQ” to match the Brat album cover. 

The internet went crazy. Just take the video of a group of men in Fire Island in chartreuse crop tops that say “kamala” in the brat font. The caption on the tweet: “BRAT Kamala shirts already on Fire Island. The gays move SO FAST.” And it wasn’t just brat that went viral, we’ve also seen a repacking of viral clips overnight: the coconut quote, Kamala loving Venn diagrams, and a whole lot of Kamala laughing.

As the internet was off to the races, mainstream politicians were forced to make a choice: embrace the Twitter-sphere or ignore it. And most chose the former. Hawaiian senator Brian Schatz endorsed Kamala on X simply by posting a photo of himself climbing a coconut tree, the caption reading: “Madam Vice President, we are ready to help.” Colorado governor Jared Polis simply posted a tweet with a coconut emoji, a palm tree emoji, and an American flag emoji. Senator Mazie K. Hirono posted a photo with Kamala with the brat chartreuse filter on it.

Clearly a unique consensus has emerged. As Katherine Boyle wrote for The Free Press this week, “The online and offline are finally merging.”  

It’s fun, it’s trippy, it’s campy, it’s weird, but the question remains, will any of this translate to actual votes? 

To help us better understand are two Free Press writers—River Page and Kat Rosenfield. This week for The Free Press, River explained how the phrase “Twitter isn’t real life” has never seemed less true and that “Twitter is now the center of the country’s political universe. For better or worse.” And Kat made the case that Kamala is brat, but not in the way we think, and she’s not so sure it’s a good thing. 

The internet moves fast, but River and Kat move faster, and they’re here today to help us dissect it all: the meme-ification of politics, brat, and how internet culture is rewiring election norms. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com/subscribe and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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The United States locks up nearly two million people, the highest number of prisoners for any country in the world. That represents about 20 percent of the world’s prison population, even though the U.S. makes up only around 5 percent of the global population.  

It's not surprising that over the past two decades, more and more people have embraced the idea of criminal justice reform. In 2020, there were calls around the country to defund the police and divert money to programs meant to address the root causes of crime. Voters embraced reforms in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and beyond. Progressive prosecutors in many blue cities pledged to reduce sentences, stop prosecuting lower level offenses, and address police misconduct.

But crime has become, once again, a major issue for American voters. Sixty-three percent of Americans said that crime was “extremely or very serious” in the country, according to the annual Gallup survey on crime released in November. And many believe that criminal justice reform initiatives have exacerbated the problem. 

That’s why The Free Press brought together four expert debaters last month in San Francisco—a city where everything from shampoo to gum is under lock and key at Walgreens—to ask: has criminal justice reform made our cities unsafe?

Arguing in the affirmative are Seneca Scott and Michael Shellenberger. Seneca is a labor leader, a community organizer, and founder of Neighbors Together Oakland. He ran for mayor of Oakland in 2022, focusing on solutions to homelessness, drug tourism, and violent crime. Michael is the founder of Public News and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Arguing that, no, criminal justice reform has not made our cities unsafe are Kmele Foster and Lara Bazelon. Kmele is a commentator and co-host of the popular podcast The Fifth Column. He is a founding partner at Freethink, the award-winning digital media company. Lara is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where she holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy and directs the criminal and racial justice clinical programs. Lara is a former federal public defender and a former director of the Project for the Innocent, at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. 

Before the debate, 87 percent of our audience said that, yes, criminal justice reform has made our cities unsafe. At the end of the night, we polled them again—and you’ll see for yourself which side won.

To watch the debate in full, go to thefp.com/watch.

Finally: lucky for you, we have more live debates in store. Our next debate will be on the state of the American dream, and it will take place in Washington, D.C., on September 10. Get your tickets at thefp.com/events 

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Tonight, President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee. After weeks of speculation, criticism of his candidacy, concern about his health, and withdrawal of donors, President Biden finally said: “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

What comes next? With the Democratic National Convention less than a month away, Michael Moynihan went live on X with Free Press contributors Walter Kirn, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Eli Lake, and Olivia Reingold, as well Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips (who challenged Joe Biden during the primaries), to discuss this historic turn and how it will impact the election.

Follow The FP on X to stay tuned for more livestreams.

Note: this episode was originally a livestream on X, and there were a few audio glitches, but we loved this conversation and think you will too.

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For the past few decades, it’s been conventional wisdom in D.C. that “demographics are destiny.” That the increased share of immigrants, young people, and racial minorities across the country would build a bulletproof coalition for the Democratic Party, swelling their ranks and keeping them in power forever.

Those who deviated from this expectation could expect to be called sellouts, race traitors, and Uncle Toms. Recall Joe Biden’s infamous interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God, when he said: “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.”

But in the past year, Donald Trump has been winning over more minority voters than any Republican in decades. Recent polls have consistently shown that Trump has reached a shocking 20 percent support among black voters. That’s compared to the 8 percent he got in 2016. And Biden’s polling with black voters has dropped dramatically.

This is a monumental, and to many, unexpected turn. And it was noticeable at the RNC. When Michael Moynihan went to the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland, the audience was more monochromatic. While certainly not as racially diverse as the Democratic coalition, the convention in Milwaukee felt younger and less white.

Monday night, Amber Rose opened the proceedings. Tuesday night, Madeline Brame, the mother of a murdered veteran, gave a thunderous speech explaining why she’s supporting Trump. She said: “Our eyes have been opened, just like so many other poor minorities across America. Donald Trump shares our values, love of God and family and country. He’s been a victim of the same corrupt system that I have been and my family has been.”

What’s behind this shift? Why do Biden and the Democratic Party seem to be losing their edge with black voters? And could this end up making a real difference for the 2024 election?

Last night, Michael Moynihan went to an event at the RNC put on by the Black Conservative Federation to ask them why they think that MAGA conservatism is appealing to black voters.

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A lot happened in American politics last night: the Biden interview, the Vance unveiling, Trump’s RNC entrance—his first public appearance since Saturday’s shooting. And there, to help you all make sense of it, was The Free Press team in our first-ever live video on X. To be honest, we weren’t sure how it was going to go. We were blown away by the response.

There were some 350,000 of you watching this experiment, in which we had the kind of panel we wish were assembled on cable news, or as host Michael Moynihan put it: “the Traveling Wilburys of political panels.”

Monday night’s supergroup included Newsweek editor and Free Press contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Puck correspondent Tara Palmeri, Red Scare co-host Anna Khachiyan (chain-smoking, of course), legendary pollster Frank Luntz, Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam, author and Free Press contributor Rob Henderson, and journalist James Pogue. This is a group of people you just cannot find anywhere else.

Today, we’ll play that live conversation for you. And stay tuned for more live! Follow The FP on X.

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As you now well know, at 6:11 p.m. on Saturday evening, shots rang out at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person, a 50-year-old man named Cory Comperatore, was killed. Two others, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, were gravely injured. Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet.

Before the 45th president was whisked away by Secret Service, he emerged defiant with his fist pumping in the air, blood on his ear and face. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he yelled at the crowd, to which they chanted back: “USA! USA! USA!”

As we would later learn, one of the bullets pierced the top of Trump’s right ear, flying just a hair’s breadth away from his head. One inch. One inch and we would be having a very different conversation. As Niall Ferguson wrote in The Free Press:

“An inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him. A slight gust of wind, a tremor of the assassin’s hand, an unexpected move by the former president—for whatever tiny reason, Trump lived to fight another day.”

Saturday’s attempted assassination has already shifted the course of this election. How will it shape our politics and our country? And was this violence the inevitable outcome of our painfully divided country, and who is responsible for those divisions?

Those are the subjects of today’s episode. This is an episode in two parts.

The first part is about the unspeakable events that took place on Saturday. Then in the second half, you’ll hear our initial conversation that took place last week about political brokenness, the crisis of trust between the American people and our elected officials—and how to fix it with some help from the Constitution. In light of what happened over the weekend, it feels even more poignant.

The guest in both halves of this episode is Yuval Levin, one of the greatest political analysts and explainers of our time.

Yuval has even been called the “the most important voice in the political culture.” He worked on domestic policy in the George W. Bush administration. He’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Congress, the presidency, the courts, the Constitution, and American political life.

He’s the author of several books including The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. And he just published American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. It gives us a road map to how the Constitution can bring the country together to solve our political troubles.

What I particularly love about Yuval is that when everyone around us seems to be taking the black pill, Yuval is clear-eyed. He’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Yuval is just realistic, informed by a deep sense of American history that gives him a perspective on what’s happening now while motivated by a true love for this country.

Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

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Yesterday, Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A few minutes into the rally, a gunman opened fire, and a bullet pierced the former president’s ear. He ducked to the ground, the Secret Service piled on top of him, supporters screamed, and chaos erupted through the crowd.

Trump suffered a superficial wound, but one rally attendee was killed and two others were critically injured. Moments after the shooting, images of Trump flooded the internet—fist clenched, blood running down his face, mouthing “fight” to a dazed crowd. It was the first time in over 40 years that an elected president was wounded in an assassination attempt. The gunman was immediately killed. He was later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

The internet was, of course, soon overrun with speculation, conspiracies, over-the-top rhetoric, and the assignation of blame—most of which demanded that the shooter share responsibility for his evil actions with certain aspects of the media or certain politicians. It’s all a stark reminder of the deep polarization of our politics, and that political violence is something of a constant in American life.

On the ground at the rally, watching the mayhem unfold, was Salena Zito. Salena is a reporter for the Washington Examiner and a contributor to The Free Press. She was standing four feet from the president when the first shots rang out.

Today, we discuss what she witnessed at the rally. We discuss her interactions with President Trump immediately before the shooting, the shooter’s possible motive, what it means for the 2024 election, and more importantly, what it means for the country.

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A few weeks ago, fresh from being knighted by King Charles, historian Sir Niall Ferguson officially joined The Free Press as a columnist. His first piece was rather provocatively called “We’re All Soviets Now.” He argued why he thinks today’s United States resembles the decaying Soviet Union of the ’70s and ’80s. We’re physically unwell, heavily in debt, run by an out-of-touch gerontocracy, and subjected to a bogus ideology pushed by elites.

This was published before the disastrous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Since then, Niall has only doubled down. He argued in his most recent column that the reason our system only offers up an embarrassing blowhard and a senile old man lies in contemporary America’s similarities to the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, these provocative arguments drove some people crazy. We’d scarcely updated the homepage with that first column before the rebuttals came pouring in. But none were quite as passionate and thorough as the one written by Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, who devoted an entire column to pushing back on Ferguson. In “No, We Are Not Living in ‘Late Soviet America,’ ” Goldberg conceded some of the basic facts presented by Ferguson, but aggressively objected to the idea that the United States was in any way similar to late-stage Soviet communism. “Do we have problems that have some superficial similarities with the Soviets? Sure. But. . . come on.” Goldberg continued: “The Soviet Union built a wall to keep its subjects trapped inside their evil empire. Many Americans understandably believe we need a wall to keep millions of people desperate to live here out.” Because at the end of the day, Goldberg argued, “America is simply not like the Soviet Union.” 

Ferguson fought back on Twitter in an 18-part thread, in which he accused Goldberg of “pure cope.” And back and forth they went for days.

We’re happy to announce that they agreed to hash it all out on this very podcast. . . today. 

The debate we ended up having was much bigger than merely whether the U.S. can accurately be compared to the USSR. It got to the heart of a core disagreement on the right in recent years about the health of American democracy—and whether the nation is still exceptional, albeit flawed, or if the country is in a state of inexorable decline. 

It’s a fitting conversation to have right after the Fourth of July and as pundits and politicians fill airtime and columns with questions about our leader’s fitness for the job, presidential transparency, and whether it’s undemocratic to replace Biden on the election ticket. Because today’s conversation gets to the heart of how the American project is faring, and what we should do to save the country we all love before it’s too late.

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As some of you know, Nellie and Bari are having another baby—any moment now—maybe even by the time this podcast is published!

Going from one kid to two is no small challenge, so we’re doing something a little different on the podcast today. In an attempt to quell the nerves, we decided to call up some of our favorite parents to give Nellie and Bari advice before they become a family of four. We ask Bethany Mandel about the importance of birth order; Elon Gold about how to protect your marriage as your family expands; Amy and Lou Weiss (yes, those Weisses) about the best part of having kids; and Mary Katharine Ham about how they should prepare for raising a boy in a household of girls.

Bari and Nellie learned a lot of parenting wisdom making this episode, and we think you will too.

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On our nation’s 248th birthday, Joe Biden faces the wrath of a thousand pundits. The whole world watched the elected leader of the world’s oldest republic befogged, slack-jawed, and mentally vacant in a debate he had to win. A recent poll from CBS showed that after Biden’s performance last week, 72 percent of registered voters believed the man lacked the cognitive ability to be president. 

Even his closest friends and sycophants are pleading for the old man to hang it up. The New York Times editorial board. Former advisers to Barack Obama. Columnist and Biden’s personal friend, Tom Friedman, said he wept in a hotel room in Portugal while watching the debate. They’ve seen enough. Joe Biden, for the good of your country, step down. 

And yet, Biden’s White House is shrugging it off. It was just a debate, they tell us. Don’t let 90 minutes define years of accomplishments. 

But it was not just a debate. It was indelible and undeniable proof that the leader of the free world lacks the stamina and acuity to do the job for four more months, let alone four more years. 

As Biden weighs his decision, he may well think back to when he was a young man and then-president Lyndon Baines Johnson found himself in a similar position. Johnson was losing the country, and in the middle of the primary he decided to bow out. 

Today, Free Press writer Eli Lake hosts a special episode about what happened in 1968 when President Johnson decided he was not fit for reapplying for his job. He listened to his critics and backed away from the White House, allowing the Democrats an opportunity to stage an open convention to choose their next candidate for the presidency. But why did the party want him gone so badly? And how did this seismic decision work out? It’s a tale of murder, war, and riots that culminated in the most explosive convention in the history of America.

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The past few days have been perhaps the most dramatic political spectacle since November 8, 2016. Ever since President Biden’s disastrous debate performance last Thursday, there has been a panic around the country. Can he still be on the Democratic ticket in 2024? And who has actually been running the United States for the past four years? 

Every minute, another shoe drops. Another grim poll, another devastating leak. All of which suggests that Biden has to throw in the towel. But the White House insists he’s in it for the long haul. “I am running. . . . No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win,” Biden told DNC staff on a call Wednesday. 

On today’s special *emergency* episode of Honestly, Bari sits down with Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson to help make sense of what is going on and what comes next. Thompson has covered President Biden for years and is one of the few reporters, long before last Thursday night, who dared to report on the subject of Biden’s age and mental acuity. There’s no one better situated to break down how the Biden camp is dealing with the fallout since the debate. 

They discuss Biden World’s calculus for staying in the race, who might replace Biden if he ultimately drops out, what is going on with Democratic donors, why the media missed this story for months, and what this could all mean for the future of the nation.

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In January, I was announced as a 2024 TED speaker in Vancouver. Predictably, a small group of very loud people were angry—mostly on Twitter. Then, five TED fellows resigned. They wrote a letter to the head of TED, Chris Anderson, titled: “TED Fellows Refuse to Be Associated with Genocide Apologists.” They pleaded to disinvite me, plus a few others who had been asked to speak, and take us off the program.

A strange thing considering that TED is devoted to curiosity, reason, wonder, and the pursuit of knowledge, without an agenda: “We welcome all who seek a deeper understanding of the world and connection with others, and we invite everyone to engage with ideas and activate them in your community.” In the end, TED didn’t disinvite me. But I wondered if I should actually go.

For some people, being invited to TED probably is the most exciting thing in the world. And at one point I would have felt that way too. But I knew they were inviting me to be their token dissident voice, to prove that they are not a monolith. And on the one hand, I appreciated that effort. On the other hand, if I’m your representation for ideological diversity, if I’m your most radical speaker, then you’ve already lost.

In the end, I decided to speak. I felt like they were genuinely trying to right the ship, and shouldn’t I support that effort?

When I arrived, I was sequestered in a group with people like Bill Ackman, Avi Loeb, Andrew Yang, and Scott Galloway, and TED called our portion of the conference “The Provocateurs.” But as I looked around at my little group of five, something felt very obvious: none of us are all that provocative. Or at least we shouldn’t be. The biggest irony of all is that that was the very topic of my speech I came to Vancouver to give.

The talk is about how normal ideas and issues are often crowded out and overshadowed by boutique issues such as whether Bari Weiss should be allowed to speak at TED. It’s about how a few small voices end up adjudicating which voices are morally righteous and which ones are not. It’s about how common-sense positions became transgressive and polarizing overnight; how our ability to disagree is our freedom, and, most critically, why it’s so important to stand with conviction in our beliefs even when it means standing out in the cold.

Today, you’ll hear my talk, titled “Courage, the Most Important Virtue.” Afterward, you’ll hear a conversation I had with the head of TED, Chris Anderson, about victimhood, about how words are misinterpreted as violence, and about the paper-thin line between civilization and barbarism.

Thanks to the TED Talks Daily podcast for letting us share this episode of their show with Honestly listeners today. And if you want to hear more talks like mine, check out TED Talks Daily. Each day, the show brings you a new idea that will spark your curiosity and just might change the future, all in under 15 minutes. You can find TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts.

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There was no raucous audience cheering and jeering last night in Atlanta, but the first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump was a painful affair. Even the most steadfast Biden partisans were devastated, panicked, and dazed, many of them waking up this morning saying the quiet part out loud: we can’t possibly run this candidate in November.

Here to break it down this morning are Mary Katharine Ham and Ben Smith. Mary Katharine is a Fox News analyst and the co-host of the podcast Getting Hammered. Ben Smith is the co-founder and editor in chief of Semafor, a former media columnist for The New York Times, and the host of the new podcast Mixed Signals. 

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In April 1997, Ellen was on the cover of Time magazine declaring, “Yep, I’m Gay.” Then a few weeks later, her sitcom alter ego came out on TV. It was watched by 42 million people. The next year, in 1998, Will & Grace premiered on NBC.

This was a watershed moment for gay representation. Then came: The Pursuit of Happiness, Mad About You, Spin City, Chicago Hope, Melrose Place, NYPD Blue, My So-Called Life, Fired Up, The Crew, Profiler, and High Society—which all started to include gay characters.

The whole decade consisted of landmark moments for gay rights. In May 1996, the Supreme Court decided in Romer v. Evans that Colorado's 2nd Amendment, which denied gays and lesbians protections against discrimination, was actually unconstitutional, and in May 1998, Bill Clinton signed an executive order that made it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation in federal workplaces. The gay-rights movement in America was making real progress. 

Then, something horrific happened. On a late October night in 1998, in a little town called Laramie, Wyoming, a 21-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was killed.

The details of the murder were brutal. He was pistol-whipped 18 times, beaten, tied to the bottom of a split-rail wooden fence in a remote part of town, and left there unconscious to die. When he was found, it was said that he looked like a scarecrow. One of the first responders said Matthew’s face had so much blood that the only place you could see his skin was where the path of his tears had fallen and washed away the blood. He died a few days later in a nearby hospital.

In the weeks and months that followed, a narrative took shape. Matthew Shepard was killed by two men who he did not know—Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson—because he was gay. It was a hate crime, and it was deplorable.

As the news spread, celebrities and politicians around the country spoke out. President Clinton told journalists at the White House, “In our shock and grief one thing must remain clear: hate and prejudice are not American values.” The story of this anti-gay hate crime came to represent the very thing that many gay Americans feared America was at its worst: a place of deep bigotry, where violence against gay people is rampant, where a young man could be targeted and killed simply for being gay, and a country where there are whole cities and towns, maybe even whole regions, where gay people aren’t safe.

The death of Matthew Shepard became the most notorious anti-gay hate crime in American history. “Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement,” as New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney said.

But what if the story wasn’t true? What if Matthew Shepard wasn’t murdered for being gay, but rather for something more common—though equally tragic? And why did so many people refuse to believe it when investigative journalists discovered the truth? 

Those were the questions on reporter Ben Kawaller’s mind when he went to Laramie earlier this month, where he interviewed residents, journalists, and former detectives who have a lot to say about the Matthew Shepard case and what really happened. Today, the real Matthew Shepard story and why the full truth is still important.

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When Hamas attacked Israel eight months ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s war goals were threefold: one, destroy Hamas; two, free all of the hostages; and three, ensure that Gaza can never threaten Israel again.

More than 250 days later, some 120 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, both dead and alive. Two Hamas battalions remain, consisting of somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 fighters. More than 300 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza and thousands wounded, 135,000 Israeli civilians are still displaced, and the war seems to have no end in sight.

Why? Israel is supposed to be the greatest military force in the Middle East. So why haven’t they achieved their war goals? Are their war goals even viable? And, can Israel win this war?

Here to help answer these questions today are Seth Frantzman and John Spencer.

Seth Frantzman is the senior Middle East correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post. He has reported on the war against ISIS, several Gaza wars, and the conflict in Ukraine. And, he is an Adjunct Fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He thinks Israel can and should win this war, but he thinks the past eight months have been dismal and that Israel is at risk of losing and losing disastrously.

John Spencer is a military expert who has served in the army for 25 years, including two combat tours in Iraq. He is now chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He was recently asked if the war was winnable for the IDF, and he said: one hundred percent. But he thinks it is contingent on a total defeat of Hamas.

Today, we discuss what has actually been accomplished by the IDF in the last eight months, why they haven’t achieved “total victory” yet and if that’s even possible, the fate of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, how the U.S. has restrained Israel and if that restraint has been good or bad for Israel, what hope there is for the remaining hostages, whether the idea of Hamas can be defeated, what a “day after” plan could look like, the war with Hezbollah heating up in the north, and, most importantly: why October 7 did not wake up the West.

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It’s been a little over a decade since cannabis was first legalized recreationally in the United States. As of today, recreational weed is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia, and Americans have never been more pro-weed. In a Gallup poll from last November, 70 percent of U.S. adults said they support the federal legalization of marijuana, up from 50 percent in 2013 and a mere twelve percent in 1969. 

In May, the Biden administration moved to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I, where it sits alongside heroin and LSD, to Schedule III, a category of drugs that the DEA says have a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” States with legal marijuana report economic benefits, a reduced burden on the criminal justice system, and positive health outcomes for patients with chronic pain and epilepsy.

But is legal cannabis really such a no-brainer? A recent study found that marijuana use—whether through smoking, edibles, or vapes—is associated with a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. Other studies have consistently shown that so-called “high-potency cannabis” increases the risk of psychotic episodes in young users. 

Today, a debate with two leading advocates both for and against the legalization of marijuana: has decriminalization worked? Or should it be reconsidered with more sober eyes? And is the most widely used and most socially acceptable illicit drug in the world, actually. . . dangerous? 

Dr. Peter Grinspoon is a physician and medical cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Seeing Through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth About Marijuana.

Kevin Sabet was a drug policy adviser for presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. He is the co-founder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, an advocacy group that has emerged as the leading opponent of marijuana legalization in the United States. He is the author of Smoke Screen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.

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Steven Pinker is a world-renowned cognitive psychologist, and is widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. His work delves into the complexities of cognition, language, and social behavior, and his research offers a window into the fundamental workings of the human mind. 

Pinker, who is the author of nine books including Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, approaches his work with a kind of data-driven optimism about the world that has set him apart from the chorus of doomer voices we hear so much from in our public discourse.   

Today, we talk to Pinker about why smart people believe stupid things, the psychology of conspiracy theories, free speech and academic freedom, why democracy and enlightenment values are contrary to human nature, the moral panic around AI, and much more.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links.

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Last Saturday, stunning news broke out of Israel: four hostages had been rescued by the Israel Defense Forces in a daring daylight operation in central Gaza. Noa Argamani, 26; Almog Meir Jan, 22; Andrey Kozlov, 27; and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were liberated after 245 days in captivity.

The first name, Noa Argamani, was one that many people recognized immediately. Everyone remembered the footage of Noa being kidnapped on the back of a motorcycle on October 7 from the Nova Music Festival, a look of terror on her face, reaching for help. Eight months later, it was hard not to see the footage of Noa’s reunion with her father, crying in his arms, as anything short of a miracle.

But it wasn’t a miracle. It was the result of a complex and historic military operation that many are comparing to the raid on Entebbe in 1976. Not that you would have known that from the headlines. One BBC article was headlined: “Noa Argamani released.” A CNN chyron said the same. A UN official posted: “Relieved that four hostages have been released.” It was as if Hamas just handed them back to Israel and that was that. Other headlines focused on the Palestinians killed during the rescue, without mention of who started the gunfire, how many Hamas militants were killed vs. true innocents, who was holding the hostages, and of course, blindly quoting numbers given by the Hamas-run “Ministry of Health.”

Reading many of the headlines over the last few days—or the Twitter posts claiming that the hostage raid was some kind of decoy for the IDF to kill Palestinians—felt like nothing new from the last eight months: more distortions of reality, more spinning of words, more half-truths or outright lies. The day after the news broke, thousands of protesters encircled the White House waving Palestinian flags and calling for the death of Zionists. “Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now.” “Stand with Hamas,” read one poster. Another sign read “LGBTQ—Let’s Go Bomb Tel Aviv Quickly.”

How did this come to be? How is it that progressives are openly siding with Iranian-backed terrorist groups and against the country trying to stop them? And why are so many people shocked by this moral inversion?

Those are some of the questions Sheryl Sandberg has spent the past eight months asking.

As Sheryl watched the horrors of October 7 unfold, she was sure that everyone would rally against these unspeakable atrocities—particularly after the reports of sexual violence and rape committed by Hamas started coming in. When she saw that people did not, in fact, rise against it, and worse—when people began denying that it even happened—she was stunned. Sheryl was particularly stunned that many of her would-be allies—prominent feminists and progressives in this country and around the world—stayed silent.

This led her to make a documentary about the sexual violence of October 7 called Screams Before Silence. Sheryl described the film as the most important work of her life, which is saying something considering her substantial résumé. 

When people think of Sheryl Sandberg, they think of a girlboss, corporate feminism, and coastal politics—wearing a power suit and campaigning for Hillary Clinton. She is, in other words, a normal Democrat. A normal liberal. But as major parts of the left side against Israel, and downplay or ignore or actually foment antisemitism, a lot of people who consider themselves normal liberals are asking themselves: What happened to liberalism? 

The position that Sheryl finds herself in is relatable to many Americans, people who feel betwixt and between in a post–October 7 world where the very people they thought were their friends are proving themselves to be just the opposite. Today, Sheryl talks about this very fraught moment we are living in. She talks about her film, the silence from so many women’s organizations and feminists, the denialism, how antisemitism is thriving in America, her changing Jewish identity, whether she feels politically homeless, and much, much more.

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When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it was the largest military attack on a European country since World War II. Reliable casualty figures are hard to come by, but U.S. intelligence officials estimated last year that as many as 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed in the conflict, with an estimated 15–30 million refugees. 

Congress has allotted $175 billion in aid for Ukraine since the war began. 

But Ilya Ponomarev says that cash and defensive weapons alone won’t liberate Ukraine or impede future Russian aggression. He insists that Vladimir Putin must be deposed by force. And he is actively working to do just that. 

Ilya Ponomarev was a member of Russia’s Federal Assembly (Russia’s national legislature) from 2007 to 2016. He was the only member to vote against Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Exiled to Ukraine since 2016, he is the political head of the Freedom of Russian Legion, a paramilitary group made up of Russian dissidents and defectors fighting for Ukraine. He argues that nonviolent resistance is not enough and that radical steps are needed to overthrow Putin. 

In today’s conversation, Ponomarev talks about his life as a dissident and what it is like being a target for assassination, his previous relationship with Putin, and why democracy has failed to take root in Russia.

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On May 30, former president Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels. His sentencing has been scheduled for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention. He faces a possible sentence of four years for each count.

If you were on Twitter or Instagram or your social media platform of choice that historic Thursday afternoon, then you will have noticed two diametrically opposed reactions. On one side, people celebrated like it was the very best day of their entire lives, as justice, at last, was served. On the other side of the space-time Twitter-uum, it was a very, very somber day for the country. 

So. . . which is it? Did Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg at long last rightly and justly prosecute Trump for felony crimes? Or was this an obviously political witch trial and an abuse of the U.S. justice system? In other words: Have we crossed the Rubicon in American politics? After all, District Attorney Bragg campaigned on a promise to bring charges against Trump.

And either way, the reality is that the presidential front-runner is now a convicted felon. What does that mean? For voters? (Spoiler: it made them want to give him. . . more money.) For future elections? And for this country?

To debate these questions on Honestly today are Sarah Isgur and Mark Zauderer.

Sarah is a columnist for The Dispatch and an ABC News contributor. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as the Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration.

Mark is a veteran New York litigator who sits on a committee that screens applicants for the same court that will hear Trump’s appeal.

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At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America.”

A lot can happen in a hundred years. Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago it faced an annualized inflation rate of over 200 percent—one of the highest in the world. What happened?

Today's guest, Argentina’s new president, says it’s pretty simple: socialism.

When Javier Milei took office in December 2023, he became the world’s first libertarian head of state—and maybe its most eccentric. During his campaign he made his intentions clear: “The [political] caste is trembling!” “Let it all blow up, let the economy blow up, and take this entire garbage political caste down with it.” Which is exactly what he’s doing now. He’s eliminating government ministries and services, cutting regulations, privatizing state-run companies, and purposely creating a recession to curb the out of control inflation.

This is also why people voted for him: change. They saw someone who could shake things up in a way that could turn out to be lifesaving—even if it meant short-term economic pain. But will it work? Not all Argentines think so. And not everyone is willing or able to wait for things to improve. In April, with food prices rising and poverty up 10 percent, tens of thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest Milei’s aggressive austerity measures.

Milei is a strange and idiosyncratic creature. There are the obvious things: he says he doesn’t comb his hair (and he doesnt appear to). He has four cloned mastiffs that he refers to as his “four-legged children,” and which he’s named for his favorite free-market economists. He was raised Catholic but studies the Torah. He used to play in a Rolling Stones cover band. And he has been known since grade school in the ’80s as El Loco, on account of his animated outbursts, which would later bring him stardom as a TV, radio, and social media celebrity.

But what really makes him unusual is that he is the ultimate skunk at the garden party. In a world of liberals and conservatives, he is neither. He has ultra-liberal economic views but right-wing, populist rhetoric. He is anti-abortion but pro-legalization of sex work. He wants to deregulate the gun market and legalize organ trade. 

He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, which basically means that he believes the state, as he told me, is “a violent organization that lives from a coercive source which is taxes.” Essentially. . . he’s a head of state who really doesn’t believe in states. A few months ago Milei showed up at Davos, the Alpine mountain resort that hosts the annual World Economic Forum. This is a place where, historically, people who all think the same way go to drink champagne and tell each other how smart they are. Milei arrives, flying commercial, and blows all that up: “Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.” 

All of this is why we were eager to talk to Milei—and put some of these questions to him: How long will it take for things to look up in Argentina? Why does he believe the Western world is in danger? What’s the difference between social justice and socialism? Can the free market really solve all of our civic problems? What is the state actually important for? And how does he feel about being the skunk at the garden party? (Spoiler: he loves it.)

And despite having called journalists “extortionists,” “liars,” “imbeciles,” “freeloaders,” “donkeys,” and “ignorant”—for some reason, he agreed to sit down with us.

Note: The interview was conducted in Spanish with the help of a translator. Watch the video version of this interview at thefp.com

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of several books—including the 2006 autobiography Infidel—as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution She runs a foundation focused on human rights and, yes, she has a Substack. But Ayaan comes from a very different world from most of the people who inhabit our think tanks and ivory towers. Unlike those of us in the West who grew up with everything, Ayaan grew up in Somalia with. . . nothing. 

No liberty, no rule of law, no system of representative government, no pluralism, and no toleration for difference. 

Ayaan knows what it is like to live without those ideals, which is why she also has a particular instinct for when they are under attack. And that is exactly what she sees happening—all over the West.

Today, you’ll hear Ayaan read the epochal essay she published this morning in The Free Press. She explains how subversion—the act of undermining a country from within—works gradually and sometimes invisibly, but can ultimately explode and destroy a society. And she argues that what’s at stake in our inability to see the threat plainly is nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article.

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Fifteen years ago, Vice was the envy of the media industry. While other outlets were shrinking, the edgy multimedia organization with a knack for virality was growing. At its peak, Vice had a reported value of $6 billion.

At one point, Disney offered to buy the company for $3.4 billion. The CEO said no. Something even bigger was on the horizon.

Except. . . it never came. No one else approached with another offer and the company started to collapse. Last year, Vice filed for bankruptcy.

The media narrative of what happened at Vice was that they simply made a series of business mistakes and the economic model of the business crumbled. But Michael Moynihan says that’s not the whole story. 

Michael—who Honestly listeners know as a frequent guest host here—is a longtime journalist who spent a decade at Vice. He was a correspondent for Vice’s flagship series on HBO. 

Today, he published a revealing insider story in The Free Press about how Vice really lost its way. Spoiler: apologizing for the gonzo journalism that fueled the business to begin with, and caving to an identity politics–obsessed staff of twentysomethings, isn’t exactly a recipe for success.

Vice didn’t just bleed cash. It also bled its backbone and its ethos. And the thing that replaced it? Well, no one wanted to consume it. 

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The first episode of Seinfeld aired in 1989. Thirty-five years later, the show remains at the apex of American culture. People speak in Seinfeld-isms, they flirt on dating apps over Seinfeld, they rewatch old episodes of Seinfeld when they’re feeling down. And, in the case of the Weiss family, Lou still watches it every night from 11 pm to 12 am on the local Pittsburgh station before he goes to sleep. People around the world even learn English watching Seinfeld!

It is not hyperbole to say that Seinfeld is one of the most influential shows of all time.

Seinfeld was supposedly a show about nothing, but that’s what made it so universal. Everyone can relate to trying to find your car in a parking garage. Everyone knows the feeling when their book is overdue at the library and they don’t want to pay the overdue fee. Everyone can relate to the frustration of waiting for a table at a restaurant. If you didn’t—or don’t—laugh during Seinfeld, something was wrong with you. 

All of which is why it was a bit strange and unexpected when a few months ago Jerry Seinfeld suddenly became “controversial.” In early October, Jerry—along with 700 other Hollywood stars—signed a letter condemning Hamas and calling for the return of the hostages. For that crime—the crime of saying terrorism is bad and innocent people should be released—crowds started protesting the events he was attending, the speeches he was giving, and heckling him in public.

A few weeks ago, when Jerry gave the commencement address at Duke University, some students walked out in protest. Then, his standup set was disrupted by protesters, to which Seinfeld quipped: “I love a little Jew-hate to spice up the show.” The crowd applauded.

Jerry Seinfeld made the most successful show about a Jew to ever exist. This was no small feat. In fact, one NBC executive, after watching the Seinfeld pilot for the first time in 1989, didn’t think it should even go to air. He said it was “too New York and too Jewish.”

And yet…it worked. And as Seinfeld spent years making Jewishness an iconic part of American pop culture, Jerry says he experienced not a drop of anti-Semitism.

But now, during a time that is supposed to be the most inclusive, the most sensitive, the most accepting, and the most tolerant time in human history, Jerry Seinfeld is targeted for being a Jew.

Jerry often says that the audience is everything. That’s the whole point of comedy. There is no joke if nobody laughs. But today on Honestly, we ask Jerry if he still trusts the audience in an age where the audience can start to feel like a mob?

You’ve probably heard or seen Jerry somewhere recently—from The New Yorker to GQ to… every podcast in the world. That’s because he has a new movie out called Unfrosted, which you should definitely go watch on Netflix. It’s hilarious, heartwarming, and you will love it.

But today’s conversation with Jerry is unlike the ones you’ve heard. He’s unfiltered. He’s emotional. And he’s speaking his mind.

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A few weeks ago, there was an awesome event in Brooklyn in partnership with UnHerd called Dissident Dialogues. It was exactly what it sounds like: debates and discussions on the most pressing questions facing our society today. Questions like: Have we reached peak woke? Can universities be saved? Can liberalism be saved? Is government censorship justified? Is this the end of mainstream media? and What is the future of feminism? So basically, just the light stuff.

But probably the most contentious debate of the weekend was: Is Israel’s war on Hamas a just war? 

This is not an easy debate. Emotions run hot, the stakes are high, people’s morality is called into question, and there are a lot of competing narratives. Which is all the more reason to debate the topic in public, something we always advocate for at The Free Press.

Arguing no, that Israel’s war on Hamas is not a just war, are Briahna Joy Gray and Jake Klein. Briahna was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and is host of the Bad Faith podcast. Arguing alongside Briahna is Jake Klein. Jake is a content creator for the Foundation for Economic Education, and he is a co-founder and editor at The Black Sheep.

Arguing yes, that Israel’s war on Hamas is a just war, are two of our very own Free Pressers, Eli Lake and Michael Moynihan. Eli is a columnist at The Free Press and a longtime journalist covering foreign affairs and national security. And Michael Moynihan, who you’ve heard guest-host Honestly, is a veteran journalist, having spent years at Vice, The Daily Beast, and Reason magazine. He is also a host of The Fifth Column podcast.

The debate is moderated by the one and only Russian British satirist, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, and Free Press contributor, Konstantin Kisin.

Facebook: Dissident Dialogues

Instagram: @dissident_dialogues

X: @diss_dialogues

YouTube: @dissidentdialogues-qm3gm?si=f-hldBmIK9CnGqRn

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Nellie Bowles wasn’t always the TGIF queen you know and love at The Free Press.

In fact, Nellie was, for a very long time, deeply embedded in the progressive left. 

Before Bari and Nellie met—and fell in love, blah blah blah—in 2019, Nellie was nothing short of a media darling. She had the right ideas, she wrote the right stories, and NYT readers ate it up. 

But Nellie is a reporter. And being a reporter—a great one—forced her to confront the gap between what an increasingly zealous left claimed were its aims. . . and the actual realities of their policies. 

People don’t usually change their minds. At least not on big-stakes political issues, and not when their jobs are at risk, or their social acceptance is on the line. And people certainly don’t change their minds publicly. 

Nellie did. And she chronicles that change in her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.

The book is a collection of stories from her reporting during the years she started to question the narrative. These were stories people told her not to write. People said, Don’t go to Seattle’s autonomous zone; there’s nothing to see there. They said, Don’t report on the consequences of hormone therapy for kids; it’s not important. 

But as Nellie writes, “I became a reporter because I didn't trust authority figures. . . . As a reporter, I spent over a decade working to follow that curiosity. It was hard to suddenly turn that off. It was hard to constantly censor what I was seeing, to close one eye and try very hard not to notice anything inconvenient, especially when there was so much to see.”

That curiosity is what got Nellie kicked out of the club. But it gave her a place in a new club, the one that we at The Free Press think that the majority of Americans are actually in. 

On today’s episode: What does it mean to walk away from a movement that was once central to your identity? How does it feel to be accused of being “red-pilled” by the people you once called friends? How did the left become so radical and dogmatic? Why do people join mobs? And how did Nellie come back from the brink?

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There’s a new $6 billion-dollar industry. Its global market size is expected to increase to $100 billion within the decade. No, it’s not a fancy new app or a revolutionary gadget: it’s weight-loss drugs.

Just a few years ago no one had even heard the word Ozempic. Almost overnight, the drug previously used to treat type 2 diabetes became a household name. Healthcare providers wrote more than 9 million prescriptions for Ozempic and similar drugs in the last three months of 2022 alone. By the end of the decade, 30 million people are predicted to be on it. For comparison, that means that Ozempic is on track to do as well as birth control pills and Prozac—a blockbuster medication. 

A little over a year ago we had a fiery debate on Honestly about these revolutionary weight-loss drugs and our cultural understanding of obesity. On one side of the debate, people saw Ozempic as the golden answer we’ve been searching for. After all, obesity is the second biggest cause of cancer. It causes diabetes, and it’s linked to dementia, heart disease, knee and hip problems, arthritis, and high blood pressure, which causes strokes. In short: when you crunch the numbers, drugs like Ozempic seem to be lifesaving.

On the other hand was another argument: Why are we putting millions of people on a powerful new drug when we don’t know the risks? Plus, isn’t this a solution that ignores why we gained so much weight in the first place? In other words: Ozempic is not a cure for obesity; it’s a Band-Aid.

A year later, all of those questions are still up for debate. Our guest today, journalist Johann Hari, has spent the last year trying to find answers, traveling the world investigating weight-loss drugs, and. . . taking them himself.

In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Johann investigates what we know and what we don’t know about how these drugs work, their risks and benefits, how our food system sets us up to fail, and how movements like “fat pride” and “healthy at any size” have completely altered the conversation.

So on today’s episode: How do these new drugs impact our brains, our guts, and our mood? What are the hidden risks? Are they really a permanent solution to the obesity crisis? Or are they merely a quick fix that do little to address the root causes of obesity? With over 70 percent of Americans today classified as overweight or obese and the average American adult weighing nearly 25 pounds more today than they did in 1960, how did we get here in the first place? And why aren’t we addressing that problem, too?

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The news lately has not exactly been a walk in the park. Iran launched hundreds of rockets at Israel, creating the prospect of World War III; we have Trump’s ongoing criminal trial; a TikTok ban; a war in Ukraine; and much of the Ivy League is now co-opted by Hamas. Should we go on?

Today’s episode isn’t about any of that. Because sometimes we just need a breath of fresh air. Cue the one and only David Sedaris—America’s favorite humorist, or at the very least, our favorite humorist.

You might know David from one of his bestselling books like Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Calypso. His words are frequently in The New Yorker, and he’s also just come out with a children’s book called Pretty Ugly, which he says has “no message.” 

David was on Honestly a few years ago—if you haven’t heard that interview, please check it out; it’s a highlight of this show—and he’s here again today to read an essay he wrote for The Free Press, where he imparts his thoughts on the underappreciated joys of small talk. We hope you enjoy.

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The United States is home to more immigrants than any other country in the world. It is a truism that everyone who lives here at some point came from somewhere else. At the same time, debates about who and how many people to let in have roiled the nation since our very founding.

And in the past few years, things have heated up to a new level.

That’s no surprise, considering that unlawful attempts to cross the southern border hit a record high of about 2.5 million last year. In the past four years, nearly 5 million attempts to cross the border illegally occurred in Texas alone.

We’ve all seen the videos of mothers with babies shimmying under barbed wire, of migrant caravans marching toward Texas, of young men charging Border Patrol agents.

It’s why immigration is the top issue for voters in the 2024 election. Indeed, the influx has made even progressive cities, which previously declared themselves immigration sanctuaries, sound the alarm. Last May, former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot said “we’ve reached a breaking point,” while declaring a state of emergency in her city. In September, New York mayor Eric Adams said the influx of migrants “will destroy New York City.”

All of this is the subject of our first live debate of 2024, which took place in Dallas, and that we wanted to share with you on Honestly today. The proposition: Should the United States shut its borders?

Arguing in the affirmative are Ann Coulter and Sohrab Ahmari. On the opposing side, arguing that no, the United States should not shut its borders, are Nick Gillespie and Cenk Uygur.

They also cover questions like: Is mass immigration is a net gain or a net loss for America? How do we balance our humanitarian impulse with our practical and economic needs? Do migrants suppress wages of the already strained working class? Do they stretch community resources impossibly thin? Does a porous border impact our national security? And what does a sensible border policy really look like?

We hope you listen, share, and discuss. 

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President Biden just signed into law a bill forcing the sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent ByteDance—or else face an outright ban. The measure was included in a bill providing a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. 

Proponents of the bill cite privacy and national security concerns. TikTok, like all social media giants, collects piles of user data—and if requested by the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance is obligated by law to share that user information. Critics also worry about political influence operations on the platform—a dictatorial foreign adversary turning our kids into little Manchurian candidates.

Opponents of the bill argue that forcing a TikTok sale under the threat of a ban is a blow to users’ free speech rights and represents an overreach of government authority. They insist that the government should not dictate which apps Americans can use, especially on opaque grounds of national security. 

Today, a debate: Is American national security at risk from an Orwellian app ultimately controlled by a totalitarian regime? Or is this just McCarthyism in digital form, a government-created moral panic fueled by dubious threats of misinformation? 

Arguing that the TikTok bill is a logical extension of our current laws—and a necessary countermeasure to authoritarian meddling—is Geoffrey Cain. Cain is the author of The Perfect Police State and senior fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University. 

On the other side, arguing that the bill is a dangerous overreach justified by flimsy evidence of an alleged threat, is Walter Kirn. Kirn is a novelist, Free Press contributor, editor-at-large of County Highway, and co-host of the podcast America This Week. 

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This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators told Jewish students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety. 

Demonstrators on these campuses shouted: “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” In one chant at Columbia, the protesters were heard saying “Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.” and “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.”

These campus activists are not simply “pro-Palestine” protesters. They are people who are openly celebrating Hamas and physically intimidating identifiably Jewish students who came near. We published the accounts of two of those students—Sahar Tartak and Jonathan Lederer—today.

Students—all of us—have a right to protest. We have a right to protest for dumb causes and horrible causes. At The Free Press, we will always defend that right. (See here and here, for example.) It is not, however, a First Amendment right to physically attack another person. It is not a First Amendment right to detain another person as part of your protest. 

The institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of truth have not only abandoned their mission—they have stood by and done nothing meaningful to condemn students who support terrorism, or to stop the horrific scenes of the past 48 hours. 

In fact, at Columbia they have done quite the opposite: on Monday morning the president announced that she is moving classes online. If that’s not cowering to the mob, I don’t know what is. Meanwhile, the NYPD has offered to help secure the safety of Jews on campus, but so far the president of Columbia has refused to let them on campus.

Since the very founding of America, this country has been a unique place for the Jewish people. That is because of America’s exceptional ideals and our willingness to defend them. 

But in the past six months these core American beliefs, once deemed immutable, have been challenged in ways that were previously unimaginable, as a rising wave of antisemitism and illiberalism have swept the country—a wave that was put on full display over the last few days, at the country’s most elite and prestigious universities.

Jews around the world are about to celebrate the holiday of Passover—otherwise known as the festival of freedom. But what does it mean this year to commemorate our freedom, when our freedom feels like it is contracting before our eyes? How can we defend the original principles that underpin our society? How can we find the courage to do so?

A few months ago, I gave a speech at the 92Y called “The State of World Jewry,” where I addressed these very questions. I argued that the state of world Jewry depends on the state of the free world. Right now, its condition is in jeopardy. Our holiday from history is over.

For those celebrating Passover, Chag Sameach. And as we say at the Passover seder, “Next year, may we all be free.”

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It was November 30, 2021, when Nicole Avant got a call in the middle of the night from her husband. The unthinkable had happened. Her otherwise healthy mom, Jacqueline Avant, was in critical condition at the hospital. She had been shot.

Nicole would soon find out that her mother had been having an ordinary evening at her home in Beverly Hills when a man broke into her home in an attempted robbery. He shot Jacqueline, and then fled the scene.

She died later that night in the hospital. Jacqueline was 81.

It was an unspeakable tragedy that would leave most people paralyzed, enraged and probably seeking revenge. But Nicole’s response surprised a lot of people. She decided that she’s not a victim, and she would forgive her mother’s murderer. 

She shares this radical sentiment in her new book: “Think You'll be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude.”

For those unfamiliar with Nicole, she is someone who wears many hats. She served as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under President Obama—and she was the first black woman to hold this seat. She's been a force in political fundraising. She raised more than half a million for President Obama in one night in 2012, and she was part of a fundraising team that raised $21 million for him in 2008. She's also a movie producer, which isn’t exactly surprising considering she was born into black Hollywood royalty—her father was Clarence Avant, the legendary music mogul who managed artists like Bill Withers, Sarah Vaughan, and Freddie Hubbard.

Today, she finds herself again a part of Hollywood royalty, just of more recent vintage. Her husband is Netflix Co-Ceo Ted Sarandos.

But unlike the British royals, Nicole Avant doesn’t put her views through a PR machine. She says what she thinks, and she doesn’t have time for bullshit. All of which is why we were so eager to have her on Honestly today. 

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In the late hours of Saturday night 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles barreled toward Israel. It was a direct and unprecedented strike on Israel from Iran.

Extraordinarily, Israel—with the help of the Americans, the British, the French, and even the Jordanians and the Saudis—were able to intercept 99 percent of the missiles. 

Iran said the attack was a response to Israel’s hit on a consular building in Syria earlier this month that killed high-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders. Many analysts and journalists have also framed the attack the way Iran had: as a “retaliatory strike.”

But it’s a strange way to describe the historic onslaught considering Iran’s war of aggression since October 7. After all, it was Iran that trained and armed Hamas to come and butcher 1,200 Israelis. It was Iran that trained and armed Hezbollah, whose attacks on northern Israeli communities have kept tens of thousands from their homes. 

Free Press columnist Matti Friedman nailed it when he wrote that this weekend’s attack was Iran coming out of the shadows for the first time: “like a flash going off in a dark room, the attack has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse of the real war in the Middle East.” 

Walter Russell Mead wrote on Twitter Saturday night: “By any reasonable standard, a state of war now exists between the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The questions now are how fast and how far does it escalate, who will be drawn in, and who will win.”

Today, Michael Moynihan speaks with Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States about these questions—and what comes next in this unprecedented moment in history.

While the U.S. was instrumental in helping Israel defend itself over the weekend, Biden has been clear with Israel: he does not want Israel to respond. He is reported to have said to Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win.” But if Israel doesn’t respond, will that only embolden Iran further? Isn’t that the sort of appeasement that got us here in the first place? And if Israel is compelled to respond for the sake of its country, can it do so without American support?

As Michael Oren wrote for The Free Press: “The story of America can end only one of two ways: either it stands up boldly against Iran and joins Israel in deterring it, or Iran emerges from this conflict once again unpunished, undiminished, and ready to inflict yet more devastating damage.”

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Uri Berliner is a senior business editor at NPR. In his 25 years with NPR, his work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others.

Today, we published in The Free Press his firsthand account of the transformation he has witnessed at National Public Radio. Or, as Uri puts it, how it went from an organization that had an “open-minded, curious culture” with a “liberal bent” to one that is “knee-jerk, activist, scolding,” and “rigidly progressive.” 

Uri describes a newsroom that aimed less to cover Donald Trump but instead veered towards efforts to topple him; a newsroom that reported the Russia collusion story without enough skepticism or fairness, and then later largely ignored the fact that the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion; a newsroom that purposefully ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story—in fact, one of his fellow NPR journalists approved of ignoring the laptop story because “covering it could help Trump.” A newsroom that put political ideology before journalism in its coverage of Covid-19. And, he describes a newsroom where race and identity became paramount in every aspect of the workplace and diversity became its north star. 

In other words, NPR is not considering all things anymore. 

On today’s episode: How did NPR lose its way? Why did it change? And why does this lone journalist feel obligated to speak out?

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